Big Bad Bald Guys

Perhaps I am thinking of seeing African children with reddish hair, and it's actually due to the malnutrition syndrome called kwashiorkor.

I just read through the Wiki article on red hair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair
and it seems that red hair was unusual, but notable, in many geographic locations. It also has this: "Estimates on the original occurrence of the currently active gene for red hair vary from 20,000 to 100,000 years ago.[27][28]

A DNA study has concluded that some Neanderthals also had red hair, although the mutation responsible for this differs from that which causes red hair in modern humans."

The article is worth a read, because it's got a lot of information that I've not been aware of. Redheads sense pain differently, for instance, and in Africa albinos can look like redheads, but the trait is selected against because the accompanying lack of melanin is detrimental. Meanwhile in more northern areas, the lack of melanin is not as important an issue, so the trait is not selected against.

Red-haired men were supposed to have been sacrificed to the god Osiris in Ancient Egypt, but that comes from the Malleus Malefactorum, which appeared in the Middle Ages as a handbook for witch hunters--red hair and green eyes being a mark of witchcraft.

Achilles and his son Pyrrhus were thought to have had red hair; Judas Iscariot and Mary Magdalene were depicted as redheads; King David, Thor, and Muhammad were also presumed to be red-haired.

Amusingly, after I saw a news article on the Red Head Day where hundreds of redheads gathered, and was informed that redheads make up 2% of the population, three of the following four commercials all featured a redhead.

I think that being bald was percieved as "having something wrong with you." High fevers will make hair fall out, and some women lose a lot of hair during pregnancy.

The ancient Egyptians usually shaved their heads, then donned wigs, mostly for hygeine purposes, but this habit may have been viewed as weird by the subjects and enemies of Egypt.

Even further back, Gilgamesh's companion Enkidu was described as being a hairy wild man, and Esau was covered in red hair while his twin brother and rival Jacob was smooth-skinned. Later, Jacob cheats Esau out of his inheritance by putting on a hairy glove for his blind old father to touch and bless Jacob in Esau's place. (Esau had previously sold his birthright to Jacob for some stew, but still, Jacob pulled a fast one.)

Incidentally, Kevin--I'd seen depictions of Neanderthals as having reddish hair, and there are some tribes in Africa where red hair is common.

Baldness can also accentuate facial features, as there's no hair to distract attention from the face.

Hair has a lot of mystique to it.

Not so long ago, and in many cultures today, women were expected to cover their hair. It was percieved to be a sexual enticement to "let your hair down." In Victorian times, little girls put their hair up when they reached the age of fifteen, and once married, women often wore caps, veils, or hats to cover their heads.

Men also used to wear hats as a matter of course, but would remove them as a mark of respect; oddly, women were expected to either put on a veil or keep their hats on out of respect, as when entering a church.

Luxurious beards were symbols of virility, and everyone mocked the "beardless boy." Today there are lots of treatments to halt or reverse balding.

As Ginrummy points out, black men can make shaven heads work for them, but white guys have mixed results.

Going bald accentuates the cranium and makes the forehead look bigger, so a lot of "mad scientist" types are depicted as bald. Years ago I heard a joke about how smart guys go bald in the back, because they're always scratching their heads, and lovers go bald in the front, because women keep running their fingers through the guy's hair.

Actually, the "Mark of Cain" was generally depicted in medieval and later art as red hair. (Check out Judas in "The Last Supper.") If you had red hair, you were thought to be touched by the devil. Nobody really knows why, but the general theory is that red hair was so rare as to be shocking to someone of the classical world. There were no redheaded Romans or Greeks, and few if any among the Germans. Thus it stuck out as sick and weird, and probably evil, and even after it had become a relatively common thing, it probably retained the evil connotations. Whatever the "mark of Cain" actually was, the arts decided it was red hair.

(The subject of red hair is interesting: it appears to have originated fairly recently and in one fairly isolated geographic region: The norse lands. It's fairly well documented, for instance, that red hair was completely unknown in Ireland until the vikings showed up)

Attractiveness is a somewhat arbitrary concept. Fencing scars were considered rakish and handsome and virile by Germans WELL into the 20th century. German nobles used to deliberately practice without helmets, and if they ended up with a particularly fetching cut, they'd pack it full of fireplace ash to make sure it scarred up nicely. As Neo said, the Romans saw baldness as a physical deformity (Interestingly, baldness was considerably rarer among them than us) hence Caesar's obsession with wearing the laurel leaves which made his thinning hair less apparent. Tattoos, when you think about it, are basically just decorated scar tissue