We were naked for more than a million years before we started wearing clothes - but why did we lose our fur [natural body hair] to begin with?

SHOOT: Simple - initially because fur tended to carry and protect lice, and later, because hair became part of sexual selection, or rather, less hair was seen as more attractive, a trait that persists today.

Mehret Tesfaye: Once hairlessness had evolved through natural selection, Dr. Pagel and Dr. Bodmer suggest, it then became subject to sexual selection, the development of features in one sex that appeal to the other. Among the newly furless humans, bare skin would have served, like the peacock's tail, as a signal of fitness. The pains women take to keep their bodies free of hair — joined now by some men — may be no mere fashion statement but the latest echo of an ancient instinct. Dr. Pagel's and Dr. Bodmer's article appeared in a recent issue of The Proceedings of the Royal Society.

SHOOT: Truly fascinating. We all know how easy it is to spot a tick on human skin and remove it. I've suffered from tick-bite fever by the way, and it is something you're really better off not experiencing.

clipped from www.ethiopianreview.com Mammals need body hair to keep warm, and lose it only for specialevolutionary reasons. Whales and walruses shed their hair to improve speed intheir new medium, the sea. Elephants and rhinoceroses have specially thick skinsand are too bulky to lose much heat on cold nights. But why did humans, the only hairless primates, lose their body hair? One theory holds that the hominid line went through a semi-aquatic phase —witness the slight webbing on our hands. A better suggestion is that loss ofbody hair helped our distant ancestors keep cool when they first ventured beyondthe forest's shade and across the hot African savannah. But loss of hair is not an unmixed blessing in regulating body temperature because the naked skinabsorbs more energy in the heat of the day and loses more in the cold of the night. Humans lost their body hair, they say, to free themselves of external parasites that infest fur — blood-sucking lice, fleas and ticks and the diseases they spread.