On cold winter days, when there are some left, we would like, like some animals, to benefit from natural fur to keep us warm. Alas, our few sparse body hairs are not enough, even for the hairiest among us, to provide enough coverage to noticeably increase our thermal comfort. But why do bonobos and chimpanzees have hair all over (almost) all of their bodies and we don’t? The difference between our genomes is however not so important, only 1.2%. A gap in which would hide not only the gene that allowed us to develop our intelligence but also that of hair? So what does science think?
Over the decades, many theories have tried to explain the hair loss of Sapiens compared to its hominid cousins, which would have occurred somewhere during the six or seven million years that separate us from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. We have as many follicles as other primates, but our hair is very fine, revealing the skin, almost non-existent compared to a gorilla or an orangutan. What evolutionary benefit could we have derived from it?
“Aquaman”, polychrome vision and savannah
For fun, we will cite a first hypothesis, now abandoned by specialists: that of the “aquatic primate”. The idea is that one of our ancestors would have adopted a semi-aquatic lifestyle, foraging for food in
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