Blond hair in the Solomon Islands has no European link

Good morning

On 18 October 1867, the United States formally took possession of Alaska from Russia. Its flag went up at Sitka, after paying 7.2 million dollars for the territory. Gold and oil later made it one of the country's richest states.

Today's issue heads to the Pacific. We visit a Melanesian country where blond hair needs no European ancestor. We also meet a group of islands named by a man who barely saw them, and a shift in Fiji's population few people noticed.

In today's edition

Solomon Islands · Fact of the day

Some Solomon Islanders have very dark skin and naturally blond hair

Most people assume blond hair only comes from European ancestry. The Solomon Islands is a country of hundreds of islands in the South Pacific. There, roughly one in ten people among the dark-skinned Melanesian population has naturally blond hair, with no European ancestors at all.

Scientists sequenced the genes of over 900 Solomon Islanders and found no link to European ancestry. The cause is a change in a single gene that helps build hair pigment. It arose locally in the Pacific and is found nowhere else.

That gene change affects only hair colour, not skin colour. That is why very dark skin and blond hair appear together there, a combination pigment research had barely studied, because it had focused mostly on Europeans.

21.24° S, 159.80° W · Place of the day

The Cook Islands

The Cook Islands are a group of 15 islands scattered across the South Pacific, northeast of New Zealand. Despite the name, Captain James Cook did not choose it. In 1773, Cook called one small atoll Hervey Island, after a British official, and that name stuck to the group for decades.

The name Cook Islands only appeared in 1824, 45 years after Cook died. It was given by Adam Johann von Krusenstern, an admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy, on a map of the Pacific Ocean. Cook himself never saw Rarotonga, the largest island and home to the capital, Avarua. A European did not reach it until 1813.

The one island Cook actually stepped on, tiny Palmerston, has no people living on it.

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Today's mystery shape · 18 October 2026

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17.71° S, 178.06° E · By the numbers

Fiji's largest ethnic group, by census year

Fiji is a country of over 300 islands in the South Pacific. Most people picture it as a country of indigenous Fijians. From 1946 to 1986, it was not. Indo-Fijians are the descendants of Indian labourers. Around 60,000 of them were brought to Fiji from 1879 to 1916. For four decades, they outnumbered indigenous Fijians at every census. They peaked at just over half the population in 1966, roughly one in every two people on the islands. The balance flipped back only after many Indo-Fijians left the country, following unrest in 1987. A country's ethnic makeup can shift sharply within one lifetime.