european hair and eye color a case of frequency-dependent…：欧洲的头发和眼睛的颜色的情况下，频率依赖….pdf

European hair and eye color A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Peter Frost c/o Dr. . Perrett, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Mary’s College, South St., St. Andrews, Fife, KY169JA, UK Initial receipt 14 June 2004; final revision received 7 July 2005 Abstract Human hair and eye color is unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe. The many alleles involved (at least seven for hair color) and their independent origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicate some kind of selection. Sexual selection is particularly indicated because it is known to favor color traits and color polymorphisms. In addition, hair and eye color is most diverse in what used to be, when first peopled by hunter-gatherers, a unique ecozone of low-latitude continental tundra. This type of environment skews the operational sex ratio (OSR) of hunter-gatherers toward a male shortage in two ways: (1) men have to hunt highly mobile and spatially concentrated herbivores over longer distances, with no alternate food sources in case of failure, the result being more deaths among young men; (2) women have fewer opportunities for food gathering and thus require more male provisioning, the result being less polygyny. These two bine to leave more women than men unmated at any one time. Such an OSR imbalance would have increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible e being an plex of color traits: hair- and eye-color diversity and, possibly, extreme skin depigmentation. D 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Gender roles; Monogamy; Pigmentation; Polygyny; Sexual selection; Upper Paleolithic 1090-5138/06/$ – see front matter D 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:. E-mail address: peter _******@. Evolution and Human Behavior 27 (2006) 85–103 1. Introduction Human hair and eye color is unusually diverse in a geographic area centered on the East Baltic and covering northern an