A more widely accepted theory is that, when human ancestors moved from the cool shady forests into the savannah, they developed a new method of thermoregulation. Losing all that fur made it possible for hominins to hunt during the day in the hot grasslands without overheating.
Humans lost their body hair, they say, to free themselves of external parasites that infest fur -- blood-sucking lice, fleas and ticks and the diseases they spread. Once hairlessness had evolved through natural selection, Dr. Pagel and Dr.
The obvious next question, then, is: When exactly did that occur? Certainly after our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and before the origins of Homo sapiens. So that narrows it to sometime between about nine million and 300,000 years ago.
Humans are the only primate species that has mostly naked skin. Loss of fur was an adaptation to changing environmental conditions that forced our ancestors to travel longer distances for food and water. Analyses of fossils and genes hint at when this transformation occurred.
As bipeds, or animals that walk upright on two legs, our heads are directly exposed to the sun. Near the equator, where humans evolved, sun exposure can be overbearing, and head hair helps people avoid overheating. "It's sort of a built-in hat," Pagel said.
Weiss speculates that one of the main reasons that human beings uniquely evolved a “thick bush of wiry hair” around their genital regions is its visual signaling of sexual maturation. (It also likely serves as a primitive odor trap and aids in the wafting of human pheromones.)
The current evidence indicates that anatomically modern humans were naked in prehistory for at least 90,000 years before the invention of clothing.
But we are not naked. We actually have the same density of body hair as other apes of our size, but ours is largely fine and colourless rather than thick and dark. We are coated with a layer of short, fine hair, known technically as vellus hair and colloquially as peach fuzz.
Is it true that the upcoming human evolution will make humans hairless? No. Hair serves many purposes, including sexual attraction.
Caucasians have the highest hair density among the ethnicities studied. Black people have the lowest. Asian people have hair density that falls somewhere in between.
Margarita - Well we know humans lost their body hair, their fur effectively, about 2.5 to 3 million years ago when they moved from more forest habitat into open savannah and, in order to be able to hunt effectively in the hot climate, they lost fur.
A well-polished bald male head was often used by tribes of cavemen to blind predators. As a result every cavemen hunting group of 8 had one bald member, and thus thousands of years later 1 in 8 men experience early on set of baldness.
It's normal to shed between 50 and 100 hairs a day. When the body sheds significantly more hairs every day, a person has excessive hair shedding.
And a rising number of millennials in the USA say they're also experiencing hair loss. Is baldness more common today? The answer to this frequently asked question is yes.
According to the company, humans in the year 3000 could have a hunched back, wide neck, clawed hand from texting and a second set of eyelids.
Genetic studies have demonstrated that humans are still evolving.
100,000 Years From Today
We will also have larger nostrils, to make breathing easier in new environments that may not be on earth. Denser hair helps to prevent heat loss from their even larger heads. Our ability to control human biology means that the man and woman of the future will have perfectly symmetrical faces.
Monkeys and apes lack the neural control over their vocal tract muscles to properly configure them for speech, Fitch concludes. "If a human brain were in control, they could talk," he says, though it remains a bit of a mystery why other animals can produce at least rudimentary speech.
It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to Ice Age conditions.” As to when humans moved on from animal hides and into textiles, the first fabric is thought to have been an early ancestor of felt.
For half a billion years or so, our ancestors sprouted tails. As fish, they used their tails to swim through the Cambrian seas. Much later, when they evolved into primates, their tails helped them stay balanced as they raced from branch to branch through Eocene jungles.
The data shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 70,000 years before migrating into colder climates and higher latitudes, which began about 100,000 years ago. This date would be virtually impossible to determine using archaeological data because early clothing would not survive in archaeological sites.
They hibernated, according to fossil experts. Evidence from bones found at one of the world's most important fossil sites suggests that our hominid predecessors may have dealt with extreme cold hundreds of thousands of years ago by sleeping through the winter.
Modesty, sometimes known as demureness, is a mode of dress and deportment which intends to avoid the encouraging of sexual attraction in others. The word "modesty" comes from the Latin word modestus which means "keeping within measure".
A combination of polls shows that 80 to 90 percent of women prefer some amount of grooming for starters. Only 10 to 20 percent prefer guys with a completely unkempt bush; this means that going wild below the waist is not the default look. It may require less work, but you're not playing the odds.
Friction. On a completely different note, some scientists think that the coarseness of pubic hair serves a biological function. The idea is that coarse hair creates a durable, fluffy layer that helps reduce friction during intercourse.