A fascinating bit of research from January 2011 on lice throws some light on human nakedness.
"The key to the study by David Reed and colleagues, which appears in Molecular Biology And Evolution, is that there are two kinds of lice that hang around humans: the head lice that live on our scalp, and the body lice that live in our clothes. At one point in the past these two shared a common ancestor, Reed reasoned, and the body lice would have split off and become a separate group once they had human clothing in which to live.
So if we can figure out when they arrived at the scene, we’d have a minimum age on clothes. Thanks to modern molecular techniques, we can compare the genomes of these two lice and come up with that date. For the curious, a “Bayesian coalescent modeling approach” tells us that we were going clothed at least 83,000 years ago, and maybe as far back as 170,000 years. [Ars Technica]
Curiously, human ancestors didn’t seem to be in any hurry to cover up. They began to lose their body hair about a million years ago, meaning they lived au naturel for hundreds of thousands of years before they bothered to develop clothing. Once attired, people could venture out of Africa to colder climes, which they started doing in the window between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago."
Coincidentally, I watched an episode of Ancient Aliens last night during which it was posited that Sasquatch might be the true modern version of the original hominids and that we, the relatively hairless ones, may be the result of cross-breeding with members of a visiting alien race.
I am surprised that no mention of alien intervention in our development was mentioned in Cecil’s response, even if it is generally considered a fringe view point. While I don’t personally believe this theory due to the lack of hard evidence, I am at least open to the possibility.
One possibility, even if it is generally considered a fringe view point, is that the invisible razor sasquatch* comes to us every night while we are asleep, and removes the hair that offends him. While I don’t personally believe this theory due to the lack of hard evidence, I am at least open to the possibility.
*He is believed to have stolen his razor from Occam.
That’s less plausible than claiming it’s due to us interbreeding with jellyfish; we are far more closely related to the jelly after all. Nor is it likely at all that the “Sasquatch” even exists.
You might as well ask why he didn’t mention the possibility of it being due to time travelers. He can’t cover every last wacky idea, there’d be no room for it given how many wacky ideas there are.
Let us only assume that the emergence of hairlessness coincided with that of the introduction of fire.
What do we know about fire? It needs air, fuel and spark right?
What do we know about our subjects (humans)? They are neither air nor spark, but they are fuel.
What do we know about our variable (hair)? It is neither air nor spark, but it is fuel as well.
Let us spatially orient two subjects who represent opposite ends of the variable spectrum—an extremely hairy fellow and a sleek fur-free guy (with chiseled abs of course)—next to our recently introduced technology, fire.
We know our subjects and our variable are both combustibles and they are surrounded by both air and spark—the fire itself. Yet the flash point of hair is much lower than the flash point of flesh. Furthermore, we know hair is essentially dead and has no nerve endings, yet just below our dermis resides billions of nerve endings ready to jump at any affronting scald.
Is this really that complicated a phenomenon with what we know about biology, what we know about fire in conjunction with our singular assumption? Occam’s Razor.
Hairier people got burnt more (perhaps often dying of infection) and thus procreated less than us sleeker types. If your a lady-hominid, do you really want to fornicate with the scar-faced burn-victim whose already shaved 20 years off his 35 year life-expectancy?
Hairy people died of their affliction.
Perhaps this is why many of us find too much hair a turn off, because we don’t want someone who will be here one day and combust the next.
Why not elves? I think there is more evidence for elves than for aliens. Or maybe angels?
We have always made up stories of other creatures around us. We have always found evidence for them. Evidence where aliens, Bigfoot and so on are one of several possible explanations. The question everybody must ask themselves is what explanation is most likely.
This is where Occam’s Razor is a good rule of thumb. A simpler explanation is almost always more likely to be true than a more complex one.
Physics have taught us that it is extremely unlikely that aliens can travel to the Earth, and that it is also unlikely that we could not detect them or the traces or their visits. Explaining human hairlessness by invoking alien interbreeding also require you to explain how they could have gotten here and how they interacted with us without leaving clear traces, and even how their DNA could be so close to human that they could interbreed, when we know very well how DNA has changed from our ape-like ancestors.
We also now have extremely sensitive detection instruments which can detect underground caverns, so the elves under the hill are almost certainly not true.
But we still enjoy tales of aliens, elves and angels. Because our normally boring lives need some spice now and then. Without storytellers we would not be human.
Logic tells us that for every event in human history, there is an infinite number of possible explanations. If pressured, I can probably come up with a dozen reasonable explanations for human hairlessness as likely and as maybe even as interesting as alien interbreeding.
Take storytelling seriously, but don’t let it guide you too much in the hard choices you must make every day. For that we have only our fallible senses filtered by reason, logic, and the scientific method.
And a final tip: The History Channel is entertainment. It is storytelling of a modern kind. There are no laws or regulations that require them to be truthful (fortunately). There are no historians or anthropologists in charge of their programming. Their business is selling airtime to advertisers - nothing else.
Why would that upset evolutionists? The fertile crescent of Iraq is indeed where human civilization (not the species itself) got one of its first major toeholds. It makes sense that human stories would point back in that direction as “where we came from”.
The lice evidence is very interesting. It establishes a latest date for clothing, leaving the earliest date open.
I’m surprised Cecil doesn’t mention the fairly straightforward fact that if you’re using fires a lot, it’s probably best not to be super hairy!
Last I heard, there was clear evidence of human-made fire 250Ka ago, with 2Ma being the likely earilest date. Cecil mentions recent evidence that it dates 1Ma ago; I’ll be googling to find that.
JakeS3212, it is unlikely that anyone on SDMB, except the psychic ones, will know to which column you are referring unless you give us a hint. Perhaps it is this one?
And is this thread about hairless humans or Occam’s Razor? Your title gives pause.
Judith Rich Harris has speculated on a third type of selection besides natural and sexual: parental selection. The idea is that, at or near birth, parents may have chosen which children to raise and which to abandon based on their perception of the child’s “worth.” (We know that infanticide was widespread throughout most of history.)
Hairlessness, and possibly pale skin, may have been prized attributes that parents selected for. As with sexual selection, there doesn’t have to be a good reason for preferring an attribute: what we might call a “fad” or “taste” will do. These kinds of superficial differences may also serve to reinforce group identity: to distinguish members of one tribe from their neighbors.
I think I read somewhere (but don’t quote me) that, on average, females in any given race or tribe tend to have both less hair and lighter skin, which may support this idea.
Humans are not hairless, as some have asserted. Take a loupe and look at your body and you will find as many hair follicles as on a chimpanzee, albeit quite receded. In fact, some human males evidence a lot of body hair, and presumably if we somehow lost the technology to manufacture clothing evolution might select the hairier to reproduce in certain climes, and we’re back to square one.