I got to wondering if male pattern baldness affects men of different ethnicities with roughly the same frequency, or are there ethnicities that have markedly higher or lower occurrence of baldness?
Indigenous peoples of the Americas – “Indians,” from the Cree of Canada to the Mapuche of Chile – undoubtedly have, as a general rule, less male pattern baldness than, say, peoples of European stock. For example.
I worked with a man who was of Cree Indian ancestry and we had that exact discussion many years ago. He had never given it a moment’s though before I raised it but agreed as he knew of no Cree males that had male pattern baldness issues. I said to him that in my opinion, the secret to curing male pattern baldness (or limiting its negative affects) would clearly lie somewhere in their genes.
Return to the rainforest: A son’s search for his Amazonian mother reports that they were able to set up a Skype link between an Amazon woman and her U.S. anthropologist former husband, and notes the following: “Yarima was disturbed by Kenneth Good’s baldness, since the Yanomami do not go bald. He had to run and get a baseball cap before they could continue the conversation.”
This is interesting, because all New World indigenous people are descended from Asians who crossed the Bering Sea land bridge starting about 16,500 years ago, a very short time on the evolutionary scale. Baldness is not unusual in Asians, so I wonder why it is so rare in New World populations?
I haven’t found a definitive cite yet, but it seems that male pattern baldness is most common and of earlier onset in Europeans, less common and later in Africans, and of late onset if it occurs at all in Asians. Native Americans are mostly descended from one subpopulation of Asians, in which baldness may have been particularly uncommon.
I can’t recall ever seeing a bald indigenous male in Panama, no matter how old.