Long-haired
Sango woman, Democratic Republic of the Congo (Friedrich 1913, Fig. 174)
A
competitive mate market will reward individuals whose secondary sexual
characteristics seem abnormally bigger or flashier. A "supernormal
stimulus" has a stronger visual impact than a normal one, and the
behavioral response is correspondingly stronger. This effect has been studied
in many animal species. When, for instance, a female butterfly passes by a
male, the latter is attracted to the flashing wing pattern. The same pattern on
a rotating drum exercises the same power of attraction, which increases as the speed of rotation increases—up to almost ten times the speed
of a normal wing-beat (Manning 1972, pp. 47-49).
A
human example? Head hair. It has become much longer than hair elsewhere on the
body, apparently because it holds some power of attraction. This lengthening has
been brought about by several evolutionary changes: faster rate of growth,
longer growing phase, higher density, and greater resistance to physical damage
(Khumalo 2005; Loussouarn 2001; Loussouarn et al. 2005). These changes have
gone farther in some populations than in others. Darwin noted "the
extraordinary difference in the length of the hair in the different races; in
the negro the hair forms a mere curly mat; with us it is of great length, and
with the American natives it not rarely reaches to the ground" (Darwin
1936[1888], p. 906).
Long
hair is the "derived" form. It evolved in those modern humans who
left Africa for northern Eurasia, including some who later back-migrated to the
tropics, such as the Austronesians of Southeast Asia and Oceania and the
Amerindians of the tropical New World.
Short,
frizzy hair is the ancestral form. Today, it is seen in sub-Saharan Africans
and in some remnant groups that remained in the tropical regions of South Asia,
Southeast Asia, and parts of Oceania. These groups are the Andamanese of India, the
Semang of Malaysia, the Aeta of the Philippines, and the natives of Australia,
Papua New Guinea, and Melanesia.
Long head hair, a
component of the Kindchenschema
The
ancestral hair form is straight and silky in a newborn child: "[...] the
majority of African babies are not born with springy tight curls, the African
child at birth is either bald or has silky loose curls similar to the Jheri
curls" (Ajose 2012). This physical difference was cited by Zambian
students when asked to describe how Africans look. Some of the girls
"noted that African babies were born with white skin and long hair"
(Powdermaker 1956).
Although
adults normally have loose, silky hair in most of the world, this was not so in
ancestral humans. Such hair was specific to infants and thus formed part of what
Konrad Lorenz dubbed the Kindchenschema—a
set of visual, auditory, and tactile cues that identifies a human infant to
adults, who then feel less aggressive and more willing to provide care and
nurturance (Lorenz 1971, pp. 154-164). The infant seems "cute."
This
has been no less true in sub-Saharan Africa, and a desire to be similarly cute has led African women to make their own hair longer, looser, and silkier.
Some of their techniques predate the colonial era:
Africa as the cradle of mankind is likely to have had hair care since the beginning of human existence. Partly because of the oral tradition of passing down history, it is difficult to corroborate evidence of hair care. But probably the earliest form of hair straightening was the molding of hair into shapes using various clays and mud (e.g., indicating the station of a married woman among the Zulu's). [...] Hair was also lengthened with fibers and grasses, much as is done for braids with synthetic extensions nowadays. Although small decorative comb-like structures have been discovered with archeological finds, it is not clear whether original Africans combed their hair or if these implements were purely decorative. Although not written down, fascinating stories of more recent hair care (and hair disasters) are often told by older women about straightening hair using hot stones even before hot combs became available. (Khumalo 2008: see also Sieber and Herreman 2000)
In 1721, John Atkins provided an early description of women braiding and dressing their hair in Sierra Leone:
[The women] work hard at Tillage, make Palm-Oil or spin Cotton, and when they are free from such work, the idle Husbands put them upon braiding, and fettishing out their woolly hair, (in which Sort of Ornament they are prodigious proud and curious) keeping them every Day, for many Hours together at it. (Sieber and Herreman 2000, p. 67)
West African women still lavish much time on their hair:
"Big hair," "plenty of hair," "much hair"—West African communities, including Mende, admire a fine head of long, thick hair on a woman. Both these elements are crucial: thickness and length. Thickness equals increase in the number of individual strands, and the length is proof of strength. Growing such luxuriant hair requires a Mende woman's patience and care. Because a man's hair is kept shaved or cut close to the scalp, people say that "men don't have hair." Beautiful hair thus is a distinctly female trait; the more of it, the more feminine the woman. (Boone 1986, p. 184)
This
hairdressing tradition is ancient enough to have spawned myths, such as this
one among the Mende:
It is known among Mende that all the "water people," angels, have marvelous hair. The mermaid Tingoi is known by her long, wavy hair and her glamorous habit of dressing it with a golden comb while seated on a rock. A little girl with especially long hair is feared to be in danger of drowning because she will be very attractive to the "water people," who may think she is one of them and wish her to join them. (Boone 1986, p. 192)
Long-haired
women appear in the folklore of other African peoples. Among the Yoruba, a
folk-tale explains "why women have long hair." A woman fell into a
pit and was pulled out by her hair, which thereby became as long as a man's
arm. She initially felt ashamed of her new appearance and hid herself.
But after a while she realized that her long hair was beautiful, and then she felt very proud and scorned all the short-haired women, jeering at them. When they saw this, they were consumed with jealousy, and began to be ashamed of their short hair. "We have men's hair," they said to one another. "How beautiful it would be to have long hair!"
So one by one they jumped into the pit, and their friends pulled them out by the hair.
And in this way they, and all women after them, had long hair. (Ogumefu 1929, chap V)
Another Yoruba folk-tale recounts how a king had a beautiful daughter with hair "so long that it touched the ground when she walked." But she lost her hair and regained it only after a man found a tree that bore human hair. She then became his wife. (Abrahams 1983, pp. 59-63)
Lengthening
of women’s hair seems to have been most common in West Africa, but it was also practiced
in central and southern Africa during early colonial times. Women of the
Manyema (Tanzania) were described as having “an abundance of hair” that would “flow
down to the waist in masses of ringlets” (Bettany 1892, p. 661). Among the
Sango (DRC), girls old enough for marriage would plait long strands of string
into their hair to create long manes (Friedrich 1913, pp.
190-191). Young women of the Mbalantu (Namibia) achieved the same effect by braiding sinew extensions (Sieber and Herreman 2000, p. 65). Nonetheless, such practices seem to have been uncommon in southern
Africa. When a black South African woman traveled to the United States in the
1930s, she was struck by the number of African American women who straightened
and extended their hair. “What really made me feel strange [was] nearly every
girl and woman has long hair and I among them looked like a boy dressed in
girl’s clothes” (Thomas 2006, p. 487).
It
appears that African American women were already braiding and threading their
hair at an early date. Men, however, often shaved their heads—an indication
that both sexes viewed long head hair as a female ornament (White and White
1995).
In
sum, hair lengthening is an African tradition that precedes colonial contact
with Europeans. From the beginning, the aim was to look feminine, and not
"white." The motive was not self-hatred but sexual fantasy—a desire
for the supernormal, a wish to become a woman with a long mane of hair. This
may be an example of humans creating in one part of the world through
artificial means what has been created elsewhere through biological evolution. The
same desire has been satisfied in different ways.
Evolution of long
head hair in Homo sapiens
African
hair can revert to the loose, silky form of infancy as a result of some
illnesses: AIDS, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, pulmonary
tuberculosis with cachexia, and Behçet's disease (Ajose 2012). These illnesses
somehow disrupt normal hair growth, and it is plausible that a similar
disruption of genetic origin, i.e., a loss-of-function allele, was the first
stage in the evolution of long head hair.
Head hair began to lengthen as
ancestral humans spread out of Africa and into the temperate and arctic zones. These environments shifted the pressure of sexual selection from
men to women. On the one hand, male mortality increased in relation to female
mortality because men had to hunt over larger expanses of land. On the other hand,
the polygyny rate decreased because it became costlier to provide for a mother and her
offspring, particularly during winter. Men were scarcer on the mate
market, being fewer in number and less polygynous. (Frost 2006; Frost 2014;
Frost 2015).
Women were now in excess supply, and the
spotlight of sexual selection was on them. Their physical characteristics
became flashier, bigger, or somehow exaggerated. In the case of head hair, the existing
practices of artificial lengthening helped show the way for future evolution. The cultural became biological. Over
succeeding generations, the infant hair form persisted more and more into
adulthood while becoming ever longer and straighter, eventually reaching down
to the waist if left uncut. Hair seems to have lengthened within the whole of
northern Eurasia, rather than within the smaller zone of steppe-tundra where skin became white and where hair and eyes became brightly and diversely colored. Hair lengthening was thus
triggered by a lower intensity of sexual selection.
This
selection pressure acted primarily on women and then secondarily spilled over
onto men, perhaps because most of the genes in question are weakly sex-linked,
as are most genes. Nonetheless, there is some sex linkage. Scalp hairs have a
greater mean diameter and hence more volume in women, even in the
shorter-haired New Guineans (Walsh and Chapman 1966). Hair growth rate and
final length are also somewhat greater in women than in men (Sigler 2011, p.
13). Men furthermore tend to lose their head hair, often as early as their
twenties. In general, growth of head hair is under stronger hormonal inhibition
in men than in women (Kondo et al. 1990).
Conclusion
Before
ancestral humans began to spread out of Africa, women were already pushing the
phenotypic envelope by artificially making their hair straighter, longer, and
silkier. Later, outside Africa, evolution brought this fantasy to life. As
Charles Darwin concluded, such hair serves an ornamental purpose in our
species: "for we know that long tresses are now and were formerly much
admired, as may be observed in the works of almost every poet; St. Paul says,
"if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her." (Darwin
1936[1888], p. 906).
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