National Geographic is reporting that human hairlessness may have evolved as a strategy to shed the ticks, lice, fleas, and other parasites that nestle deep in fur. “One of the most unusual things about humans is that we don’t have fur,” said study co-author Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at Reading University in England, who suggests the idea in an upcoming issue of Biology Letters. His idea is meeting with scepticism. The most prevalent theory to explain human hair loss is to allow adaptation to hot African savannas. Another thought is that humans lost their hair to aid in swimming to fill aquatic ecological niches; humans are by far the best swimmers of the great apes.

No word yet from the authors about what advantages evolutionary loss of hair would confer against urinary-tract burrowing Staphylinidae rove beetles.