#CHIMPANZEE HAIRLESS SKIN#

#CHIMPANZEE HAIRLESS SKIN#

He estimated that the gene (or instruction) that makes dark skin is just over 1 million years old. One person who studies genes (the instructions that your body gets from your parents) is geneticist Alan Rogers. We think that we lost our hair at the same time as when people started getting darker skin (because darker skin protects you from the sun better than paler skin). When we lost our hair it meant that nothing was protecting our skin against the sun. (But that doesn’t explain why human hair is so fine and short… so there are still lots of questions that even scientists can’t always answer.)Ĭurious Kids: How do x-rays see inside you? Staying warm is easier for bigger animals, which may explain why smaller primates like monkeys tend to have thicker hair than bigger ones like chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. But if you are a big animal like an elephant you might not need the warmth of hair as much. If you are a very small animal like a mouse you can get cold easily, so hair is very important. Sea otters have some of the warmest fur in the world because they live in freezing cold water next to the Arctic. Hair can help keep you very warm, which is helpful in a cold place. Whales and dolphins, mammals that live in the sea, have almost no hair because it is very difficult to swim if you are covered in fur. Most animals need hair for sun protection, but some animals, like naked mole rats which always live underground, have no fur because they don’t need any protection from the sun. That makes it easier to hide from predators, and also easier for predators to stalk prey.Ī lion’s fur blends in to its environment. The colour of hair can be very useful for animals like kangaroos and dingos because it can make the animal difficult to see.That’s why nowadays you won’t see very furry humans.Ĭurious Kids: Where does the oxygen come from in the International Space Station, and why don’t they run out of air?Īll mammals (warm-blooded animals) have body hair, which protects their skin from sunlight and means it won’t get cut or grazed as much, but every animal has different kinds of hair for different reasons, such as: And just like how you might have the same eye or hair colour as one of your parents, those kids also inherited having less hair from their parents. That means the people with less hair were the ones who stayed alive long enough to have kids. If you’re more hairy, it means you can only travel a short way before you get too hot, which means you find less food and go hungry. So if you’re less hairy, it means you can travel a long way, which means you can eat more food.

Dr Nina Jablonski, an expert on ancient humans, thinks that slightly less hairy people may have been in better shape to travel these distances because they would have been able to keep cool more easily.

Chimpanzee hairless