HUMANS have so little hair because this leaves disease-carrying parasites with nothing to cling to, according to Mark Pagel and Walter Bodmer at the University of Reading, UK. They say this would have been an advantage for early humans battling biting insects in the forests of Africa.
Although the idea has been around since Darwin’s time, the father of evolutionary biology wasn’t convinced – wherever he looked, men were much hairier than women. Pagel and Bodmer explain this difference by noting that males continue to prefer mates that have even less hair than they do (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2003.0041).
