After Darwin put forward the theory of evolution, we have a new understanding of the origin of life on earth and the origin of mankind. Progressive theory tells us that the earliest life on the earth was just a few simple single-cell primitive life. It is such a simple primitive life. After continuous evolution and evolution, it has grown step by step and enriched the marine biosphere.
After the marine life became rich, some of the amphibians began to break away from the sea and moved towards terrestrial life, becoming the earliest ancestors of terrestrial life. After the emergence of terrestrial life, it took hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary evolution. With the birth of human ancestors, human ancestors passed millions of years of evolutionary evolution before the birth of modern humans.
From here we can see that life is really the most mysterious and mysterious thing in the universe, and the evolution of life makes us feel incredible. Anything that is impossible may appear in the evolution of life. Humans are also a member of mammals, but we have intelligent brains and evolved into advanced intelligent life.
As early as tens of millions of years ago, humans shared a common ancestor with the primates that exist on earth today, and they are ancient apes. Later, the ancient apes made two choices on the evolutionary path, and most of them still evolved along the original direction of strength and became modern primates. A small number of people chose to move on the path of intelligent evolution, and after a long period of evolutionary evolution, they became modern humans.
The ancient apes had two evolutionary paths tens of millions of years ago, and the different evolutionary paths also made some obvious differences in the evolution of the ancient apes. Humans and primates have a common primitive ancestor, the ancient apes, and although humans have some similarities with other primates, they do not appear to be very different in appearance. The most obvious one is primates. All have long hair, inheriting the characteristics of the ancient ape.
The human body does not have these long body hair. Our protection from the cold depends on clothing, while primates rely on long body hair. So some people have a question: humans and primates have a common ancient ape ancestor, but why did humans lose their long body hair in the process of evolution?
Long body hair is very common in the animal world, which shows that long hair is very important for the survival of animals. This is an external feature that animals have evolved in order to adapt to nature, allowing them to better survive in the cold environment. Humans evolved from ancient apes, which naturally have very thick body hair.
With thick body hair, you can keep warm in winter and survive better. Humans didn’t have clothes such as clothes millions of years ago. If they lose their long hair, they will not have the ability to keep warm. The winter survival of human ancestors will inevitably be more difficult.
The law of survival of nature is the survival of the fittest. Since mankind can embark on the path of intelligent evolution, nature must also be very preferential and will not let mankind fall into desperation. In the natural environment, the human ancestors having the same body hair as the ancient apes should be the right choice for mankind by nature, but why did the long body hair fade in the end, making it harder to keep out the cold?
In fact, to unravel the mystery of this problem, we need to have a general understanding of the path of human evolution. After you understand this, you will understand why human ancestors chose to lose their long body hair. As we said earlier, tens of millions of years ago, part of the ancient apes embarked on the path of intelligent evolution. Why did they choose this path? Is the evolution of wisdom the best choice for animals?
In fact, from the perspective of the law of survival of the fittest in nature, the road of wisdom evolution is a very difficult road. Why do you say that? We all know that the evolution of wisdom is actually the evolution of the brain, which is a substantial increase in the proportion of brain capacity. Although the brain is a very small structure in the human body, it requires a lot of energy.
The greater the brain capacity, the more energy the brain needs to function, but in nature, food is the basis for our survival. After the brain’s demand for energy has increased significantly, we need more food to provide, and obtaining food is not easy in the animal world. Human beings will feel dizzy if they don’t eat a day.
But in the animal world, animals often need to skip meals, and the body can store more energy, allowing organisms to starve for longer. But if the brain is on the path of intelligent evolution, it needs a lot of energy support every day, and it needs to constantly search for food. This is very difficult for the survival of animals, so organisms will not choose to embark on the path of intelligent evolution before they have no alternative.
Why did part of the ancient ape go down this road again? In fact, there is no alternative. When we look at the world, we will find that there is a huge fault zone on the land-the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. This Great Rift Valley was formed by plate movement, that is, about 3000 years ago, this place underwent a plate movement that lasted for 25 million years.
During this process, the crust on the east side of the Great Rift Valley continued to uplift, which gradually transformed this area from a lush forest to a grassland with few trees. Unfortunately, human ancestors lived in the rift valley. To the east. The forest has turned into a grassland, making the ancient apes living here lose their comfortable and stable environment.
The ancient apes do not have a tall and strong body, nor the ability to run fast. They originally lived in the forest and could live on trees without animals that could threaten them. But after arriving in the plains, everything changed. The ancient apes became the animals at the bottom of the food chain on the grasslands. They were often attacked by various beasts, and the entire race was at risk of extinction.
Under such circumstances, the ancient apes had to embark on the path of intelligent evolution. In fact, this path was also a choice that the ancient apes had no choice but to adapt to life in the grassland. The ancient ape was considered a smarter animal tens of millions of years ago. Its brain volume is larger than that of other animals, and it has very flexible forelimbs.
In order to avoid being attacked by beasts, the ancient ape began to learn to walk upright, and after standing up, he had a wider field of vision and was able to see far. In this way, the arrival of the beast can be detected in advance, and the risk of a sudden attack by the beast can be effectively reduced. In this way, the ancient ape learned to walk upright and liberated the forelimbs.
Walking upright is very conducive to the rapid evolution of the brain. They slowly learned to use their hands to make the tools they need. This time also marked the initial evolution of the ancient apes into intelligent life. Although I have learned to walk upright and can make some simple tools, it is still very difficult to get food on the grassland.
Carnivorous beasts are creatures that the ancient apes evade, so naturally they don’t dare to provoke them actively, so what they can choose is those herbivorous animals. However, it is not so easy to capture these herbivorous animals. Animals are very alert and have no chance of attacking human ancestors. You can’t live without food, so what should I do?
The ancient ape thought of the last way to compare endurance with these animals. Human ancestors chased herbivores on the grassland. With the passage of time, the physical strength of the herbivores is weakened, and in the end they cannot run and can only be captured by human ancestors and become food. This was the most important hunting method used by early humans. Relying on this method, human ancestors had food and survived.
Running for a long time will inevitably cause a lot of sweating, and the heat in the body needs to be released in a large amount, otherwise it is easy to get sick. In order to be able to dissipate the large amount of heat generated by running, human ancestors gradually lost the body hair covering the whole body, and also evolved sweat glands all over the body.
With better heat dissipation capabilities, the running endurance of human ancestors is stronger, it is easier to hunt herbivores, and the survival security is greatly improved. Human ancestors had to shed all body hair for food, but after losing body hair, keeping warm became a big problem. So clever human ancestors made simple clothes from animal skins to keep warm. This is the earliest clothing of mankind.
In later days, clothing was given more meaning and gradually became an indispensable “standard configuration” for mankind. It can be seen from this that the choice of humans to use clothing to keep out the cold is actually a choice that human ancestors had to make in order to survive. If human ancestors still chose to leave their body hair to keep out the cold and do not want to lose it, then survival would be very difficult, and it may eventually disappear in the long river of history without human beings.