The Trouble with Human Evolution: Part One

When it comes to the standard model of how modern humans evolved from our primate ancestors, especially apparently the chimpanzee, you should be prepared to ask the tough questions and see if they get answered to your satisfaction. Questions like can you really go from chimpanzee stock to what makes you, the reader, you, via natural selection in 6 to 7 million years? That’s not just a little change, but a massive change and on several broad physiological, anatomical and behavioural fronts. Contrast your society, lifestyle and body-plan with that of the chimpanzee. So, if you think the standard model is unlikely, and you reject any supernatural explanation, that leaves but two alternatives, an artificial selection by ancient aliens, or we’re akin to characters in a video game – we are simulated beings.

Modern humans have evolved over the past six to seven million years a number of traits that make us, Homo sapiens, a very unique species indeed. We alone of all the mammals (as well as all invertebrates, amphibians and reptiles) have a bipedal gait. We alone of all of our primate cousins are for all practical purposes hairless. Of all the animals that are, or have ever been, we’re top of the pops with respect to brain size as a function of body size, and in terms of intelligence, king of the hill full stop. And while animals can communicate via vocalizations and body language, none can communicate the extremely wide range of practical and especially abstract concepts that we can. Last, but not least, humans are nearly unique in making and using external tools, tools unique in terms of their sophistication.

All five major traits noted above, and a lot more that’s related besides, don’t seem to be a requirement for basic survival, since other species survive and thrive without them, and in fact all these major five defining traits (and more) seem to have some actual evolutionary drawbacks, not the least of which require very serious modifications to basic primate anatomy for apparently no increase in that Darwinian phrase “survival of the fittest”. The proof of that pudding is that our ultimate primate ancestor still survives – the chimpanzee; their ultimate descendent survives – the modern human; yet all those in-betweens hominids who were presumably adapting via natural selection resulting in all those evolutionary changing improvements, went kaput – over twenty species of them. If these “survival of the fittest” evolutionary adaptations were all that crash hot and necessary, then why was their demise? Any ancestral hominoids that went extinct prior to 200,000 years ago can’t have Homo sapiens as the villain. Those 20 plus extinct hominid species aside, why aren’t many of those natural selection improvements really so crash hot for us modern humans either? Here’s the trouble with human evolution. But first consider this.

THE ROOT CAUSE & DRIVING FORCE

The current standard model of human evolution explains the ‘why’ question due to rapid and extreme shifts in climate in continental Africa over that six to seven million year period. The central problem there IMHO is why these shifts failed to drastically produce evolutionary changes in the rest of the animal populations like elephants, lions, hyenas, giraffes, zebras, wildebeests and other African landlubbers as the Dark Continent went from jungle to forest to savannah to arid deserts and back again.

Now of course environmental change is a major driving force behind biological evolution, at least when it comes to natural selection. But one has to look at the Big Picture, the entirety of the bio-realm and not just isolate one changing species and link the two and ignore all else. The environment changes and hominoids change but all the other species seemingly don’t change. That makes for an anomaly. 

One of the key phrases in evolution is that “there is a price to pay” for change – no free lunch or get out of jail card is authorized. That “no pain, no gain” price applies whether you’re dealing with natural or artificial selection. But I sometimes wonder whether one is getting a fifty-cent gain return on a dollar investment worth of pain. Consider the following. 

OUR BIPEDAL GAIT

* Is an anomaly in that human beings, alone of all the mammals, walk routinely on just two legs.

* It called for a complete redesign of our musculoskeletal system vis-à-vis our chimpanzee ancestors.

* That results in an increase in all our various painful bad back trials and tribulations.

* And it also requires a rearrangement of our internal organ attachments.

* A bipedal gait needs a harder working heart to pump blood up to our now higher upper reaches, like the head and neck, instead of mainly sideways. A bipedal gait means having to fight the better fight against gravity.

* A bipedal gait results in an increase in difficulties in maintaining an upright balance (especially as one grows older) because the centre of gravity has shifted dramatically. It’s much easier to push over a standing human than say a standing dog.

* A bipedal gait further results in a decrease in survival value due to the ever possible loss of or injury to a leg, foot, ankle, etc. Lose the use of a leg and in the wilderness, you’re nearly helpless.

* A bipedal gait has to the best of my knowledge only arisen once before, and that was in the theropod dinosaur branch, like T-Rex, etc. That was the branch that gave rise to the birds, therefore they are also bipedal, but it originated with an early, early ancestor of T-Rex. Some may argue that kangaroos and their relatives like the wallabies are bipedal, but they don’t put one leg in front of the other in a left-right-left-right-left-right fashion. They hop, which doesn’t quite put them in the same category as humans or even birds. Further, the theropod dinosaurs, the birds, and even the kangaroos all have tails to help keep their centre of balance, well, balanced. That’s cheating!!! Humans lack that support structure (a rather sad tale I’m sure), so I’ll argue that the human bipedal gait is still unique among all animals, past and present. Humans remain the one and only really bona-fide bipedal entity. Okay, a few tailless primates can ‘walk’ for brief intervals, but their normal locomotion is via their four limbs on the ground when not swinging in the trees.

C - A bipedal gait isn’t a lifestyle walk-the-walk gait that is commonly noted in cats – in fact it isn’t noted at all. Why cats? Why not cats? C is for Cat; C is for Comparison. So as a comparison, let’s take cats, who have a multitude of feline relatives (tigers, lions, etc.) and who have survived and thrived for quite some considerable time. Why cats? Firstly because I’m familiar with cats and secondly because they are an advanced multicellular relatively sophisticated mammalian species, much liken to us. Cats share a great deal with us humans apart from being warm-blooded mammals. Cats, like humans are curious, playful, tend to look after number one, are territorial, like to sleep, dream, have a good memory, show emotions, and like humans have colonized the globe – except Antarctica – either as domestics or as ferals or as wild animals, etc. But, they don’t walk-the-walk on just their two hind legs!

A LARGE HUMAN BRAIN

* Is an anomaly, along with that associated brain thingy high IQ or intelligence we have, relative to the rest of the animal kingdom, which collectively aren’t quite, by any stretch of the imagination, in Einstein’s league. Humans have the largest brain size as a function of body size in the entire animal kingdom, again, apparently both past and present. .

* A large human brain makes for an increasingly hazardous childbirth. The relatively large head of the foetus at childbirth, having to pass through the space available via the hip opening, has resulted in not just a rather painful experience for the mother (and presumably the infant too) but has often led to the premature death of a lot of said newborns and/or their mothers. Now another anomaly here is that if the human body has accommodated all the massive anatomical changes required for a bipedal lifestyle, you’d think an increase in the birth canal hip opening size would have been relatively evolutionary child’s play. 

* The human brain takes years to develop fully, nearly two decades worth in fact, leaving infants totally dependent on others for survival. Infants need care not just for a few weeks or months or seasons, but for many, many years, extending right through their teens, thus cramping the lifestyle of the parents. This length of time for brain development and associated acquiring of survival skills to fully develop is unprecedented in all other primates.

* A large human brain is a very energy-intensive organ. In fact 25% of our energy requirements are required to fuel our upstairs grey-matter wetware. That in turn puts additional pressures on hunting and/or gathering for that extra in food resources required to supply that energy need. Apparently the increase in those energy demands is what drove us to begin to hunt down and eat meat and invent cooking (to make the meat easier to digest). Well, maybe.

C - Cats, however endearing, are not a little feline version of Einstein.

A LACK OF FUR

* Is an anomaly since humans alone of nearly 200 species of our primate cousins are considered a “naked ape”.

* Our relative lack of fur makes us dependent on sweating for temperature regulation, also making us highly dependent on sources of freshwater and salt.

* Our relative lack of fur has the apparent advantage of enabling humans to become long distance endurance runners since we can continually keep cool, even while running, by sweating, yet what we are running after (prey), or from (predators), don’t sweat and therefore are quickly overcome by heat exhaustion. We get a meal, or escape from being one. Well that’s the standard scenario. I think it would have made more sense to have used our social group numbers, increasing IQ and tool making abilities to hunt and ambush game rather than running them down. As for escaping predators, perhaps we should have retained our tree climbing abilities, and if no trees were available, there are always rocks to throw and sticks to club predators with. I’m not convinced loss of fur in order to sweat in order to run marathons in order to eat or avoid being eaten are related in a cause-and-effect way. In any event running is also very energy consuming and it isn’t normally sound practice to expend more energy than you have to, especially when you don’t know where and when your next meal is coming from. And if it is advantageous for evolving hominoids to lose fur, take up sweating, take up jogging, and run to exhaustion large prey animals, then it should also be advantageous for other predators, like the lion, to do the same. But that hasn’t happened. Why not?  

* Our relative lack of fur requires the need, as a substitution, for clothing in cooler environments. Why a human, originating in and adapted to a tropical climate without need of fur, therefore without need of clothing, would migrate into cooler, even cold habitats where fur, or now a clothing substitute instead, is a near requirement, is itself an anomaly. You swap fur for clothing, but clothing in itself requires a whole lot of special skills to produce – fur doesn’t.

C – Cats, as well as their wildlife big cat cousins, do not lack a natural covering of fur. 

To be continued…

The Uniqueness of a Human Being: Part One

There’s just something really special about Homo sapiens relative to all the other animal and plant life forms we share Planet Earth with. Well actually every life form is special in one way or another*, but still humans stand out from the crowd. Many people will attribute that to the alleged ‘fact’ that we were created in God’s image, although IMHO the concept of a supreme, supernatural creator being carries so much dead (philosophical baggage) weight as to have as close to zero credibility as makes no odds. Therefore, I suggest something’s screwy somewhere.

For a few quick examples of human uniqueness, of all the true mammals, humans alone walk exclusively upright – we’re bipedal critters. Why is that so? If the trait of bipedal walking had real survival-of-the-fittest evolutionary significance, I’d expect the walking-on-two-feet trait to be way more common than it is.

We’re also top of the pops when it comes to IQ, and by a very wide margin relative to our primate ancestors, or even the dolphins and whales, not to mention the crow family (like magpies). Again, if extreme intellectuality abilities had some sort of paramount importance in terms of Darwinian natural selection, you’d expect we’d have some animal rivals in whose species will compete with us to be grand master in chess. Alas, no species, other than the human one, will ever lay claim to that title. Artificial intelligence is another issue, but not overly relevant here and now in context.

Now extreme exceptions to the bipedal and IQ rule require some sort of detailed explanation. I’ve dealt with those traits in a separate essay. (Hint: Extraterrestrial intelligence and artificial selection could account for these.)

Humans come in breeds – well we call our breeds’ ‘races’. There are lots of other animals that come in breeds too. The commonality between all our animal (and plant) kin that come in breeds is that we humans were responsible for their creation – our artificial selection versus natural selection. That at first glance doesn’t make us unique, until you stop and wonder who applied artificial selection on us? (Hint: think extraterrestrials again.)

Facial features: How do you help finger and identify the suspect in a crime? Well you try to provide an identikit profile – facial features. Of course you could say the criminal was white – that fits a lot of people; the criminal was male – that fits a lot of people; the criminal was short – that fits a lot of people; the criminal was fat – that fits a lot of people; the criminal was bald – that fits a lot of people. You could say the criminal was white, male, short, fat and bald – that still fits a lot of people. But, match the face to the perpetrator – you’ve got your man! Apply that to an animal – say a man-eating tiger or a crocodile. How do you finger which tiger or crock is the man-eater? By facial features – I think not.

However, I received a comment from a friend who said: “About crocodile individuality; tour guides get to know individual crocodiles and give them names!  I actually made the comment last year on a boat cruise, “don’t all crocs look the same?” and I was told no, they are as unique in their body marks, bumps, etc. as people!”

However, my reply was along the lines that obviously people who work closely with animals day after day can tell them apart via their bumps and scars and size, etc. but rarely by their facial features. I can tell my cats apart that way too. But here’s a test: In one folder are the photos of ten crocodile faces each with a name; in a second folder are photographs of the faces of ten human Caucasian males all the same age, each with an associated name. You get five minutes to study the ten crocodile faces with their associated names and five minutes to study the ten human male faces and their names. One crocodile is named Fred; one human male is named Fred. Ten minutes later you get one minute to identify the facial photo of Fred the crocodile; one minute to identify the facial photograph of Fred the human male. Care to take bets as to which identification of Fred (crocodile or human) will be way easier?

Speaking of facial features, I understand humans, and humans alone have ear lobes!

Here are a few other anomalies.

Physical anthropologists are pretty much in agreement that the modern human evolved in and migrated out of roughly equatorial Africa and from there colonized the planet (minus Antarctica). Now all our primate kin in Africa (gorillas, etc.) have fur. For some reason we lost our massive cover of fur. That suggests that humans were going to be relatively unsuited to colder climates because we lost our fur covering. Why? Okay, it’s hot in equatorial Africa, we don’t need fur there, but yet our kissing cousins in Africa have fur but they don’t really need it either - Something’s screwy somewhere.

Question: Why did we lose our fur?

For that matter we have primate ancestors that live, survive and thrive in cold climates – because they have fur. This time, in these geographies, fur is required. If we migrated to colder climates, why didn’t we keep our fur?

Okay, naked (no furry) humans migrated out of Africa and drifted into colder climates too. Firstly, why would we migrate into cooler geographies when presumably our population was low enough way back then that there was more than enough hot (or at least very warm) geography to go around? Again, I think that there’s something’s screwy somewhere. Well obviously we did migrate towards the Arctic, and points south as well, but we needed to invent, unlike our furry primate cold climate cousins – clothing. 

Okay, so at some point clothing served a very practical purpose. However, humans today live in some parts of the world where it’s hot enough that clothing isn’t required for all or some of the year. Take say, Adelaide, South Australia. For much of Adelaide’s summer, the population could save on the wear and tear and cost of their clothes and exist in just their birthday suits. The same could be said about various other geographic regions throughout the world. What prevents humans from clothing themselves in just their birthday suits when the climate is right? Even in tropical regions, primitive tribal societies still tend to wear some form of covering over selected areas of the body.

One obvious answer is protection of the private parts, although the rest of the animal kingdom seems to get along nicely with exposed private parts. Even so, be it primitive societies, or cultured societies, the actually amount of protection offered isn’t really that great. It’s not all that difficult to do yourself a private parts injury even when fully dressed – unless you’re a knight in shining armour of course, but that subspecies has gone extinct.

Well, the other obvious answer is, in public at least, it tends to be against the law – that’s what society wants and expects. Though shall wear clothes when in public. Well, something’s screwy somewhere because no other animal society has any such equivalent ban on nakedness. 

Translated, if our animal kin don’t worry about it, why don’t you take your furless body out in public minus clothing when the temperature’s hot; even hotter; and absolutely at its hottest?

Well the standard answer, apart from being arrested of course for alleged indecency, is that you’d probably be embarrassed to; having others seeing your birthday suit is an invasion of your privacy, so to avoid that, you don’t allow the great unwashed to see same and thus, heatwave be damned, you go out in public fully dressed. Comfort is not the issue.

To be continued…

*All animals are unique or different in their own way. Felines can purr; bats have radar and dolphins have sonar; some animals can see into the infra-red or ultraviolet part of the EM spectrum; some animals can hear higher or lower frequencies than us humans.

My Top Human Anomalies: A List

It’s been said and cited again and again that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine. Whether or not that’s true, the universe, and all it contains, like us, is surely strange indeed. 

EXTINCT ANCESTORS: Modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved from other primates, most probably from chimpanzee stock in Africa when DNA relationships are analyzed. We have a 98% compatibility with chimpanzee DNA. However, there was a long chain of in-between hominoid species twixt chimpanzees and modern humans. Modern humans didn’t evolve willy-nilly in one jump from chimps. The interesting thing is that while all the numerous in-betweens have gone extinct, our ancestral primate chimpanzee stock didn’t. The anomaly is, why should ALL of our in-between ancestral species have gone extinct? We’re not talking one or two or three here, but dozens. It’s stretching credibility to the breaking point that one ancestral species should survive and thrive just long enough for the next in line ancestral species to evolve, and in turn survive and thrive, before going the way of the Dodo, and that this scenario was repeated again and again. There’s no real logical reason why some of our ancestral species couldn’t have survived to ultimately end up coexisting alongside modern humans to this very day.

HUMAN CULTURE & CIVILIZATION: There are two relatively unexplained turning points in the evolution of modern man when contrasted with our more primate-like ancestors. One is the acquisition of what we call culture. Culture (like art appreciation and abstract ideas like an afterlife) happened within a fairly narrow timeframe, roughly 50,000 years ago, wherever nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers gathered. Why the sudden transition? The second great leap forward, again, within a narrow timeframe, some 9000 years ago, was the transition from nomadic lifestyles to settlements – farming crops and herding now domesticated wildlife. Settlements rapidly became villages became towns became cities. While some nomadic hunter-gatherers still roamed the plains, like the Australian aboriginal, what was once that nomadic rule now became that exception to that rule. In both cases, culture and civilization, the observational evidence is rock-solid; theory can’t really explain the transition, or at least the relatively rapid transition, around the world, from the tried-and-true before-the-fact pre-cultural nomadic lifestyle to the unknown leap of an untested experiment with culture and settlements. 

CREATION, THE CONCEPT OF: One of the biggest mysteries to me is why anyone in their stark raving right mind would assume anything and everything had been created from scratch. You cannot make that assumption from first principles based on personal observations and human history. The anomaly is between what our ancient ancestors couldn’t have been expected to know, logically, with what they knew. Their knowledge, often expressed in their mythologies and religions, that there were in fact creations – the universe, stars, solar systems, life, and the human species - therefore must be based on information passed down from those with way more insight or knowledge than they could have possessed. Who passed that information on down the line?

GIFT OF FIRE: In mythologies around the world, one common tale is that some junior deity nicked off with fire belonging to the senior gods, a hot technology that the senior gods had decreed humans shouldn’t have. These junior deities, Prometheus being the best known, in defiance of their superiors give the stolen fire to humans as a gift, usually at quite some considerable peril to their own life and limb. The anomaly here is exactly why presumably humans would come up with such a tall tale in the first place, not once but often and independently in cultures around the globe. The anomaly is because humans don’t need to receive fire as a gift from the gods; fire is a natural part of the human environment. It’s as logical as saying that the gods gave the gift of animals and plants for food, or air and water to humans and prior to that the human species didn’t eat or breathe or drink. At the time humans from many cultures invented the tale of fire from the gods, they had been using fire for tens of thousands of years! Perhaps the gift of “fire” wasn’t really “fire” at all but something more dangerous that the senior gods in their wisdom knew we shouldn’t have, like a parent knows better than to let their very young child play with matches. 

HUMAN UNIQUENESS: The anomaly here is that we humans are not just a different species to all others past and present, but vastly, vastly different. Four vastly different differences in particular strike me as odd.

We alone of all the mammals are bipedal. We alone of all the primates are ‘furless’ – the “Naked Ape” as Desmond Morris described us.  We alone of all species that are and have ever been, are top of the pops in IQ; king of the hill by an extraordinary wide margin in intelligence or the ability to figure things out, call it what you will, plus the use of tools and technology way above that of any other species. Lastly, humans have very distinct facial features – it’s usually how we recognize the identity of another human we’ve seen before. With all other animal species, you’re hard pressed to tell one individual from another based on facial features. You see one sheep’s face, you’ve seen them all. You tend to recognize individuals of other species by size, color and colored patterns, some sort of deformity or abnormality, not by their distinctive facial features which don’t really exist.

If it suits all the other mammals to adopt a four-legged gait and be quadrupeds; if it suited our nearly 200 other primate cousins to retain their fur; if all other species can exist, survive, even thrive without screwdrivers, the automobile, plastics, central heating, the dishwasher, the Internet and the atomic bomb then we have an anomaly here. Every animal species is different from every other animal species, obviously, but there are differences and then there are DIFFERENCES! The human species is so far out in left field as to be nearly out of the biodiversity ballpark.

MORE NAKED APE: Humans of all mammals are the species that sweat the most. The retrograde step of temperature control via sweating instead of fur imposed two additional restrictions on us. 1) We were forced to stay close to reliable sources of freshwater. 2) It also makes us way more dependent on supplies of salt since salt is excreted from the body via sweat. Salt supplies in the natural environment are rare – so rare that once upon a time salt was so extremely valuable and you got paid in salt. It’s where we get our word, salary from. It would appear that in this case, Mother Nature goofed! Not only did this backwards evolutionary step make us more highly dependent on freshwater and salt than would otherwise have been the case, but since we lost our hairy covering in order to sweat, we’ve been forced to replace that hairy covering with artificial coverings – clothes. If only we’d kept our fur, but then clothing manufacturers and the fashion industry wouldn’t have ever existed!

INTELLIGENT DESIGN: THE EYES HAVE IT: Presumably, in the wild, animals that are active in the daytime need as close to perfect eyesight as makes no odds. They need near perfect vision to find prey, to avoid predators, to navigate, especially those animals who navigate in all three dimensions like flying birds and other creatures (like monkeys) that have an up-and-down as well as a front-back and a left-right lifestyle.

I’m not aware that any of the great apes, and that includes chimpanzees (our closest living ancestral species), are often in need of corrective lenses – they exist perfectly well without glasses, or at least that would be the case with the vast majority. Yet the reverse seems to be the case with humans, their descendents. A very large percentage of the human species have problems with their vision yet require (if they want to read, drive a car, watch TV, sew or play video games) acute vision made possible by glasses, contact lenses, surgery, etc. Presumably, before the invention of corrective lenses, people employed for certain tasks had to undergo an eye exam – like those transcribing by hand onto parchment, say the Bible; an archer in medieval times; a chariot driver in pharaoh’s army. And if you were part of the Mayan emperor’s ball team and couldn’t see very well, well you wouldn’t live to have bad vision for long. 

So, why do many humans have less than 20/20 vision, yet wildlife, even domesticated animals, seem to be able to see with visual acuity for whatever passes for their 20/20?

SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION: The anomaly here is that, albeit very rare, the human body can spontaneously burst into flame, killing the victim and turning the body into ash. It’s anomalous in that 1) the human body is composed mainly of water which you don’t tend to associate with fire or spontaneous combustion; 2) the body’s temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is hardly scorching heat; 3) this anomaly isn’t noticed in animals; 4) the fire is localized to just the body and immediate surroundings despite the intense heat needed to consume a human body, and obvious sources of external fire, say a burning candle, are usually lacking. The closest theory is that perhaps the victim’s body was saturated with alcohol from excessive drinking, and alcohol of course can burn, but that rarely fitted the lifestyle of the victim and it would take one hell of a drinking binge to saturate bodily tissues with alcohol in high enough concentrations to cause the body to combust. Since animals don’t spontaneously combust, that tends to rule out body fat as a fuel source.  

The Hairy Tale of the Naked Ape

Zoologist/Anthropologist Desmond Morris authored his best selling book “The Naked Ape”, which was all about us humans, in 1967. We’re the naked ape. According to Wikipedia, “The book was so named because out of 193 species of monkeys and apes only man is not covered in hair.” The 64-cent question is why we are naked (as opposed to being a nudist), as in why don’t we too have a natural fur coat? Extreme exceptions to the rule require explanation(s). I wish I had one for something’s screwy somewhere!

Fur, like feathers, is a very good temperature regulator. In cold weather it traps your body heat next to your body; in hot weather it can loosen or fluff up a bit and allow your body heat to escape into the environment. Further, fur (or a considerable hairy covering) is excellent protection from ultraviolet (UV) radiation. UV rays as we know can cause tanning, a painful sunburn, and ultimately skin cancers. On balance, fur has a positive evolutionary survival value as witnessed by the large number of mammals that have a natural fur coat.

While not all species of mammals wear a natural fur coat, our primate ancestors, past and present, did and do. Since humans are their naturally evolved descendents, it would be logical to expect Homo sapiens to also have a natural fur coat. We don’t. Where’s our fur coat gone?

Any ‘Age of Mammals’ or physical anthropology text will show our hominoid ancestors (like Australopithecus from roughly 3.2 million years ago) as being quite the hairy critters we once were, even while we were well on the evolutionary road to the modern human of today. Somewhere between then and now we lost our fur, but our primate relations (those 193 species of chimps, gorillas, monkeys, etc.) didn’t – yet we shared the same environment way down Africa way with many of those furry primates. Why one (us humans) and not the many (them primates) lost and retained respectfully their hairiness is mystery number one. 

It makes relatively little sense for humans to have lost their fun covering, migrate to cooler climates, then have to invent clothing when the original fur covering would have adequately served the same purpose. That’s mystery number two. Having to invent clothing carries with it a whole host of other required skills and technologies that would have needed to have been discovered and learned and passed on generation to generation like skinning, and curing, and sewing, making threads, the concept of buttons, and belts and ability to tie knots – all unnecessary if we had just kept our fur. There are primate cousins of ours that survive and thrive in colder, even snowy climates with just the benefit of fur.

Now one reason we lost our hairiness might be that we evolved sweat glands to rid us of unwanted heat. However, sweating in hot, humid weather would make for soggy fur, so by-by fur. Yet fur is a good heat regular. So why, if sweat glands are so superior, didn’t other primates evolve sweat glands? [Actually, like cats and dogs, primates can sort of ‘sweat’ and lose heat through the non-hairy parts of their body, like the pads on their feet/hands, their naked noses or via panting.]

So why did we trade our ancestral fur coat for sweat glands, which, by the way, is only a cooling mechanism and not overly efficient in humid conditions (“it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”), and further force the need to invent the totally unnatural concept of clothing which no other animal species makes any use of?

A New York Times (19 Aug 2003) article made the suggestion that it was an advantage to lose fur because it rid humans of the parasites that inhabit fur. However, all furry critters have parasites. Cats can have ticks and fleas. So why aren’t my cats naked? In other words what’s so damn unique about humans with parasites that we lose our fur, yet other furry animals with parasites didn’t – lose fur that is?

Another possible reason we lost our fur is that we’re large. Larger animals have greater difficulty in getting rid of excess body heat relative to smaller animals. As one grows larger, body volume (which generates heat) increases faster than body surface area, from which heat escapes.  Perhaps that’s why really large animals like cattle and horses and elephants are way less hairy than cats and rats and mice.

However, while humans are large relative to many primates, some primates are roughly our size, and furry, so that’s not the be all and end all of explanations. We should be roughly the right size to be covered in fur as many other mammals roughly our size, even larger (like bears or lions) are fur covered.

Of course even very large mammals living in extremely cold climates still require fur, like your Ice Age woolly mammoths. Speaking of the Ice Ages, they should have provided an evolutionary incentive for us to reacquire our furry cover – but strangely we didn’t. Which reminds me; fur is a good insulator and protector against snow - Snow on fur – no big deal; Snow on skin – well talk about chilling out. And fur also offers some protection against the wind-chill factor. Cold is one thing; cold when the wind is blowing really feels extra cold and can rob you of body heat quick-smart. 

Speaking of larger hairy animals, specifically potential primates, there’s the often reported (never proved) Sasquatch, Big Foot, Yeti, Yowie, (and a host of other cryptozoological bipedal hominoids reported from around the modern world). If these beasties really do exist, and a lot of people, even scientists give that more than just some credibility, the most likely candidate is the now not so extinct giant hominoid ape Gigantopithecus (traditionally considered to exist only from 1 million to 300,000 years ago). One characteristic of the modern sightings, from anywhere in the world, is an ape-like being covered in a lot of fur. So, Sasquatch (if it exists) matches us in being bipedal, but kept its fur. We’re still the odd one out. 

Of course you might argue that we haven’t lost all our heavy covering of fur – we have a head full of hair (or at least most of us have). Maybe our hair is to keep the brain warm, but it’s not much comfort in having a warm brain when the rest of your body is experiencing hyperthermia. In any event, there appears to be a critical difference between our head (and facial) hair and real fur. The difference is that we need hair cuts because our hair growth doesn’t know when to quit growing! We’ve all seen women with hair lengths down to their waist; men with beards a bird could build a nest in. If that sort of uncontrolled hair growth happened in the natural world, it might look, but ultimately wouldn’t be, comical. Extrapolate a woman’s waist length hair to your pet cat or dog and your pet (or any equivalent wild animal) couldn’t function. I mean we’ve all heard shaggy dog stories, but not that shaggy!

Of course there are other means of temperature regulation apart from fur. One can warm up in the sunshine; cool off in the shade regardless of having skin or fur, but at night it’s all shade, and if it’s already cold and you’re naked in your skin, there’s not much temperature regulation you can do, except shiver.

Quite apart from the heat regulation issue, fur colourations and patterns are useful as camouflage. Some mammals even change their fur colour with the seasons – for example a white fur coat in the snowy winter. Soldiers on the other hand have to wear ready-mades, having lost all natural furry camouflage they may have once had.

In conclusion,  the question is, did we lose our fur because we evolved sweat glands, or did we have to evolve sweat glands because we lost our fur, fur which again seems to provide a perfectly good means of heat regulation as we note in our cats and dogs and many other mammals? Translated, there was no real environmental reason to lose our fur unless we evolved sweat glands, but then it’s back to the question why our kissing primate cousins didn’t evolve sweat glands if they provide a more efficient means of losing heat – which they don’t (recall humidity). And that provides no explanation for retaining heat; an ability we lost without fur and requiring the invention of the garment industry as a replacement.

I don’t know the answer to why we lost our fur; it certainly is a biological anomaly of the first order. However, I need to stress the word “ape” in that ‘naked ape’ phrase of Desmond Morris least anyone attribute this puzzlement solvable by saying it’s all due to man (and woman) being created in God’s image. That’s only attributable should ‘God’ be a flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial IMHO. To be consistent with my point of view that humans were created in ET’s image via genetic engineering and artificial selection, well, maybe ET wanted a naked ape as a subject and not a walking, talking hairy carpet!

A Hairy Issue for Humans

The amount of your hair from the neck up is different from your hair (what little there is of it) from the neck down. There are sexual differences with respect to hair between the human male and female as well both from the neck up and from the neck down. The curious part is that neither neck up or neck down or sexual differences tend to have close parallels with nearly all the rest of the terrestrial mammalian kingdom, mammals we presumably naturally evolved from. The 64 cent question is why?

Humans vs. Mammals: Humans tend to have way less body covering usually termed hair and/or fur relative to other mammals, our size or below, including our primate ancestors. That our first uniqueness. Why is that? Now apparently our lack of fur, why we lost the fur we presumably once had way back once upon a very remote time ago, was because we developed sweat glands to regulate heat, which, IMHO was a retrograde development.

Fur is a good regulator whether retaining or allowing body heat to escape. Some animals, like cats, shed some fur as the warmer weather approaches, though it thickens again as winter approaches. Sweat glands are only a cooling mechanism. That’s okay. But be that as it may, the ‘why’ question now becomes one of explaining why humans alone out of all our primate cousins developed sweat glands thus contributing to the evolutionary loss of our fur. You’d think what’s good for the human is also good for the gorilla, chimpanzee, gibbon, orang-utan, etc. So, why were humans and humans alone selected to be ‘the naked ape’? Was it a normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Neck Up / Neck Down – Distribution: For the human species, there’s an obvious dichotomy between the amounts of hair we have from the neck up relative to the neck down. But any breed of cat, or dog say will tend to be just as furry neck up as neck down. Why do we have a neck up / neck down division to our relative hairiness? Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Neck Up / Neck Down - Haircuts: From the neck up, humans tend to need to have the occasional trim or haircut, or shave. But, humans, like the rest of the mammals, don’t need haircuts from the neck down. To b honest, the rest of the mammals don’t need haircuts from the neck up either, unlike humans. Why is that? Why do humans need haircuts? Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Sexual Differentiation: Hairiness or furriness has no obvious sexual differentiation in nearly all the rest of the mammals. You can’t normally tell the sex of a mammal by the amount of fur it has. Male cats of any particular breed will have as much hair on their bodies as their female counterparts, although male lions have manes that lionesses don’t have. Still, lions and lionesses apart, that sexual distinction is part and parcel of the human species. In humans, males tend to be way more the hairier in terms of overall body covering. Males also tend to have far more hair on the front of the face – beards and moustaches. But that’s not always true on top. When it comes to hairiness, there’s not only a neck up / neck down division but a differential between the sexes. Why is that so? Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Natural Pattern Baldness: I need start here by making a distinction between thinning hair which a goodly percentage of human males and females experience as they age, and baldness. Some human males, percentages increasing with ever increasing age, tend to lose, for reasons apart from disease, stress, chemotherapy, etc., more of their hair up top – the common occurrence called male pattern baldness or partial baldness or massive thinning of the hair on top. But whether to a greater or lesser degree, there’s not an inevitability of hair thinning and total loss of hair up top with age in human males. That alone suggests that aging isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of the condition.

Human females, though to a far lesser extent, will also tend to exhibit hair thinning (as opposed to total baldness), again, percentages going up as one’s age goes up and up. On balance however, you see far, far fewer females than males with bald spots relative to gradual hair thinning.  

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that I’ve got a lot less hair up top today than I had in my teens. That applied to my father and equally as well to my father’s father. The question is why is baldness an unfortunate fact of life for some since baldness isn’t a fact of life for all human males; it certainly isn’t as much of an issue for the female of the species (another of those sexual differentiations noted above). Baldness certainly isn’t a fact of life for most hairy or furry species (another human vs. animal data point to be added to the above), like our companion animals, be they cats or dogs, mice or rats, rabbits or guinea pigs, ferrets or alpacas. However, the thinning of the hair isn’t quite uniquely confined to humans. Some primates, but only a relatively few species, show some progressive thinning of their scalp hair following their version of puberty.

So baldness tends to be fairly obviously a sex-linked genetically transmitted condition that arose as the result of some genetic mutation in an ancestral primate and/or human male multi-thousands upon thousands of years ago, way before the start of written history. But lots of questions arise. Why balding on just the top of the head; why not, especially with inevitable aging, the entire head (and face)? Why not the entire body’s covering of hair? Humans have so little fur that the thinning and loss of the rest of it shouldn’t matter really. [There are medical conditions that do involve total facial, even in extreme cases total body hair loss, but they aren’t related to normal hair thinning and baldness.]

If hair thinning and eventually baldness (in some individuals) confers no evolutionary advantage or disadvantage why is there nothing similar in any other non-primate mammalian species? Actually there might be an evolutionary advantage in that genetically linked hair thinning and eventual baldness presumably started with one mutation in a statistical sample of just one individual (perhaps even one of our ancestral primate cousins) which has now spread to include a reasonable minority of adult males (or majority of adult males, even females if you count just hair thinning and those over 60 or so). However, why did that original mutation spread as it obviously did? What could that evolutionary advantage actually be? And if there is an evolutionary advantage, why isn’t the condition more widespread throughout mammalian species? For the moment, those questions stump me. Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Spots / Stripes / Plain: Humans, from the neck up, have a single natural hair colour. Human hair tends to be blonde, red, brown or black (I’ll ignore grey/white since that’s an aging issue). So here we have one species, four different hair colourations. Mammals of any one species tend to be one of two colour patterns, neither of which has a parallel akin to the human condition. Either all members of a species are just one plain colour and only that colour; polar bears are white; brown bears are brown (the very rare condition of acquiring the genetic mutation and ending up an albino is a separate issue), or else all members are multi-coloured with spots, stripes; often an irregular pattern. All humans, one species, aren’t all the same with respect to hair colour like brown bears – some humans are blonde, or black or red-haired. Now I’m aware that there are black cats and white cats and grey cats too; my next door neighbour has two dogs of the same breed, one cream and one black. Then there’s the normal grey mouse and the (laboratory) white mouse. But cats and dogs and similar mammalian companion animals have been bred or ‘created’ by humans via artificial selection criteria. While the grey mouse is probably natural, the white mouse again has been ‘created’ for laboratory use. Tigers have stripes; leopards have spots; calico cats tend to be multi-coloured with an irregular symmetry. Humans have neither stripes, spots nor an irregular colouration pattern. Why are humans different from other mammals when it comes to the general rule of one species – one hair colour, or one species - multi-coloured fur patterns? Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

But the biggest anomaly of all is what natural environmental changes – triggers – survival-of-the-fittest scenarios transpired that could account for all these differences between the human mammal and the rest of the mammals blessed with fur? It’s not an advantage one would think to need a haircut; the amount of relative hairiness between males and females, including baldness, is great enough to require an explanation, but I can’t think of one; and there would appear to be no advantage in humans coming in four basic hair colours, yet no combinations of those. It is all very strange.

Summary: Non-human mammals our size or less are way more covered in hair or fur than humans. Non-human mammals show no sexual differentiation in their hairiness or furriness. Nearly all non-human mammals show no neck up/neck down differentiation with respect to hair covering. Non-human mammals don’t need haircuts. Non-human mammals don’t go bald though some primates exhibit hair thinning. So what’s up with humans? Were all these anomalies just normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design? And if by design; whose design? And what was their ultimate purpose? It’s a hairy issue!