Experts Debunk Redhead Extinction Myth as Trait Persists in Under 2% of Population
Updated
Updated · Livescience.com · Jul 26
Experts Debunk Redhead Extinction Myth as Trait Persists in Under 2% of Population
2 articles · Updated · Livescience.com · Jul 26
Summary
Less than 2% of people worldwide have red hair, but experts said there is no evidence the trait is disappearing from the human population.
MC1R variants that produce red hair are recessive, so many non-redheads carry and pass them on; extinction would require carriers or redheads to have consistently fewer children, which researchers said is unsupported.
A two- to fourfold higher skin-cancer risk tied to MC1R does not change that outlook, because many cancers emerge after reproductive age and therefore do little to remove the variants from the gene pool.
Researchers said red-hair frequency could still decline somewhat as populations mix more broadly, especially beyond U.K. and Ireland hotspots where about 10% of people are redheads, but that would be a shift in prevalence, not extinction.