Many a man hath more hair than wit

He called it Macaroni

A recent visit to the barber was my last for this year. Haircuts this year, like everything else in 2020, are weird. I don’t mean the styles. Long-and-shaggy is a more common look than last year to be sure, though that is not by preference. I mean the actual process of getting a haircut. The shops are open in NJ at present, but at limited capacity, by appointment, and with a variety of plastic barriers. Fancier salons and haircutters always have required appointments, of course, but I go to a traditional barbershop, striped pole and all. It’s the same one I’ve used for more than four decades, though the most recent cut was by the grandson of the fellow with the scissors the first time I sat in one of the shop’s chairs. 

The traditional red-striped barber pole, by the way, is a holdover from the days of barber-surgeons. The first guild of barber-surgeons was formed by King Edward IV in 1462 who gave the members a monopoly of surgery and barbering in London. I guess the reasoning was that both activities involved cutting so they were more or less the same. The two professions weren’t formally separated until 1745 with the formation of the Company of Surgeons (soon renamed the Royal College of Surgeons) and the Company of Barbers. Anyway, bloodletting was a common surgical technique from medieval times until the early 19^th century in order to get rid of “bad blood.” (I’m not sure why bad rather than good blood was expected to flow out.) The patient commonly stood and gripped a pole while he bled. So, a pole (blood red) with a spiral wrap of a white linen bandage became an early symbol for a practitioner that potential patients (many of them illiterate) could recognize. The original symbolism soon was widely forgotten, and so the sign (oddly) stuck with the barbers rather than the surgeons after the two went separate ways. 

Fortunately, I’ve never experienced bloodletting, intentional or otherwise, at the barbershop I patronize. Yet, as snippets of hair dropped to the floor while I was last there, the peculiarity of human hair came to mind, abetted by reading the night before, which happened to be Hair by Kurt Stenn, a leading follicle expert. Hair isn’t primarily about fashion, despite some nods to the importance of hair styles for social signaling, but mostly about the biology of hair. Under the general term “hair” Stenn refers to all pileous growth whether tresses, beards, or fur. 

Humans have the strangest hair of all primates. At first glance, the absence of it on most of the body is the most striking visual difference between us and the other apes – hence Desmond Morris’ classic 1967 work The Naked Ape. Just as weird, we have a mane, which no other primate does. If uncut a head hair likely will grow anywhere from one to three feet (30cm to 1m) long depending on the person. At that point it falls out and the follicle generates a new one in its place. In a sense it is not quite right to say we are mostly hairless on our bodies. Except for the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet we have hair follicles everywhere. We have, in fact, just as many as do chimpanzees: see Comparative Evidence for the Independent Evolution of Hair and Sweat Gland Traits in Primates in the Journal of Human Evolution. Unlike the thick body hairs on a chimp, however, most of the body hairs growing from humans are so delicate, short, and wispy that they are all but invisible; one needs a microscope to see many of them. On the other hand, we have 10 times more sweat glands than chimpanzees and other apes have. 

There may be a common cause for the evolution of increased numbers of sweat glands and reduced hairiness. Both traits are great for shedding heat, which was a big advantage on a hot savanna where our ancestors were highly active, unlike most mammals, which laze around most of the time in between short bursts of energy. (Humans may not be particularly fast, but when in shape we can run or travel at pace nonstop for extraordinary distances by the standards of most mammals.) For this reason, the leading conjecture of when humans lost their thick body hair is some 1,800,000 years ago when Homo erectus pursued a lifestyle (evident in butchered bones at archeological sites) of long distance tracking and hunting. Since clothes apparently date back only 70,000 years for anatomically modern humans (determined by DNA analysis of lice that inhabit clothes), for nearly 2,000,000 years we really were the naked ape. There are other proposed timelines and reasons for reduced hairiness, however. (Darwin suggested sexual selection as the proximate cause, which not need not favor a useful trait so long as the trait isn’t seriously harmful – it can even be a little harmful as famously in the case of the peacock’s tail.) DNA studies currently underway are intended to date the changes in hairiness, so in the coming decade we may get a firmer answer from these analyses. 

There is another possible cause that I’ve never seen mentioned in the literature (though it might have been) but which I’ll just toss out there. Our hairless bodies and shaggy manes might have made us look scary to other animals. Consider our own first reactions to, say, a mostly hairless mangy bear. It isn’t, “Aw that’s cute.” It’s “What the hell is that and what is wrong with it?” If other predators had a similar (if nonverbal) negative first reaction to us, they might have been more inclined to leave us alone – a definite survival advantage. Few of these conjectures are mutually exclusive, of course. 

Mangy bear

Humans are not keen on their own body hair; modern folk often attack it ferociously. We are, however, obsessively in love with our head hair. Life being what it is, this is the hair that gives us the most trouble. It grays, thins, mats, and falls out while our body hairs get, if anything, thicker, longer, and richer. Shelves of books can be, and have been, written on the social aspects of hair styles, but that is outside the scope of either Stenn’s book or this blog. I’m just happy to still have something left for the barber to cut. The day may yet come when I don’t.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Almost Cut My Hair