Are other primates born with little hair? If so, neoteny could be a mechanism for our near hairlessness, but it wouldn’t be the reason.
I gotta say, I think the alien hybrid hypothesis is in the lead on this one. That or Jesus. Which brings up an interesting question- how hairy was Jesus?
Yes indeed. Furthermore, study of the DNA apparently found not only evidence that bigfeet have at some time interbred with humans, but also indications that they have interbred with angels! :eek:
Unfortunately the lab responsible seems to have gone out of business.
But this story is about DNA analysis, so it is all sciencey and must be true. Right folks?
I was with Cecil right up until the penultimate paragraph, specifically this:
[QUOTE=Cecil]
When the ancestors of modern east Asians were trapped in Siberia by glaciers during the last ice age, 25,000 to 50,000 years ago, they evolved eyefolds and flatter facial features to protect against the cold.
[/QUOTE]
This seems a pretty bald (heh) statement without any support. Wikipedia suggests that the forces behind the origin of the epicanthic fold are uncertain.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
It is hypothesized that epicanthic folds are caused by climatic factors and it may have originated more than once during human evolution. Sexual selection may have also influenced the evolution of the trait. The genetic basis of the adaptation is not well known.
[/QUOTE]
So this seems at best an hypothesis, with limited evidence. And it is not clear to me how flatter facial features protect one against the cold; I can imagine an explanation but I would like a little more than that, if I am to believe this to be true. It just seems a little too convenient.
Roddy
I do not know if you are being serious, but the Bible says no such thing. All it says about the location of Eden is that it was “eastward” (and it does not even say eastward from where). It would be nice if Christians could get their own myths right sometimes.
Not in my Bible, it doesn’t. Do you have a specific passage in mind, and is the word “Iraq” in it? (I’ll accept an anagram, but that’s it.)
Doesn’t really have a lot to do with the OP, or the original article it’s based on…but then, not much in this thread does so:
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Nor is it likely at all that the “Sasquatch” even exists.
[/QUOTE]
I guess interest in BigFoots (:p) has gotten more intense lately, based on the number of ads for shows on History, Discover, TLC and the like. Anyway, one of the commercials I’ve seen repeatedly on one of those channels always cracks me up. It’s some show about some ghost hunter types tramping through the woods trying to find Bigfoot. At one point, you hear what sounds like a wolf call to me, and you see some bozo in a night vision scene say ‘Sounds like there is a squatch in these woods’, in a sort of half quavering, have excited voice. I don’t know why, but every time I see that I just bust out laughing.
Anyway, just wanted to share. I find the idea that humans are a hybrid race of Bigfoots and ancient aliens (I LOVE the crazy guys hair that is on that show btw) to be very believable. My guess is it’s mutant alien muskrats that are at the bottom of it because of that Muskrat Love song a long time ago? If you listen carefully you can hear squeaky noises during the song, and if you play those backwards it’s actually aliens talking about anal probes and stuff, which is a dead give away that they are still breeding human politicians for their evil purposes.
I am not convinced that human hair thinning/loss is can be correlated with wearing clothing.
Persistance hunting, wounding a prey animal and then either running it down until it bleeds out or gets exhausted is thought to be a reason for our upright gait and ability to run and walk long distances. Even not wounding the prey animal we can out last them by running them until they are exhausted. This is thought to be a hunting tactic used even before we had hunting tools
And an upright stance keeps a body cooler in the hot African sun. Perhaps human hair loss/thinning actually happened before we left Africa as a trait that allowed us to keep up the pursuit longer and was selected for as a survival trait.
Rather than clothing being the reason for hair loss, clothing might have been a response to thinly haired people moving into colder climates.
The evolutionary split of lice species is probably explained by the advent of clothing. But which came first, the loss of hair or the clothes?
Human have more hair follicles than chimps, and our density of hair follicles is what you would expect for a primate our size; our perceived hairlessness is due to the nature of our hair and not the number. An adult human has 5 million or so follicles. The question is not really why we don’t have more hair but rather wjy are hairs are so reduced over most of our body. One clue might be that we have a lot more fat cells (10 times more adipocytes) as babies than baby chimps. That could very well be related to the heart regulation idea. We don’t need our hair to be as thick because we have more fat to keep us warm, two traits that you would think developed together. Of course, some people use the thin hair/more fat to argue for aquatic apes, a rather ridiculous idea I think given the lack of evidence. That we seem a little more like aquatic mammals in these areas than chimps is just a kind of convergent evolution. For what it’s worth, I don’t see why our relative hairlessness couldn’t have been driven by several factors
Geneisis 2:10-14:
“A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.”
This is the verse usually used to locate Eden somewhere around modern-day Iraq, between the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates.
Cecil researched this idea, and in the end discarded it as not having enough support in the scientific community.
The claim is that hair loss occurred first, in warm climates, and subsequent migration to colder climes (or change in climate) caused the need for clothing on the now bare bodies.
This may be handy in the discussion.
There’s a new report getting attention that claims that a single gene, miR-941, is what separated us from the other apes. (Yet another nail in the coffin for the alien hybrid nonsense.) Maybe 1-6 million years old. Too old to explain hairlessness, probably. Also most likely involved in brain development.
Maybe miR-942 will turn out to be the hairless gene!
Maybe, but I hardly think that will “upset Evolutionists.”
And what about the other two rivers? The Gihon is mentioned that it winds around Cush which is Ethiopia. The Pishon and the land of Havillah is completely unknown.
There are actually two people named Havillah in the Table of Nations listed in Noah.
One is the son of Cush (associated with Ethiopia). Traditionally, it is thought that Havillah was associated with Yemen. The other is the son of Joktan, the son of Eber (where the term Hebrew comes from. Joktan is associated with the land around the Indus river. This would put Havillah near there. Because of this, some Rabbinical commentators say that the Pishon is the Indus River or the Ganges River.
Of course, there’s another problem: All four rivers came from the same Headwaters. Even the two known rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates don’t share the same source. Let alone whatever river is near Cush that’s associated with the Gihon and whatever river is near India that is associated with the Pishon.
There are two ways this could be interpreted:
[ol]
[li]The Noachdic Flood messed everything up. Eden has been scoured clean off the map, and the four rivers mentioned simply don’t exist in the post-flood world.[/li][*]The location of Edan is a metaphor. The four rivers mentioned cover the Eastern edge of the known world, the Western edge of the known world, and the center of the Known world.[/ol]
Thing is, even if you’re a biblical literalist, this offers no explanation other than “Cuz God said so”.Whcih is not a testable hypothesis. That’s why “intelligent design” is not a valid rival theory to natural selection.
Hell, even in the story, there is no explanation for Eve and Adam’s nudity - it’s simply stated as a fact.
Dante, of course, puts the Garden of Eden at the antipodal point to Jerusalem (specifically, to Golgothea).
You commented briefly on the "descended from aquatic apes notion, but there was a variant I always found interesting since reading “The Descent of Woman” - written as a reply to Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape - within a year or so of its publishing that contains an alternate water-based account of why this would happen after we branched off from the ape line.
In the author’s scenario, humans were living on the (west?) coast of Africa - which is supported by other newer evidence that we actually dwindled to a small number in that area at one point. One part of her hypothesis was that one way to avoid land-based predators was to paddle out into the water and stay there until the danger passed - and that we began a series of changes much like dolphins and whales, but kept the hair on the TOP of our heads for protection from the sun during these periods of dog-paddling for relatively long periods, and our underarm and public hair because those areas need sweat protection during lots of exertion.
Still makes logical sense to me…
I’d heard that it was for cooling once we started walking upright. So we could walk long distances for tracking game and moving to where seasonal food supplies could be found.