No one is sure why Homo sapiens is the only primate to have lost its body hair (Image: Laurent Gillieron / EPA / Corbis)
RIGHT from the start of modern evolutionary science, why humans are hairless has been controversial. “No one supposes,” wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, “that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man: his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection.”
If not natural selection, then what? Despite his book’s title, Darwin had little to say about human origins. He intimated that his strongest supporter, Thomas Huxley,…
