The Not Quite Naked Ape, Part 2

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

(Page 4 of 8)

Our blatant kinship with other animals makes us nervous. Declaring ourselves half angel, we fear that we are also half beast. It does not help that, like wolves and mice and camels, we are inescapably hairy. Mammals have different kinds of hair on different parts of the body, and we are no exception. Most of us were born without hair except on the scalp, eyebrows, and eyelashes. This differs from body hair. The fine downy hair that infants develop soon after birth is called vellus. At puberty and afterward, the body replaces vellus with the pigmented, coarser body hair called terminal hair. Puberty has little effect on the hair of the scalp, lashes, and brows, but those areas, as we all know, tend to show age dramatically later in life. (Because this book is a tour of the body by region rather than by theme, we will address the unique aspects of pubic hair in Chapter 11.)

The November 1941 issue of Life magazine applauded the striking hairstyle of a young actress named Veronica Lake. In his enthusiasm the author of the article went into microscopic detail: "Miss Lake has some 150,000 hairs on her head, each measuring about .0024 inches in cross-section." He then measured the various parts of Lake's now legendary peekaboo hairstyle and added the memorable detail that "her hair catches fire fairly often when she is smoking." The allure of Veronica Lake's hair was not in its quantity or diameter; the quoted number of hairs and their width are perfectly normal. Although figures vary slightly between brunettes, redheads, and blondes, each of us carries around an average of 5 million hairs, with roughly 100,000 to 150,000 of them located on the head. Yet hair frequently plays a role in such hyperbole. In The Second Sex, while denouncing the artificiality and idealization in standard notions of femininity, Simone de Beauvoir observes slyly of Rémy de Gourmont, the versatile French man of letters and Symbolist missionary, that he "wanted woman to wear her hair down, rippling free as brooks and prairie grasses; but it would be on Veronica Lake's hair-do and not on an unkempt mop really left to nature that one could caress the undulations of water and grain fields."

To understand the virtues of hair, it is useful to contrast mammals with other animals. The body heat of reptiles and amphibians, for example, is not regulated by internal thermostats. Therefore they raise or lower their own temperature by the simple expedient of seeking or fleeing warmth, sometimes merely by moving into or out of direct sunlight. When this method is not an option, they turn to dormancy. Swaddled in protective coverings, mammals are not slaves to climate and season at least not quite so much as other animals are. (Hair is such a warm and cushiony wrap that long ago we learned to steal it from our fellow mammals.) Extremes of temperature tolerance in other words, the range of external temperatures that the body's internal thermostat can combat vary widely with different species of mammal. Not that these generalizations are inflexible rules; some primitive mammals also have body temperatures that fluctuate. Depending upon its environment, an echidna's body temperature can vary from 72 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit.

Not all mammals are completely covered with hair when fully grown. Adult whales have only a few bristles near the mouth or even lack hair entirely. As long as it remains dry, hair traps air, but in water it would be worse than useless. Therefore most aquatic mammals gradually evolved to their current hairless state and replaced the external wrap with a subcutaneous layer of insulating fat. But even aquatic mammals possess hair as embryos. Surprisingly, it was not hairiness that the Swedish systematist Linnaeus chose as the defining characteristic of the order to which he himself belonged; mammals are so named because of their milk-producing glands.

Like fingernails and skin itself and, for that matter, like feathers and horn hair consists largely of the protein keratin. This strong material is the primary ingredient in the horn of the rhinoceros the reputed aphrodisiacal properties of which, possibly because of the presence of luteotrophic hormone, have endangered the creature. In fact, the word keratin comes from the Greek keras, "horn." It is a complex substance that resists the enzymes that usually dissolve proteins, a trait that also explains the clogged drains that afflict sinks and bathtubs: Keratin is insoluble in water. This resilience explains why exhumed human bodies often have no internal organs left, while the hair and much of the skin remain. Many people believe that hair continues to grow after death, but actually rigor mortis contracts the erector pili, the diminutive muscles that make hair stand on end a holdover from ancestors in which such a sign indicated fear or anger and the hair becomes more prominent. This reaction unites with the shrinking of decaying flesh to give the appearance of still-growing hair.

Hair grows from a mass of epidermal cells that lie, as if at the bottom of a well, in the cylindrical depression of the follicle. The follicle extends from the surface down into the dermis and sometimes even into subcutaneous layers. In the dermis, at the base of the follicle, connective tissues transmit blood to nourish the hair's growth. As the cells divide at the bottom of the follicle, they are channeled upward, acquiring pigment and becoming keratinized along the way. Downy hairs may last only a few months. Each follicle of terminal hair continues to produce for at least a couple of years and sometimes as long as six, but only the growing cells at the base remain alive. The rest of the cells are as inert as the outer edge of fingernails. When the breathless Life reporter stared at Veronica Lake's hair, he was looking, as we are looking every time we glance in a mirror, at a mass of long-dead protein.

For a dead substance, hair is very much alive in religion, the arts, and everyday life. It is important across a spectrum of religious symbolism. Long, unbound hair represents penitence in some Christian iconography. During the christening ceremony, Greek Orthodox priests bestow upon a baby the sign of the cross by cutting its hair in three places. Many Hindu deities wear a sikha, a braided topknot. Representations of Brahma always include his towering braids. Although ornately coiffed on the feminine side, the hermaphroditic Ardhanarisvara wears the piled braids of an ascetic on the masculine side. Even Ganesha, the elephant-headed minority leader of the Hindu pantheon, wears the braids atop his vast noggin.

One of the sillier records of military herdthink although described within the fold as a noble expression of esprit de corps is a photograph of at least a couple of dozen U.S. paratroopers in France in 1945. Looking like extras in The Last of the Mohicans, all wear Mohawk haircuts. When Fidel Castro was leading a guerrilla war against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the late 1950s, his followers vowed to neither cut their hair nor shave until they had achieved their goal. By contrast, in the West African nation of Mali, the elaborate coiffures of traditional Songhai women exhibit a sense of history. They recall the heritage of the fabled Songhai Empire, which flourished in the Niger Valley of the Sudan until the Moors destroyed it in the late sixteenth century. On special occasions married Songhai women wear on their foreheads the zoumbo, a circular disc of hair and wool that dates back to the days of the empire. Wodaabe women wear a similar large topknot bunched over the forehead and shave their hairlines to make their faces seem longer. Muslim Fulanis denounce this ornamentation because it inhibits women from praying in the prescribed Islamic manner by prostrating oneself and touching the forehead to the earth.

Modifications of the hairline are common. The American actress Rita Hayworth underwent electrolysis to raise her hairline. She suffered through numerous painful treatments at the insistence of her husband, who argued that her natural hairline revealed too little of her forehead and diminished the visual impact of her eyes. Photographs of Hayworth before the procedure reveal a beautiful young woman in no way disfigured by not conforming to a trendy ideal. Because men's hairlines naturally recede over the years, shaving them is a routine method of making an actor look aged. When he died in an automobile accident in 1955, James Dean looked decades older than he really was because his hairline had been shaved to age him for the final scenes of Giant. (Among the more gruesome celebrity mementos on record although not quite rivaling Napoleon's penis are locks of James Dean's bloodstained hair, cut that evening after the accident.)

Obviously human hair is more than a covering. Our busy little brains are not about to permit it to remain mere fur. Hair is symbolic of many things, and symbolic for many reasons. It is also a great source of visual, tactile, and olfactory pleasure for both its owner and observers. Besides symbolism growing out of the biology of hair, geographical differences in Homo sapiens the minor variations, originally local and the result of isolated evolution have evolved several distinct kinds of human hair: the straighter, darker hair adorning those of Asian or Polynesian descent; the many versions of blonde, brunette, and redhead among Caucasian groups; and the usually dark, more tightly curled hair resulting from African ancestry. Each culture has responded to its own hair and to those whose hair differs.

Often, too, scent is omitted when hair is discussed. Why? Is it too intimate a topic? Surely most of us have hugged a child and smelled tousled hair and been flooded with tenderness. Most people have leaned into a lover's hair and inhaled the very breath of intimacy. The American writer Sandra Cisneros nostalgically expresses how much that hair can represent and convey how much more it is than mere strands of dead protein in two sentences from the linked stories in her collection The House on Mango Street.

But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in little pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes a little room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama's hair that smells like bread.

© 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.