NYT: Neanderthals were Redheads

Other than some general anatomical features of Neanderthals — a large nose and heavy brow among them — not much is known about how they looked. Just bones exist of this hominid species, which lived in Europe and Asia and became extinct
30,000 years ago. But by analyzing DNA from some of those old bones, European researchers have helped fill in the picture. Some Neanderthals, they suggest in a study published online by Science, were fair-skinned and redheaded.
Carles Lalueza- Fox of the University of Barcelona and Holger Römpler of the University of Leipzig in Germany and colleagues report the finding.
They discovered a variation in a fragment of a Neanderthal gene that regulates pigmentation of skin and hair through melanin production and saw that it had effects similar to those from variations in the gene in humans.
The study suggests that redheadedness would have evolved separately in Neanderthals and humans, at different times and through different genetic variations. The conditions that drove the evolution were likely the same. Fair skin would have
been advantageous in northerly latitudes because it
would have let more sunlight into the skin to manufacture vitamin D. In the north, large amounts of melanin were not needed to protect skin from ultraviolet light.