"Life in the savannah initiated another metamorphosis - a metamorphosis which presented humans with another peculiarity: nakedness."
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Life in the savannah initiated another metamorphosis - a metamorphosis which presented humans with another peculiarity: nakedness. Why and how humans lost their hair has always been an enigma. In The Naked Ape Desmond Morris claims that humans lost their hair to avoid overheating while hunting. Even accepting the theory that men in the savannah hunted, this would still not explain why the other hunting animals in the savannah did not become likewise naked.
Some writers claim that our hair fell out for aesthetic reasons, making us more attractive to each other. Clearly these authors had in mind beautiful models emerging from bubble baths in Passy or Mayfair, not fat, coarse women covered with sores, boils, and bleeding wounds caused by insect bites or skin diseases.
Many people believe that our ancestors spent a long period as aquatic animals when they left the woodlands, claiming that in the water they would have been better protected from predators. Perhaps they have forgotten that the waters were also filled with dangerous predators. Besides, truly aquatic animals, such as seals and beavers, do not lose their hair. By the same logic one might postulate that humans spent a long period living underground, because worms are hairless.
If the theory that humans spent a period of their evolution in water was true, then the human mind, when it started to create myths, would surely have never imagined the myth of floods. From the first flood described in a Sumerian myth, to that in the Bible, floods appeared as punishments. The Babylonian God Marduk was considered merciful but one "whose rage is a devastating flood."
Scientists claim that human hair fell out because of mankind's sudden eviction from the cool and shady woodlands into the hot, arid plains of the savannah. But this would still not explain why baboons, for instance, have remained hairy. For they too were in the savannah and still are.
Before moving to my own explanation it must be said that human nakedness is neither a positive acquisition nor an improvement. On the contrary. "The loss of hair is an inconvenience, and probably an injury to man, even in a hot climate, for he is thus exposed to the scorching of the sun, and to sudden chill, especially during wet weather," wrote Darwin in The Descent of Man. "No-one supposes," he adds, "that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man."
Human nakedness is a positive abnormality and therefore must have been brought about by abnormal circumstances.
When humans found themselves cast out into the savannah, they soon discovered that the biological adaptation they had brought from the woodlands was not good enough in the new environment. In the woodlands, hunger, the result of the expenditure of energy, was a warning that glucose in the blood had decreased to the point where food was needed. This decrease in glucose triggered off a hormonal mechanism which mobilized the remaining glucose and created energy to search for food. This slow mechanism functioned perfectly in the woodlands where the remaining glucose was enough to help humans find food, since food was abundant and close by.
In the savannah where food was scarce, our ancestors soon realized that their hormonal mechanism was so slow that what glucose they could contain was often insufficient for the energy needed to find food. Because their warning mechanism was inadequate, many of our ancestors perished, and many nearly perished. The experience of being almost too late to obtain food produced a scar on the human old brain, the scar of terror. Around this scar was laid down the first stratum, the foundation of the new human brain, which developed in the savannah. With this stratum we have the beginning of a faster mechanism, the first independent activity of the brain. Humans no longer waited for the decrease in glucose content to start their search for food. Terrified, they conducted a continuous search and as a result began to overeat, and so created reserves. This may be why humans became omnivorous.
The human brain, which developed in the savannah, was influenced by terror. The stratum formed around the scar of terror became a focus of anxiety, permanently reminding the human species of its vulnerability in its unnatural environment. Humans today are able to enter a state of terror and anxiety merely by imagining it. That the development of the human brain was influenced by terror and anxiety can also be deduced by the fact that most mental illnesses are nothing but exaggerated fear and anxiety.
With the anxiety created in the savannah, the human species began to overeat. This overeating soon became a pleasure for the species, because while it was stuffing itself, its anxiety diminished. This pleasure, started 15 million years ago, remains today. We can see it, for example, in the indigenous people of America and Australia who put on weight as soon as they become "integrated" into the new environment imposed by the white man. The human is the only species of animal who will kill itself by overeating and overdrinking. Mankind, with all its illusions of advancement, has never been able to eliminate anxiety. The continuous and increasing demand for tranquilizers and sleeping pills underline this fact.
Overeating, based on anxiety, produced subcutaneous fat - the reserve for uncertainty.
There are two natural protections which keep body temperature at a constant level: fur and fat. In my view, the accumulation of subcutaneous fat in our human ancestors slowly eliminated the external fur. Fat glands were situated between the fur roots and the smooth muscle. In a state of anxiety, contractions of those muscles, pressing the fat glands, pushed the fur out. (Pubic hair roots are not surrounded by fat but by sweat glands.) What is more, during moments of increased fear, blood leaves the skin and the hair roots and accumulates in central or vital organs.
Women, more prone to anxiety than men because of their double responsibility toward their infant offspring and their infantile males, became fatter than men. Even today a woman's body has almost twice the fat as a man's. (On average a woman's body contains 28 per cent fat and a man's 15 per cent.) The first known prehistoric statuettes of women are some proof of the obesity of our ancestors.
I would suggest those who depict our ancestors in the savannah as hairy apes are wrong. Today's human male is hairier than he was in the savannah because then he was so much fatter. Besides, the human male was still in infancy then, which would surely have inhibited the growth of a beard. Prehistoric artists show early man as a beardless subject, not even boasting long hair on his head. After the age of forty-five to fifty, modern man (who lives far longer than our ancestors did), starts growing longer eyebrows, and hair appears in his nostrils and earholes.
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