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zoologist to name the creature ‘the naked ape’. We have since seen that it could have been given any number of suitable names: the vertical ape, the tool-making ape, the brainy ape, the territorial ape, and so on. But these were not the first things we noticed. Regarded simply as a zoological specimen in a museum, it is the nakedness that has the immediate impact, and this is the name we will stick to, if only to bring it into line with other zoological studies and remind’ us that this is the special way in which we are approaching it. But what is the significance of this strange feature? Why on earth should the hunting ape have become a naked ape?
    Unfortunately fossils cannot help us when it comes to differences in skin and hair, so that we have no idea as to exactly when the great denudation took place. We can be fairly certain that it did not happen before our ancestors left their forest homes. It is such an odd development that it seems much more likely to have been yet another feature of the great transformation scene on the open plains. But exactly how did it occur, and how did it help the emerging ape to survive?
    This problem has puzzled experts for a long time and many imaginative theories have been put forward. ‘One of the most promising ideas is that it was part and parcel of the process of neoteny. If you examine an infant chimpanzee at birth you will find that it has a good head of hair, but that its body is almost naked. If this condition was delayed into the animal’s adult life by neoteny, the adult chimpanzee’s hair condition would be very much like ours.
    It is interesting that in our own species this neotenous suppression of hair growth has not been entirely perfected. The growing foetus starts off on the road towards typical mammalian hairiness, so that between the sixth and eighth months of its life in the womb it becomes almost completely covered in a fine hairy down. This foetal coat is referred to as the lanugo and is not shed until just before birth. Premature babies sometimes enter the world still wearing their lanugo, much to the horror of their parents, but, except in very rare cases, it soon drops away. There are no more than about thirty recorded instances of families producing offspring that grow up to be fully furred adults.
    Even so, all adult members of our species do have a large number of body hairs—more, in fact, than our relatives the chimpanzees. It is not so much that we have lost whole hairs as that we have sprouted only puny ones. (This does not, incidentally, apply to all races—negroes have undergone a real as well as an apparent hair loss.) This fact has led certain anatomists to declare that we cannot consider ourselves as a hairless or naked species, and one famous authority went so far as to say that the statement that we are the least hairy of all the primates is, therefore, very far from being true; and the numerous quaint theories that have been put forward to account for the imagined loss of hairs are, mercifully, not needed. This is clearly nonsensical. It is like saying that because a blind man has a pair of eyes he is not blind. Functionally, we are stark naked and our skin is fully exposed to the outside world. This state of affairs still has to be explained, regardless of how many tiny hairs we can count under a magnifying lens. The neoteny explanation only gives a clue as to how the nakedness could have come about. It does not tell us anything about the value of nudity as a new character that helped the naked ape to survive better in leis hostile environment. It might be argued that it had no value, that it was merely a by-product of other, more vital neotenous changes, such as the brain development. But as we have already seen, the process of neoteny is one of differential retarding of developmental processes. Some things slow down more than others—the rates of growth get out of phase. It is hardly likely, therefore, that an infantile trait as