Time for some science!
Now, today in the shower, as I was washing my hair (something which occurs far less often for me than for majority of the population who seem to pretty much have a phobia of going without a shower every day - a phobia which is incredibly wasteful and unreasonable unless your job is filthy like my Dad's) I thought, not for the first time, that it really is freakin' weird that the only part of our bodies in which humans have long hair is on their skulls. Think about it. It is. Most animals have fur pretty much everywhere - my kitten Copernicus, who is a Turkish Angora, is a great example of this. He's one furry little bastard. Besides humans, there are very few animals in the world which run around mostly naked like us and most of them are domesticated dogs or Sphinx cats.
It's a fact that humans are extremely strange animals, but what I'm wondering here, is why we evolved to only have long hair on our heads. It is illogical to think that the use of clothes contributed at all to our shaggy heads, because human kind evolved in Africa, a very hot landscape where clothes aren't particularly needed except to maybe cover our nether regions. The invention of clothes probably only came when our ancestors started wandering north and realized that "oh crap, we have no fur like the animals, so we're freezing our willies off! We can't take this! We'll die if we don't do something quick! Somebody - invent clothes!" (The conversation, if there was one, probably did not go along those exact lines. Probably a bunch of our not-so-bright ancestors had to die by hypothermia before one came around and realized that it might be intelligent to think up a solution. Probably a woman; the men were all out doing manly stuff.)
Besides the vetoed theory that clothes have anything to do with it, our hair really is not particularly useful, even when it's long. I have a lot of experiance with this, because much like our cave man ancestors, I didn't have the greatest concept of hygiene as a child. (More so, I hated baths because they make me fall asleep.) The result of this of course, was that my hair tended to get greasy. Now, hair grease is something which a lot of humans seem to get. At some point, there was probably a purpose for it, but more often then not, I have experianced that hair grease is not at all useful. Not only does it make the human scalp itchy, if it gets cold, that grease is going to disable your hair's insulating properties, because it's basically sweat, which is the human body's version of coolant. When sweat dries on the skin and the temperature drops, the sweat, which was meant to keep you from overheating, suddenly becomes a double sided knife - it keeps making you feel colder, which is not at all a good thing when the mercury goes lower!
Further discouraging the point of human hair evolution is the fact that hair does almost absolutely nothing for keeping insects away from your body (like a horse's mane does,) because there's just not enough of it to protect your skin, unless you really grow it out. Furthermore, it's hard to even argue that it might be some sort of mating display thing to attract the opposite sex, because both genders have it and different cultures have it longer or shorter. Really the only way our hair would be useful, is if it was fur and insulated our entire bodies, but it doesn't.
Human hair is weird. Why do we have it? What is it's purpose? That's what I would love to know!
FACTS OF THE DAY
- Aspartame, a common sweetening agent in gum and soft drinks turns into formaldehyde at approximately 98 Degrees Fahrenheit which is the average temperature of the human body. Formaldehyde is commonly used to preserve corpses. In humans, ingesting formaldehyde can lead to vomiting, dizziness, abdominal pain and death. More disturbing, if possible, there is evidence that formaldehyde can have carcinogenic side effects - as in, this shit can cause cancer. Why is something which can turn into it in our sweets?
- Despite what most mistaken humans believe, humans are omnivores, not carnivores and besides possessing just one evolutionary trait geared towards the disgestion of meat (the pepsin in our stomachs,) humans, along with our ape relatives, aren't even members of the order Carnivora, a group which includes nearly all strictly carnivorous mammalian animals. Not even the argument that humans have canine teeth can be used, because horses, strict herbivores, often have them too. Take that meat eaters! (To be fair, I know humans need protein, but in this day and age and with our modern knowledge, it really doesn't have to come from animals. Beans in particular are a fantastic form of protein and have far less of an environmental impact than that top sirloin burger most people wish to saver!)
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