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Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 21 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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anon answered on 21 Jun 2014:
Other animals have natural clothes – they’ve all got fur or feathers. We don’t have fur because we developed clothes a long time ago so there was no advantage to being hairy and furriness started to die out.
Maybe in nudist colonies it would be an advantage to be hairy so that you stay warmer when not wearing any clothes?
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Daren Fearon answered on 22 Jun 2014:
We evolved from furry animals which used body hair as natural clothes. The main reason we lost our hair during evolution is that it allowed us better control over our body temperature. Bare skin means we can lose more heat through convection and by sweating. Losing our fur meant our skin was more prone to damage from the sun, so we evolved to produce more dark pigments at a similar time. Humans which then migrated to cooler climates evolved to lose this pigment and have fairer skin.
We now can add or take off clothes to control our body temperatures much more easily. We can also use clothes to give us shade from the sun. So evolving to grow natural clothes, or fur, doesn’t offer many advantages.
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Phillip Manning answered on 25 Jun 2014:
Our species does not always wear clothes, at different points of our history the amount of clothing has varied hugely. As our species started to occupy higher latitudes….clothing became more important, if not essential to survival.
Evolution is far from perfect and often does not find elegant or suitable solutions to a perceived problem. Clothing in the form of more body hair might well evolve in the future of our species, if the adaptation is present and the environmental pressures select for it.
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