• Question: people have been wearing clothes for millions of years why haven`t our bodies evolved natural clothes that come out of our skin then ???

    Asked by nicenadia to Alessandro, Angela, Claudia, Marina, Phil on 10 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Alessandro Guazzi

      Alessandro Guazzi answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      But the real question is not why haven’t we evolved new clothes but rather why did we get rid of our original one- the fur! In fact, scientists generally agree that we lost our body hairs (that a gorilla still has) long before we started making our clothes.
      A cool study was done to try and work out when people started wearing clothes based on when lice evolved from living on our heads to living in our clothes. What they found was that we had clothes about 170,000 years ago. This could actually mean that starting to wear clothes was the evolution! Thanks to the clothes, the humans were able to survive the colder ice-age climates and spread from Africa to the rest of the world!
      Since then, clothes have been pretty good at keeping us warm, so I guess we haven’t really been pressured to evolve towards fur again!

    • Photo: Phillip Wilkinson

      Phillip Wilkinson answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin

      So i think its about adaptability. Humans are so successful as a species because we can adapt to so many different environments, hot, cold, dry, wet… we cover the majority of the planet.

      By wearing clothes we have a great ability to adapt to environment than by having fur. It makes it difficult to swim and you can see how uncomfortable dogs look in the heat!

      Though this is just one theory. Other theories suggest we our ancestors lived a semi-aquatic life style. So they spent time on land and in water, so had to lose their fur to learn to swim. Another theory says that we lost our fur to combat parasites, like lice!

      Can find out more here if you are interested -> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=latest-theory-human-body-hair

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