It seems like body hair doesn’t have an important purpose, so many of you probably ask – why do we grow body hair when we don’t need it? The answer to this question is provided by a team of researchers who found out that our body hair can help us detect parasites and bugs. This is why in the past, women preferred hairier men who were considered bug-free.
The closest relative to the average human is the ape. However, we have much less body hair when compared to apes, so this must mean that we’ve been slowly loosing our hair, right? The truth is that the hair we have now is finer and has replaced the thicker hair which is seen on most apes. Basically, our body hair is a leftover from our evolution. A group of scientists from the University of Sheffield worked on the research and in the end found out that people with more body hair are capable of detecting bedbugs better.
The research wasn’t very complex. Basically, they checked how much time an individual needs to spot a bedbug on his arm. The results showed that men with hairier arms easily detected the movement of bedbugs while the hairless ones needed more time to spot the intruder.
