kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_hair-3.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Body hair	4/4	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_hair	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T15:31:24.069114+00:00	kb-cron

== Across populations == In 1876, Oscar Peschel wrote that North Asiatic Mongols, Native Americans, Malays, Hottentots and Bushmen have little to no body hair, while Semitic peoples, Indo-Europeans, and Southern Europeans (especially the Portuguese and Spanish) have extensive body hair. Anthropologist Joseph Deniker said in 1901 that the very hirsute peoples are the Ainus, Uyghurs, Iranians, Aboriginal Australians (the people of Arnhem Land being less hairy), Toda, Dravidians and Melanesians, while the most glabrous peoples are the Indigenous Americans, Bushmen, and East Asians, who include Chinese, Koreans, Mongols, and Malays. Deniker said that hirsute peoples tend to have thicker beards, eyelashes, and eyebrows but fewer hairs on their scalp. C. H. Danforth and Mildred Trotter of the Department of Anatomy at Washington University in St. Louis conducted a study using American army soldiers of European origin in 1922 where they concluded that dark-haired white men are generally more hairy than fair-haired white men. Harry Harris, publishing in the British Journal of Dermatology in 1947, wrote Native Americans have the least body hair, Han Chinese people and black people have little body hair, white people have more body hair than black people and Ainu have the most body hair. Anthropologist Arnold Henry Savage Landor described the Ainu as being "very hairy". Stewart W. Hindley and Albert Damon of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University studied, in 1973, the frequency of hair on the middle finger joint (mid-phalangeal hair) of Solomon Islanders, as a part of a series of anthropometric studies of these populations. They summarize other studies on prevalence of this trait as reporting, in general, that Caucasoids are more likely to have hair on the middle finger joint than Negroids, Australoids and Mongoloids, and collect the following frequencies from previously published literature: Andamanese 0%, Inuit 1%, African American 16% or 28%, Ethiopians 25.6%, Mexicans of the Yucatan 20.9%, Penobscot and Shinnecock 22.7%, Gurkha 33.6%, Japanese 44.6%, various Hindus 40–50%, Egyptians 52.3%, Near Eastern peoples 62–71%, various Europeans 60–80%. However, they never completed an Androgenic hair map. According to anthropologist and professor Ashley Montagu, East Asian people are less hairy than other groups. Montagu said that the hairless feature is a neotenous trait. Eike-Meinrad Winkler and Kerrin Christiansen of the Institut für Humanbiologie studied, in 1993, the Kavango people and !Kung people from Namibia of body hair and hormone levels to investigate the reason some Africans did not have bodies as hairy as Europeans. Winkler and Christiansen concluded the difference in hairiness between some Africans and Europeans had to do with differences in androgen or estradiol production, in androgen metabolism, and in sex hormone action in the target cells. Valerie Anne Randall of the Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Bradford, said in 1994 beard growth in Caucasian men increases until the mid-thirties due to a delay caused by growth cycles changing from vellus hair to terminal hair. Randall said white men and women are hairier than Japanese men and women even with the same total plasma androgen levels. Randall says that the reason for some people being hairy and some people not being hairy is unclear, but that it probably is related to differing sensitivity of hair follicles to 5α-reductase. Rodney P. R. Dawber of the Oxford Hair Foundation said that East Asian males, as well as black Africans and Native Americans, have little facial or body hair and Dawber also said that Mediterranean males are covered with an exuberant pelage. Milkica Nešić and her colleagues from the Department of Physiology at the University of Niš, Serbia, cited prior studies in a 2010 publication indicating that the frequency of hair on the middle finger joint (mid-phalangeal hair) in Europeans is significantly higher than in African populations, where the lowest values were found, and "completely absent" in Northern Native American (Inuit) populations. Their own study found that the latter was part of a wider trend of "Mongoloid" peoples having less hair overall.

== Androgenic hair as biometric == It has been shown that individuals can be uniquely identified by their androgenic hair patterns. For example, even when one's particular distinguishing features such as face and tattoos are obscured, persons can still be identified by their hair on other parts of their body.

== See also == Alopecia Hair removal Hirsutism Human hair color Trichotillomania

== References ==

== External links ==

Media related to Body hair at Wikimedia Commons