Abstract
Human Hair and Primate Patterning.—A study of the puzzling problems presented by the human hair has been made by Dr. Gerrit S. Miller and is published by the Smithsonian Institution (Misc. Coll., vol. 85, No. 10). Most solutions offered assume tacitly that all the peculiarities of the human hair arise from man's special constitution and its reactions to the natural environment or to the artificial conditions that man has imposed upon himself; for example, that bareness of skin comes from the habit of wearing clothes; that baldness conies from barbers and wearing hats; that greyness is due to the lessening of bodily energy which goes with increasing civilisation and ‘domestication’, and so forth. These solutions do not take into account the zoological possibility that many features of the human hair may be generalised primate traits instead of specifically human developments. In other words, they may be special examples of ‘patterning’, a tendency which attains its greatest development in the primates. Human hair patterning shows itself more conspicuously in the head than on the limbs and body. It is not exactly duplicated in the head of any of the other primates, but all the elements can be found rarely in non-human members of the tribe. In man, both sexes have certain elements in common, but the females' pattern differs in the extension of the bare area over the whole of the base and the sides of the face. The first step in baring the forehead is shown in one of the Celebean macaques, while the essentially human forehead can be seen in the orang. Among non-human primates a bare or nearly bare area round the mouth is usual, while the extension of the bare area to the cheek is seen in the great apes. Yet some, such as the orang and the African guerion, have a beard like a male Caucasian or an Australian. Similarly, baldness, turning grey, and other features, as well as racial differences in man, can be shown to be instances of patterning.
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Research Items. Nature 129, 440–442 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129440a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129440a0