Re: Blond Child, Brownhaired Adult

[HCN]

<vjp...@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com> wrote in message
news:edirbh$f9h$1...@reader2.panix.com...
> What happens when a blond child has dark hair as an adult? In the
> largest
> Greek parish in the USA (St Nik, Flushing, NY) half the kids going
> for
> communion are blond and both their parents have black hair. ...

Look up the term "tow-head". Actually, I just did, and it doesn't help.

Anecdotally... children will have very blond hair that may darken as they
get older.

It is very common, and not very strange. My mother was very blond as a
child, but had brown hair when she died. I thought that my hair would
darken, but it has stayed a fairly fair red (also known as strawberry
blond). My siblings both have pale brown hair, which has turned gray by the
time they were 40 (my sister keeps hers brunette with the use of hair dye).

Then I looked at my kids... all had blond hair as toddlers. As teenagers
one has light red hair (like me!), one has pale brown hair (like her aunt
and uncle!), and one is still blond!

Anyway, check this out (though it is not very scientific),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blond .... with this quote: "Blond hair is
common in infants and children, so much so that the term "baby blond" is
often used for very light-colored hair. Babies may be born with blond hair
even among groups where adults rarely have blond hair, although such natal
hair usually falls out quickly. Blond hair tends to turn darker with age,
and many children born blond turn from anything between a light brown to
even black before or during their teenage years."

[Agamemnon]

<vjp...@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com> wrote in message
news:edirbh$f9h$1...@reader2.panix.com...
> What happens when a blond child has dark hair as an adult? In the
> largest
> Greek parish in the USA (St Nik, Flushing, NY) half the kids going
> for

> communion are blond and both their parents have black hair. Someone
> (from

And are both their parents of Greek decent on both sides of the family going
back for 5 generations ?

> Cold Spring, no less) once explained this to me, but I pretty much
> forgot. I
> think he said something that there are competing traits and the dark one
> wins
> out in adulthood. Someone also suggested that the darker pigment is
> produced
> more under certain circumstances. The above also applied to me, and I
> became
> dark haired about the time I started school. (I do have adult blond
> cousins

> I have also heard something that when people are highly inbred,
> the
> dominant gene becomes more pronounced, but if they just vary a bit
> (like
> marry from a hundred miles away instead of the next village) the
> recessive
> traits do reappear? Also that when folks tend to be undernourished,
> the
> dominant phenotypes rule more strongly? My blond ancestors were all
> born
> before 1900 and my blond cousins after 1969; ie none during the lean
> years

Yer right, and a load of use before 1900 is. So were mine, but they probably
had something to do with king Richard I back in 1200 and yours probably have
something to do with the Normans as well.

> (1910-50) and this pattern seems (by casual observation) to repeat
> amongst
> all Greeks. King David had red hair and there are some red haired
> Arabs.

King David is a fictitious character and even if he is based on a real
person his ancestors came from Anatolia not Palestine so would have no
connection with Arabs. If there are red haired Arabs then they are probably
Scythes. Read Herodotus.

> I've seen blond Arab toddlers on NYC Transit and as much as is visible
> of

Yer, yer.... in NYC. Then they are not pure Arabs but interbred. There are
Lebanese who are blond but Lebanese are not Arabs, and anyway their
blondness probably has something to so with Richard I as well.

> their mothers seems dark haired. There are enough writings of fair
> haired
> ancient Greeks to make some sicko white supremacists web cites claim a
> number

The ancient Greeks bleached their hair blond with lemon juice. Any inherited
blondness was already in Greece more than 7000 years ago with the M170 P37
HgI1b linage since that's how long it takes to form a sub linage, and was
probably recessive several millennia before classical times.

> of them were "nordic" or "Alpine" (actually the part of Greece my family
> is
> from, the Pindus Mts, is part of the Alps, but this was only
> acknowledged
> after Greece joined the EU) and that they no longer exist.

And which Alps would this be. Pindus is part of the Balkans range.