Supposedly, they hated “bear babies.”
I’m not sure I buy that argument about why we’re not hairy. To me, I’d think that growing lots of fur would take more food, so in times of famine, the hairless folks would have had better survival chances.
The problem I have with this is that it seems to me that it’s based on putting today’s standards of beauty into the minds of Stone-Age mothers. It’s not that long ago that body hair was seen as a good thing, for men, at least. And I seem to recall that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the standards of feminine beauty included a liking for women with faint facial hair.
So, starting with the assumption that hairy babies were ugly to our Stone Age ancestors seems a bit of a large swallow. Without reading the paper, of course, it’s hard to judge, but as it is, it sounds no better than the articles I remember from the 80’s supporting the idea that humans are hairless because of adaptations to cursorial hunting - a neat sounding theory, but no way (That I’ve heard.) to test the hypothesis.
I’m not so sure about that. A fairly common reaction of the female body when one has anorexia is to start growing coarser and thicker body hair than the down that they had when they were eating healthfully. Discovery Health mentions that anorexia may be a cause of hirsuitism in women.
What bugs me about this is the presentation of the idea that childrearing was some sort of choice. There is no mention of natural bonding with infants - it’s just some sort of transaction based on perceived beauty vs available resources.
As **Otakuloki ** said, the author appears to be basing their argument on the standards of today rather than any decent research or evidence.
Well, no way to prove a cause and effect relationship, but we do seem well adapted to cursorial hunting. On the other hand, as you point out standards of beauty have included hairy men, and to a degree women. I’d put the cursorial hunting hypothesis on a higher level because it seems to fit the facts more than the “hairlessness = beauty” hypothesis.
My personal guess is that it was a combination of factors; for example, cursorial hunting, neonatalism, and the fact that a hairless human can more easily remove parasites without freezing, thanks to clothing.
I don’t recall hearing any evidence for early humans hunting, much less eating, the Neanderthals. I have read of campsites with fire pits and tools and such and there is usually a “discard” area of local fauna. These bones typically show signs of scraping/ sawing tools and perhaps teeth marks. To the best of my knowledge, these bones/fossils have never included those of Neanderthals. Anyone have a site to support such a claim. Last I heard there was a debate about “absorbing” them due to social contact and another theory that superior hunting skills by humans (cro-mag?) just made those unwilling to migrate less able to adapt.
Well, in regards to ‘choice’ and ‘bonding’ as a factor in childrearing there’s certainly one heck of a lot of evidence that, bond or not, our forebears had policies of infant abandonment during times hard and soft depending upon circumstances. I seem to recall some other customs that indicated a distancing of the parent-child relationship due to high infant mortality such as not naming children until they’d proven they’d make it past some age-mark to prevent over-bonding.
Not exactly, but I do recall a news story a few years ago about Neanderthal bones found in a human settlement with butchering marks. I’ve never been able to find an online cite, however.
Oh, I like the cursorial hunter hypothesis. I just don’t think it’s something that’s going to be amenable to easy proof.
I agree that it seems to be putting today’s standards on the issue, and really, IMHO, doesn’t make much sense. Why would hairless (or less hairy) babies be seen as cuter by such folks? And I’d think that naked babies would be more difficult to care for under cold conditions than a furry one.
nashiitashii, hadn’t heard that, but it might not throw out my theory, since anorexia really tends to screw with people’s bodies and nearly every system is out of whack, so it could be that because of the loss of some hormone or other chemical, the suppression of hair producing genes is lost.
Could someone explain what this has to do with homophobia?
Pardon what may be a stupid question, but how does homophobia come into play?
[Argent posted between the time I opened the thread, read, and hit submit- sorry for dupe.]
First line of OP: "Supposedly they hated “bear babies.” Amongst gay men, there’s what’s known as “bear men,” these are big, burly guys who tend to have a lot of hair. Need I explain further?
Given that relative hairlessness is a trait common to all existing human populations, and that all of these trace their ancestry back to Africa, it’s almost certain that hairlessness evolved under tropical conditions.
While lack of access to the original article makes it difficult to evaluate, at least the way it is presented on the website makes the idea seem to be exceptionally ridiculous.
First of all, human babies in general are nearly hairless, and even more hairless than human adults. If the idea were to be true, you would have to establish that there was some correlation between the degree of hairiness of an infant and that found in the adult. (And if there were, wouldn’t you expect selection against males, who have much more body hair than females?)
The hypothesis that Neanderthals were necessarily hairer than Homo sapiens and would have been perceived by them as furry animals also seems absurd. Neanderthals may well have used animal furs for warmth, although they may not have sewn them. (Googling turns up contradictory references as to whether or not Neanderthals had needles.) Among modern human populations, the degree of hairiness is not strongly correlated with climate. Northern European populations are fairly hairy, while those of northern Asia have little body hair. Tropical African populations are hairier than those of South America. There is no really strong reason to suppose that Neanderthals would have been much hairer than Cro-Magnons.
While such speculations as this one and the hypothesis of cursorial running as the basis for the evolution of hairless can’t be tested directly, they can be critically examined. Quite a few other human traits point to an adaptation to cursorial running in tropical savanna. I would like to see what other human traits have been proposed as supporting the speculation that parental selection was responsible for the evolution of hairlessness.
It seems to me that the same hypothesis could be used to explain pretty much any existing human trait. Some human groups are taller than others? Why, their ancestors must have systematically culled short children from the population, because short people were regarded as subhuman. Why do Irish people have green eyes and freckles? Because unblemished skin and dark eyes were considered loathsome reptilian features, and those children were driven into the peat bogs to die. Why do the Ostrich People have two-toed feet? Their prehistoric forefathers must have viewed five-toed feet as a mark of shame in the eyes of the Ostrich God.
As primates, humans are wired to pay close attention to facial cues. Therefore, if our ancestors actively selected against hairy folks as being animalistic and undesirable, it stands to reason that the very first part of the body to become hairless would have been the head, and we’d all be bald and eyebrowless now. Yet the only hair found on most infants is on the head. Why would prehistoric humans arbitrarily decide, “Body hair means that our kid is a Neanderthal, and must die! Oh, except for that enormous, constantly growing patch on the scalp area; that’s alright, not Neanderthalic at all.”
For that matter, if ancestral humans and Neanderthals were both originally hairy, why would humans suddenly conclude that “hairiness” equals “Neanderthal?”
But that wouldn’t make sense.
Certainly it would help the group to abandon infants during periods of prolonged hardship but disgarding infants based on how they look wouldn’t unless a certain look was associated with disease. Aside from periods of hardship though, it certainly wouldn’t be sensible to abandon any infant where there is a possibility of it growing to reproductive/useful age. Thinking about subsistence cultures of today the drive is to produce as many offspring as possible so that they can grow fast and contribute to the group.
As to cultures around naming, bear in mind we are talking about stone age here with no idea of whether names were even used. I believe in India it was (and may still be) customary to give children different and increasingly more permanent names as they age. Somebody here posted a fascinating account of all their names and what they indicated - my mind says **Anaamika ** but I couldn’t be sure.
Sparta comes to mind as a place where a child would be abandoned if they didn’t like the look of it. Bear in mind that certain things which could be present in an infant might make the child appear unhealthy to people with little in the way of medical knowledge.
Yes, I mentioned disease as a factor. But how would you get from a situation of having hairy humans to non-hairy humans via perception of disease? Logically if a child was hairy at birth and it was in a group of other people who were all also hairy then it would just look normal. The alternative would be that a hairy child was born in a group of non-hairy people. That could well indicate poor health - for example, preemies are sometimes hairy - but if the group are already non-hairy it rather defeats the theory in the OP.
I cannot find a logical way to go along with this theory.
Me either. That’s why I posted this to see if I was alone in that conclusion.
The “mustachioed woman” thing was, at least in the cultures I’m most familiar with:
- not so much an attractor, as something that nobody gave a second thought to (would you consider “has a nose” an attractor? everybody has one!);
- a sign that the woman was fully grown up;
- and, in some locations, a sign of “whiteness”.
That nit picked, I can see abandoning the weakest child in times of famine, but something like “babies with hair are yucky, let’s kill them” is hard to imagine as such a general thing as to be an evolutionary force. In some location? Ok, yes, it may be… but “the Spartans killed babies with harelip” is not the same as “in ancient times, babies with harelip were murdered systematically”, this second formulation is strictly true yet completely misleading.