Mangetout wrote:
And even as we speak, the International Brotherhood of Chimpanzees is patting themselves on the back saying, “Boy, it sure is good to know that we chimps are set apart from all the other animals. We sure wouldn’t want to think of ourselves on the same inferior plane as those bonobos, gorillas, and humans!”
Of course everybody knows that it is weaseling out of things that separates us from the animals [sub](except the weasel)[/sub]
The points you have all made are fair but ultimately not convincing:
These animals have always used these objects - it is part of their make-up, it is what they are. Humans however haven’t always worn clothes. Presumably we didn’t wear clothes when we had fur.
Also, ALL humans seem to wear clothes. Admittedly some African and South American tribes may wear only a loose rag around their genitals but this is still clothing. I don’t know of any peoples who walk around completely butt-naked.
We would have expanded our range gradually and become acclimatised to the weather in our new territory. We wouldn’t have suddenly thought “'Ere, its a bit chilly up here, I know lets invent clothes”
Also it doesn’t explain the fact that all of the people who live in central Africa (where man is thought to have originated) also wear clothes. These people never moved very far from Mankinds birthplace and so wouldn’t have needed to adopt the practice of wearing clothing and yet they do, why?
I would dispute that humans are perfectly suited to their environment. Where I live, I wouldn’t last long if I lived naked outside.
comparing us to other animals that aren’t well suited to their environment doesn’t really help much because each species has its own reasons for evolving the way it does. They aren’t really comparable.
its not just the losing of the fur that made a big impression on us, it was the leaving of the forests. Leaving the safety of the forest was a huge risk and it can’t have been easy for those first few generations that did it.
A large primate like a gorilla doesn’t have to hunt for food, its food is all around it. It just lazily picks a few leaves off a tree. Once we were on the plains, however, we needed to actually go and catch our next meal. My suggestion therefore is that leaving the forest could be the origin of “original sin”. The Garden of Eden could be the forest.
We were safe in the forest, we had plenty of food and no real predators. We took a BIG gamble in leaving.
Lions, and other plains predators, have fur, true. But they don’t tend to run over long distances. Wolves, Hyenas etc do run over long distances but they are a completely different shape to us and so have a completely different evolutionary history.
All people all over the world wear clothes even if they live in a warm country where they don’t have to. This suggests that the wearing of clothes is not a functional thing - it is a choice.
Why would we choose to wear clothes? Why are we ashamed of nakedness?
Because somewhere, deep in the collective human subconsciousness, we remember what a big risk it was to leave the forest. We know that we can never go back and we remember that there was a time when we had fur.
Out of this deep collective memory we have constructed our religions. And a large part of religion is shame - the idea that we are all sinners, the idea of original sin, the idea that we have to make amends for this before God can forgive us.
I wonder, though.
If we did decide to give it all up and go back to the forest, would we get our fur back after a million years or so?
How do you define always? Taking it for granted that the original arthropods didn’t evolve fully clothed we have to assume at some stage a caddis fly or a hermit crab took up wearing clothing. Their ancestors have folowed after them and diversified into many species, but so have the ancetsors of the original clothed homninids. Saying that animal species that wear clothing have always done so is nonsensical. It had to start somewhere.
I’d like two cites here. The first is the one saying that Homo sapiens haven’t always worn some form of clothing. Bearing in mind that no extant H. sapiens have fur and that there is evidence of pelt preparation by H. heidelbergensis C800000 y.a I’d say that assertion is highly questionable. The second cite I’d like to see is one saying that H. sapiens ever had fur. Considering all extant humans lack fur, waht exactly leads you to assume that hairlessness wasn’t already a trait of our line 4 million y.a?
Nope. Several Australian Aboriginal groups wore no clothing. There is at least one South American tribe that wears no clothing aside from a belt for utility purposes. I imagine there are others. Given that you concede that many people wear only sufficient clothing for the pruposes of modesty, with no real protective or utility purpose this seems to suggest that whatever the reasons for clothing it is not related in any way to skin condition. By your own admission the only place these people wear clothing is about the only place on the human body to retain hair. Hair or lack thereof is obviously not a driving force here.
No, we wouldn’t. Tasmanian Aboriginals lived on about the same latitude as NY. They had no clothes whatsoever and although they survived in the southern coastal parts of the state they couldn’t move from camp in the winter months for fear of freezing. They lost an awful lot of condition and only survived because of low population densities, complete absence of disease and bountiful spring/summer food. There is an absolute limit to the physiological range of any species and humans reach it at about 40o latitude. To move beyond this we’d need some serious restructuring in body form and physiology and probably a covering of hair. Acclimation can only do so much. Beyond that you need evolution or tools.
Similarly dogs/wolves haven’t moved far from the birthplace in Europe, yet dogs in coats still have a huge advantage when hunting in winter. Kelpies were bred from dingo stock, and yet still work better when given shoes. Taken to its logical extreme people in Africa will have an advantage when using rifles and 4WD vehicles as well, despite living and hunting in the same area where we evolved. Just because a species is in it’s optimal environmental range doesn’t mean that using tools (and clothing is a tool) won’t make life easier. All it means is that it probably doesn’t need tools for survival. This quesion could be quite easily answered by asking by asking a Zulu why he wears a hat. I’ll lay pounds to pence that he’ll tell you it keeps the sun off his head.
You did read where I said that our environment is the tropics, right? If you can’t survive naked then you must be living above 40o latitude, because people without clothes have survived in every other climate.
True enough, which was exactly my point. You said in the OP that animals are all perfectly adpated to their environment and that humans are the only exception. I pointed out that neither part of that statement is true, and even if it were it would be irrelevant because each species is unique.
A brief lesson in theoretical human evolution.
‘People’ left the forest about three and a half million y.a at best guess. This occured over a period of millenia at least because the forest was vanishing, being replaced by savanna woodland. There weren’t a first few generations that did it, it was a progressive move made by numerous groups and individuals over thousands of years. Basically generation one spent 10 minutes/day foraging in the rainforest/savannah ecotone. Generation two spent 15 minutes and so on. Eventually we got to the stage where hominids could go days in the open without feeling any stress, but they probably still felt safer in the jungle. Eventually we had Australopithecus that proabably didn’t care if it slept in tree bower, or in a hole scratched under a log but almost certainly still returned to the remaining jungle remnants. At this stage hominids weren’t quite as bright as chimpanzees. Which generation exactly do you envision as being traumatised by leaving the forest, and why do you believe that such a gradual transition would have been more traumatic than the coincidental move to upright posture? Do you honestly believe that a race memory of such a trauma would be passed down for the better part of 4 million years by something like a chimpanzee, and that being the case why stop there. Why haven’t the really traumatic transitions in our evolutionary past like the transition form egg-laying to live birth, acquisition of mammary glands and so also been equal candidates for race memory? To me this is ludicrous.
Gorillas are exclsuively herbivorous. They don’t hunt for the same reason moose don’t hunt. It’s got nothing to do with food availability. If a gorilla were stuck in a cage full of rabbits it would starve to death. Chimpanzees on the other hand live in identical environments and are active hunters, having been observed in organised hunts for monkeys, gazelle and on several occasions the babies of other chimp tribes.
But the dentition and eye placement of Australopithecus, and the knowledge we have of chimpanzees, all points towards a very strong pre-adaptation to a semi-predatory lifestyle. In other words our ancestors were very effective predators in the rainforest just as chimpanzees are, and on leaving that environment probably became less carnivorous.
Your theory theory then assumes that Australopithecines were capable of either oral tradition or race memory that has been preserved into H. sapiens.
I’m sorry, but unless you can back this up with something I’m going to label this as unbelievable.
Cites?
What are you basing this on? If early hominids had no predators and plenty of food why would they leave? What was the evolutionary pressure pushing this change? As I have already pointed out, the assumption is that the forests were slowly vanishing due to climatic change and that the early hominids were neitehr safe nor overfed, rather being under real threat of starvation and losing the only shelter they were able to utilise. Place chimpanzees in a shrinking patch of rainforest surrounded by savannah and see how well they fair.
2)Added to this if hairlessness is an advantage in outcompeting big cats as you posit in your OP then those species selected to pressure from such predators for the longest period should demonstrate hairlessness more often, not less. Evolution doesn’t say 'Oh dear, this poor little species has no other survival traits, we’ll take off all his hair. If hairlessness were any sort of advantage we should see hairless baboons, hairless gazelle, hairless deer and hairless hyaena, all of which have been subjected to selective pressure form big cats far longer than homininids.
Evolution doesn’t work like that. You have suggested that hairlessness is somehow an advantage in fast running. If this were true than other running species would have evolved the same trait. It seems to me that hairlesness would be a distinct disadvantage in outsprinting predators in terms of streamlining and loss of camouflage. Can you actually provide any evidence that hairless animals are any faster?
We, like all species, are both predator and prey. Hyaena prey on lions, lions prey on hyaenas. Baboons prey on gazelle and leopards prey on baboon. There are huge numbers of savannah predators who are equally likely to need to compete with big cats one way or the other. Not one of them is hairless.
And I’ll buy that for a dollar. Makes perfect sense, but has nothing to do with a need for greater speed as you posited. Rather a need for endurance and the associated heat dispersal.
2)So which is it? Is clothing the result of selective pressure driven by hairlessness, or is it a choice which could be made with or without hair? I’m having a hard time seeing what your position is here.
Or because they are very handy tools. They give me somewhere to stick my axe while I’m chasing a kangaroo with my boomerang.
Or because they’re very attractive. A nicely tanned leather vest with tassels really gets the chicks.
Or because they’re very good protection. The keep me from getting cut, stop sunstroke, prevent melanomas etc.
Or because they’re comfortable and stop the flies biting me, keep me cool/warm etc
Or because they allow me to cover my grey hair, my wrinled pot belly, my numerous battle scars…
I’ve got to say that the only time I wear clothing for your stated reason that I’m ashamed of nakedness is when I’m swimming. At all other times I do it for one of the reasons stated above and not wearing clothes wouldn’t even be considered. Even when swimming I wear clothes not out of shame, but for the trifold reason that the law requires it, social restrictions/fashion demands it and perhaps slightly out of shame.
The odds are that we lost our hair sometime after leaving the forest. The two events almost certainly weren’t simultaneous for the simple reason that the ability run, or even stand upright, for long periods requires some serious re-engineering of the legs and hips. This isn’t going to happen unless there is pressure to do this, and that isn’t going to happen unless you’re gathering food in an environment where it’s all above your head in unclimable trees or where you need to carry food back to shelter. In other words people were only capable of running or even walking upright after they’d already at least partially left the forest.
As I’ve already pointed out there is no logical way we could retain race memory from 4 million y.a.
I think you seriously misunderstand how long ago homids left the forest, and how sub-human these species really were.
Given that humans have almost certainly never fully left the rainforest the answer would have to be no. There is no reason to assume that forests have any more requirement for hair than anywhere else on Earth.
Sorry about the over-quoting, but it’s hard to address that many points without doing so.
Jeez, such a simple question. Because we’re the only species with money and credit cards to be able to pay for the clothes. Duh! The stores don’t give clothes away, you know!
Hell, my fur grows in pretty good if I get 3 consecutive weeks off work.
Ill try to condense the argument to (what I see as) the important points.
As you are aware, it is impossible to prove this one way or the other. Clothing wouldn’t become fossilised and neither would fur since it is soft tissue. I am relying on conjecture to some extent. I realise that conjecture isn’t hard scientific fact but sometimes its all we have.
And can I just make it clear that I agree that the leaving of the forest, the losing of fur and the adoption of clothing would all have taken place over a very long period. Im not suggesting it all happened overnight.
I don’t think there is any doubt amongst zoologists that humans once had fur and we evolved to a stage where, for some reason, it was of more advantage to discard it. I suggest you read The Naked Ape. Also I searched around on the net and there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that we once had fur. The only question is why we lost most of it.
I don’t “concede” this. This is my whole point. Humans wear clothes even when they don’t have to for any functional reason. Whats “modesty”? Where did “modesty” come from?
Why would we hide our genitals? No other animals do, in fact, other animals try to display their genitals at every oppotunity if they think it will help attract a mate.
OK you may be able to cite one or two tribes in Australia that wear no clothes at all but I would say:
I only have your word for this
In any case, even if one or two naked tribes do exist somewhere in the world, my point is still valid. The overwhelming majority of the peoples of the world wear clothes.
Agreed. Humans are tropical creatures, clothes are a tool that enable man to live in cold places. So then why do people wear clothes in Africa? They don’t need to.
OK I take on board your “Zulu in a hat” analogy, but this doesn’t explain why people would wear a full set of clothes. Wearing no clothes at all would make your body cooler than wearing clothes. Clothes trap heat. Even white clothes are probably warmer than no clothes at all.
It may be the case that some animals use tools in order to adapt to their environment but my question really concerns humans and clothes not other animals and the tools which they may use.
I didn’t mean to imply that humans were an exception, more that they are an oddity. The fact that 99% of humans wear clothes, even those humans that don’t need to, seems to suggest that there is a reason why humans wear clothes.
Since humans live in all kinds of different climates and all kinds of different locations then no one explanation will suffice. All hermit crabs live in the sea or on the beach, they all live in the same environment so they all use the same tools.
This doesn’t apply to humans because we all live in different locations with different climates and different topography. Therefore no one single climactic reason can adequately explain why all humans wear clothes.
There must be some reason other than climate or location.
Agreed. It all happened over thousands of years. Im sorry if you got the impression I was saying it all happened instantaneously, this isn’t what I meant.
You state that it was evolutionary pressures that made us leave the forest. I agree - the forest was shrinking. But we could have stayed like all the other primates did. The difference between us and the other primates however is that their numbers have been slowly declining as a result of their decision to stay in the forest whereas we have been immensely successful.
You asked for evidence that hairless animals are faster but I didn’t say that they were faster. I will quote from The Naked Ape.
There are a number of suggested reasons why we lost our fur, these include:
skin parasites. “When the hunting ape abandoned its nomadic past and settled down at fixed home bases, its dens became heavily infested with skin parasites. The use of the same sleeping places night after night is thought to have provided abnormally rich breeding grounds for a variety of ticks, mites, fleas and bugs, to a point where the situation provided a severe disease risk. By casting off his hairy coat, the den-dweller was better able to cope with this problem”
feeding habits. “the hunting ape had such messy feeding habits that a furry coat would soon become clogged and messy and, again, a disease risk. It is pointed out that vultures, who plunge their heads and necks into gory carcasses, have lost their feathers from these members; and that the same development, extended over the whole body, may have occurred among the hunting apes”
the development of fire - the hunting ape will only have felt cold at night and therefore the discovery of fire meant that fur was no longer neccesary
the forest ape, before he became a hunting ape, was for a long period an aquatic ape. He will have, at first, groped around in rock pools but eventually learnt how to swim for long distances and to great depths. During this process, it is argued, he will have lost his hair like other mammals that have returned to the sea.
humans lost their fur as a social, sexual response. “Naked patches of skin can be seen in a number of primate species and in certain instances they appear to act as species recognition marks”
a cooling device. “by coming out of the shady forests the hunting ape was exposing himself to a much greater temperature than he had previously experienced, and it is assumed that he took off his hairy coat to prevent himself from becoming overheated. Superficially this is reasonable enough. We do, after all, take our jackets off on a hot summers day. But it does not stand up to scrutiny. In the first place, none of the other animals (of roughly our size) on the open plains have taken this step. If it was as simple as this we might expect to see some naked lions and naked jackals”
In the end, he thinks that none of these arguments are convincing enough on their own, although they may have all played a part. He thinks humans lost their fur because they were not equipped to make lightning dashes after food but instead had to make long endurance chases.
The loss of fur was accompanied by the development of a sub-cutaneous fat-layer which indicates that there was a need to keep the body warm at other times.
“If this appears to counterbalance the loss of the hairy coat, it should be remembered that the fat layer helps to retain the body heat in cold conditions, without hindering the evaporation of sweat when over-heating takes place. The combination of reduced hair, increased sweat glands, and the fatty layer under the skin appears to have given our hard-working ancestors just what they needed, bearing in mind that hunting was one of the most important aspects of their new way of life”
Finally, you question the existence of a collective sub-conscious memory. I will tell you about a film I recently saw about the Congo, from where mankind is thought to have originated.
The Mandrill apes of Congo have only recently been filmed. This is partly because the jungles of Congo are so inaccessible and partly because there has been a long-running civil war there.
Now that they have been filmed, however, some unusual behaviour has been noticed.
Mostly these apes live in the forest but every so often they decide to cross the plains. When they do this they band together in their thousands. Why do they band together?
For the same reason sheep, birds and fish band together - for safety.
And yet these are huge apes, they have no predators. So what do they need to be safe from?
The only possible answer is Man.
Yet Man hasn’t lived in this part of the world for millenia. Before the film crew arrived these apes hadn’t seen Man for thousands of years.
Yet still they band.
We must have been pretty scary.
And they still remember us in their collective sub-conscious.
We wear clothes because we are the only animals dumb enough to think that we should cover up ourselves for the sake of decency.
The trouble is that we have evidence from H. heidelbergensis that pelt preparation was underway many hundreds of thousands of years before the evolution of H. sapiens. We can but assume that these pelts were being used for environmental protection. We also know that the very earliest H. sapiens habitations show signs of clothing, that the earliest sculptures and paintings all show clothing.
We know that H. neanderthalensis wore clothing and that they separated from the sapiens line at least 250, 000 y.a. That only means either that clothing was either discovered by pre-sapiens hominids and was lost and then rediscovered, or that H. sapiens eveolved using clothing. I suspect the latter, but if the former then your theory collapses altogether. H. sapiens use of clothing can’t be out of shame at leaving the forest because his ancestors were clothed, he rejected this and then re-discovered it exactly the same (non-tropical forest) environment in which it was rejected.
Conjecture is a good thing, but when the outcome of that conjecture is at odds with the known facts and common sense then it’s probably time to return to the drawing board.
WIth the exception of ‘The Naked Ape’ I have never in my entire life seen one suggestion that H. sapiens ever had fur. None, nada, zip zilch.
I’m sorry, but I have seen the theories of ‘The Naked APe’ demolished in so many texts that I have no desire to read it. It wa sfaily groundbreaking in its day and provoked much thought, which is a good thing, but these days seesm to be treated somewhere between von Daniken and Lamark.
Then I will repeat my request that you provide a cite. Every test I have ever read suggests that H. sapiens was hairless throughout its history. If you have found web sites contradicting this then can you please link to them.
That is an entirely separate debate (albeit one I’d love to partcipate in). What we are discussing here is why humans wear clothes. The fact is that some humans wear clothes when they don’t need to for functional reasons and some don’t. How much of this is social? How much is being done for fashion? I really don’t know, but your suggestion that all people wear clothes or that shame is universal is simply not true.
Well if you wanted to debate this you should have said. 
The theory that makes the most sense to me is that after the development of upright posture male sexual organs became prominant. This led to their use as intimidation items/fitness indictaors like the horns of deer, hence the reason they are so prominantly framed by pubic hair, and the reason why the penis is a darker colour than the rest of the body. Coupled with the larger pelvic opening of the female in response to larger brain size this meant that penises became larger. When clothing was developed for other reasons males that covered their penises were less likely to be seen as challenging/threatening, leading to greater social cohesion. An ability to cover an erection also gives a male an advantage in the flirting stage of courtship (it’s a bit hard to pretend you’re only mildly interested in a prospective mate if you get a raging boner every time she smiles at you). These together meant that males who covered up had a genetic advanatge and a meme for modesty developed and spread. Note that this all works quite plausibly while still fitting the known facts of human evolution.
There are similar advantages for females.
1)Other male animals don’t need to cover their genitals because they are safely slung beneath the abdomen and between the legs even in those perishingly few species that have external penises.
2)Other male animals don’t usually display their penises until they get an erestion. Female animals by and alarge have next to no interest in a male erection.
3)Other female animals can’t cover their genitals because physiology means they are open to display in normal posture. Only after the development of clothes is covering the vagina an option. To suggest that clothing developed to hide the genitals relys on pre-supposing the outcome you’re trying to prove.
4)Some female animals do display their genitals, some don’t. Most rely on scent, behaviour, stance, vocalisations and a range of other factors.
Again saying that animals will display their genitals to attract a mate pre-supposes the outcome. If hiding the genitals resulted in a dearth of suitable mates then the meme for clothing use would have dies out rapidly in humans regardless of what was driving it. If shame resulted in less mates then shame would have dies out rapidly. By the very ubiquitousness of human clothing use we know that this line of reasoning is invalid. Obviously genital display is no more important in attracting mates in humans than it is in kangaroos, which are also bipedal.
Wel this is GD. If you require a cite you have but to ask.
Flannery, T. 1998. ‘The Future Eaters’.
“The French savants of the Baudin Expidition, who observed the Tasmanians in 1802, were amazed that even though the Tasmanians lived in an often bitterly cold climate, they lacked clothing.”
Quoting Capt. William Dampiers log on an encounter with Tasmanian Aborigines “The young Ouray Ouray, like her parents wholly naked, yet entirely unselfconscious…”
Marquardt, K.H. 1995. “Captain Cook’s Endeavour”
From the journal of Capt. James Cook, HMS Endeavour, 1770.
“The Natives of this Country are not numerous…Men, women and children go wholly naked, it is said of our first Parents that after they had eat of the forbidden fruit they saw themselves naked and were ashamed; these people are Naked, and are not ashame’d”
I fear we are going in circles here. As I have already stated clothing is worn for numerous purposes. It is a tool. People in Africa don’t need to use tools either, but the use of tools makes human life easier. People in Africa wear clothes for the same reasons peopple everywhere do: for fashion, for comfort, for protection, for utility, for religious reasons etc.
Light clothing invariably makes you cooler. This was resolved in GQ when discussing traditional Arab fashion a few months ago.
Fair enough, but I wasn’t going to let you use an erroneous assertion (that all animals are better adapted to their environment than H. sapiens and that no animals need clothes) to support your position.
Little dispute there. But:
2)99% of humans are also agricultural. This isn’t a biological phenomenon, it’s a cultural one. There is no reaso to suspect the same isn’t true for clothing.
3)Of course there’s a reason. I listed half a dozen of them above. Not one of them are universal which suggests to me that the reaosn is not biological. If there was a biological reason then it would be universal.
2)‘Water’ is the largest and most diverse environmant on Earth. Well over 2/3 of the Earths surface. It ranges from the poles to the tropics, from small ponds to the ocean depths. Saying all hermit crabs live in water (which they don’t) is less valid than saying all humans live on dry land and so use the same tools.
DItto for hermit crabs.
2)As I have already pointed out, clothes are worn for protection from climate, protection from physical assault, fashion, religious reasons etc. Focussing on climate would be invalid even if it were logically supportable.
1)Even if you mean apes (there are scores of non-sylvan primates), many other species did leave the forest and didn’t survive. This isn’t open to debate. There were several species of plains dwelling apes extant at the same time at several points in our history. We can’t be descended form all of them.
2)We couldn’t have stayed. Our non-hominid ancestor is extinct. This tells us that the decision to stay was not valid. Obviously those individuals who didn’t adapt to savanna dies out.
Which proves that your assertion that “We were safe in the forest, we had plenty of food and no real predators. We took a BIG gamble in leaving.” is invalid. Precisely my point. The forests were shrinking, the savannas expanding. The gamble was in staying, not leaving.
Your exact words are “…when we came out of the forests and moved onto the hot plains we lost our fur. This is because when you live on the plains you suddenly have to compete for food with the ultra-fast big cats. So the need for speed was greater”
If this isn’t saying taht hairless animals are faster then I don’t know what it is saying. If hairless animals aren’t faster why would a need for speed engender a loss of hair? Please explain.
I’m not entirely certain what your point is quoting huge chunks of “T.N.A.”. You basically restate the endurance theory put forth by Badtz above. I’ve already conceded that sounds plausible. This is not the same as what you said in the Op, where you staed that we lost our hair because of a need for increased speed.
Aside from that, as I discussed above, by this theory hairlessness occured after the development of upright posture. This proves that hairlessness must have occured well after we had already left the forest. Even if I were prepared to buy the concept of oral tradition amongst australopithecine apes with no speech apparatus (which I assume is what you are suggesting) leaving the forest and nakedness couldn’t be linked in such traditions.
WHat a load of old cobblers.
Mandrills suffer significant casualties from leopard predation. Their herd instinct has been seen in play against leopards time and again. The only possible answer is not man. Since leopards are the prime cause of loss of life amongst mandrills wouldn’t it be more logical to assuemt his is what they seek to protect themselves from?
What absolute piffle. Sorry but it needs to be said.
Mandrills live in forested areas in Cameroon, Gabon and Congo amongst other nations. Coincidentally leopards live in forest areas in Cameroon, Gabon and Congo (and half the rest of the world).
What in God’s name makes you believe that they rememebr humans? Is that assertion based on anything at all?
xanakis I’m having a hard time following your argument here. Are you suggetsing that a race memory of leaving the forest exists in hominids, and that a race memory of losing hair tens of thousands of years later exists in hominids, and that these have soemhow been confused giving us shame, and that this shame forces us to wear clothes? And that for some reason the transition to upright posture that occured between these two events has not resulted in a race memory for some reason, despite being a far more radical change? And that this race memory somehow failed to have any effect on a huge range of people right around the world who refused to wear clothing?
We wear clothes because we are the only animals dumb enough to think that we should cover up ourselves for the sake of decency.
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I’m not sure if you’re being facetios or just can’t be botehred reading along thread, but as has being pointed out many human populataions didn’t believ they should cover themsleves up for the sake of decency, so that can’t be the reason.
Gaspode,
Let me come at this from another angle:
Of all the great apes, only humans wear clothes.
Of all the great apes, only humans have no fur.
Coincidence?
Your idea that the Mandrills are protecting themselves from leopards sounds good until you think about it.
Leopards rarely attack large creatures such as mandrills. It happens, for sure, but rarely.
Leopards tend to hang out in the jungle rather than on the plains. If they make a kill they drag it up into a tree.
When I say “humans had fur” I am not talking about Homo Sapiens. I am talking about the very earliest creatures from which Homo Sapiens evolved.
I don’t think Desmond Morris is on a par with Von Daniken. This is an unfair comparison. Von Daniken is an out and out nutjob whereas Morris is a respected zoologist even if some of his theories have been subsequently debunked.
My theory is simple:
But my theory is that this “something” was the leaving of the forest - the real Garden of Eden.
Think about it, what stops you from leaving your house butt-naked tomorrow? Its more than just you need to keep warm. There is something deeply ingrained within all of us that prevents us from walking around naked.
In fact, if you did walk around naked you would be arrested. We have elevated nudity to the status of an actual crime.
Why do we feel so strongly about nudity to the point where we feel it is a criminal offence?
If I walk down the street naked, Im not harming anyone. Im not doing anything different to what I would be doing if I was fully clothed. The only difference is that I am naked.
This would shock and outrage all who saw me and I would eventually be arrested and branded a “sex offender”.
And yet, all I am doing is walking around as I was when I was born.
The strength of feeling we have about nudity is out of all proportion to the actual act itself, which is completely harmless (in physical terms).
The reason we feel so strongly about nudity is because there is something deep, deep within us that makes us feel this way.
Of all the great apes, only humans listen to rap music.
Of all the great apes, only humans have no fur.
Coincidence?
Of all the great apes, only humans drive corvettes.
Of all the great apes, only humans have no fur.
Coincidence?
Of all the great apes, only humans cultivate crops
Of all the great apes, only humans have no fur.
Coincidence?
Of all the great apes, only humans build permanent structures.
Of all the great apes, only humans have no fur.
Coincidence?
It’s almost certainly coincidental, or at most tangentially linked via upright posture, as are all those other factors. You’re ignoring the fact that clothes are neither more nor less than tools. All the factors listed above are examples of humans using tools in a way that other apes are incapable of. Are you suggesting that humans fly F-15 fighter planes because we’re hairless, or that we are hairless because we fly F-15s? If not then why put the use of another type of tool (clothing) into a special category?
Taking it to the next level humans are unique in our use of codified language, music, upright stance, recognition of the dead and a huge range of other factors. Are we to attribute all these directly to hairlessness as well?
Do you actually have any facts to back up that assertion, because the experts seem to disagree.
Although baboons spend most of their time foraging on the ground, they all retire in trees or high up on steep-sided cliffs to sleep, safe from predators like the leopard. So they can also climb well. In fact, the availability of safe sleeping sites is the limiting factor to troop size.
The primary predator of the mandrill is the leopard.
If troop size is limited by a lack of sleeping places, and leopards are the primary predators it seems to me that leopard attacks are far from a rarity. Can you please provide a cite.
Secondly you initially made an assertion that these creatures have no predators apart form man. Are you now willing to retract that?
Leopards/panthers prefer to hang out wherever they damn well please. They are the widest natural distribution of any carnivore on Earth and range from area above the snowline in Tibet/china to the rainforests of SE Asia and the semi-desert of Israel (prior to their extermination C200 AD). Where the hell are you pulling these assertions from xanakis? Do you actually have any facts?
Even if those last two assertions of yours were true what difference would it make. You acknowledge that Mandrills herd up for protection against predators. You acknowledge leopards are predators. You acknowledge leopards have been in constant contact with mandrills for the last x thousand years. How the hell do you then justify making an assertion that the only reason Mandrills herd up is because they have a race memory of humans? That’s bizarre in the extreme.
Then when you make statements like “Humans wear clothes even when they don’t have to for any functional reason” do you also mean the very earliest creatures from which Homo sapiens evolved? I think you really need to distinguish between humans and ancestral hominids for the sake of clarity. Australopithecines were usually not as bright as chimpanzees. Calling them humans or people and implying that they may have had the option of wearing clothing is misleading at best.
Which is why I said he was somewhere between von Daniken and Lamarck. Lamarck was a respected zoologist whose theories have been subsequently debunked but who made errors based on the limited knowledge of genetics at the time. von Daniken extrapolated wildly and went looking for facts to support his position ignoring all contrary evidence. Morris falls somewhere in between having been guilty of ignoring much of the anthropological data available at the time T.N.A. was written.
The problems with your theory are as follows:
1)There is absolutely no evidence of race memory, none whatsoever. I could state that the IPU telepathically gave the first H. sapiens a memory of leaving the forest and it would be equally valid. The IPU, telepathy and race memory have one important fact in common: there is no evidence for any of them and no plausible mechanism by which they might exist. Any theory that hinges on race memory form something like A. afarensis is in deep, deep trouble.
2)You say that we have a race memory of leaving the forest and of losing our hair, and yet at some intervening point we also adopted an upright posture. This must have had far more social, psychological
, cultural and physical impact than the loss of hair, yet your theory fails to address why we have no race memory of it.
3)You imply that a race memory of losing our hair causes us to wear clothes because it is associated with leaving the forest. However as pointed out above upright stance would also be associated with leaving a forest, more strongly in fact, yet we don’t deliberately stoop.
4)You imply that a race memory of losing our hair causes us to wear clothes because it is associated with leaving the forest, which we feel guilty about. Why. The forests were shrinking. Massive extinctions were leading to a dearth of food. Competition with other species would have been fierce. The savanna woodlands on the other hand were unexploited by apes. Food was abundant. Surely this was the original fruited plain to the starving apes that crept out into the noonday sun. Why the sense of shame.
Damn straight. The reasons are as follows (in no particular order)
I burn easily and it’s hot outside.
I’d get arrested for indecent exposure.
My clothes reflect my social prestige and make me more attractive to the chicks.
I can honestly say that shame doesn’t enter into it.
I’ve already proven, with supporting cites, that this is not even close to being true. People in Australia, South and Central America and SouthEast Asia all walked around naked for thousands of years. There’s nothing ingrained about this, it’s a fairly recent cultural phenomenon. Even the ancient Greeks had no particularly preference for clothed or unclothed in public.
Oh come on. The US has elevated having sex with 17 yo girls to the status of an actual felony despite 17 yo women being the ideal mate evolutionarily speaking. Homosexuality is also a felony in several nations and was in even more 50 years ago. What does that tell you about our laws regarding sexuality? It tells me that we’re prudes, not that homosexuality or consensual sex with 17 y.o.s is ‘unnatural’ or prohibited by race memory.
If I have sex with a grown man, I’m not harming anyone. I’m not doing anything different to what I would be doing if I was heterosexual. The only difference is that I am homosexual.
This would shock and outrage all who saw me and I would eventually be arrested and branded a “sex offender”…
If I have sex with a 16 yo girl, I’m not harming anyone. I’m not doing anything different to what I would be doing if I was having sex with an 18 yo girl. The only difference is that I am having sex with her younger sister.
This would shock and outrage all who saw me and I would eventually be arrested and branded a “sex offender”.
You do realise that 30 years ago those statements would have been true? All this proves is that laws are sometimes illogical and based on prejudice and prudery, not logic or instinct.
Me thinketh you need to learn to love your body more. I’m not a nudist but I have no particular feeling towards nudity. Seeing a naked person walking down my street would give me the same reaction to seeing a person walking on all fours down my street. It’s a cue that they may be mentally disturbed, nothing more. The strength of feeling is exactly the same.
If by ‘we’ you mean humanity in general then that statement is incorrect, as you well know by this. We have absolutely no reaction to nudity much of the time and a positive reaction frequently.
You may feel strongly about nudity but that doesn’t prove anything.
Hmm…so if the process of evolution has somehow progressively diminished the amount of hair on the bodies of humans, it might eventually disappear completely. That’s what I’ll tell my son when he starts to go bald someday
As has been explained very well by others, there is no basis for the assertion that there is a biological basis for shame being associated with nudity. This CNN story describes how common ancient erotic art was.
Where’s the shame?
if the apes herding instinct was based on racial memory of humans then they would still have a fear of the human preditor. although I didnt see your film, something tells me that the apes in question had the same response to humans that other apes do, at least ones that arent hunted regularly.
ok this keyboard sucks arse. Im outta here.
I wonder if it would “irk” the moderators if I were to point out that animals are clothes… I’ve seen FashionTV… and apparently fur is making a comeback.
start mad dash for the exit before the animal rights types form a lynch mob
http://biology.uindy.edu/Biol504/HUMANSTRATEGY/23hair.htm
"CHAPTER 23. HAIR, SWEAT, AND THERMOREGULATION
Hypotheses for the Reduction of Hair
Thermoregulation. Since fur represents insulation to keep an animal warm, it is most reasonable to suppose that the elimination of it enables a body to cool down. The most widely accepted explanation for reduction of hair, addition of subcutaneous fat, and changes in the sweat glands relates to a more efficient thermoregulation that enables humans to maintain high activity levels for long periods of time without overheating (Ebling 1985; Porter 1993; Wheeler 1984, 1985, 1992, 1994; Zihlman and Cohn 1988). This hypothesis is discussed in more detail below.
Allometric trend. Some scholars believe that the reduction of body hair occurred earlier than the shift in behavioral strategies. Newman (1970) suggests that our forest-dwelling ancestors lost their hair while still living an ape-like existence. Schwartz and Rosenblum (1981) suggest that it was increasing size in the ape lineage that led to hair reduction to allow a larger body to lose heat more effectively. A size-related, or allometric, change may explain the relatively reduced density of hair in the living great apes, but it does not explain the extreme condition found in modern humans.
Hunting. In the 1960’s most models for human evolution focused heavily on hunting. Montagu (1964) and others suggested specifically that hair reduction permitted long-distance chasing of prey animals without overheating. The emphasis on hunting has had many reinterpretations in the past two decades.
Aquatic habitat. The feminist response to the hunting hypothesis was the aquatic hypothesis (Hardy 1960; Morgan 1972, 1982, 1990). An aquatic mammal, such as a whale or hippopotamus, faces very different problems of maintaining body temperature than do terrestrial mammals. Flowing water carries heat away from the skin more quickly than does air. Evaporative cooling through perspiring is impossible in water, and wet hair is useless as insulation; therefore it was discarded. There is no solid evidence that early hominids were adapted for an aquatic existence and the fossil record contradicts the idea.
Sexual attraction. Darwin (1871) and Morris (1967) understood the reduction of hair as an adaptation to heighten sensitivity and thereby sexual attractiveness and arousal. This view fails to acknowledge that the nerve endings associated with hair can be just as sensitive, if not more so, as the endings on naked skin.
Clothing and culture. Since there is no fossil evidence bearing directly on the presence of absence of hair, it is not impossible that hair reduction was a very recent event. Hamilton (1973) and Kushland (1985) suggested that the use of clothing and fire made hair redundant and led to its reduction. This hypothesis would ignore the physiological implications and other changes in the integument in the hominid lineage"
etc etc
"SWEAT, HAIR REDUCTION, AND FAT AS A HUMAN STRATEGY FOR THERMOREGULATION
Humans are unusual in the number and functioning of the eccrine glands. In most other mammals, apocrine glands vastly outnumber eccrine glands, and the latter are restricted in distribution to non-hairy regions, such as the pads of the feet. Among higher Old World primates, eccrine glands do appear in hairy skin, but these may not be sensitive to temperature state. Even animals noted for their ability to cool themselves by sweating, such as horses, rely on apocrine glands. These glands are responsive to systemic adrenaline levels, reflecting activity level or emotional state rather than temperature.
Most mammals with a coat of hair would find sweating of limited effectiveness. Fur traps a layer of dead air against the skin that is very effective for insulation. Perspiration in this area would quickly saturate the air, inhibiting further evaporation. Unless air can circulate freely over the moisture, perspiration cannot evaporate; without evaporation there is no cooling. Thus an animal that relies primarily on evaporative cooling from the body surface must reduce its coat of hair. This explains one of the most conspicuous of human adaptations.
Terrestrial mammals that cannot sweat may use other means for cooling the body. One common strategy is evaporation from the mouth and pharynx through panting, commonly observed in dogs. Water buffalo, elephants, and pigs apply water or mud to their bodies. Most medium or large mammals have a limited capacity to shed excess heat and thus modify their behaviors accordingly. In the tropics, they avoid activity during the heat of the day and strenuous activity is limited absolutely. Few mammals have the endurance for long distance running or sustained high metabolic rate that humans do. Predators such as lions or cheetahs can maintain a sprint for only short distances, and their prey need run only a little longer to be safe. Concern with overheating is a primary consideration for them.
The human design permits us to sustain high levels of activity for long periods of time in a warm, tropical habitat. With the emphasis on eccrine glands and the reduction of hair, our perspiration is a more effective means of dumping heat. However, there are other consequences that demand compensatory adaptations. One is the need to replenish body fluids. Humans drink more and are more dependent on standing water resources than are most other mammals. Another consequence is the need to ingest and consume more energy. Thus humans have a diet that is relatively rich in meat for primates. A third problem is the need to replace the layer of hair with another form of insulation to prevent hypothermia between periods of activity. Modern humans have two solutions, one physiological (fat) and the other cultural (clothing).
The human layer of subcutaneous fat is thicker than that found in other primates and represents significant energy reserves. Although the locations of fat deposits are the same in humans as in other mammals, the increased size of individual deposits permits them to expand under a greater proportion of the skin (Pond 1991). Moreover, fat has the advantage of lying deep to the outer layers of the body and thus can be bypassed when necessary. Blood vessels, which are responsible for moving heat within the body, mostly run deep to the fat, where they are insulated from the cooling environment of the skin. If it is desirable to loose heat, the arterioles of the dermis dilate to carry a volume of blood greater than the actual metabolic needs of the skin. Much of this extra flow passes through shunts that connect directly into venules. Thus the blood bypasses the capillaries, but is still exposed to the cooler surface.
If it is desirable to retain body heat, the vessels constrict and minimize dermal blood flow. The outer layers of the skin are highly tolerant of such a temporary reduction of oxygen supply, although they may loose sensation. As a protection against actual frostbite (freezing of tissues), prolonged exposure to extremely cold conditions may produce a secondary vasodilation due to cold-induced paralysis of the vasoconstricting muscles. This mechanism brings a flush of warm blood to restore the tissues.
Vascular dilation is under both local and central control. Warming a region of the skin causes a relaxation in the smooth muscles of the vessel walls and valves. The result is flushing, or redness in the skin. Changes in the blood flow also have significance for the body as a whole. Expanding or closing cutaneous channels lowers or raises blood pressure accordingly and can be manipulated by the neuroendocrine system for that purpose.
Vessels to the head do not undergo vasoconstriction in response to cold. Rather, they maintain a flow of warm blood. The obvious advantage to this in terms of maintaining a constant temperature for the brain comes at a cost of the additional heat lost to a cold environment. This suggests that scalp hair has been retained as functional insulation."
etc etc
Yep, agreed. The shame that causes us to restrain from going around naked is the fact that it is a crime. The reason for a crime is because we know it is wrong.
Naked Zombies!
The Unclad Undead! Revenants in the Raw! Nude Necromantic Nasties!