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Comment on What's the evolutionary advantage of very long hair on human heads?

This reminds me of something I’ve been wondering about for a while now - burning hair has a distinct and very strong smell. That makes sense - if your hair is on fire, you want to know ASAP. My question is whether our hair evolved to have something in it that produces this smell, or if we just evolved to be particularly receptive to the smell of burning keratin.

That is of course ignoring the boring answers: “A little bit of both” and “It just worked out like that randomly”, as well as the best answer “Wait, that’s what that smell is?! Oh shit, you’re right, I’m burning! AAAAAAAA!!!!”

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myrmidex@belgae.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
You had it: people whose hair didn’t smell when burning died more often, skewing the chances of survival towards smelly-when-on-fire hair.

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- TheLunatickle@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  All hair smells bad to us when burnt, not just human, ergo it’s unlikely that it’s some human specific adaptation. It seems more likely that it’s related to avoiding wild fires than anything else.
  
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- ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  How often were people catching on fire and not noticing that this would cause any kind of selection criteria?
  
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  - Aeao@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    People catch on fire a lot actually. I’ve caught my hair on fire dozens of times. It didn’t cover my whole head on fire because I noticed and put it out. Having long hair and cooking over a fire …. You’re occasionally going to catch on fire.
    
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    ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    But did you notice because of the smell? Or because your head was on fire?
    
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    SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Yea in our modern society sure. But not for the last 250,000 years of human evolution.
    
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  - myrmidex@belgae.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Does the subject’s awareness of the selection matter?
    
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    ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    The premise here was that they noticed in time to not die… So, yes?
    
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- SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  People would not have been catching their hair on fire when the only fire they would encounter was natural wildfires or bonfires.
  
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- Klear@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Not what I was wondering about, but thanks.
  
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