http://www.canada.com/topics/lifest...63-24d8f3bfd777

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Steven Edwards, CanWest News Service Published: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 NEW YORK - Blondes are supposed to have more fun -- and now a Canadian anthropologist says it's been happening for more than 10,000 years. The number of blonde women grew rapidly at the end of the last Ice Age because their looks got them noticed at a time of male scarcity in northern and eastern Europe, says Peter Frost, currently linked with St. Andrews University in Scotland. Food was also in short supply, which made men more choosy as they cut down on the mouths they had to feed by selecting fewer mates, his study says. The blonde gene began in Europe as a rare mutation, but proved a key to female survival as the dangers of Ice Age hunting killed off more men. "Such a [male-female] imbalance would have increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women," writes Dr. Frost in the latest edition of Evolution and Human Behaviour, an international journal. "When an individual is faced with potential mates of equal value, it will tend to select the one that stands out from the crowd -- [the one] that has the rarest colour morph." One of the publication's editors predicts the article could raise an academic storm. "In most hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied in recent times there are unmated males, but there are never unmated females," said Martin Daly, an editor-in-chief at the journal's office in McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. "They've all got a husband. So in that regard it will be controversial because the general view of human evolution has always been that women are perceived as a scarce resource by men." The study, to be published this week, is called European Hair and Eye Colour: A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? In it, Dr. Frost ponders the long-studied mystery of why people who evolved in northern and eastern Europe developed varied hair and eye colours, while black hair and brown eyes dominate elsewhere in the world. "Is this diversity due to admixture with older European populations, notably the Neanderthals?" he asks, before citing recent DNA studies showing there was no significant transfer of their traits to modern humans. He notes the spread of modern humans into Europe from Africa changed traditional divisions of labour between men and women, arguing that led to sexual selection. Much of northern Europe was still covered in ice when the modern humans arrived, so males had to spend more time, and travel over greater distances, to hunt herds of mammoth, reindeer, bison and horses. This led to more of them dying. The terrain, meanwhile, was not as lush as Africa, where women had traditionally gathered berries, fruits, roots and other foods. For the first time, therefore, men were responsible for gathering almost all the food, while women turned to processing meat, garment making and shelter building. Dr. Frost argues men took fewer mates when faced with having to provide all their food. "One might expect that this female surplus would encourage more men to take second wives, but having two families simultaneously is difficult," he suggests. Instead, he says men looked around for women with the most alluring qualities. © National Post 2006

Interesting. I've always wondered why blondes were primarily European genetic thingy.

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Originally posted by chinamon not true. i say "ugh" but i am a tranny.

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Originally posted by kotsy lol colour me retarded