See http://aquaticape.topcities.com/hair.html for the full web-site (including other, more valid counter arguments).

Writing about body hair and the AAH's claim that our nakedness was a swimming adaptation Jim Moore wrote...

"Now for the first question, does lack of body hair make us faster swimmers? Sure, we already know it can't make us fast enough, but does it make us faster at all?  Since we've seen swimmers shave their body hair for years now, it might surprise you as it did me [it wouldn't surprise me!] to find that there was no real attempt to experiment and see if it actually worked until fairly recently.

When I looked this up some time back, in literature on sports physiology, I found one study which showed an effect that could possibly help swimming speed, although actually helping swimming speed was not demonstrated. ("Influence of body hair removal on physiological responses during breaststroke swimming", Rick L. Sharp and David L. Costill, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 1989: 21(5), pp. 576-580.)  That study showed a difference in build-up of lactic acid in the muscles in athletes who had shaved their bodies, a slight increase in distance per swim stroke, and an "insignificant decline" in heart rate, which all together indicated reduced effort in swimming.  This, it was assumed, would lead to an increase in swimming speed.  They also showed a slight increase in coasting distance (compared to a control group) when a swimmer dove into a pool when that swimmer had shaved their body hair.  These differences, they felt, could be as high as 3-4%, which would work out -- for the fastest Olympic swimmers in the fastest event -- to as much as one-quarter of a mile per hour.  This would be important for competition swimmers, where an increase in a quarter mile per hour might easily mean the difference between defeat and victory against other human swimmers, but against swimmers -- like crocs and sharks -- that still swim 2-5 times faster, it would have a negligible effect."

:-)    !

Jim, clearly assumes that these hominids would be competing against the crocs and the sharks when anyone that knows anything about evolution knows that they were, in fact, competing with each other to get away from the predator not with the predator itself. It's the traits that help the ones survive that would get passed on and the fact that one or two poor hominids would get caught and eaten every time, just adds weight to the selective pressure for those traits and would be expected to speed up their evolution.

If a trait could give an individual a 3% advantage in one race (a race *not* to be the last - as a group desperately try to get out of the water) how much benefit might it give an adolescent hominid, assuming he only had to swim once a week, over fifteen years before he was able to pass on his genes? And this is for ONE GENERATION!! How much selective pressure might there be for such genes that eliminate body hair over, say six million years?

It's a beautiful piece of evidence. When I had considered this, I thought that the advantage might be something of the order of 0.05% - I thought that that would be strong enough - but 3-4%!? That's an amazing difference - just by shaving body hair off humans - imagine if it was a gorilla?

Algis Kuliukas