Hairstring is an important textile traditionally made by Aboriginal Australians. People, particularly women, would cut their hair regularly using quartz or flint knives.
Many tribes cut their hair while grieving the death of an immediate family member, or to signify a traumatic event or a major life change. Cutting the hair at these times represents the time spent with the deceased loved one and it's ending; it can also represent a new beginning.
Hair is your strength; it's the teaching that's been passed down from generation to generation. It's who you are. It's your spirit'. The longer your hair is, the more connected you are to the land.”
They did use animal hair, but were also very successful at using human hair to create strong and versatile threads. The hair was spun into yarn, sometimes alone and sometimes mixed with bark, which could be woven into clothing items, blankets, bags, and other items.
Thus it appears that both sexes of the two regions, the desert and the coastal, of the present study fall within the range of variation of hair forms of the Australian aborigines. Campbell et al. (1936-37) found curly hair with a frequency of 7.89%.
Many Asians have naturally straight hair, but there is a significant group of us who do have naturally curly or wavy hair! However, because it's the norm to see straight and sleek hair, curly haired boys and girls tend to think that their hair is some kind of unruly straight hair that isn't behaving.
Hair curvature is greatly diverse among different ethnic populations. In contrast to African hair that is more flattened and often has twists and turns, Asian hair tends to be round in shape, straight, and more cylindrical. The low values of average curvature in Asian hair suggest a relatively straight hair.
By comparing Aboriginal genomes to other groups, they conclude that Aborigines diverged from Eurasians between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, after the whole group had already split from Africans.
Scientists are still debating on the cause of the blonde hair in Aborgines. Some of them say, the blonde hair is caused by mixing with Europeans during colonization. Others say it is due to a genetic mutation.
The people used grease from porcupine, possum, muttonbird, seal and penguin to coat their skin as a waterproof layer and for warmth against the extreme weather conditions. The founding population in this new land became the most southerly living humans in the world during the last Ice Age.
In the Sikh religion, long hair is mandatory due to its spiritual component. In China, hair represents class, ethnicity, status and even political alignment. Until very recently within Chinese society, hair was not an outlet for personal style but a symbol of conformity and unity within a cohesively structured society.
"It's rare, but it happens. There are more red-headed Aborigines around the place than a lot of people realise.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have used grasses and reeds from wetlands for thousands of years. They used these materials for weaving to make many different kinds of useful everyday objects.
Religions such as Orthodox Judaism, Rastafarianism, and Sikhism all prohibit haircuts, the removal of facial hair, or a combination of the two due to beliefs that hair is sacred or a gift from God.
It is symbolic of letting go of the past, getting out of our hair whatever has been troubling us, cutting old ties and lightening the load to go forwards into a new future.”
Gisuborān meaning haircutting (Persian:گیسوبران) is one of the mourning rituals in Iranian culture. This ritual gives a sad and emotional state to mourning. In 2022 women in Iran and later internationally used haircutting as a protest against the treatment of women in Iran.
Their dark skin reflects an African origin and a migration and residence in latitudes near the equator, unlike Europeans and Asians whose ancestors gained the paler skin necessary for living in northern latitudes.
Asian populations did not develop a mutation for blonde or red hair the same way that populations in other areas (like Northern Europe) did. Black hair color is dominant and only requires one gene for the person to have black hair. There are some Asians that have Mongolian influence that have red or blonde hair.
Blond hair has also developed in other populations, although it is usually not as common, and can be found among natives of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, among the Berbers of North Africa, and among some Asians.
Aboriginal origins
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
Getting back to the Australian aborigines, separate research has shown that they have roughly the same Neanderthal DNA component as non-Africans, which indicates they split off after at least the first interbreeding between the two species.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
The predominant gene is straight hair but the recessive gene is slightly curly or called wavy. So if both parents have recessive gene then the children will have wavy hair. It's not uncommon but estimated to be 10% of the Chinese have wavy or slightly curly hair.
The same study showed that Asian (East and West) hair shape is also mostly straight (46.7%) or wavy (41.3%), with some curly hair (12%) (n = 92).
There are plenty of blue-eyed Asians. This probably happens when the traditional blue-eyed allele comes into a family from a (possibly very distant) European ancestor. Blue eyes then resurface in a child generations later if they inherit the allele from both parents.