Chengdu has probably entered the coldest time of the year, although the coldest will not be below minus zero, but under the blessing of the southern humidity, it still makes people feel cold.
After taking a bath, shivering at the same time thinking, modern society can make people through air conditioning and clothing quickly warm up, and in the past Ru Mao blood drinking era, in the cold winter of the Chinese land, not to mention bathing, is normal activities also need to wear heavy warmers, extremely inconvenient. In contrast, orangutans and apes, who are also higher mammals, rely on a light and warm body hair, even in winter, but our ancient relatives usually do not go to cold places, and why do we come to such a cold place to be frozen and do not even need body hair.
Gorillas feeding in winter
If you think about it, with some exceptions such as platypus, most mammals retain body hair. Keeping warm from prehistory has been an important subject of our lives, so from an evolutionary point of view, why not directly retain the same body hair as our ancient relatives, so that it is easier?
If it is not good-looking, in fact, everyone looks like that, no one will think that anyone is not good-looking. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that we do not belong to this place in the first place, belong to migratory species, and the characteristics that were originally formed in the place of origin have not yet reached the point of influencing reproduction in the place of migration, and the characteristics of these origins have been retained, that is, we need to make up for the incompatibility that occurs from the place of origin to the place of migration by wearing clothes.
Roadmap for human migration
So where do we originate? The more widely accepted claim now is that we humans (homo sapiens species of homo sapiens, to be precise) originated in East Africa about 200,000 years ago and migrated to East Asia tens of thousands of years ago.
But originating in Africa doesn't seem to explain why we don't have body hair, and gorillas living in tropical Africa don't always have long hair and short hair.
The countless coincidences of geological movements have led to the birth of our Homo sapiens. 12 million years ago, the ancient ape ancestors who used to happily pick fruits and enjoy life in the dense forests of East Africa suddenly found that the forest on which they depended for their livelihood was gradually degrading, followed by a wide view of the savannah.
At this time, two factions appeared among the ancient ape ancestors. As the degraded woods slowly narrowed their range of activities, they confined themselves to the forest kingdom; the other faction gradually moved away from the forest and multiplied in new habitats because they seemed to see new opportunities in the vast savanna or were difficult to compete with other families in the woods. The decisions of these two schools of ancient apes have created an unimaginable gap tens of thousands of years later, the former still inhabiting the forest and evolving many intelligent life skills, but it has always been limited to small troubles in the forest, while the latter has spread across the globe to a terrible point that can change the earth's ecosystem.
But it's not all in vain, or just choosing to get out of the forest. Fierce competition from the open grasslands forced the ancient ape ancestors, who were accustomed to using both hands and feet in the forest, to start walking and running on both feet to improve their athletic ability, so as not to starve to death due to lack of food or become prey to other predators because of slow movement.
In the process of our ancient ape ancestors getting used to this grassland, the process of body hair fading was gradually completed. The different communities that began to migrate after gaining a foothold and scattered around the world are now the same body hairless, indicating that this change was completed before the migration.
There are many theories about the causes of body hair loss, and many theories are difficult to verify, mainly because hair does not leave any fossils and relics.
At present, the most common theory is that because ancient apes came out of the shady forest to the hot grasslands, they had to shed their body hair to adapt to the hot weather and meet the heat dissipation requirements of long hunting activities. However, it is obvious that no mammal of the same size as the apes on the hot grasslands has evolved into nudes because of the hot weather. The zebras, lions, hyenas and other animals we see on the grasslands now have evolved to be more hairy, and they are basically short-haired. Because in the equatorial region where ancient apes are hunted, the damage caused by direct sunlight cannot be underestimated. The thick short hairs not only maintain good air circulation, but also maximize the absorption of the sun's harmful rays, and can also effectively protect the delicate skin. The burqa of arabs active in the tropical desert is actually the same reason, which can maintain good ventilation and effectively block the sun.
Arabs in burqas and short-haired camels
And why can't the hunting apes think of this strategy, and to shed their body hair, they will let the skin melanin gather to resist the invasion of the sun's rays?
Let's think differently.
The reason why we see so many species of animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria that exist in the world today is because in addition to the regularity of evolution in adapting to its environment (such as terrestrial mammals have evolved lungs, etc.), there are also surprises in the selection of evolutionary strategies by specific species. That is to say, in order to achieve the same environmental adaptation purpose, there are many paths that can be taken from the perspective of genetic variation, and there have been corresponding shapes in the group to express individuals, and later in many coincidences, only one mutant individual survives and multiplies. Individuals who also achieve their goals through other paths have not left evidence of the existence of fossils due to insufficient numbers and other reasons, and are often ignored by people, believing that there is no such evolutionary path. In fact, this evolutionary path is not worse than the existing one, but for some special reason there are no descendants.
Okay, back to the case of the ancient ape. In the process of the ancient apes chasing the deer grassland, it is likely that many different types of variation were produced to adapt to the hot weather. There is a variant in which the hair is directly shed completely and strengthens the skin melanin, there is also a variant scheme where sparse long hair evolves into thick short hairb, and there may also be a variant c that removes the hair like an elephant and undergoes skin keratinization (there may also be other options that we have not yet thought of).
Also hairless elephants
At the time, individuals of all three evolutionary schemes may have existed to some degree and were well adapted to the environment. However, due to the coincidence of many factors such as local climate mutations, population diseases, and lack of resources, the individuals of mutation schemes b and c failed to pass on their evolutionary schemes to their offspring, resulting in the seemingly not-so-good scheme a becoming the ultimate winner, and the descendants of scheme a (that is, us) deduce from the perspective of the outcome that scheme a is the only and best scheme, but the question left is why we alone have become an alien of nature , the naked ape.
Therefore, we don't need to be puzzled about why we have to shed body hair, but we should feel sorry for missing out on the better-looking solution b, for missing a naturally thick and tight body of practical short fur.
Each fork in the evolutionary tree of each species in nature represents a different evolutionary strategy of species, and the purpose of all species is ultimately to adapt to the environment of the earth, and even if most species of individuals adopt different evolutionary strategies, it will generally not affect other individuals with different strategies, such as the production of seven-star ladybirds does not lead to the extinction of one-star ladybirds or two-star ladybirds.
Species represented by hunting apes and their descendants of humans, because of their strong sense of territorial possession and insatiable desire for resources and power, have led to narrower and narrower evolutionary routes. Because any other evolutionary type that may be competing in the process will be ruthlessly eliminated, which is why as the only living species in the human family, we feel different from any species in the world in terms of appearance or cognition, and the real reason behind it is extremely frightening.
Beginning 12 million years ago, we, as the ultimate winning species of hunting apes (humans) in the deer-chasing grassland, gained the most intelligent and competitive brains, and became the loneliest on the evolutionary tree.