HUMAN HAIR AND PRIMATE PATTERNING 



By GERRIT S. MILLER, JR., 

 curator, division of mammals, u. s. national museum 



(With Five Plates) 



Few problems have caused more perplexity to anthropologists, 

 physicians, and zoologists than those presented by human hair. Why 

 is it that only some relatively small areas of the human skin are 

 normally capable of bearing a hair growth dense enough to be in any 

 way comparable with the fur of other mammals? Why do men have 

 beards and women not? Why are beards better developed in some 

 races than in others ? What is the cause of baldness, and why is there 

 no certain cure for it? Why does baldness commonly occur ort the 

 crown and rarely on the sides of the head? Why do we turn gray? 

 Why does grayness usually show itself first on the temples or in 

 the beard? Why does the moustache often remain dark after the 

 beard has turned gray? Why do we have hairy eyebrows, and why, 

 when there is a difference in color between the hair of the eyebrows 

 and that of the head, are the eyebrows usually the darker of the two ? 

 Why is the hair of the scalp often difTerent in quality from that of 

 other parts of the body? Why are there several types of hair — kinky, 

 curly and straight ? 



To all of these questions so many and such unsatisfying answers 

 have been suggested that it would be a huge and useless task to try 

 to list them. Variable and inconclusive though they are, most of the 

 answers possess one quality in common, namely, they have in their 

 background the tacit assumption that all these peculiarities of human 

 hair are things that arise from man's special constitution and its 

 reaction to the natural environment or to the artificial conditions that 

 man has imposed upon himself. It has, for instance, been urged that 

 the general bareness of the human skin comes from the widely preva- 

 lent habit of wearing clothes ; that baldness comes from barbers and 

 tight-fitting hats ; that women have less baldness than men because 

 women have for centuries taken better care of their scalps than men 

 have; that graying hair is the result of a lessening bodily energy 

 supposed to go with increasing civilization or " domestication ; " that 

 the axillary and pubic tufts of hair were once useful for babies to 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 85, No. 10 



