Human Body Hair

Did you know that we have just as much hair as monkeys, apes and chimpanzees (in fact any other furry primate). The hair that we have however is known as “vellus hair” or “peach fuzz” and is very short and also generally very light in colour.

Most of a humans thick hair is most often found on the tops of our heads and it sees quite unusual but it is how we have been put together and if we had a mound of hair on the side of a leg that would look weird wouldn’t it?

Scientific research shows that humans lost most of their hair through evolution around a million years ago.

One theory is that we lost most of our body hair so that we could prevent things like ticks, fleas and lice. Also that we have kept the hair on our heads because it looks pretty.

There is a very special kid of louse that can only live and breed in human clothing and DNA tests have concluded that it came from a louse that only lives on human hair. Now from what science research has turned up it looks like this happened around 42 to 72 thousand years ago.

What this tells us is that clothes were invented around the same period of time ago. So, that’s probably roughly when clothes first went on sale. There is also no evidence of any type of footwear louse so that is a relief 🙂