Why does the fur of animals stop growing/shed past a certain length but we have to manually cut our own hairs?
In: Biology
Humans have a natural hair limit like animals. It’s just that men and women alike often prefer to cut it shorter than that. This does bring up a good question.
Why then does human head hair so greatly exceed the head hair lengths of other creatures?
Because women.
Through sexual selection in our history, female humans with longer hair limits were preferred over their shorter counterparts likely because it came to represent good health and fertility which made them ideal partners and offspring-bearers.
The phenotype of long hair however, would still be passed onto male offspring and before long, all humans whether male or female had the capacity to grow their head hair multiple feet longer than those of animals. This would then also make it so males had to constantly trim their hair because our preferred manageable length is still far shorter than what our biology dictates.
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