Fur or Fire: Was the use of fire the initial selection pressure for fur loss in ancestral hominins?
Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Anthropology, Evolutionary Studies, Zoology
- Keywords
- hairlessness, human, naked ape, nudity, fire, hominin, sexual selection
- Copyright
- © 2016 Couch
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Fur or Fire: Was the use of fire the initial selection pressure for fur loss in ancestral hominins? PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1702v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1702v1
Abstract
A variety of reasons have been advanced to explain the loss of fur in humans and why they differ in this way from all other primates. None of these reasons has become generally accepted as the explanation for the absence of functionally effective thermally insulating fur. The hypotheses previously advanced have not satisfactorily explained why humans are the unique naked ape. This paper proposes a new hypothesis; that Homo sapiens ancestors use of fire created the initial selection pressure leading to fur loss in humans.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.