Why we lost our fur

THIS is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky!

Why do humans not have fur like chimpanzees and gorillas? – Thomas, age 4, Darlington, New South Wales, Australia.

Mark Elgar replies:

We know that at one point humans did have fur! But we don’t know why we lost it, so we have to guess.

Scientists think that our ancestors (more than a million years ago) experienced a very big change in the climate. The world became much hotter, and that meant that people had to start travelling further and further to find food.

Dr Nina Jablonski, an expert on ancient humans, thinks that slightly less hairy people may have been in better shape to travel these distances because they would have been able to keep cool more easily.

So if you’re less hairy, it means you can travel a long way, which means you can eat more food. If you’re more hairy, it means you can only travel a short way before you get too hot, which means you find less food.

That means the people with less hair were the ones who stayed alive long enough to have kids. And those kids also inherited having less hair from their parents.

That’s why nowadays you won’t see very furry humans.