Dear Mr. Biologist,
Why don’t women go bald as they age, like men do?
-Happily Hairy On Top
Dear Happily,
At a time in our evolutionary past when our ancestors lived in caves, men were accustomed to raiding other settlements to find wives and girlfriends. Think of it as an early form of speed dating. Much of the social dating protocols we know today were not developed yet. Men basically grabbed the women and dragged them by their hair back to their caves, while fighting off angry relatives in the process. Distances between settlements were long and women needed strong hair roots to survive the journey. The ones who made it back to the new cave to reproduce passed on their strong hair root genes, which you enjoy today. The ones with weaker roots did not survive the journey. Over time mate selection has evolved into the more two-way hair pulling process we know today.
