Blond hair evolved separately in Europe and the South Pacific
Karen Kaplan for the Los Angeles Times’s Booster Shots blog:
Though the indigenous people of the Solomon Islands all have dark skin, about 5% to 10% also have naturally blond hair – and a new study finds that the genetic quirk responsible for this is different from the one that produces blond hair in people of European ancestry.
…
Many Westerners had assumed that encounters with European explorers and traders over the years had introduced a blond gene into the Melanesian gene pool.
Evolution is weird.