Hair's influence on the brain

[Frabjous]

https://www.wsj.com/science/biology...4?st=CQDZ2M&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

 

[Drakkith]

Nice. I'm bald, so now I have an excuse to go inside instead of mow my yard. "My brain is too hot because I don't have hair to cool it down, Honey!!"

 

[pinball1970]

Hair is failing for me and so is my brain. Youth and long hair I claim that brain function is optimal.

 

[Ken Fabian]

An adaptation to more exposure to sun from changed environment makes some sense, yes. To being more upright? I'd expect a chimp or bonobo walking in sunlight would get similar sun exposure to their head, as well as more along their backs. Baboons are successful primates of savannas and open woodlands - they aren't furless but do have more head hair, just not very long head hair - and as an aside are my choice for most likely to evolve into intelligent tool users.

“You don’t want to have flyaway hair when you’re being chased by a saber-toothed cat,” she (Jablonski) said.

Not a race a hominid could expect to win - just have to be faster than the others?

Without washing hair using means that removes the oils - and probably no combing/brushing other than fingers - I would think long and other not tightly curled types of head hair would be a lot less loose and 'flyaway' than us well washed types might think of as normal. Perhaps more like what we get with hair sprays to solidify them. A very small population, a local variant emerging as a different species would be unlikely to have a lot of variation; those will have come after homo sapiens speciation.

Just what those earliest saps had at that time and carried through from direct ancestral types isn't so clear.