World over, guys like women with long hair. It does not seem at all cultural, as it is world wide. Many goofy religions (and some not so goofy) have women cover, tie up, or wrap their hair in public, so that the long hair is only seen in the home and in terms of sexuality.
Being a guy, I endorse, but do not understand what it is that makes longer hair part of the deal that attracts males.
Most of the male attractors seem related to issues of health and child rearing ability. Guys like big boobs, wide hips, etc. And while weight seems to be cultural in terms of attractiveness, the weight seems based on guys in a particular place and time judge as optimum healthy. Guys don't like big guts, but they do like a bit extra in the hip and breast than is considered optimum by doctors. The evaluation seems based on a woman who can bring a child to term and feed it well.
So where does the hair come in? Does hair somehow prove long term healthiness? What are the limbic systems of us guys doing, evaluating hair length as a sexual positive.
There is a theory, which postulates that humanity spent some time as an aquatic creature; A period of intense climatic change drove humans living in Africa to seek survival by moving into water where abundant food was available with more or less minimal risk to the most inteligent creature of the period, about 2-Million years ago.
This theory was first stated by Alister Hardy, and later picked up and developed by Elaine Morgan.
The involvement of human hair is explained thusly: As an aquatic creature, fur was less relevant and subsided on the human body until it only remained in quantity on the surface areas where it offered an advantage. The head is the primary area of an abundance of hair, since a creature needs cover for the head when it is the area most exposed to the sun while standing erect in water, say in a lake or estuary environment. That's because in a body of water there may be very little shade from the sun offered up.
But also, the creature that was to become mankind at the time was a creature which needed to spend most of its time on the acquisition of food. In the trees, the very young child would hang onto the fur at the back of its mother. In a water environment the hair on the head was a substitute for the fur as a means of hanging on while the mother was pre-occupied with obtaining survival for them both. The male offered very little or nothing to the survival of the very small child.
Standing or moving around in a water environment also explains how a creature formerly of the trees, would learn to walk erect, something that a dangerous period of evolution on the savanah does not adequately explain. Today the monkey that walks fully erect is one that spends its time in an aquatic environment. When ashore the probiscus monkey walks in a completely upright posture. It too, like humans, has a long nose which helps out in a aquatic environment. Its young too, unlike other primates, cling to the hair of the chest rather than the back. If its mother attempted to swim while carrying its young, it would drown.
Hardy published the theory in an article in New Scientist on 17 March 1960:
"My thesis is that a branch of this primitive ape-stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the sea-shores and to hunt for food, shell fish, sea-urchins etc., in the shallow waters off the coast. I suppose that they were forced into the water just as we have seen happen in so many other groups of terrestrial animals. I am imagining this happening in the warmer parts of the world, in the tropical seas where Man could stand being in the water for relatively long periods, that is, several hours at a stretch"
Big "boobs," the early ability for infants to take to the water - human hair, became sublimated in the new environment, while still there over most of the body, on most of the surface it is not much more than an opening for the sebacious glands to permit sweating. As an aside, my own son, born in the sixties, learned to swim just beyond infancy, and took to swimming under water, because holding the breath while submerged was a natural tendency for infants. These are among many others human features, which support the
AQUATIC APE HYPOTHESIS.
Here are the opening lines to her latest book and a link to the book
The Naked Darwinist <<- Link here (94 pages PDF)
“Don’t Ask”
“ - Imagine you are a student revising for an exam of human evolution and wondering what questions you might be asked. It suddenly occurs to you that you cannot remember why human beings lost their body hair. It sounds just the kind of topic on which they might give you a quote and then say: “Discuss” - and the answer has gone right out of your head. You cannot even remember the point being raised, and the exam is tomorrow. What can you do? - “
Here is a listing of all her books touching on the subject:
The Aquatic Ape, 1982, Stein & Day Pub
The Scars of Evolution, 1990, Souvenir Press
The Descent of the Child: Human Evolution from a New Perspective,
.....1995, Oxford University Press
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, 1997, Souvenir Press
The Naked Darwinist, 2008, Eildon Press
Must have hit a nerve, but hey, I guess the truth hurts.
