Compared to our sisters and brothers in the animal kingdom, humans are gloriously naked, when they are naked. The drastic reduction of hair on our bodies is nothing less than remarkable. It is unprecedented in our family of hominids, which include orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. Nevertheless, humans still have approximately the same density of hair follicles as chimps and gorillas.
So why have we lost most of our body hair? Today’s evolutionary scientists speculate, but do not offer one definitive reason.
There is, in fact, good reason to see a variety of selection processes that contributed to hair reduction.
The origin of skin nakedness began approximately 1.2 million years ago when our ancestors descended from the branches to walk upright on the African savannahs. Without the protection of the cooler forests, the advent of hair loss and sweating would have accommodated our ancestors to deal with the hotter environment.
This combination of reduced hair and the exposure of naked skin was a perfect recipe to create the most sensuous animal alive. Neuroscientists are researching the social implications between touch and emotions, and have “clear evidence that primary somatosensory cortex encodes emotional significance of touch.” Friendly touch that leads to the gratification of emotional desires and bodily appetites for our enjoyment as our tactile signals intensify during sex can thank sexual selection for exposing large surface areas of skin.
Throughout our prehistory one of the primary forms of private, group and public pastimes and entertainment was sexual activity. Even after the development of agrarian cultures, sex continued to be a much sought after experience independent of child-rearing; so much so that then and now we truly are the number one “sexual animal” followed only by our cousins, the Bonobo chimpanzees.
More often than not, evidently, there is a variety of processes bearing down on natural selection. But whatever initiated the loss of human body hair, sexual selection locked it into place. In essence, the sight and touch of naked skin largely contributed to the visual and physical attractions we have for one another.
For the first time in mammalian history, the evolutionary traits that exposed so much of our skin have made humans the sexiest animal on the planet.
Who sexually selected?
One qualification behind this loss of hair is that it was our black ancestors who sexually selected. There were no white people then because this sexual selection took place in the cradle of human development located within central Africa and was long present in human sexual evolution by the time the Africans migrated into the other climate latitudes, both north and south of the Equator.
“According to a new study reported in Science magazine it has been found that Caucasians are the product of “a patchwork of (genetic) evolution in different places” across Europe, which have played a part in the lightening of Europeans’ skin color over the past 8,000 years.
When modern humans first traveled from Africa to the continent around 40,000 years ago they had darker skin, which was still seen in Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary around 8,500 years ago.”