C Odell Smith

The Naked Australopiths C Odell Smith

What is it about our hairlessness that makes it so typically human? Assuming that natural selection would have been the cause of this event, a number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain what provided the members of the human lineage with their hairlessness. Our prehistoric ancestors' hairlessness has been attributed to: parasite reductionsexual selectiondivergence from chimpanzeesan aquatic stage of developmentmaternal selectionuse of fire, shelters, and clothingthe trait's cooling effectIt has predominantly been the focus on a key adaptive benefit to hairlessness that has guided these various hypotheses. Being hairless would have liberated evolving hominins from susceptibility to parasite-borne diseases. It would have made them sexually attractive, sleeker swimmers, more attractive for mothers to hold onto, or less likely to overheat during bipedal foraging. Each of these hypotheses sheds light on some potential or actual advantage of lacking a furry covering. But none provides an adequate account of either of what hairlessness's costs would have been nor of how hairless hominins would have coped with being hairless. Pursuing the widely supported hypothesis that hairlessness would have evolved in Australopithecus, The Naked Australopiths takes a serious look at the needs that being naked would have imposed on mothers with infants and these hominins as a whole. A closer examination of this characteristic and its survival implications reveals a fundamental lack of adequate adaptedness for conditions in nature that would have placed hairlessness in a category similar to bipedalism, the hands, the brain, and eventually also the larynx. As we'll see in The Naked Australopiths, what would have made hairlessness so typically human would have been its bearers' profound dependence on emerging cultural practices to provide them with vital support. The needs associated with the evolution of hairlessness would thus have constituted one of a few significant areas from which an emerging Paleolithic culture would have taken its original impetus. The investigation of this phenomenon in The Naked Australopiths therefore promises to give us an important initial glimpse of just what it was that gave rise to Paleolithic culture and also eventually gave rise to the modern human being. INCLUDES: A new theory of feedback between cultural practices and genetic characteristics that more clearly articulates the process of cultural transmission and how culture must have emerged or "evolved."The first hypothesis that adequately describes why it is that our Paleolithic ancestors would have made the critical shift to using cultural practices. The only existing overview of major extant hypotheses concerning why hairlessness evolved in the human lineage. A revision of Lovejoy's sequestration hypothesis that I call the hypothesis of circumstantial sequestration. An up-to-date revision of the savannah theory. An extended explanation of why, in contrast to purely naturally evolved organisms, there was purposiveness in the process of human evolutio