Why on earth do guys have beards on their faces? Why do they only occur after puberty? Why don’t women have beards? How did the beard evolve? These are some common questions you may be having about facial hair. I will attempt to answer them, but this is no simple concept, that’s for sure. Let me preface this by saying that there are no definitive answers to this question, so I will present the most prevalent and most likely theories. So, let’s head back to ancient Africa, shall we?
From a study found here.
A long time ago, in a land far far away, humans diverged from the rest of the great ape species to head in a new direction. Over time we started to walk upright, and we developed a cool new thing that most animals had never seen before: running on two legs. These days this activity is not as popular as it used to be, seeing as getting food no longer requires it, but as our bodies changed physiologically to run upright we had to change some things up. First, we needed to re-shape our pelvis to make this whole two-legged thing work a little better. We also needed to ditch the hair, because, as you may know, Africa is rather warm, and when you run you get even more warm. Having ape-like hair covering our entire bodies was not very beneficial, and those individuals who were able to lose the hair survived better than those with it.
Now, if we follow this line of thinking then we reach an interesting argument. Beards are hair, and they make our face hot. It would be smart of us to get rid of it, right? It would make sense for it to go away just like our back hair (well, most people’s back hair…). The interesting thing about beard hair follicles is that they are not like normal hair follicles. Facial hair falls into a class of hair known as “hormone-dependent hairs” which means that the follicles that produce the hair are only activated by certain hormones. The same goes for other pubic hair, but beards respond specifically to male sex hormones, so testosterone. Based on this information, two really good theories have popped up that try to explain the origins of beards:
Theory 1: beards are all about sex… obviously
The first theory of why we still have beards is that they act as a secondary sexual trait so that we can differentiate between males and females, and also distinguish between sexually immature and sexually mature individuals. This made picking a mate a little easier back in the day before language and Tinder and Match.com. In theory, a man with more testosterone would grow a bigger beard, so they would be the strongest and would make strong babies. This could explain why women are instinctively more attracted to men with beards, because science. But this theory is pretty hotly contested. There are a lot of things that differentiate men from women in the human species, so beards seem redundant, and biology doesn’t necessarily like redundant systems. There has to be another answer.
Theory 2: the bearded lady hypothesis
This theory claims that we are asking the wrong question about beards. What we should really be asking is “why don’t women have beards?” Apparently this question is the one that answers the mystery of the beard, while providing the theme for a 1920s carnival show. This may sound a little strange, but stick with me.
Remember when I told you that beard hair is testosterone dependent? Well it turns out that women have the same testosterone-dependent hair follicles in their face. Basically, women could grow beards too, just like men could breastfeed if they took the right hormones. The only thing keeping women from producing beards is that they don’t make a whole lot of testosterone, so if they stared to make a lot more for some reason, they would start to grow a beard. This is actually pretty common in nature. Many species have physiological ways of telling if an individual has a weird hormone imbalance, because that hormone problem could mean that they would be less fit to reproduce. Maybe women with beards were an ancient way of telling that a woman was suffering from some hormone problems and would not serve as a good baby-maker! Well it looks like we have another suitable answer, but it relies on some pretty complicated genetic theories that extend way past a basic understanding of Darwin’s theories.
So what do we know? We know that beards will probably remain one of those crazy enigmas of human evolution, and unlike wisdom teeth and the appendix, we probably won’t find a definite answer any time soon. Maybe they serve as a sex symbol, maybe they are there to make sure our women don’t have testosterone production disorders, but whatever the reason, we have them and they are here to stay.
In the next post, we will talk about what the beard has contributed to society and science, and highlight some of the most famous beards of all time.
