Question: Why do we have hair on the body

Ross King answered on 9 Nov 2015:

This is an excellent question and actually it tells a very good story about how humans evolved from other related animals (such as apes). There are probably many reasons why we have hair.

I would say that the main reason we have hair is to keep us warm. Millions of years ago, our ancestors probably lived outside and certainly did not have access to all of the clothes that we have in modern times, although they did learn to keep warm by wearing some clothing. For this reason, our bodies adapted to make our own way of keeping warm by making hair.

Hair is very good at keeping us warm because it is good at trapping lairs of air between the hair and our skin. By keeping air trapped, we can warm the air which then keeps our bodies warm.

You only need to look at chimpanzees and gorillas to see that they have a lot of hair compared to us humans. Over time, as we grew better and better at controlling our environment, we didn’t need to make as much hair to keep us warm as our ancestors who still live outside. This is a fantastic example of how humans have evolved!