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

• 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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      • Aeao@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Smell. I noticed it before it reached my skin.

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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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      • Aeao@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        “Having long hair and cooking over a fire” - me

        Yeah I’m sure it happened alot

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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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      • myrmidex@belgae.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Ah I misread it.

        I reckon it’s not so much about noticing in absolute terms (to notice vs not to notice), but rather about the smallest difference that smelly hair would make. Amplify that over millions of years and smelly hair has a good chance of being everywhere eventually.

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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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