Re: Why is Homo sapiens hairless?
John Waters (jdwaters@dircon.co.uk)
8 Nov 1996 06:14:03 GMT
Barry Mennen <barrym2@ix.netcom.com> wrote in article
<55lpvv$2qt@sjx-ixn10.ix.netcom.com>...
> In <01bbc9e8$5f6571a0$f42270c2@default> "John Waters"
> <jdwaters@dircon.co.uk> writes:
> >
> >JW: Come on Barry. Dish the dirt. Let us hear your
> >hypothesis.
> >
> >John.
> >
> Well John, it's hardly mine, but here goes:
>
> As Darwin said, it is "ornamentation;" but ornamentation
> to attract the male; my guess is that the first parts of
the
> female hominid to lose hair would have been the buttocks,
>chest and face--since there is no real heat season for
humans,
JW: There is no real _heat_ season for any specie of mammal
in
equatorial conditions. So what made the hominids special?
>I am making an *assumption* that this
> ability for continual sexual receptivity in the female
set
>our emerging line apart--to that end, the engine of sexual
>selection worked on the libidinous males to mate with the
>females that offered the most in the way of visual cues.
JW: Sexual cues tend to vary according to the habitat and
mating
system. In this context, ape species with polygamic mating
systems
are virtually devoid of visual cues. The dimorphism of
early hominid
fossils implies that they had a polygamic mating system.
How
does that square with the Darwin-Mennen theory, Barry?
>
> Protuberant breast and buttocks would have followed;
>after all, if we as a species were able to develop a brain
>good enough to solve quadratic equations in a few million
>years, why couldn't we lose hair for sex in a flash?
JW: Does it really take a few million years to solve
quadratic
equations? No wonder I failed at maths.
John.
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