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Whether a given genetic sequence is a mutation rather than a polymorphism hinges on two issues: its global frequency and its usefulness – mutations being rare and harmful, polymorphisms being generally neither. As far as frequency goes, redheads may be common in northern Europe (6 per cent in Aberdeen), but globally they are rare. Worse, a count of heads overestimates the frequency of the ‘redhead gene’. This is because each redhead is unusual in his or her own way. MC1R comes in at least thirty different versions, and many of them are found in Ireland. Six, but perhaps as many as ten, of these human MC1R versions, in a multiplicity of combinations, cause red hair – be it auburn, deep red, orange or strawberry blond. Africans, by contrast, all have just one kind of MC1R.

Globally, any single red hair version of the MC1R gene is so vanishingly rare that we must, it seems, call it a mutation rather than a polymorphism. But perhaps an argument can be made for utility? Some have speculated that northeners need lighter skins in order to garner sunlight for the manufacture of vitamin D, without which they would suffer rickets, a bone deformity. Darwin thought that the variety of human colour was due to sexual selection – generations upon generations of perfectly arbitrary choice for beautiful mates. This is a pleasing but difficult-to-prove hypothesis – at least if we discount Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s belief that redheads give off an especially erotic odour.

On the other hand, it is easy to make a case against the usefulness of red hair. The uniformity of MC1R in Africa tells us that dark skin is needed in the tropics – there is no doubt that it protects against skin cancer. Removed from soft northern light, redheads are easily ravaged by the sun. Their MC1R genes give them delicate complexions that refuse to tan but only burn. Many Australian children are descended from Scottish and Irish immigrants, and Australian law ensures that they all wear hats and long sleeves in their schoolyards. None of these arguments is conclusive. But the evidence tends to suggest that, delightful though it may be to look at, red hair is not good for anything at all. MC1R in northern Europeans may simply be a gene that is decaying because it is no longer needed, rather as eyes decay in blind cave-fish.

THE STORY OF PETRUS GONSALVUS AND SHWE-MAON

Pale, and proud of it, nineteenth-century European anthropologists typically ordered humanity by skin colour. Perhaps unsurprisingly, scholars from elsewhere have often seen matters differently. Upon returning from a European tour, the Chinese savant Zhang Deyi (1847–1919) informed his compatriots that many Frenchwomen had long beards and moustaches. Eschewing the skin-colour geographies of their European counterparts, Chinese anthropologists made maps showing which of the world’s people were or were not hairy. They were fascinated by the Ainu, a relatively hirsute northern Japanese people whom they depicted as a race of dwarfish ape-men. The Ainu are, of course, nothing of the sort. True, Ainu men take a traditional pride in the length of their locks and beards (neither of which they trim), yet they have no more body hair than most Europeans. But then, learned Qing commentators also compared European visitors to macaques, a pleasant tradition that persists in Singapore, where foreigners are still called angmo or angmogao, Hokkein for ‘red-haired ape’.

It is perhaps not quite fair to single out the Chinese for their preoccupation with hair (it was, after all, almost certainly a white South African who invented the ‘pencil test’). And Europeans may be hairy, but this has never made them especially sympathetic to people who are hairier yet. Several genetic disorders called hypertrichoses cause infants to develop lush growths of hair on their noses, foreheads, cheeks and ears, limbs and torsos – parts that are, in most babies, only modestly clad. Grown up they have been the wild men, Waldmenschen and femmes sauvages of early travellers; the hommes primitifs and Homo hirsutus of taxonomists, and the dog-bear-lion-ape-people of fairground hucksters.

In the collection of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples there is a painting by Agostino Carracci, elder of the Bolognese artist brothers. Two figures frame the scene: a humorous dwarf and a bearded man of middle age whose teeth are bared in a grimace. Their attention is fixed upon a third figure, young, handsomely proportioned and serene, who sits between them. He is, it seems, a wild man, a man of the woods. Apart from a rude cloak he is naked, and his face is covered in hair – not just a beard, but locks that grow high on his cheeks and low on his forehead. The background foliage is lush, and a parrot, two monkeys and two dogs complete the bucolic scene. The whole thing could be an allegory of Nature were it not for the title, Arrigo Peloso, Pietro Matto e Amon Nano – Hairy Harry, Mad Peter and Tiny Amon – which tells us that it is really the inventory of a zoo.

The painting, commissioned by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, was completed in 1599. It was only a trifle compared to the magnificent interiors of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome that the Carraccis had already done for him. Attached to this palace, which now houses the French Embassy, were a botanical garden and a small menagerie, almost certainly the source of the animals depicted in Agostino’s painting. The wild man, a gift from the Cardinal’s kinsman Ranucci Farnese, lived there as well. His cloak hints at his status and identity. It is a tamarco, the robe of the Guanches, who once inhabited Tenerife in the Canary Islands but who had been briskly subjugated and largely exterminated by the Spanish a hundred years before.

HYPERTRICHOSIS LANUGINOSA. ARRIGO GONSALVUS, ROME 1599. DETAIL FROM AGOSTINO CARRACCI, ARRIGO PELOSO, PIETRO MATTO E AMON NANO.

Arrigo Gonsalvus, to give the wild man his full name, was not himself a Guanche. He was, however, the son of one, and a rather unusual one at that. In 1556 Petrus Gonsalvus arrived at the court of Henri II of France, brought there possibly as a slave from Tenerife. He could not have been more than twelve, but already a thick pelt of facial hair obscured his features. He seems to have been treated kindly there and was even given some education. In 1559, after the King’s death, Gonsalvus appears at the court of Margaret, Duchess of Parma, despot of the Spanish Netherlands, where he married a young and rather pretty Dutchwoman who bore him at least four children of whom three were exceptionally hairy as well, among them Arrigo.

Margaret of Parma returned to Italy in 1582, the hairy family trailing in her wake. They were wonders, marvels of nature, and the Hapsburgs and Farneses could not get enough of them. Frederick II, Archduke of Tyrol, commissioned a set of individual portraits for his Wunderkammer at Schloss Ambras near Innsbruck where they may still be seen, part of his collection of natural curiosities. A group portrait of the family by Georg Hoefnagel appears in the illuminated Bestiary of Rudolf II, Emperor of Austria and Frederick’s nephew, the only humans to do so. Perhaps the loveliest of the many portraits that depict this remarkable family is by the Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana. It is of Arrigo’s younger sister, Tognina, and shows the little hairy girl dressed in silvery brocades, smiling sweetly as she holds a document recounting her history aloft, and looking much like a preternaturally intelligent, if amiable, cat.

It may be thought that these portraits exaggerate the family’s hairiness, but this is certainly not so. The travels of the family Gonsalvus in northern Italy were noted by that assiduous encyclopaedist of nature Ulisse Aldrovandi, by then Professor of Natural History at the Papal University of Bologna. In his Monstrorum historia, he records meeting the family, describes them with care, and includes four woodcut portraits of them. Some scholars have suggested that Mad Peter, who stares so fixedly at the hairy man in Agostino Carracci’s painting, is a portrait of Aldrovandi himself. In support of this charming conceit, it is certainly true that the bearded figure resembles Aldrovandi, and artist and naturalist had known each other since their student days. But in 1599 Aldrovandi would have been in his seventies, whereas Mad Peter is clearly in his vigorous prime.