evolution of human hair

I am totally interested in this question. I'm prone to the hippy "if it's natural, it's good" attitude, but it just doesn't work for hair. My mustache grows long enough to just cover my bottom lip, getting in the way of food, but not long enough to comb to the side. My beard stops at a decent enough length, but others have beards that grow to their waist.I like the reproductive advantage idea. My very unscientific observations of myself and those around me is that long hair does indeed tend to appeal to the opposite sex, male and female.

Oh, it does.The worst time ever was when I was wrestling about six kids and I inhaled some of my hair. Fortunately, they were nine and ten year olds, so I was able to immediately fling them off and retrieve the ends of my hair from my throat. If it were teenagers who could have kept my hands pinned, I might have died.

I doubt it, as my hair is very fine. However, I think you will find that standing upright is the best way to get a large amount of hair down your throat, and wrestling helps that. A violent jerk of the head, combined with a deep breath, can get a whole handful of hair to go down your throat (a lock, not just several loose strands). It has happened to me twice, separated by three or four years. (I have six children, so wrestling with lots of children is not a rare occurrence for me.)I don't find that I whirl my head and shoulders violently, putting large amounts of hair in front of my mouth, when I'm "wrestling" my wife (maybe others do, I don't know) so strands are all I have to worry about there.It seems to me, though, that the jerking of wrestling with kids would simulate fighting that might well be faced in an uncivilized society, and it would be very detrimental to choke on your own hair and have to pause to pull it out. Especially if we hadn't evolved speech yet, and your couldn't say "time out" to your opponent.

I think I should have had a smiley face in that last post at least a couple times. :-)

Oh, my smilies don't work, because I'm putting an nose in them. I should have read that smilies legend a long time ago .(edited to change my 0 to and O and make the embarrassed smiley work )[This message has been edited by truthlover, 01-28-2004][This message has been edited by truthlover, 01-28-2004]