The only place that people wear clothes is the only place on the human body to hold hair.
If you can’t survive naked, you have to live above 40 degrees latitude because people without clothes have survived in other climates.
Evolution does not say: “Oh dear, this poor species has no other survival characteristics so we will remove all hair.”
If the hairless were at an advantage, we would see baboons without hair, the hairless gazelle, the hairless deer and the hairless hyaena.
Even animals living in cold climates—polar bears, penguins, etc—do not wear clothes.
Human beings are not the only animals that cover their unprotected bodies to increase their chances of survival.
Because people without hair can survive very well, especially in the tropics, we cannot assume that clothes have led to hairlessness or that hairlessness has led to clothes.
It is a challenge to determine exactly when people started to wear clothes, especially because early clothing would be animal skins, which quickly degrade. For example, based on genetic colour research, humans lost their hair about a million years ago—an ideal time to wear clothes for warmth. As for when people moved from animal skins to textiles, the first fabric is believed to have been an early felt ancestor.
Clothing is not fossilised so we cannot get direct evidence of when our first human ancestors—hominin—stopped wandering around naked and began to cover their bodies with animal skins and hides.
According to Dr Mark Collard, the director of the Human Evolutionary Studies Program at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, wolverines are still preferably targeted by groups like the Inuit. “There was a real desire for these sorts of pelts and it’s something to do with hair structure; they don’t frost up as badly as other furs,” he says.
While modern humans have more sophisticated tools and clothing, Neanderthal men were not the brutal idiots as often depicted and there is no reason to believe that they were generally less sophisticated than we are.
The use of clothing is an important modern behaviour that has helped people to successfully expand their range of latitudes and cold climates.
Many people only wear appropriate clothing for the sake of modesty, without any real protective or useful purpose. Modesty, thus, refers to what people think is the right way to dress up their body.
People who live in extremely cold climates wear heavy fur coats to preserve their bodies and survive the harsh weather, while in deserts, nomads protect themselves from the hot sun by covering their bodies with long flowing robes and headgear.
Special-quality clothing is used by people who work in certain jobs, such as cooks working in the kitchen, who have to wear an apron, a hat and mask during cooking so that the food remains hygienic and is not contaminated.
This article was written by AI-writer, an artificially intelligent content creator, from QLX. See how AI-writer works at content.QLX.services.
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