Saturday 8 April 2023

The Bald Truth About Body Hair

Humans evolved over millions of years, first coming down from the trees, walking upright, growing opposable thumbs and learning that if we poked a Woolly Mammoth with something pointy we could eat for a week but between then and now we have had many evolutionary changes, one of which is we lost almost all of our body hair.
I assume there was some evolutionary dead ends we went down where we started to develop or lose something and then found out actually, that's a stupid idea so never took it forward but i do wonder if we could reverse evolve to get back some of the things we changed.
Charles Darwin put down our fur loss to natural selection with our female ancestors preferred less hairy mates and i am happy to go with that, men who look as though they have a carpet on their chests and backs are not sexy, but scientists don't know exactly why anyway but they do say that we still have the hair follicles need to grow the fur but our our genome regulation currently stops them from growing properly, just producing funny little fuzzy little ones instead.
I am sure people living in colder environments of the Globe would be happy to grow a warm, thick fur again, far more convenient than wearing 7 layers and risking frostbite if they expose their naked skin for a second.
There are not too many other mammals i can think of that followed us down the hair loss evolutionary route, whales and dolphins i understand because being surrounded by a shag pile while trying to swim would be a nightmare but apart from elephants i couldn't find any other mammal who shed their fur.
Rhino's and hippo's are hairless mammals but i couldn't find out if they ever had it to lose in the first place and i know there are some of those weird looking bald cats but none of our closest relatives in the animal world such as chimpanzees or gorillas went the same way as us or maybe their women are not as picky
when it comes to their mates as our ancestral primates were.   

3 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

that is an unproven theory

Anonymous said...

Obviously unless you got a Time Machine

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

hmmmm, that would work. unproven technology...