Redheads are special. They are said to have a very fiery temperament and to be very rebellious and hard-headed (source). Recently I came across an article that said that redheads are overrepresented in Math, Science, Philosophy, and comedy (source) and one person on Quora asked: “Why are there so many redheads working in media jobs?”.
All of the above traits are typical for a certain personality type, intuitives or “N” (in Myers-Briggs), who I have hypothesized have more original “hunter-gatherer” genes than other personality types (“farmers” and “pastoralists”). Plus I teach in a school with media classes, and those classes have an extraordinarily high percentage of N types (more than 50%, even though N types make up only around 25% of the population).
Another piece of information that got me interested in redheads is that they (like gifted and autistic people) tend to look younger than their age in childhood and their teens. This fits well with my hypothesis of r/K selected personality types, with “hunter-gatherers” being the last group to reach puberty. Moreover, redheads seem to be more prone to ADHD, Tourette syndrome and ASD, all of which are not untypical for hunter-gatherer personality types.
Another piece of information that got me interested in redheads is that they (like gifted and autistic people) tend to look younger than their age in childhood and their teens. This fits well with my hypothesis of r/K selected personality types, with “hunter-gatherers” being the last group to reach puberty. Moreover, redheads seem to be more prone to ADHD, Tourette syndrome and ASD, all of which are not untypical for hunter-gatherer personality types.
So I started to look for some famous redheads and it turned out that the majority of the ones I found are indeed N types: Prince Harry (INFP like his wife and his late mother), Ed Sheeran (ENFP), Nicole Kidman (INFP), Felicia Day (ENFP), etc.
- Socrates
- Galileo
- Darwin
- King David
- Vincent van Gogh
- Mark Twain
- Thomas Jefferson
- Queen Elizabeth I
- JK Rowling
- Jane Goodall
N types again: Van Gogh (INFP), Darwin (INTP), Galileo (INTP), Jefferson (INTJ), Twain (ENTP), even King David (unusual redhead for the region) is commonly typed INFP.
That is not to say that all red-haired people are “hunter-gatherer” personalities, but such a high percentage of a rare personality type in redheads is quite remarkable. Where does it come from?
We typically associate red hair with Celtic origins. The Celts were of Indoeuropean origin and those were farmers and pastoralists. So, redheads should really be descendants of farmers/pastoralists, then? Some more research revealed that red hair is also found outside the Indo-European territory, among other the Udmurts in Russia, who are completely unrelated to the Indo-Europeans. What Celtic redheads and Udmurts have in common though is Y-haplogroup R1b, which shows a high correlation with the distribution of red hair (and the respective MC1R gene).
If we compare the map with the Indo-European expansions (farmers from Anatolia, pastoralists from the Russian Steppe), we find that there is actually not much correspondence between the Indo-European expansions and red hair. On the contrary, it seems there is actually a “hole” in the redhead map, wherever the early farmers arrived in Europe.
Indo-European expansions (eradicating red hair?)
I asked myself, “What if it is actually the other way round?”. What if redheads were endemic to Eurasia and common among European hunter-gatherers (like they were in Neanderthals) and that it started to disappear with the arrival of farmers and herders? What if the Indo-Europeans actually punched a hole in the redhead map of Eurasian hunter-gatherers? The later early farmers and Indo-European pastoralists arrived, the more redheads left. Of course, it is historically documented that at least some Indo-Europeans (Celts and Thracians) were redheaded. However, they might have been so due to admixture with Eurasian hunter-gatherers. The Yamnaya, the population of Indo-European pastoralists that probably brought most of the Indo-European languages to Europe, are thought to have had a 50% hunter-gatherer admixture.
A European region that caught my particular interests: the Basque Country. The Basques are among the people with the highest rate of R1b and Basque is most likely and ancient hunter-gatherer language* that far predates the arrival of farming even though the Basques are likely a mix of early farmers and hunter-gatherers. It should be strange that one of the few non-Indoeuropean people in Europe has such a high rate of R1b, which supposedly migrated with the Celts. It is more likely IMHO that is had been there long before the arrival of farming in Europe.
Why should redheads belong mostly to the “hunter-gatherer” personality type if these ancestral populations all mixed up in the end? Perhaps they didn’t mix that well after all. It could be that they preferred to mate with their own “kind”. Indeed, Helen Fisher has found out that certain personality types tend to seek mates among their own group:
It could, therefore, be that red hair has been mostly stuck with “hunter-gatherer” types through sexual selection.
Wherever they came from, I (brown-haired) find redheads incredibly cool and likeable and I hope they won’t ever disappear from the human gene pool.
Dedicated to Marisa, my redheaded, one-year-old daughter and Sophie, Alexander and Andrej, who were reddish when toddlers.
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