The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris Read Free Book Online

potentially dangerous as nakedness was going to be allowed to persist simply because other. changes were slowing down. Unless it had some special value to the new species, it would be quickly dealt with by natural selection.
    What, then, was the survival value of naked skin? One explanation is that when the hunting ape abandoned its nomadic past and settled down at fixed 38 home bases, its dens became heavily infested with skin parasites. The use of the same sleeping places night after night is thought to have provided abnormally rich breeding-grounds for a variety of ticks, mites, fleas and bugs, to a point where the situation provided a severe disease risk. By casting off his hairy coat, the den-dweller was better able to cope with the problem.
    There may be an element of truth in this idea, but it can hardly have been of major importance. Few other den-dwelling mammals—and there are hundreds of species to pick from—have taken this step. Nevertheless, if nakedness was developed in some other connection, it might make it easier to remove troublesome skin parasites, a task which today still occupies a great deal of time for the hairier primates.
    Another thought along similar lines is that the hunting ape had such messy feeding habits that a furry coat would soon become clogged and messy and, again, a disease risk. It is pointed out that vultures, which plunge their heads and necks into gory carcasses, have lost their feathers from these members; and that the same development, extended over the whole body, may have occurred among the hunting apes. But the ability to develop tools to kill and skin the prey can hardly have preceded the ability to use other objects to clean the hunters’ hair. Even a chimpanzee in the wild will occasionally use leaves as toilet paper when in difficulties with defecation.
    A suggestion has even been put forward that it was the development of fire that led to the loss of the hairy coat. It is argued that the hunting ape will have felt cold only at night and that, once he had the luxury of sitting round a camp fire, he was able to dispense with his fur and thus leave himself in a better state for dealing with the heat of the day.
    Another, more ingenious theory is that, before he became a hunting ape, the original ground ape that had left the forests went through a long phase as an aquatic ape. He is envisaged as moving to the tropical sea-shores in search of food. There he will have found shellfish and other sea-shore creatures in comparative abundance, a food supply much richer and more attractive than that on the open plains. At first he will have groped around in the rock pools and the shallow water, but gradually he will have started to swim out to greater depths and dive for food. During this process, it is argue, he will have lost his hair like other mammals that have returned to the sea. Only his head, protruding from the surface of the water, would retain the hairy coat to protect him from the direct glare of the sun. Then, later on, when his tools (originally developed for cracking open shells) became sufficiently advanced, he will have spread away from the cradle of the sea-shore and out into the open land spaces as an emerging hunter.
    It is held that this theory explains why we are so nimble in the water today, while our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, are so helpless and quickly drown. It explains our streamlined bodies and even our vertical posture, the latter supposedly having developed as we waded into deeper and deeper water. It clears up a strange feature—your body-hair tracts. Close examination reveals that on our backs the directions of our tiny remnant hairs differ strikingly from those of other apes. In us they point diagonally backwards and inwards towards the spine. This follows the direction of the flow of water prising over a swimming body and indicates that, if the coat of hair was modified before it was lost, then it was modified in exactly the right