And Then, I Wonder...

Further to yesterdays post I braced myself, and with tremendous caution, shortened my barnet to disguise the runway. This looked to work to a certain degree so I sallied forth to test results in public. Sadly, I came fifth as the shops were jammed. I can only surmise folk are stocking-up prior to self isolating themselves.

Anyhoo, I wasn’t aware of any strange looks so I’ll give my cut a pass. However, having nothing weighty on my mind and feeling a tad light headed, this got me thinking about Mother Nature and evolution in general.

We started off as a damn hairy bunch way back, right? This hair was mandatory – pre Wranglers and T-shirts – for modesty, protection and warmth. Time passed, shy guys invented loin cloths and found that the big beasts they killed to eat had an outer layer that could be cut to form jolly warm coverings.

With these innovations, over generations the need for excessively hairy bodies receded. But the head remained hairy and I can only assume that came about as the head is the control and communication centre thus, even with the advent of hats, needed that extra layer of protection – mainly from the cold.

And so to my thought that Mother Nature and evolution need to look again at human head hair. Why? Well, as we get older, we need to keep warmer but this is the time when many ageing folk start losing their hair. Why do we gain a surfeit of ear and nose hair and if you fail to keep control of your eyebrows they quickly present the opportunity of a comb-up-and-over all apparently at the cost of proper head hair?

There is of course a chance, and thus  a trick, Greta Thumbelina, blessed be her name, could be missing and that is that Mother Nature has put the need for head insulation on the back burner owing to the advance of global warming...

My next step is to obtain funding for a ten year study investigating the speed of hair growth in the summer, warm weather compared to the speed of growth in winter, cold weather. If I can link this study, however tenuously, with climate change, funding shouldn’t be a problem at all, right?

I can see the headlines now; “An exciting new study has found links between the accelerating speed of loss and the declining speed of growth of hair to climate change.”

Quote;  Harry Graham??

"’Tis years of sorrow and of care
Have made his head come through his hair."