The elusive redheads of Easter Island

French editionHere’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia page Rapa Nui National Park 

The earliest inhabitants of the island called it "Te Pito o TeHenua" (the navel/end of the world). The first European to discover the island was Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen on Easter day, 1722. As a result, he named it "Easter Island". He observed that the inhabitants were of three groups: "dark skinned, red skinned, and very pale skinned people with red hair".[15]

As you can see, after “red hair” there is the footnote 15, where this article is linked. I quote from it: 

In 1722, a Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, sighted and visited the island. This happened to be on a Sunday, Easter Sunday to be precise, and the name stuck: Easter Island (Isla de Pascua in Spanish).

What he discovered on Easter Island were three distinct groups of people, Dark skinned, Red skinned, and very Pale skinned People with red hair.

So, I began researching the original source of this statement and I found out something quite surprising. It turned out that this excerpt is not from Roggeveen’s writings, but from a book written by Carl Friederich Behrens,  a corporal during Roggeveen’s expedition. The book is Reise durch die Süd-Länder und um die Welt, published in 1737. 

Carl Friederich Behrens

Here’s the original book (click on the cover). As you can see, it was printed with the old book hand Fraktur, so it is not very easy to decipher. Anyway, it is important that we see the original. If you go to book page 87, you’ll find this passage: 

Der Coleur nach waren sie braunlich, wie ungefehr ein Spanier, doch findet man derselben einige schwarzer, auch theils ganz weiß; wie nicht minder derselben auch einige roth, gleich als wären sie von der Sonne etwas stark verbrannt.

That is:

The complexion was brownish, about the hue of a Spaniard, yet one finds some among them of a darker shade and others quite white, and no less also a few of a reddish tint as if somewhat severely tanned by the sun.

So… no mention of red hair! Here the author is clearly talking about the indigenous’ complexion, not about their hair colour, and I’m really surprised that Wikipedia cited a source with wrong information in it. Anyway, it is interesting that on Easter Island there were so many different shades of complexion.

Map from Behrens' travel report

Now, as far as this book by Behrens is concerned, something very strange happened. As you can read here:

The first edition was published in 1737 followed, among others, by a re-published edition made by German anthropologist Hans Plischke that was published in 1923. The important thing is that this version differs from the original to a great extent and the editor did not account for the changes he had introduced into the text: besides grammar and orthography modernization, he omitted certain portions, misinterpreted other ones and added some comments without marking them as his own. As a result, the narrative gives an impression of having been written by another author; Behrens appears as a person with a different character and attitude, weaker, less convincing and even less trustworthy than he really was. This article presents numerous examples of the distortions as a warning against making a scientific or an anthropological use of unreliable editions of source texts, as this may wield a negative infuence upon our view and interpretation of the culture we are analyzing.

This is very worrying, because one wonders how much we can trust modern editions/translations of old books.

So, I checked the French edition, to see if the sentence about complexion was translated correctly. Here it is (page 133 of the book): 

Ils sont en général bruns, comme les Espagnols; on en trouve cependant qui sont assez noirs, & d’autres qui sont tout-à-fait blancs. ll y en a encore, dont le teint est rougeâtre comme s'ils étoient brulés du soleil.

The sentence is exactly the same of the first German edition, so, probably the introduction of red hair instead of reddish complexion is something recent, maybe done by that website linked on the Wikipedia page of Rapa Nui National Park. 

Pakomio Maori

However, there are other sources about redheads in Easter Island.

Here’s an article written in the 90s by Robert Langdon from the Australian National University (not to be confused with Dan Brown’s character 😁), where the author talks about an alleged bue-eyed, red-haired Easter Islander called Pakomio Maori, born between 1816 and 1826 and dead in the first 1910s. Langdon writes that in 1971 he discovered 18 Easter Islanders with no known non-Easter Island ancestors who were carriers of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes A29 and B12, that are especially common among Basques. All 18 islanders were the children of Pakomio Maori through his two wives. 

Pakomio Maori (source)

In his article, Langdon posits that Pakomio Maori was not a descendant of early Europeans visiting the island, although he doesn’t bring any defintive evidence, since at that time ancestry DNA tests had not yet been developed. As a consequence, we don’t know where the “Basque” genes of his children come from.

In any case, we know that traits such as blue eyes and red hair, in order to show up, need to be inherited from both parents, which would mean that Pakomio Maori would have to be the descendant of Europeans from both sides of his family. And not whatever Europeans, but Europeans carrying the mutations for red hair and blue eyes. 

Langdon also quotes early explorers describing isladers with light-coloured hair and skin and “European” facial features and in the article you’ll find photos of some European-looking Easter Islanders. One is Maria Garcia Pate Pakomio, a grand-daughter of Pakomio Maori’s, while the others are the cultural informants Juan Tepano and his mother Viriamo.

Thor Heyerdahl

Here’s the Wikipedia page about the Hanau epe, a semi-legendary people who are said to have lived in Easter Island, where they came into conflict with another people known as the Hanau momoko. I quote from the page: 

Various theories have been put forward to explain the alleged ethnic difference between the two groups. Thor Heyerdahl popularised the view that they were a South American indigenous people, who were pale skinned with red hair. Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition was designed to show that migrants from Peru could have reached Polynesia. He believed that the Hanau epe were the earliest inhabitants of the island; they created its unique monuments, which resemble similar sculptures found in the Americas, but were eventually killed off by either the Polynesians or a later wave of migrants from the Northwest coast of America.

Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian adventurer, ethnographer and author, know for conducting experimental voyages to test hypotheses about ancient human migrations and cultural diffusion using replica primitive watercraft.

Here’s how Wikipedia introduces him: 

Heyerdahl is notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he drifted 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a primitive hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was supposed to demonstrate that the legendary sun-worshiping red-haired, bearded, and white-skinned "Tiki people" from South America drifted and colonized Polynesia first, before actual Polynesian peoples. His hyperdiffusionist ideas on ancient cultures had been widely rejected by the scientific community, even before the expedition.

However, Grokipedia adds: 

Although Heyerdahl's specific diffusionist theories faced significant academic rejection for lacking corroborative genetic, linguistic, and archaeological consensus—often prioritizing independent invention narratives—his hands-on replications provided causal evidence of navigational capabilities that later findings, like transpacific crop transfers, have partially vindicated.

We’ll get back to this later.

But why Heyerdahl posited the existence of South American indigenous people with red hair? 

One reason are the mummies of Peru and Chile we have seen in this article, but we have to keep in mind that, as of now, we don’t know whether these individuals were really red-haired or not.

Another reason are the legends of red-haired and fair-skinned mythological beings in New Zealand and the uru-kehu, that we have seen in this article.

One more reason are accounts of voyagers and explorers describing red-haired people in Polynesia, as you can read in Heyerdahl’s book American Indians in the Pacific (1952), particularly in Part IV (The Complexity of Polynesians Origin). 

Clealry, in order to be sure Heyerdahl correctly translated and copied all these citations, they should be checked in their original versions. 

I copy here some of these citations.

Page 194: “A very beautiful native sat near Doña Isabel, with such red hair that Doña Isabel wished to cut off a few locks; but seeing that the native did not like it she desisted, not wishing to make her angry.” (Santa Cristina Island - Tahuata)

Page 195: “Five natives came in a canoe, the middle one vigorously bailing the water out of the vessel. His red hair came down to the waist. He was white as regards colour, beautifully shaped, the face aquiline and handsome, rather freckled and rosy, the eyes black and gracious, the forehead and eyebrows good, the nose, mouth, and lips well proportioned, with the teeth well ordered and white.” (Peregrina Island)

(both citations from The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros)

Page 197: “… Forster (1778, p. 229) speaks of a native Tahitian who had "perfectly red hair, a fairer complexion than the rest, and was sprinkled all over with freckles". (Tahiti)

According to modern genetics, Polynesians come from two groups: Austronesians from South-East Asia and Taiwan, and Melanesians (especially Papuans).  

These “European-looking” indigenous are explained with: normal inner variation of Polynesian people, mixing between Austroneasian and Melanesian groups, independent evolution of traits such as fair skin and hair, and (obviously) subjective interpretation by European explorers.

As we have seen, both Wikipedia and Grokipedia wrote that Heyerdahl’s ideas have been rejected by the scientific community, but… it turned out he was right about contacts between South America and Polynesia, as you can read in the 2020 study Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement, by Ioannidis and colleagues, and in the article from the National Geographic DNA reveals Native American presence in Polynesia centuries before Europeans arrived. 

I won’t get into this matter, because it falls outise the topic of this post, but I want to end with this quote from Grokipedia, which, in my opinion, gives you food for thought. 

Particularly in the context of post-colonial shifts, Heyerdahl viewed the intensified rejection of diffusionism as entangled with decolonization agendas that privileged autochthonous origins to bolster indigenous self-determination, even at the expense of causal realism in migration dynamics. Mainstream institutions, exhibiting systemic preferences for narratives aligning with political sensitivities, have critiqued diffusionist claims—including his—as undermining local agency, yet Heyerdahl countered that such politicization obscured the advanced navigational prowess of ancient non-Western societies, as empirically shown through reed boat replicas navigating from Africa to the Americas in 1969 and 1970. In interviews, he underscored pursuing unvarnished truth over diplomatic consensus, warning that deference to orthodoxy stifled inquiry into humanity's interconnected prehistoric seafaring heritage.

Red Hair in Art: Thomas Cooper Gotch

Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854–1931) was an English painter and book illustrator loosely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement; he was the brother of John Alfred Gotch, the architect.

Gotch studied art in London and Antwerp before he married and studied in Paris with his wife, Caroline, a fellow artist. Returning to Britain, they settled into the Newlyn art colony in Cornwall. He first made paintings of natural, pastoral settings before immersing himself in the romantic, Pre-Raphaelite romantic style for which he is best known. His daughter Phyllis was often a model for the colourful depictions of young girls.

His works have been exhibited at the Royal Academy, Royal College of Art and the Paris Salon.

Self-portrait

The Heir to All Ages

Portrait of a Redhead

The Mother Enthroned

My Crown and My Sceptre

The Child Enthroned

Alleluia

A Pageant of Childhood

The Dancing Lesson

Red Hair in Art: Frank Dicksee

Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee (27 November 1853 – 17 October 1928) was an English Victorian painter and illustrator, best known for his pictures of dramatic literary, historical, and legendary scenes. He also was a noted painter of portraits of fashionable women, which helped to bring him success in his own time.

His father Thomas and his sister MArgaret were painters as well.

Red hair is featured in many of his paintings.

A Knight Being Crowned

Harmony

Chivalry

The Two Crowns

La belle dame sans merci

Passion

Stella

The Ideal or In Quest of Truth

Startled

Yseult

Red Hair in Art: Ferdinand Hodler

Ferdinand Hodler (March 14, 1853 – May 19, 1918) was a Swiss painter. He is one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of Symbolism which he called "parallelism".

Here are some of his painting featuring redheads.

Portrait of an Unknown

Portrait of Madame Loup

Spring

Spring

Head of a Red-haired Woman

Portrait of an Unknown Woman from Wien

Abendruhe

Portrait of James Vibert

Portrait of James Vibert

Portrait eines lesenden Mannes

Die Empfindung

The Dream. Cover for the novel Die Mittagsgöttin

Is red hair the result of sexual selection?

As we have seen in a previous post, in the study by Rosalind Harding and colleagues Evidence for Variable Selective Pressures at MC1R (2000) the authors argued that MC1R gene didn’t show any selective pressure.

The study by Peter Frost, published in 2006, European hair and eye color: a case of frequency-dependent sexual selection?  is a sort of reply to Harding’s paper. 

Frost writes that, without any selection, the current level of hair-colour diversity would have taken 850,000 years to develop, but modern humans have been in Europe for approximately 35,000 years according to Out of Africa II (for which I refer you to the final part of the post I linked above). So, Frost argues that there was indeed a selection: a sexual selection, which, however, acted primarily on women.

He proposes the concept of frequency-dependent sexual selection, according to which much rarer traits are more attractive and desirable and have a reproductive advantage as long as they remain rare. 

This process was stronger during the Upper Paleolithic and the last glacial period, when many men died or were absent for long periods due to long-distance hunting and extreme environmental conditions. This would have created fewer available men, less polygyny and a greater difficulty for women in finding a stable partner. In this situation, women had to compete for male partners, thus increasing the sexual selection’s pressure at more conspicuous feminine traits such as hair, eyes and skin pigmentation. Fairer traits would become a sort of visual signal, so women with these traits had an advantage in finding a partner. 

Europe during the last glacial period

This would also explain the rapid spreading of MC1R and its many mutations. Normally, more "silent" mutations (which do not change the phenotype) accumulate in genes than visible mutations. In MC1R, however, the opposite occurs: there are numerous variants that actually change hair colour. Frost interprets this as a sign that these variants have been favoured by selection (sexual selection, in this case) and not simply tolerated. The genetic structure of MC1R seems incompatible with simple random genetic drift and instead suggests a selective pressure that favoured visible hair diversity.

On the contrary, according to Frost, in many other traditional societies the situation was the opposite: thanks to a better climate, mortality rate among men was lower and they had to compete among them for women. As a consequence, sexual selection would affect men primarily. Furthermore, due to the very strong UV radiation, environmental natural selection tended to maintain more stable pigmentations.

This theory of sexual selection seems to be supported (at least in part) by other studies cited by Frost, according to which during adulthood blond hair darkens with age more slowly in women than in men, and that in all human populations women are paler than men after puberty. 

Besides, the 2008 paper Spectrophotometric Methods for Quantifying Pigmentation in Human Hair—Influence of MC1R Genotype and Environment also supports these findings, because the authors argue that hair colour varies more in women than in men and that redheads are more frequent among women. They don’t identify the genes causing this variation, but in his study Frost writes that, according to an unpublished work by Mather and colleagues, prenatal exposure to estrogen appears to be higher in individuals with blond hair or non-brown eyes. 

Many geneticists and evolutionists consider Frost’s hypothesis interesting, but not definitively proven. The main criticisms are: difficulty in empirically demonstrating prehistoric sexual preferences, speculative reconstruction of demographic relationships, possible underestimation of genetic drift and migration and risk of “adaptationism” (each trait must have a specific selective function).

Today, it is believed that skin, eye, and hair colour are likely the result of multiple combined factors, such as sexual selection, adaptation to UV rays and vitamin D, genetic drift, migrations and demographic history.

PS: as far as the last glacial period is concerned, in July 2025 a study was published which argued that even during the coldest ice ages the Arctic remained partially open, with seasonal sea ice allowing life to survive in the harshest climates. Here’s a short article and the original study. 

Do redheads synthesize vitamin D even without sun exposure?

The study Increased 25(OH)D3 level in redheaded people: Could redheadedness be an adaptation to temperate climate?  was conducted in 2020 in the Czech Republic on a sample of 203 individuals: 73 with red hair and 130 with different hair colours. Its aim was to investige the correlation between red hair and vitamin D, in particular the vitamin D precursor 25(OH)D3 (calcidiol) and folic acid.  

The results were quite interesting: 

Redheaded subjects had higher 25(OH)D3 concentrations and approximately the same folic acid concentrations as non-redheaded subjects. […] Redheaded subjects also reported that they used more intensive chemical and mechanical sun protection than their non-redheaded peers. In contrast to the situation in non-redheaded persons, redheaded persons' 25(OH)D3 concentrations seemed independent of the intensity of sun exposure or protection from solar radiation. […] This suggests that a factor other than eumelanin concentration (and skin fairness) is responsible for higher concentrations of 25(OH)D3 in redheaded individuals and that both traits, that is both red hair and fair skin, may well be two independent adaptations for life in environments with low UVB radiation.

 

Basically, they are saying that red-haired people are capable of synthesizing sufficient amounts of 25(OH)D3 even when their sun exposure is minimal. However, the authors warn that this observation cannot be generalised, and add:

This phenomenon was observed in two medium-sized samples of 93 men and 110 women who passed a relatively stringent self-selection process. Until this phenomenon is demonstrated in other, more representative populations, especially those living north of the 55° parallel, such as Scotland or Sweden, our conclusions must be considered merely preliminary.

In the years that followed, the study was not refuted, but it was not definitively confirmed either. There are several studies about skin pigmentation and vitamin D (like this one), but none of them focuses on the difference between red hair and other hair colours.

In any case, this Czech study is very interesting nonetheless, and we can verify these results by ourselves. If you have red hair and don’t expose yourself to the sun too much, you can have you level of vitamin D tested and see if you have deficiency of it or not. 

Also, should the study be correct, one wonders why red hair is not more common, at least in northern countries. If you have a hair colour that gives such an advantage, one expects for this hair colour to be selected by evolution over all the other hair colours. 

An original theory about the origin of red hair: boglands and nitrogen!

I recently came across an original theory about the origin of red hair, which links this hair colour to boglands. You can download the paper here. 

A bog (or bogland) is a wetland that accumulates peat as a deposit of dead plant materials, often mosses, typically sphagnum moss. They are often covered in heath or heather shrubs rooted in the sphagnum moss and peat. Bogs occur where the water at the ground surface is acidic and low in nutrients. They are generally found in cooler northern climates and are formed in poorly draining lake basins. In general, the low fertility and cool climate result in relatively slow plant growth, but decay is even slower due to low oxygen levels in saturated bog soils. Hence, peat accumulates. Large areas of the landscape can be covered many meters deep in peat. Bogs are widely distributed in cold, temperate climes, mostly in boreal ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere. The world's largest wetland is the peat bogs of the Western Siberian Lowlands in Russia, which cover more than a million square kilometres.

A bog in Lauhanvuori National Park, Isojoki, Finland

The anaerobic environment and presence of tannic acids within bogs can result in the remarkable preservation of organic material. Finds of such material have been made in Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Russia, and the United Kingdom. They have yielded extremely well-preserved bog bodies, with hair, organs, and skin intact, buried there thousands of years ago after apparent Germanic and Celtic human sacrifice. Excellent examples of such human specimens include the Haraldskær Woman and Tollund Man in Denmark, and Lindow man found at Lindow Common in England (here a list of the most important bog bodies). The Tollund Man was so well preserved that when the body was discovered in 1950, the discoverers thought it was a recent murder victim and researchers were even able to tell the last meal that the Tollund Man ate before he died: porridge and fish. This process happens because of the low oxygen levels of bogs in combination with the high acidity.

As you can see in the photo below, the high levels of acidity darken the skin of these bodies, which often exhibit red hair. This led to the hypothesis that the high nitrogen level in boggy environments may be the cause of the red hair colour. The interaction between nitrogen and keratin in hair can lead to a chemical reaction that results in red pigmentation, regardless of the individual’s original hair colour.

Grauballe Man

I quote from the paper:

Building on these observations, this study posits that prolonged exposure to such environments could lead to genetic adaptations over generations. The hypothesis suggests that the nitrogen-rich conditions could exert selective pressure, favoring individuals with genetic mutations that produce red hair. These mutations might confer some survival advantages in boggy environments, possibly through mechanisms related to UV protection or thermoregulation. As a result, red hair could become a heritable trait within populations living in or around these regions.

[...]

In addition to direct genetic effects, nitrogen exposure may have also influenced epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetics involves changes in gene expression that do not alter the DNA sequence but can be heritable. Prolonged exposure to high nitrogen levels could have triggered epigenetic modifications that enhanced the survival and reproductive success of individuals in these environments. Over time, these epigenetic changes could become stabilized in the population, contributing to the genetic adaptation observed today.

However, the author concludes by saying that the exact mechanisms and pathways of this process remain to be fully elucidated.