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Did Homos have long hair before they learned to cut it?
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What could possibly be the environmental influence that caused Homos to evolve with long hair?
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Any other species with the potential to grow hair for several feet?
As a homo, I can certainly assure you that I’ve never had long hair.
I don’t know about ‘evolving’ long hair - I think it’s just that most homos are heavily influenced in their choice of hairstyle by the fashions that are current. Perhaps in your area long hair is just popular, and fashion-forward homos are particularly inclined to follow suit. But I can’t really think of any homos I know with long hair. Especially not the girls.
Oh ha bloody ha Excalibre.
Like so many questions we can’t really answer that because hair isn’t normally fossilised. However it is widelthough that the Khoi San, Hottentot and simiar peoples have a lot of primitive human fetaures, and amongst them is their hair structure. These people often have what are known as ‘perppercorn’ curls, where the head hair grows in tight curls and drops out at a relatively short length. This hair strcture never grows long and never requires cutting.
Although it is impossible to tell it seems reasonable to assume that the earlier Homo species had this hair structure. At worst they almost certainly have had the typical Negro curls which never really become highly poblematic if left uncut.
The long straight hair that is today mostlly restricted to Causcasian and Mongoloid populations is almost certainly a trait that evolved in H. sapiens or perhaps H. neanderthalenis, both of whom were able to cut their hair quite easily.
So the on the balance of probabilities no member of lineage would have had long hair before they had the ability to cut it.
It probably wasn’t strictly environmental reasons. As with so many thing there are probably multiple factors at play that reinforced one another. People probably evolved away from perppercorn hair because of sexual selection. Hair condition is actually a pretty good indicator to health and rich lustrous hair is seen as being sexually desirable, especially for women, in most cultures.
Once people evolved longer, though still curly, hair for sexual reasons then an environmental factor came into play. There is a school of thought which suggests that straight hair developed as an adaptation to freezing conditions since snow and ice will more readily shed and won’t get trapped in striaght hair. So once people developed longer hair the environmental factor that pushed for long straight hair was movement into colder climates as peope left Africa for Asia and Europe.
I’m not sure how pluasible that theory is, but it is worth noting that staright har is by far most common amongst Northern Europeans and Mongoloid peoples who are believed to have evolved evolved in cold conditions, so there may be something to it.
Some strains of horse can grow mains of several feet. The manes of lions are also fairly impressive, though more like a foot than several feet. But really the mane of human with tightly curled hair is no longer than the mane of a horse or the mane of a lion, while the mane of a person with peppercorn hair is much shorter than either. It’s likely that even the ancestral H. sapiens didn’t have particualry spectacular manes by normal mammal standards.
But this is presumably a trait that was artificially selected for, no? (I’m not sure what strains of horse you are referring to).
I guess it has been artificially selected for now in some cases, although the trait is considered to be a defect in most breeds.
They’re bred for it, of course, but some breeds of Guinea Pig have very long hair. It’s so long it has to be bundled up in paper towels and kept in elastics. We had one at work.
Evil little thing too.
This question makes the assumption that long straight hair was a desirable trait for survival. We have no evidence of this (other than the snow shedding guess.) It is entirely possible that the population that survived of Caucasian and Mongoloid peoples just happened to have straighter hair, and that the straighter hair was not a detriment to them. And the selection may have continued due to cultural or sexual selection.
As for cutting it… in the ancient world, there may have been no real reason to cut hair. If you are sleeping on the ground every night, running through forests, no soap, etc, your hair may just naturally get torn or worn away before it gets much longer than mid back.
I’ve known modern women who wanted long hair but were never able to get it to grow longer than mid-back (or in some cases shoulder-length). So even if hair is well cared for and not exposed to lots of damaging environmental factors, it’s not always going to be possible to grow it very long.
While this may not be related, I remember reading this about male pattern baldness and evolution. When most men become bald, the retain the hair along the sides and back of the skull, as well as the beard. This was supposedly to keep the neck and ears shielded from cold (the ear area is more sensitive than the top of the head).
I’ll admit this is probably 20-30 year old information.
If you buy that explanation for pattern baldness, then having longer hair may simply be a matter of keeping the ears warm. In sub-Saharan Africa, unless one is climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, there is probably no problem with keeping one’s ears warm.
Sexual selection/attraction undoubtedly played a role as well.
[nitpick]Particular physical features do not evolve in order to perform a function. Particular physical features are propagated if they allow a creature to produce more offspring that survive, or if the physical feature is just carried by the same people who have other advanced survival characteristics. Hence, if extra hair over the ears in old men helped them avoid pneumonia long enough to help raise a larger family group, then perhaps it would have propagated for this reason. But given the ages of onset of baldness and the life expectancy of early humans…
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Sorry. Just read the Bad Scientist webpage on evolution a few days ago. Couldn’t help myself. I tend to think that baldness, like acne, was an annoying mutation that didn’t impact survival enough to be selected out.