Body Hair Transplantation

In reply to my post titled Hirsute Men and Head Hair Loss, Duke writes…

That is fascinating but it prompts a few thoughts. Why not use body hair for transplant processes?

More research into the Red Indian genetic heritage us surely required.

And why does the balding gene only impact on the top of the head and not the sides.

This is a fun question. First, why the top of the head. Leonard Shlain’s book, “Sex, Time and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution,” had an interesting insight into the cause of balding. He postulates that our tribal heritage arose when man lived amongst his peers constituting 100-150 people. When looking at that the hunters (the healthy and fit men) in the light of certain qualities, there was a distribution of 4 traits that would pencil out to an 8% rule. He believed as animals learned to be afraid of man, the 8% of the hunters who were bald did not frighten the animals because they did not have the typical framed face of a hairy man, so animals would not run from them. They fulfilled the role of the spotter in the hunting party. Likewise, 8% of men were color blind and could see the animals in the bush missed by normal color visioned men, 8% were left handed and they threw the spear from the left side of the hunting group and 8% were gay so that they would stay home with the women and become more involved in their activities yet retain the strength to protect them. Fathering of children, while the heterosexual man were away hunting, was therefore not a concern.

If you take the 100-150 tribe hypothesis into the Red Indian, it would be relatively easy to see that with a small band of Indians that moved over from the Alaskan Bridge and down the Canadian countryside (they initially migrated to what would become the western American territory) it is possible that selective extermination of a sub-set (based upon the balding trait for example) of Indians over some generations during hard times, might have wiped out that genetic characteristic. This hypothesis for the Red Indian has been made by some, but without the presence of a written language or other documentation of their history, such assumptions might be a dangerous precedence to be proposed by a hair transplant surgeon.

Now, regarding body hair transplantation:

Experimentation is presently occurring on the use of body hair in some transplant centers (they just do not call it experimentation). As body hair grows in singular numbers (not follicular units of more than 1 hair each as in scalp hair) and length is not as long, and the hair cycle is possibly much shorter and the sleep cycle much longer, the use of body hair for transplantation might leave much to be desired.