Sahul 10,000 years ago
John Hawks has a very long rumination on the story of blonde Melanesians which came out last week. If I can read between the lines I think some of the implications dovetail with John’s thesis in his 2007 paper on adaptive acceleration. But I’ll leave the deep reading of tea leaves to those better versed in such affairs. Rather, I will comment on two issues. The first is specific. I believe that the TYRP1 R93C allele responsible for blonde hair among the Solomon Islanders is going to be found to be the same one responsible for blonde hair around New Guinea and among some Australian Aboriginals.
There are several reasons why I suspect this. First, these Oceanian populations do seem to be a distinctive clade. There are some disagreements among geneticists as to whether they are the descendants of the first settlers of Oceania in totality, or whether they’re a compound lineage. The natural historical details need to be teased apart, but there’s no doubt that they’re a distinct and separate phylogenetic lineage in relation to other human populations (with some admixture …