How and when did we evolve our uniquely human trait of hairlessness? Much of recent theory on the evolution of hair loss in the human lineage has focused on the possibility that our first naked ancestors would have been the australopiths - a genus of hominins that lived between 4 and 2 million years ago. Yet none of these theories has offered a rigorous examination of what hairlessness would have implied for a genus of hominins that continued to be largely arboreal - that still spent a lot of time in the trees. Over fifty years have passed since Desmond Morris offered a general examination of what the implications of hairlessness would have been for evolving humans. The Naked Australopiths takes up the task again to provide a thorough examination of what the social, subsistence, and technical implications of hairlessness would have been for the partially arboreal representatives of Australopithecus as they were making the gradual transition from life in the trees to life on the ground. Not only is this the first treatment of what hairlessness would have implied for our pre-human australopithecine ancestors. The examination of the broad implications of hairlessness for the australopiths also provides C. Odell Smith with the opportunity to examine for the first time in a general way under what conditions these animals would have lived. How did the australopiths subsist in a transitional environment that no longer provided sufficient fruit? How would they have accommodated their nests to make nighttime temperatures bearable under hairlessness? How would they have cooperated to help hairless mothers and infants maneuver both in the trees and on the ground? How might their unique epidermal characteristic have made it necessary for the naked australopiths to begin to adopt uncharacteristic behaviors - ways of acting that would later distinguish human beings as being capable of flexibly adapting to different surroundings of their own choosing? The answer provided by The Naked Australopiths is that these partially arboreal ancestral hominins must have started to transform their surroundings in ways that we would now regard as typically human. Whether australopiths were really naked or not, a new variety of selection was beginning to take place that constituted a significant and consequential alternative to natural selection. Among the australopiths, a radically new, non-genetically determined variety of selection was occurring that began to characterize the behavior typical of primates in the evolving human lineage. An unprecedented variety of ape was emerging that was beginning to be characterized by features that were partially of its own selective determination. C. Odell Smith's The Naked Australopiths is an account of how one of those features might have been our humanly inherited nakedness itself. The Naked Australopiths is an account of the integral role that hairlessness might have played in bringing Paleolithic society into being. Alternatively, it is an account of how Paleolithic society might have been the generative organ that gave birth to hairlessness. In the final analysis, it is an account of how both of these essentially human features would have been put together into a culturally and organically integrated whole. Geneticists like David Reed and Mark Stoneking and ecological paleoanthropologists like Peter Wheeler, Graeme Ruxton, and David Wilkinson suggest that the trait of nakedness would have evolved among the australopiths during the Pliocene epoch. Smith takes up their contention to reveal the profound interdependence that would have existed between hairlessness and an emerging supportive cultural environment. Smith rigorously examines the existing theories and evidence to better determine not only how, but also how likely it is that a characteristic like hairlessness could have been effectively accommodated in a bipedally adapting hominin undergoing the tree-to-ground transition during the Pliocene.
About the Author: Having encyclopedic interest in the humanities, the life sciences, the social sciences, anthropology, prehistory, ancient history, philosophy, and languages, C. Odell Smith has lived in Latin America and Europe and travelled widely in Egypt, the Middle East, and the Far East. Holder of a PhD in Germanics from the University of Washington in Seattle, Smith has conducted extensive research in evolutionary theory, paleoanthropology, archaeology, zoology, psychology, linguistics, and cultural evolution in pursuit of his hypothesis that the most essentially human traits are expressions less of human evolution than of life in human society. His investigations have led to the development of an intriguing new theory of human evolution. His hypothesis expresses itself in terms of the Cyclical Interdependent Regeneration of essential human traits in developmental interaction with the emerging cultural spheres of Paleolithic society. The Naked Australopiths examines the presently available hypotheses on hair loss in Australopithecus to conclude that hairlessness would have needed to be supported by fundamental cultural practices in order to be sustainable. Hairlessness may therefore have been instrumental in generating the first Paleolithic societies.