Where in Melanesia come from dark-skinned people with blond hair

Melanesia is an island group in the Pacific, which includes New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu and other States. On the archipelago of more than thousand Islands is home to more than 500 thousand Melanesians. They are the owners of the darkest skin in the world outside Africa, but on the head of many of them bright, as if dyed, eprocure.

Every tenth Melanesian blonde that for members of the Australoid race is atypical.

At first, scientists believed that the gene for blond hair went to the Melanesians of British, German and Australian colonizers, who owned the Islands in the XIX-XX centuries and was grown here are coconut plantations.

The researchers of the XIX century versions were easier. Some believed that the hair of the islanders colored coral lime. Others have suggested that the hair quickly fade from the tropical sun and salt water, and still others blame a diet rich in fish.

And only recently emerged convincing hypothesis: hair color blond Melanesians can answer random mutation.

Geneticist Sean Myles noticed that blonde hair all Melanesians have the same hue. This means that the hair color is governed by a simple mutation in a single gene, and there was only her to find. Miles and colleagues took samples of saliva and hair in two groups of islanders: 43 blond and 42 dark-haired.

The groups were completely different versions of the TYRP1 gene encoding involved in pigmentation protein. Hair color specifies only one amino acid in the protein — arginine instead of cysteine.

A quarter of the population of the Solomon Islands — the carriers of the mutated gene (blonde born just 10% of the population, as this gene is recessive). Blondes can inherit a hair color from both parents. The anthropologist from temple University in Philadelphia, Jonathan Friedlander believes that the mutation likely arose by chance in one person.

Nowhere in the world such a mutation is not found, and it appeared from 5 to 30 thousand years ago.