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Re: Why is Homo sapiens hairless?
Phillip Bigelow (bh162@scn.org)
Fri, 01 Nov 1996 17:53:47 +0800
Bullwinkle wrote:
>
> In article <01bbc5b9$29d272a0$LocalHost@dan-pc>,
> rohinton@collins.prestel.co.uk says...
<major snip>
> It would be more logical to assume humans
> lost their hair through random genetic mutation, and as a result of that hair
> loss THEN began to wear clothing to keep warm.
Or, an equally parsimonious situation is concomittant reduction
of hair and an increased "frequency" of clothing wear.
There may not be a strict cause and then a later effect.
Consider the possiblity that fully-haired hominids FIRST wore
"clothes" as a sexual display....or as "cammo" wear for hunting
savanna animals (many Africans still wear wildebeast hides
and heads to approach heards).... or as "status" impliments
in hominid social structure. Fully haired hominids could
have first donned clothing for reasons *totally* unrelated
to thermoregulation.
In other words, clothing may have been more of a social
adaption (a non-evolutionary learned response) that, later,
as this cultural adaptation "caught on", THEN became
the driving force for the "redundancy" of hair.
There is no evidence that temporal overlap didn't happen.
Likewise, there is no evidence that temporal overlap
did happen.
This may be one example of those things that may never
be totally clarified.
<pb>
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