Sunday, September 20, 2009

Why Are We The Naked Ape?

No one is sure why Homo sapiens is the only primate to have lost its body hair
(Image: Laurent Gillieron / EPA / Corbis)


From New Scientist:

RIGHT from the start of modern evolutionary science, why humans are hairless has been controversial. "No one supposes," wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, "that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man: his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection."

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