Might have been in prehistoric times. Do we even have any idea?
I can’t imagine we can ever know this for certain.
I would guess it happened when hygiene became an issue. For example, a military force living in close quarters could find something like lice a real problem so shaving their heads made sense.
Hair got cut the first time it got into someone’s eyes while they were busy doing whatever. Impossible to know.
How easy is it to cut hair with stone tools?
IIRC obsidian is one of the sharpest things there are so, if you had some at hand, probably pretty easy.
It may not look great but doable.
If you don’t have obsidian…not sure.
Once metal was available to make tools it shouldn’t be too much trouble to make a sharp(ish) blade.
I would need to check these facts but I believe that hairs found from Ötzi the Iceman, who lived somewhere between 3100 to 3400 were around 8 cm long and would have been cut.
According to this it is possible to cut hair with a reed or sharp piece of wood:
Traditionally, the Yanomami don the the pudding pudding-bowl haircut. In the past, and perhaps still in very remote villages, they used a piece of wood or reed called “sunuma.” It has very sharp edges. Sharp enough to cut their hair or even shave parts of their head.
https://www.davidgoodamazon.com/post/my-first-yanomami-makeover
Wow…I am surprised you can do it with wood (a reed I can see…those things can be sharp/saw-like).
Cool!
Yeah, me too. But that means there’s no limit on how far back the first haircut could have been.
Yeah. So, since we know hair can be cut since forever the question becomes when did humans decide getting their hair cut was worth doing?
Apart from military reasons I got nothing. I can’t imagine it started as a means to look good.
Maybe hygiene when living in close quarters in a cave was sufficient. Just guessing.
Perhaps after the first caveman bent over the first cooking fire and set himself on fire? That would do it for me.
This anthropologist suggests that current thinking is that humans have probably been cutting their head hair for at least tens of thousands of years, although at that time only males would have been cutting it short.
How would this interact with the evolution of head hair in the first place?
Great apes don’t have long head hair. We do. So presumably there must have been a transition stage when hair was starting to become long, but the proto-humans concerned were still quite ape-like and low-tech. That doesn’t seem to work very well if you assume a hair-follicles pattern similar to ours, but with hair maxxing out at a shortish-medium length, since hair of a few inches is the hardest sort to deal with appropriately (long enough to get in your eyes, too short to braid).
A more likely evolutionary pathway is probably one where long hairs start off as a display right on the back of the head, where it doesn’t get in your way so much, and then this display lengthening and widening until it’s as large as we have today. That way proto-humans have plenty of time to learn to deal with it before it starts to cause practical problems.
Do we have any sort of evidence for how long it’s been since humans evolved long head hair in the first place?
Maybe they killed two birds with one stone:
I could see long hair becoming a problem in a fight. It provides a means for your opponent to grab on to you and toss you about. That might be a reason why males had their hair cut and not females.
Just a WAG but I think it is safe to assume there was a practical reason for cutting hair and not a fashion reason (to start anyway).
We have a 4,000-year old belt made of woven human hair (from the heads of several different people) that was found at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia. So people evidently had uses for human hair, and this provides a reason for cutting it.
Keep in mind that straight hair is probably a pretty recent development.
Seems like you could still grab that hair.
I dunno…I am only speculating. I doubt cutting hair started as a fashion. I would think there was a reason for it. Hygiene or fighting or something else…I cannot say.
It was suggested earlier only males did it at the start which would make one think it had something to do with fighting rather than hygiene.
I am way into WAG territory here.
Nice scientific cite (not):
Therefore, the God left a population of mostly people with curly hair, producing offspring with even more kinky hair than the previous generation until about everyone in that population had the same gene of kinky hair.
Okay, I didn’t read it throughly. Do you have a cite that refutes the basic distinction, though?