• Question: why do we have pubic hairs?

    Asked by laur to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by tammy.
    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      You’re not the first to ask this question! I googled and it came up with loads of different theories, including:

      “Pubic hair is to trap the ‘scent’ of pheromones and thus make us more attractive to the opposite sex (well thats every teenage lad’s excuse for not washing down there).”

      “Most bodily orifices (the nose, the ear) are protected by hair to ‘trap’ invading pathogens.”

      “To plait when you are bored.”

      “So it can be shaved into all manner of amusing shapes”

      “Free dental floss”

      So I guess there’s a few explanations out there! 😆

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      From an evolutionary point of view, we are descended from animals that had fur! We have a common ancestor with chimps and gorillas (who for whatever reason have kept their fur).

      So I think the more interesting question is why we don’t have hair all over us. There are apparently three theories (we don’t know which is true):

      1. at some point in the past the ancestors of humans lived in water and we lost our fur/hair to streamline us when swimming.
      2. we lost our hair because we needed a mechanism to control our body temperature when running around in the savannah hunting animals (otherwise we would overheat).
      3. we lost our hair to cope with some particularly nasty parasite – like a tic or louse that would have lived in fur.

      If we can find out the answer to why we lost our fur then it might explain why we kept our fur in certain places!

      Note that there is a rare genetic disease that can act to ‘switch on’ our hair/fur production – see the picture in this article:

      http://anthropology.net/2007/06/08/on-why-some-humans-have-lost-their-body-hair-why-are-we-the-only-hairless-primate/

      (The picture isn’t me by the way although sometimes I feel like that if I don’t shave for a few weeks…) 😉

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