Melanesians: dark skin, light hair

Melanesians are the natives of the Solomon Islands, located in the South Pacific. These islands have certain peculiarities, such as their extraordinary linguistic diversity, however, none is so striking as the contrast between hair and skin that many of its inhabitants present: dark-skinned, as we can find in Many areas of Africa have curly blonde manes on their heads, as we can find in many areas of the north. European. In a PROFESSOR we are going to get to know this ethnic group a little more in order to become more familiar with them.

The origin of that blonde hair was never clear. It was taken for granted that it was the result of miscegenation. With the arrival of Europeans in the area, an exchange not only cultural and economic began and it is clear that racial mixtures often compose very striking results. However, that explanation failed to convince anyone.

Not even the Melanesians themselves, who argued that the origin was in the long exposure to the sun and in the diet, very rich in fish. But neither was right.

Scientists from the Center for Causal Analysis in Translational Epidemiology, University of Bristol (UK) and the Stanford University School of Medicine (USA) decided to investigate the matter thoroughly and for this they took saliva samples from 85 natives: 43 with blonde hair and 42 with dark hair. From these samples they made genetic analyzes whose conclusions, published in the journal 'Science', do not leave anyone indifferent.

Blond hair in the Solomon Islands developed independently, in a similar way to how it could develop in northern Europe. Carlos D. Bustamante, professor of genetics at Stanford, points out the importance of this finding and the alert that he supposes regarding the drugs of perhaps not too distant future: if we are going to design the next generation of medical treatments that use genetic information and not we have a very broad spectrum of populations included, we could disproportionately benefit some populations and harm other

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