Neanderthal or Not?

I don’t have red hair. In these days I don’t have much hair of any other colour for that matter. When I was first born I had black curls but these soon disappeared and eventually were replaced by hair of my natural light brown colour. However, when I first grew a beard, now that was red. It’s white now and I am considering a new career as a department store Santa.

Some time ago I read a remarkably ill-informed article that confidently asserted that red hair was a genetic inheritance from Neanderthals. Now I’m reliably informed that this is, in civil service parlance, a consignment of geriatric shoe repairers i.e. a load of old cobblers. The genes responsible for red hair in homo sapiens are not the same genes that produced red hair in Neanderthals.

Not to worry though. After UC on Monday night I watched the latest edition of BBC2’s Humans. According to this, pretty much everyone of western descent outside of sub Saharan Africa do have about 2 percent Neanderthal genetic material. Well, not native Americans and South American Indians. No, like many people ultimately of Asian derivation they have a small percentage of Denisovan genes. Basically, the Denisovans were another species of human, like the Neanderthals and pretty much contemporary with them. Little fossil evidence of Denisovans has yet been found, but the genetic evidence is pretty much irrefutable.

I’m not an expert on any of this, I hasten to add.

So, prior to discovering that my red beard was not significant, and pretty much all of us have either Neanderthal and/or Denisovan genes, why was I so interested in the fact that it seemed that I was (a tiny) part Neanderthal? I’m not sure, to be honest, but this might have something to do with it. In Oaklands Junior school in the early 70s, my three best friends had a) a Nigerian father and a Jamaican mother – b) A Dad from Pakistan and a mum from Sweden - c) A Turkish father and a Mum from Italy. I used to really envy their exotic heritage, while all I could offer was a Scottish grandfather. I used to go on about him, you’d better believe it. Even though he died before I was born and I never even visited Scotland until my Mastermind final in 2007 when I was forty three.

Not, you understand, that I’m trying to imply for one minute that Scots have more Neanderthal DNA than anyone else. Even if some people do persist in depicting stereotype Scots with flaming red hair – I’m looking at you, Groundskeeper Willy!