Why are we near hairless?

I mean the mammals out on the veldt are all hairy. Our fellow primates are all hairy. Why not us? What advantage did this give us? Or was the mutation merely neutral?

 

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Smoothness.

 

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I'm going to go with, we more or less have been evoloving it off us.
You have to ask yourself, why would humans need hair (as in totally covered in fur)?
Given our intelligence, we really don't need it.

 

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Actually it would have been smarter to have fur, but vanity won.

 

Run with that. What did smoothness give us?

 

the less body hair you have the more evolved you are

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Elephants aren't very hairy, nor are whales, rhino, and hippo.

 

Here's one recent theory....

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/65232.php

 

Good point, and at least the elephants had hair ancestors, so what was the advantage?

 

damn smart animals too

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Because we could make clothes and fire? But we wouldn't have needed so much clothes if we had the fur. I mean our intelligence figured out ways to make artificial hair. We could have focused on other things with our intelligence and been really hairy.

Not well argued...but my point is not needing hair isn't a cause, or....?

 

Upper cuts.

 

Here's another nice link I found....

http://www.ask.com/bar?q=hairless h...ww.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/966532/posts

This article mentions the aquatic phase theory
but moves on to support the advantage of having no parasites in the fur.

 

And all those land animals live pretty much in tropical/sub-tropical or otherwise fairly mild climates. And the whale does not need hair either, it isn't very hydrodynamic. They have enough blubber around them to insulate them.

Come on. Think about what kind of climate that the mammoths lived in.

And if we learned how to make the clothing, we wouldn't need the fur. Would you want a thick-ass gorilla type coat on the beach in Bermuda?
You'd be sweating your freakin balls off!
Why not be furless and just be able to put a coat that you had the ability/intelligence to make should you get cold.

 

So you think that when we became intelligent, our bodies knew we could make our own fake fur to put over us so we just figured we'd lose the hair we had?

 

Ehh, something like that. But it would have had to take place over the course of a LONG time, tens of thousands of years, for that to happen.
And again, this is just my hypothesis. Though others could be thinking the same.

 

Hence the hypothesis that humans were water creatures for a while but came back on the land while the dolphins/whales never came back.

Sure, but then one has to wonder why primates needed hair where they were.

You mean like literal gorillas have in the equally hot and extremely humid jungles they live in?

Do Orangutans sweat their balls off?

Why not have a coat built in that you don't mind having on in the heat - all those jungle and veldt primates with fur.

 

Well, what is the advantage that

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and

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have?

For some reason, some hairless versions of some species that are otherwise covered with fur are valued above the furred. Why?

 

I respectfully disagree.

 

Possibly we are hairless because we find that sexually attractive.
Same reason as peacocks have those beautiful tails.

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