Интересная статья, дающая объяснение высокой по сравнению с другими человеческими популяциями изменчивости цвета волос и глаз у европейцев.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/just-for-show_1.htmlWhy would sexual selection have been more intense among ancestral Europeans? Such selection happens when too many of one sex are competing to mate with too few of the other. In most mammals, the males do the competing—because polygyny dries up the pool of available females. So the males are brilliantly colored, and the females duller in appearance.
But here we have the reverse. Hair color is brighter and more diverse in European women than in European men. We see a similar pattern with skin color. “European” physical traits seem to be female traits. It looks as though sexual selection primarily targeted women and then secondarily spilled over on to men.
This unusual color scheme seems to result from the unusual steppe-tundra that covered the plains of northern and eastern Europe during the last ice age 25,000 to 10,000 years ago. This environment offered ancestral Europeans a huge amount of edible biomass, but nearly all of it was locked up as meat in wandering herds of reindeer and other herbivores. Since male hunters provided almost all of the food for their wives and offspring, the cost of supporting a second wife and her children was prohibitive for them, being feasible for only the ablest hunters. At the same time, pursuit of migratory game greatly lengthened the mean hunting distance and boosted male death rates accordingly.
Thus, limited polygyny, combined with higher hunting-related mortality, skewed the mate market towards a shortage of available men. Women had to compete for men, unlike the situation among tropical humans and most other mammalian species. This intense mate competition in turn drove sexual selection for colorful features that could, by their brightness or their novelty, catch the attention of a prospective mate (Frost, 2006; Frost, 2008).
Тема: Изменчивость цвета глаз и волос у европейцев - результат полового отбора? (Прочитано 3020 раз)