Redheads have spent centuries as the subject of folklore, superstition , and a disproportionate number of Halloween costumes. Now, science is handing them a win. A sweeping new study out of Harvard found that natural selection has been actively pushing red hair genes forward for thousands of years, and the trend is still going. The research, published in Nature and led by Harvard geneticist David Reich, is one of the largest ancient DNA studies ever conducted. Reich’s lab spent seven years assembling DNA sequences from ancient people who lived across Europe and parts of the Middle East, ultimately combining newly reported data from over 10,000 ancient individuals with thousands of previously published sequences and modern genomes, covering nearly 16,000 people across 18,000 years of history. “This single paper doubles the size of the ancient human DNA literature,” Reich said . Videos by VICE What the data revealed upended a long-held assumption in evolutionary biology.…