4/28/2023 0 Comments Fumy human hair![]() ![]() In other words, before she could even attempt to answer the question of which genes control the texture and color of hair, Lasisi had to figure out a system for defining those hair textures and colors. “But it’s as if we were trying to do genetic studies on height saying, there are short people, medium people, and tall people, now find what genes are related to that.” We tend to talk about hair as straight, wavy, curly, in some cases frizzy,” Lasisi says. Only human hair has this tightly coiled configuration. Contrary to what your shampoo bottle may say, there is no real classification system for different hair types. How Did Different Hair Types Come To Be?Įven the lack of categorization for hair types is telling. “They were like, ‘Oh yeah, hair, it’s sexy on women, it’s probably sexual selection.’ But there was no effort to look into it as a unique human trait because they were more interested in our large brains, bipedalism, and whatnot,” Lasisi says. But it’s also because it wasn’t a question posed by earlier (male) scientists, according to Lasisi. That’s partially because of the time and expense of conducting genomic analysis to pinpoint which genes affect the production of hair. If scientists want to answer the question of how our hair evolved from full-body fur, they have to explore the human genome-and Lasisi found that surprisingly few have done so. Hair doesn’t usually stick around for hundreds of thousands of years the way fossilized bones do. Basically, scalp hair created a kind of built-in hat. Other researchers hypothesized that the hair remaining on human heads helped hominins regulate body temperature when they became bipedal and started traveling long distances. Losing body hair meant we could sweat more, a cooling mechanism that “helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain,” writes anthropologist Nina Jablonski in Scientific American. Some researchers have tried on various hypotheses to explain the patterns of hair growth in Homo sapiens and why they differ so dramatically from our close relatives, like chimpanzees. Why we have different hair types and how they came to be is a mystery that scientists are just now beginning to untangle. In warmer, wetter, more acidic environments, hair can degrade within weeks.īut that’s only what hair is. ![]() It can survive for millennia under the right conditions-think Ötzi, the 5300-year-old iceman whose clothing, body, and hair were all preserved when he was frozen in a glacier. Like fingernails, hair is made mostly of the protein keratin. On the surface, our hair types are simple enough. “ we’re the only mammals that have hairless bodies and hairy scalps.” “When it comes to human uniqueness, people come up with all kinds of stuff-culture, intelligence, language,” Tina Lasisi, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Penn State University, tells Mental Floss. Our multitude of hair types is so ubiquitous that it’s actually easy to ignore how weird hair is-and not in the sense that your hair style might be on the wrong side of edgy. Be it brown or blond, in a straight or naturally curly hair style, the hair that grows from our heads is a fundamental aspect of the human appearance.
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