The Not Quite Naked Ape

Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims

(Page 3 of 8)

Men are beastly! They are silly, vain, arrogant, and have hair all over their bodies.

Countess Charlotte, in Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night

The Hair of the Prophet

Even God understands the importance of a spiffy hairdo. At least his vicar in Hollywood did. In his 1956 remake of his own earlier film The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille, while surpassing even the shameless vulgarity of Samson and Delilah, returned to the hairy symbolism of that film. When Charlton Heston's Moses goes up on the forbidden mountain to speak with God, he wears a short brown beard and a cloak that hides his hair. Afterward, when the prophet returns to his people laden with commandments, he has aged. The beard is longer and has two prominent gray swaths. The headgear has vanished, revealing a dramatic coiffure long gray-white hair drawn back from his forehead and face and covering his ears. The blow-dried look is reminiscent of Michelangelo's God on the Sistine ceiling, or of the lord of the gods in Ingres's regal Jupiter and Thetis. Walking back down the mountainside, Moses now looks like a patriarch, as if he has been visiting an image consultant rather than conferring with a talkative shrub. When he returns to his tent, his faithful wife, Sephora, played by Yvonne De Carlo, expresses the sentiments of the viewer by greeting her husband with "Moses your hair "

The Mark of the Beast

With his depiction of Moses, Cecil B. DeMille demonstrated how powerfully symbolic hair can be. Our cultural response to this highly visible and easily varied part of the human body has ranged from the most primitive kind of magical thinking to forthright signifiers of caste and allegiance. The human brain is always eager to assign symbolic meaning. It perceives our animal attributes and promotes them to metaphor. Long ago it accomplished this conceptual upgrade for the lingering evidence of our mammalian ancestry.

"There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes," wrote the English biologist Desmond Morris in his 1967 book The Naked Ape. "One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens." In reality the species that dubbed itself wise is not quite naked. Most of us have hair on every area of our bodies except our lips, our nipples, the palms of our hands and soles of our feet, and certain parts of the external genitalia. Much of it, however, is either fine or sparse or both. Compared with our furry cousins, we certainly look naked.

In their microscopic analysis of our every trait, evolutionary biologists have not ignored hair. A glance at any fellow mammal raises questions. For example, nowadays elephants are almost hairless. This is not a problem for them nor, presumably, an embarrassment because they live in the tropics. Like human beings, they experience no discomfort running around stark naked in such an environment. Some of their ancestors, however, were famously woolly and lived as far north as the Arctic. In 1871, in The Descent of Man, Darwin remarked that even Indian elephants native to cool altitudes have more hair than do their lowland Indian brethren. "May we then infer," he asked, "that man became divested of hair from having aboriginally inhabited some tropic land?" As usual, Darwin immediately examined an objection to his own speculations. None of our fellow simians, most of which are fully as tropical as we, have lost their hair. Only humans emerge, as Desmond Morris would say, naked. One conjecture, mentioned in the Overture, is that we may have lost much of our hair in response to the evolution of sweat glands. Our relative hairlessness struck Darwin's colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, as an objection to the theory of natural selection. He insisted that, even if our tropical ancestors gradually became less hairy, still they ought to have reevolved a fur coat during the hominid diaspora to less temperate climes. For this reason, he concluded, "man's naked skin could not have been produced by natural selection." Wallace was always looking for some aspect of human evolution that might testify to a little divine nudging; finally he settled upon the brain's complexity.

Darwin pointed out that in human beings the old mammalian body covering remains most dense "at the junction of all four limbs with the trunk," and, at least in the male, on the chest and face. Before our ancestors evolved bipedalism and stood erect, all of those areas would have been sheltered from the sun. But another objection immediately came to mind: "The crown of the head, however, offers a curious exception, for at all times it must have been one of the most exposed parts, yet it is thickly clothed with hair."

Not only are we not hairless as adults, we were not even naked in the womb. Roughly four months after conception, the human fetus grows a mustache. Fine hair forms on the upper lip and eyebrows. Gradually, over the next few weeks, it covers the entire body, and by the end of the fifth month the unborn fetus is completely hairy. It will remain so for many weeks. Biologists call this coat of hair the lanugo, from a Latin word for down or wooliness. Usually, but not always, our lanuginose phase ends before birth. During the last few weeks of pregnancy, the baby swallows the shed lanugo. The tiny hairs join mucus and bile and other substances to form the meconium, the baby's first bowel movement after birth.

Occasionally, like most other aspects of the human body, our genetic orders about hair provide the wrong instructions. This happens even with the lanugo. There is a rare genetic disorder called variously congenital hypertrichosis lanuginosa or hypertrichosis universalis congenita, which has been recorded in only about forty families, in places as far apart as Southeast Asia and Central America. Certain chromosomes malfunction, and individuals are born still covered with a longer version of the lanugo. One of the earliest recorded cases occurred in the Canary Islands in the mid-sixteenth century, when an infant named Petrus Gonsales (or Gonsalvus) was born with his entire body covered in long, soft hair. Rosamond Purcell describes the situation in her book Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters: Gonsales "was placed with a kind of muted awe into the upper echelon of Renaissance society . . . an object of social fascination, a cultivated man who was somehow not a man." He married a pretty Dutchwoman. Unfortunately their furry children resembled the father more than the mother. Various artists portrayed the werewolfishly hirsute Gonsales and his normal-looking wife, sometimes alongside their hairy-faced daughters. In these works the family is arrayed in court finery, their human eyes peering calmly from monster-movie faces. Even a glance at these portraits suggests that they inspired Jean Marais's elaborate Beast makeup in Cocteau's 1946 film La Belle et la Bíte. Apparently it was a variation on hypertrichosis that afflicted Julia Pastrana, a member of the so-called Root-Digger Indians of western Mexico. Anticipating the Elephant Man, she became a celebrated plaything of American and European society in the mid-1800s. In the case of Pastrana, neither serious medical commentators nor sideshow promoters could resist expressing the titillating frisson of horror they felt at the sight of a human being especially a woman entirely covered in hair.

Hairiness has always been a bestial symbol of nature gone wild. Ambroise Paré, a sixteenth-century physician, recorded in his book On Monsters and Marvels a child who was born "furry as a bear" because her mother was gazing upon a picture of a hairy man at the moment of conception. In the ancient Babylonian epic Sha Naqba Imuru (He Who Saw the Deep), the warrior king Gilgamesh terrorizes the people of Uruk. In time the goddess Aruru hears the citizens' prayers for rescue. From a pinch of clay she makes Enkidu, a rival whose job it will be to make Gilgamesh pick on someone his own size, thus distracting him from tormenting the ordinary mortals. Naturally the two brainless lugs become pals. The wild nature of Enkidu, who is raised by animals, is visible; he is "coated in hair like the god of the animals."

From the semiotics of rock music to the enduring popularity of the fable about Beauty and the Beast, the symbolic relationship between hair and our impure nature persists to this day. One of the items found in the luggage of Mohammed Atta, a leader of the Al Qaeda terrorists who crashed planes into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, was a four-page document with instructions for the last evening before the attack. Alongside an admonition to make an oath to die was a reminder to "shave excess hair from the body." Bestial impurities, we imagine, can be shed along with bestial signifiers.

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Michael Sims has written about science and culture for newspapers and radio, and for magazines ranging from American Archaeology to Creative Loafing. He is also the author of Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts and Adam's Nave.