Just a few years ago, there were concerns that minorities like blondes and redheads were going extinct. The future belonged to Miss Clairol because they're recessive genes and with just five generations of bad biological rolls, you could have less chance of Scottish hair than Senator Elizabeth Warren has of being Native American.
It may be that scientists just weren't seeing the signals.

Instead of going extinct, a study of 10,016 newer ancient West Eurasian genomes, plus 5,820 existing ancient sequences and 6,438 modern ones finds that red hair and fair skin have become more common over the last 10,000 years, not less. Evolution not only didn't slow down in that time, natural selection could those traits to speed up over the last 4,000 years.


R. Leigh

This opens up new questions, like what was the driving force? Was it just a random evolutionary walk or did red hair become more desirable? Maybe because they brought beer, but that isn't Murphy's so probably not.

That's just speculation but one thing that isn't is that there is good news. A lot of it. Though activists who hate the modern world claim everything is killing us, we instead have greater immunity from baldness, arthritis, leprosy, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. The things that have increased are Celiac and Crohn's disease, probably because in the past people with those died young.



Citation: Ali Akbari, Annabel Perry, Alison R. Barton, Mohammadreza Kariminejad, Steven Gazal, Zheng Li, Yating Zeng, Alissa Mittnik, Nick Patterson, Matthew Mah, Xiang Zhou, Alkes L. Price, Eric S. Lander, Ron Pinhasi, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick&David Reich, Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia. Nature (2026).  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10358-1