That straight hair is recent? Seems irrelevant. Like @Whack-a-Mole, I don’t see an afro being any harder to grab ahold of than straight hair, maybe even easier.
The Venus of Willendorf is a figurine of a woman with braided hair which is thought to be about 25,000 years old. If people were braiding hair for cosmetic, ritual or other reasons as long ago as that, it’s not unreasonable to surmise that they may also have been triming or cutting it.
As far as I can see, nobody is actually advancing a position that cutting hair started as a fashion, so … who are you debating with here??
Why not?
Looking good is important.
Human hair on the head keeps growing and growing and gets in the way/in the eyes/annoying after awhile. I could definitely see proto-humans hacking away at it, and then, being human, fashion could kick in and custom and tradition…
I expect that the first haircut predated H. sapiens.
Very long hair would seem to be an odd trait. Another question might be to ask when it turned up in humans or proto-humans.
Use of cutting tools is probably a pre-condition to hair cutting. Whether early humans were content with braiding or otherwise managing long hair or whether long hair as a trait emerged after cutting tools were available is another question.
Humans seem to be the species with the longest hair growth. Animals with manes still have hair of limited length. Humans that refrain from cutting beards or hair for cultural or religious reasons can end up quite an mess, to the point it is hard to imagine it wasn’t some level of a disadvantage.
No one. Just talking out loud as I think it out.
Humans have been preparing leather for 400,000 years. It’s a small step from dehairing hides to cutting hair.
Well, the ancient Egyptians used wigs… So I would imagine well before then? It’s really hard to scientifically say when humans started cutting their hair, as the practice doesn’t exactly leave obvious evidence. That said, I would imagine that the practice came naturally to tool-using homo sapiens after they figured out you could cut substance A with substance B.
Cutting tools are at least as old as Homo habilis.
Nits.
I recall reading that the Roman army mandated short hair for its soldiers, for exactly that reason.
Hunter-gatherer tribes often use hairstyles, along with body paint, tattoos, and scarification, as markers of tribal identity. A person with this haircut is One Of Us. A person with that haircut is One Of Them. I think the practice probably predates H. sapiens.
Recent anthropological findings suggest hair cutting began with Homo habilis.
…they were apparently more fashion forward than originally thought, too.
Well, scraping a hide clean from hair and shaving yourself are quite different. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to perform the former on yourself unless you are already dead, really. But I can certainly see someone jumping from that to “Hey, I’ve figured out how to not have to braid this nonsese anymore!” It wouldn’t be pretty, but it could be functional at keeping the hair out of your face.
I don’t see there being a really satisfactory answer to this question, other than finding the earliest mummy we can certainly say had its hair cut, or finding an early artwork depicting someone with hair that has obviously been cut.
Not really that different. Both involve running a blade against skin, cutting hair without cutting the skin.
But I wasn’t talking about shaving, anyway, just cutting. Once you get the “these hard things can cut as well as bludgeon and pierce” technology down, cutting anything should be obvious (I say “should” because obvious is in the eye of the beholder, like the whole colour language thing)
Not necessarily. They may have had other, more pressing reasons to cut it (battle or hunting perhaps) and then found things to do with the cut hair later on.
Pretty much everyone did, the *men are all close shaved * is fairly standard code for "they are at war
It’s not necessarily the case that a culture could have one, and only one, reason for cutting hair. My point is that the use of hair to make belts tells us that this culture had at least one practical reason for cutting hair, and it was a response to Whack-a-Mole’s post saying that he couldn’t think of any practical reason for cutting hair, apart from fighting.
People like to ornament ourselves. Aren’t there burials going back forever showing that is a trait of humans?
Cutting hair is a form of ornamentation.
This. Ornamenting the body goes back at least to Neanderthals, as we know from burials. SWAG here, but I’d guess hominids have been doing it since homo habilis discovered tool use. Vanity and fashion are, I suspect, fundamental qualities of human nature.