History has dealt a mixed hand to the redhead. Alternatively admired or derided for the color of their crowning glory, attitudes to those with red hair have always been polarized. Throughout time, redheads have been portrayed as beautiful and brave or else promiscuous, wild, hot-tempered, violent or immoral. Gingernut, carrot top, flame-haired, copper head and rusty just some of the nicknames for red hair. The modern mind also associates the hair color with individual countries such as Scotland and Ireland or cultures such as the Vikings.
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The reason for these attitudes and associations is complicated and lies partly in the origins of red hair and the human reaction to things that are different. For although 40% of people carry the gene for red hair, real redheads are rare, amounting to no more than 1% of the population. It requires two carriers to make a red headed child. So why is red hair so rare and unique? What is its history, and is it fair to assigned heads such a turbulent reputation?

All in the Genes

Red hair has always been a question of genes. Clues suggested that red hair could have evolved in Paleolithic Europe amongst the Neanderthals. Scientists analyzed Neanderthal remains from Croatia and found a gene that resulted in red hair. However, the gene that causes red hair in modern humans is not the same as that in Neanderthals. Nor is the red-haired gene of either race found in any of the peoples who are descended from Paleolithic humans, namely the Finnish and most of Eastern Europe. This fact not only rules out interbreeding as a route for Homo sapiens red hair, but it also rules out early Europe, as it’s the birthplace.

Instead, the origins of red hair have been traced back to the Steppes of Central Asia as much as 100,000 years ago. The haplogroup of modern redheads indicates that their earliest ancestors migrated to the steppes from the Middle East because of the rise of herding during the Neolithic revolution. The Steppes were the perfect grazing lands for the herds of the agriculturists. Unfortunately, however, the lower UV levels of the area limited their bodies’ ability to synthesize vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiencies bring about weak bones, muscle pain and rickets in children. So the migrants had to change.

To survive their environment, people living in northern regions, in general, had begun to evolve to suit their environment and to allow their bodies more access to the limited light. As a consequence, their skin and hair started to become much lighter. In the eastern steppes, however, things occurred slightly differently. A mutation occurred in a gene known as M1CR which caused hair color not merely to lighten but to change entirely- to red. The skin of these new redhead people was well adapted to absorbing the much-needed UV light. It was, however, a little too sensitive to the sun- which is why redheads often sunburn and are more prone to skin cancer.

These pioneers of red hair then began to spread to the Balkans and central and Western Europe in the Bronze Age as they migrated once again, this time in search of metal. The majority of the migrants remained in these regions, although some spread further west to the Atlantic seaboard, and fewer still moved eastwards into Siberia and some as far south as India. However, these latter migrations were scant- which explains the rarity of red hair in these areas.

​The Balkans and Western Europe now became established as the geographical and historical homeland of red-haired culture. It was one that was observed by ancient writers who began to form their conclusions about the red-haired peoples they encountered.

This business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back style has been around way before it was popularized by actors and rock stars in the 1980’s. According to some historians, the mullet has been around since at least Ancient Greece, where the style was as much for function as it was for fashion. Cropped hair around the face with longer locks in the back allowed for both visibility and a protective layer of hair for your neck. Homer even described a haircut that sounds eerily familiar in The Iliad: “their forelocks cropped, hair grown long at the backs.”The Greeks weren’t the only ones sporting the mullet, though. There is evidence that Neanderthals and our oldest ancestors would wear this ‘do, as well.

The relative ease of maintaining it makes it possible to keep up even without the existence of barbershops and hair salons, and the practicality makes it perhaps one of the oldest haircuts in human history.Some Native American tribes, both historically and more recently, have included the mullet with other traditional hairstyles. In many tribes, long hair is representative of a strong cultural identity. It is connected to values of family and community, and there are multiple rituals surrounding the upkeep of long hair. The preferred style for displaying long locks is most commonly braids – often two or three – but cuts closer the Mohawks and mullets have not been uncommon, either.

Mullets have been present in and out through our entire history as a species, in different parts of the world. It wasn’t until the 1970’s when the mullet starting rising to modern mainstream fame, though, reaching its peak in the 80’s when everyone from George Clooney to Metallica’s James Hetfield sported one. It tended to be popular with white dudes who played rock music or hockey, incredibly cool and trendy for a while. The hairstyle didn’t actually have the name “mullet” until 1994, though, when the Beastie Boys released a song called “Mullet Head.” Not long after the name mullet was christened, the hairdo was on its way out. 

By the time the Beastie Boys gave the style its name, it had begun to slide from the trendy mainstream position it had been sitting comfortably at to a more countercultural phenomenon.

The peak of mullets ended in the early 1990’s, but the style has never completely faded from relevance. Instead, it slipped from the good graces of the masses and became iconic in various subcultures: everyone from country music stars and lesbians, to hockey players and Native Americans. Jennifer Arnold even created a documentary about the haircut in 2002 titled American Mullet (which you can find on Amazon Prime if you’re curious). 

In more recent years, the mullet was actually banned in Iran, for being considered too much of a “western hairstyle”. No matter what you think of it, the mullet has become enough of a staple of the American aesthetic that it’s been placed in that categorization along with spiked hair, ponytails, and long hair in general. 
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Will the mullet ever rise once more the its former glory in the 80’s? Maybe not, but it has certainly cemented itself as an iconic haircut from the past, and an important style to this day for many groups of people. 

The Mullet in 2020

It’s 2020, and the question everyone must now ask is: is the mullet coming back in style? Some may argue that it was never in style, while others will insist that it never went out of style. Ask the general public or a hair stylist, though, and they will probably be inclined to tell you that yes, the mullet is coming back. In January this year, men’s fashion blogs across the internet all declared the same thing: 2020 would be the year for the mullet. Beginning as a counter-culture hair style that was just getting its footing in the world of fashion once again, this year has proved to be the perfect time for the resurgence of the mullet. 

With hair salons being closed for multiple months in the first half of 2020, many people took on the dreaded task of facing down a home-brewed haircut. For some this manifested in a mullet style: either out of appreciation for the cut, or, perhaps, out of necessity. Get the hair off your face without worrying about trimming the back of your head where you can’t see. Like our ancestors before us, we must acknowledge the mullet for what it truly is: a practical haircut. 

The sudden lack of access to salons isn’t the only reason mullets are coming back, though. There have been whispers of the style in the mainstream over the last few years, and this was simply the boil-over point. In the second half of the past decade, we’d seen a steady increase of mullet action once again amongst the most famous of us. Ironically, a lot of the most notable celebrities actively rocking mullets today are women. Female singers especially. Everyone from Kesha and Miley Cyrus to Billy Eilish and even Zendaya have been seen sporting the look. What may have been considered a trashy style by many even just a few years ago has become a chic look sported by those of us who have a tendency to look coolest. 

When it comes to less famous women wearing the look, just as many have been sporting the ‘do as the pop stars and celebrities of the world. Especially amongst women in the LGBT+ community, the mullet is becoming as big of a fashion statement as it is amongst guys. Combine this cut with absurdly large earrings and colorful pants, and you’re ready to tell the world “Hello ladies! I, too, am gay.” 
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Is the mullet resurging in popularity along with 80’s nostalgia-themed media, like It and Stranger Things? Perhaps. Like media and clothing, hair styles tend to move in cycles. Men’s hairstyles have been typically short-on-the-sides, longer-on-top for a while, now, and maybe the mullet is a shift out of those restrictions. Recent women’s fashion has involved a lot of things that were at one point, not long ago, considered tacky (looking at you, mom jeans and scrunchies). Maybe the mullet is the next step in this resurgence, allowing men to embrace the tackier sides of our previous societal fashion faux pas, as well. 

They may have had a reputation for trade, braids and fearsome raids, but the Vikings were far from a single group of flaxen-haired, sea-faring Scandinavians.

A genetic study of Viking-age human remains has not only confirmed that Vikings from different parts of Scandinavia set sail for different parts of the world, but has revealed that dark hair was more common among Vikings than Danes today.

What’s more, while some were born Vikings, others adopted the culture – or perhaps had it thrust upon them.

“Vikings were not restricted to blond Scandinavians,” said Prof Eske Willerslev, a co-author of the research from the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen.

Writing in the journal Nature, Willerslev and colleagues report how they sequenced the genomes of 442 humans who lived across Europe between about 2,400BC and 1,600AD, with the majority from the Viking age – a period that stretched from around 750AD to 1050AD.

The study also drew on existing data from more than 1,000 ancient individuals from non-Viking times, and 3,855 people living today.

Among their results the team found that from the iron age, southern European genes entered Denmark and then spread north, while – to a lesser extent – genes from Asia entered Sweden. 

“Vikings are, genetically, not purely Scandinavian,” said Willerslev.

However, the team found Viking age Scandinavians were not a uniform population, but clustered into three main groups – a finding that suggests Vikings from different parts of Scandinavia did not mix very much. 

The team found these groups roughly map on to present-day Scandinavian countries, although Vikings from south-west Sweden were genetically similar to their peers in Denmark. Genetic diversity was greatest in coastal regions.

Further analysis confirmed the long-standing view that most Vikings in England came from Denmark, as reflected in place names and historical records, while the Baltic region was dominated by Swedish Vikings, and Vikings from Norway ventured to Ireland, Iceland, Greenland and the Isle of Man.

However, the team say remains from Russia revealed some Vikings from Denmark also travelled east.

The study also revealed raids were likely a local affair: the team found four brothers and another relative died in Salme, Estonia, in about 750AD, in what is thought could have been a raid, with others in the party likely to have been from the same part of Sweden.

In addition, the team found two individuals from Orkney, who were buried with Viking swords, had no Scandinavian genetic ancestry.

“[Being a Viking] is not a pure ethnic phenomenon, it is a lifestyle that you can adopt whether you are non-Scandinavian or Scandinavian,” said Willerslev, adding that genetic influences from abroad both before and during the Viking age might help explain why genetic variants for dark hair were relatively common among Vikings.

Dr Steve Ashby, an expert in Viking-age archaeology from the University of York said the study confirmed what had been suspected about movement and trade in the Viking age, but also brought fresh detail.

“The evidence for gene flow with southern Europe and Asia is striking, and sits well with recent research that argues for large-scale connectivity in this period,” he said.

“[The study] also provides new information about levels of contact and isolation within Scandinavia itself, and offers an interesting insight into the composition of raiding parties.”

But Judith Jesch, professor of Viking studies at the University of Nottingham said the study is unlikely to rewrite the history books.

“We long ago gave up on the most colourful popular myths about Vikings, and recent research has focused on the Viking age as a period of mobility, when people from Scandinavia migrated in various directions, and often back again, encountering and interacting with other peoples, languages and cultures in a process which I and others have called diaspora,” she said.
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Even so, Jesch said the study offered food for thought. “Archaeologists have long suggested that many cultural ideas reached Scandinavia through the Danish gateway, so it will be interesting to discuss further what this gene flow [from Denmark to Norway and Sweden] means in terms of how culture is diffused. Did it happen as a result of the movements of people or by some other process?,” she said.

More than 3,300 years ago, in a newly built city in Egypt, a woman with an incredibly elaborate hairstyle of lengthy hair extensions was laid to rest.

She was not mummified, her body simply being wrapped in a mat. When archaeologists uncovered her remains they found she wore "a very complex coiffure with approximately 70 extensions fastened in different layers and heights on the head," writes Jolanda Bos, an archaeologist working on the Amarna Project, in an article recently published in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.

Researchers don't know her name, age or occupation, but she is one of hundreds of people, including many others whose hairstyles are still intact, who were buried in a cemetery near an ancient city now called Amarna. [See Photos of the Egyptian Skeletons and Elaborate Hairstyles]

This city was constructed as a new capital of Egypt by Akhenaten (reign ca. 1353-1335 B.C.), a pharaoh who unleashed a religious revolution that saw the Aten, a deity shaped as a sun disk, assume supremacy in Egyptian religion. Akhenaten ordered that Amarna be constructed in the desert and that images of some of Egypt's other gods be destroyed. Amarna was abandoned shortly after Akhenaten's death, and today archaeologists supported by the Amarna Trust are investigating all aspects of the ancient city, including the hairstyles its people wore.

Bos is leading the hairstyle research, and the woman with 70 extensions leaves her puzzled.

"Whether or not the woman had her hair styled like this for her burial only is one of our main research questions," said Bos in an email to Live Science. "The hair was most likely styled after death, before a person was buried. It is also likely, however, that these hairstyles were used in everyday life as well and that the people in Amarna used hair extensions in their daily life."

Many of the other skulls Bos analyzed also had hair extensions. One skull had extensions made of gray and dark black hair suggesting multiple people donated their hair to create extensions.

Hairy discoveries

As Bos analyzed a selection of 100 recently excavated skulls (of which 28 still had hair) from the Armana cemetery, she noticed the people who lived in the ancient city had a wide variety of hair types. They range "from very curly black hair, to middle brown straight," she noted in the journal article, something "that might reflect a degree of ethnic variation." [Photos: 10 Iconic Hairstyles That Took Root]

Those skulls with brown hair often had rings or coils around their ears, a style that was popular at Amarna, she found. Why people in this city liked it is unknown. "We still have no idea. This is of course one of the answers we are still trying to find from the record," said Bos in the email.

People in the city also seemed to be fond of braids. "All braids found in the coiffures were simple and of three strands, mostly 1 cm [0.4 inches] wide, with strands of approximately 0.5 cm [0.2 inches] when tightly braided," Bos writes in the journal article.

People at Amarna also liked to keep their hair short. "Braids were often not more than 20 cm [7.9 inches] long, leaving the hair at shoulder length approximately," Bos added. "The longest hair that was found consisted of multilayered extensions to a length of approximately 30 cm [11.8 inches]."

 Fat was used to help create all the hairstyles Bos found, something that would have helped keep the hair in one piece after death. More research is needed to determine whether the fat was from animals. A textile found on each of the skulls may have been used to cover part of the head.

Hide the gray?

In one case a woman has an orange-red color on her graying hair. It appears that that she dyed her hair, possibly with henna (a flowering plant).

"We are still not completely sure if and what kind of hair coloring was used on this hair, it only seems that way macroscopically," said Bos in the email. "At present we are analyzing the hairs in order to find out whether or not some kind of coloring was used. On other sites dyed hair was found from ancient Egypt."

This woman, among other ancient Egyptians, may have dyed her hair "for the same reason as why people dye their hair today, in order not to show the gray color," Bos said.

The article can be found here