Beards, mostly false, were also, worn by men of rank. The rank of the individual was signified by the length of the beard. The beard of an individual of low rank was short and square. The beard of a king was equally square, but much longer. The beard of a god was pointed and turned up at the end. Inasmuch as Pharaohs were regarded as gods after death, they too were depicted with curved beards. Merchants, landowners, and upper classes wore beards. The false beards were made of tufts of hair held in place by cords looped back over the ears. Slaves and lower classes were beardless.
Charles and DeAnfrasio, History of Hair
Throughout human history probably no other social trapping has played so large a role as hair. Though the function of hair is complex, one theme predominates - its menacing use to signify rank. Thus, I will use hair as a central thread to introduce several diverse evolutionary themes involving a suite of human social organs used in threat. Out of an evolutionary context, our hair patches are curiously located. Why do we, have a little tuft under our arms, a triangle in our crotch, some above our eyes, on our crown, and, among males, this coarse growth on the lower face? Using information from comparative anatomy and behavior, it all fits into a definite pattern of function and location. Each of five following chapters is devoted to the function and, evolution of a different hair patch (and the organs that evolved with each patch): beards, eyebrows, our scent patches, the crotch and underarm tufts, scalp hair, with a final chapter on the social role of hair in general. The origin and function of these hair patches in our communication are quite different, but the have that one thing in common - menace.
In the summer of 1959, on a fossil dig the upper Brazos in northeast Texas, I grew a beard. Shaving in the field was inconvenient, and it was a good excuse to see what the thing looked like, anyhow. In the late 1950's there were a few beards on T.V. (Mitch Miller was the first, I believe), but there were none to be found in be found in the rural Midwest. If I hadn't realized it before, it became very clear to me then in my travels, that the human beard was no emotionally neutral object. My hitchhiking success was the same as had I been carrying bandoleers of cartridges slung from each shoulder and a knife between my teeth. Drivers speeded up as they passed, gawking in disbelief. In bus stations people talked loudly and derogatorily about me. Some people were considerate, asking what religion it was that I represented. Homosexuals propositioned me in johns and clerks ignored me in stores. It was the same me, behind the beard, but I was treated like a completely different person.
In the rocks we were excavating that summer were remains of Permian reptiles and amphibians. At that time, about 200 million years ago, no mammal had ever raised a hairy head. But in sediments a few hundred miles to the north of our dig there were bones from later beds that revealed the lives of mid-Tertiary mammals who-lived about 30 million years ago. The primitive artiodactyls (vegetarians with cloven hooves), ancestors of the modern deer, bovids, pigs, and giraffes, were still heavy-limbed and thick-bodied. Instead of fighting with horns and antlers, they fought with sharp teeth. As time passed and their descendants evolved into larger creatures, they must also have attacked their opponents with blunt head thrusts to the body with some form of pointed projection on the head. Teeth were still used, but their role was declining in many groups.
Among modern artiodactyls, we can see remnants of these early fighting patterns and can piece together how the animals might have behaved long ago. Not all modern ungulates fight with horns and antlers. In some deer, like the Chinese water deer, the males have long teeth and neither sex possesses antlers. Males fight by slashing at each other with their teeth. And they use their canines in a threat display. The hair on the lower lip beneath the canine teeth is black, setting off the outline of the white fang.
Strangely enough, other deer that have switched from canine fighting to antlers as weapons, such as the majestic European red deer or his American counterpart the elk or wapiti, still retain part of the threat behavior associated with their ancestral canine fighting. These deer still have that black spot on their lips. In some of the American deer, the Virginia (whitetail) deer and the mule deer, the black spot has even expanded to color most of the lower jaw. But even more significantly, wapiti lift their upper lip in a snarl in one of their threat displays to reveal the tiny vestigial canine which in their ancestors was a flashing, wicked scimitar. Opponents, however, recognize the gesture as threat as if the long canine were still there and ready to tear its deep gashes. The ancient, out-of-date weapon is still used symbolically.
If any primate besides man were to attack you or a member of his own species, it would be a biting attack. Nonhuman primates are virtually all armed with projecting sharp teeth whose main function is to chomp into members of their own species; they have no horns or sharp hooves to use in fights. Invariably the canines of the males are larger than those of the females and in many cases they are so much larger that it is difficult to believe both are members of the same species.
Tooth-baring and mouth movements play an important role in primate social signals - perhaps the most important role. Predictably, the oral area has specialized supporting paraphernalia. It is brightly colored in some, or adorned in contrasting shades. But the major morphological ornamentation occurs in the areas wielding the weaponry - the jaw and jaw muscles.
Some types of facial hair and color patterns found among primates, including man: (A) Celebes black ape; (B) Crab-eating monkey; (C) White ear-tufted marmosets; (D) Squirrel monkey; (E) Sacred baboon; (F) Brazzae monkey; (G) Hoolock gibbon; (H)Patas monkey; (I) Red-backed saki; (J) Diana monkey; (K)Congo guenon; (L) Mandrill; (M) Black-crested mangabey; (N) Man; (0) Moustached tamarin; (P) Owl-faced monkey; (Q) ked howler; (R) Red uakari; (5) Orangutan; (T) Gorilla; (U) Grivet; (V) Abyssinian colobus.
The two chief themes in these changes are increased contrast and false contours. A number of primate species have contrastingly colored snouts or lower faces. An equally large or even larger number have chin or cheek ruffs contributing to a false contour. That is, they are bearded. Old male orangs, howlers, and sakis have particularly large beards. Some, like the male baboon, have immense sideburns, which always remind me of the exaggerated "muttonchops" worn in Europe and North America during the mid-to late 1800's. The mandrill baboon has a blond goatee with a Van Dyke point. The face, and correspondingly the size of the face, are important in primate communication. Beards of various types fuse indistinguishably in some cases with facial ruffs.
Human beings are different from most other primates in our choice of weapons, even though it is only a difference of degree rather than kind. Instead of biting when we fight, we flail away with our arms, objects held by our arms, or missiles thrown by them. I suppose this peculiarity arose in conjunction with the specialization of becoming a rock-wielding predator. We turned the newly acquired methods of the chase back on our fellow man. Since these were several magnitudes more effective than trying to run up and bite him, the whole evolutionary accent on the mouth as a weapon was reduced in our evolutionary line. We can see in the fossil record a reduction in tooth size among our ancestors and their immediate relatives even back into the Pliocene several million years ago.
It is good to point out this dramatic shift away from our primate oral tradition, because it is important in understanding our humanness. But that is a lot of heritage to shake. For almost a hundred million years we have bitten as primates should and served time as non-mammalian biters for several hundred million years before that. Like the antlered red deer who challenges his opponent in the dim light of a German forest glade with a snarl, we fight with our new tools yet can't help harking back to the older ones - as we search for clues to our opponent's social state and signal ours to him. Like the red deer, we still use our teeth and jaws to signal.
A friend of mine once felt extremely self-conscious about his mildly receding chin. He developed the habit of resting his chin in the heel of his hand every time he sat down at a desk or table, pushing outward in the hope that it would make him more prognathous. Another trick was to keep his teeth occluded in an underbite to press his jaw further forward. If his age and the social norms had permitted it, he could have grown a beard, as Abraham Lincoln did during his latter period of office, to increase the apparent size of his jaw.
Bullies the world over jut out their jaws as a symbol of belligerence; it is a gesture understood by people of all tongues and customs.
"He glared at the schoolmaster. Town bred, ain't yer mister?' His beard jutted fiercely, thrust at an angle into the schoolmaster's face."
Stranger, Breed of Giants
People shrinking in horror retract their jaws toward the neck as part of the submission signal, the grimace. The chimp uses the jaw in a similar manner in its displays. Konrad Lorenz refers to humans' sticking out their chins as a vestigial part of our threat display. We often cover up our chins and mouths with our hands when under social stress. Plastic surgeons do a good business inserting silicone artificial chins in people who wish to present a stronger image. In our everyday activities we use chin size in appraising other individuals and refer to strong jaws and weak chins, as if they had some rational relation to people's personalities.
In a way they do, of course. The chin is the quickest clue to an individual's sex and age status in an unshaven, unshorn, and unplucked society. One begins life with a tiny smooth round chin, which becomes more prominent with age.
The young (and sometimes the females) of many mammals have an unspoken protection from unrestrained male aggression. This recognition of youth and sex is accomplished by social ornamentation or the lack of it. Likewise, pre-puberty human males and all females have implicit protections from adult male aggressions. It is considered grossly unfair for a man to get into a knock-down, drag-out fight with either a girl or a nine-year old boy.
At the time of male puberty, chin hair, moustache, and sideburn growth down the jaw become symbolic of membership in adult male ranks. The beard continues to enlarge and become thicker until the mid-thirties. Along in the later thirties and early forties, it begins to gray - not everywhere, just in certain spots; these spots of light hair expand and lighten until eventually in the fifties and sixties the beard is completely white. Chins were accordingly sensitive indicators of relative status among our distant ancestors.
All this changed with shaving. Although shaving seems on the surface to be a rather arbitrary custom to promote comfort and sanitation, it goes well beyond that. Shaving is an alteration of a basic status organ for status reasons. A shaven adult male runs himself back down the hierarchy spectrum so that he can enjoy to some extent the protections given pre-puberty males. It is a gesture of social appeasement - of social facilitation. In general, one interacts more easily with a kid than with a patriarch, for rather obvious reasons. In our modern complex, open society, there are greater advantages accompanying a social posture of cooperation rather than blatantly flaunting one's high position. This factor will emerge as a general pattern as we investigate each character used in human social communication. Or there is a tendency in modern societies to alter one's social organs into more subtle covert signals of rank.
If you look at human beards carefully, you can see that the texture of the beard is very different from scalp hair. The change occurs in front of the ear, at the very zone where the scalp hair of females and pre-puberty males changes to the almost invisible soft velum hair of the cheeks. The beard hair is coarser than the scalp hair and has more kink. Coiling, thick hairs provide loft, creating a more exaggerated false contour than the finer, straighter hair of the scalp.
Also, there is more often than not a slight difference in color between the beard and scalp. On some males with light hair the beard is darker, and there are men with black scalp hair who have light (usually auburn or red) beards.
If the beard originated because it increased the apparent size of the jaw, one might expect that these pressures would result in an increase in actual size. The human chin is unusually large, and I contend this is the reason. The explanations which have attempted to account for our chin size on mechanical grounds - that it gives us greater biting power, allows clear speech, or protects our jaw from breakage - do not jibe with what we know about chins. Rather, the evidence points toward a function similar to that of the beard - a social organ, more specifically a threat device.
Human chins have a forward projection - the mental protuberance and mental tubercles (a couple of knobs - you can feel them) - which often extends farther forward than the lower teeth. Some living apes and early human ancestors have poorly developed mental knobs. Like the hair growth on the chin, the angles of primate chins vary considerably with age and sex in many species, and especially in human beings. The paired mental tubercles add character to the chin, usually in the form of a dimpled chin, visible mainly in females and pre-puberty males.
It is unimportant to know whether the chin developed before the beard, or vice versa. There is a complementarily in signal. A large jutting chin enhances the effect of a beard, and a prominent unbearded chin gives a signal somewhat similar to a small bearded chin. The large, square jaws of heroes on television soap operas or in cigarette advertisements are a socially acceptable form of menace, without the gross signal of a full, thick beard. The male and female models hired to represent types of masculinity and femininity, ugliness and beauty, etc., are sensitive indicators of current values regarding the meaning of facial characters.
It is difficult to believe that in early man the diet of prepuberty males and females was so different from that of mature males as to produce the gross differences in chin shape. It is not apparent that there are any eating handicaps suffered by a person with a receding chin. Phil Herskovitz discusses a number of criticisms of the earlier theories of chin function and concludes that the chin is an ornamentation. Yet he doesn't go so far as stating the connection between the evolution of jaws as status and threat signals and their role, present or past, as weapons.
The social myths attached to the human chin, and the growth there of special threat structures, suggest it has been affected by selection pressures arising from social interactions. Children the world over protrude the jaw as a gesture of anger and defiance. There are also genetic variations in the expression of skin puffiness below the lower lip. There is a broad continuous variation in these lip patterns. One such variation, however, was traced through the Hapsburg ancestry and found to be a dominant gene, referred to as the "Hapsburg lip." It is particularly common among Americans of Swedish or Norwegian ancestry.
Human beings tend to protrude their chin in times of anger and withdraw it in times of submission. In children the use of the lower lip to augment this display is particularly apparent. The child on the left is pushing out his lower lip in pouting defiance and the child on the right pulls his inward in shame. In personal recrimination adults even suck in their lower lip and bite it.
At the point in human evolution when our ancestors began to swing clubs at one another, the display organs around the mouth began to have less objective meaning. By this time the shift away from the mouth may have had little effect on its value as a signal though the raised arm with the bent elbow and a clinched fist is also an important signal of aggressive intent in humans. Why wasn't the shift away from mouth, jaw, and beard completed? One must remember that the audio portion of our threat still comes mainly from the mouth. Also remember that human beings do go through a relatively short stage in life, from just before one year of age until about one and a half, when the mouth is the most important weapon.
The significance of the chin, beard, and mouth also comes out in the actual gestures of aggression. The cheek slap is a physical expression of anger without injury - an emphatic form of communication rather than a blow intended to cause bodily harm. Women often use it against males as an extreme gesture of displeasure, usually without provoking combat. Between males it has a different meaning. It is the last stage in the threat escalation. In the days of jousting or dueling, a cheek slap with glove on hand was the formal challenge. Striking a blow with the flat of the hand on the ancient weapon of the other individual would have had the greatest intimidating effect. Also, in a serious fight, the first blows with the fist are usually aimed at the jaw and mouth, though other areas (eyes, neck, nose, abdomen and testicles) are even more vulnerable.
Human males with deep voices are considered more masculine. Many men with tinny voices affect a throaty bass. We are well aware of how the voice changes with age, especially at puberty. The male voice loses its pure, feminine pitch and becomes lower, with a squeaky period of alternating highs and lows in the interim. Eunuchs, without male hormones, have particularly falsetto voices.
In our daily conversations, we shift the tone of voice to match the situation. If the person we are talking to is a stranger, the notes are quite low. The way we answer a telephone is a good example of this. Here's a call from you-have-no-idea where or whom. So in a deep penetrating voice you answer, "Dr. Jones speaking." If it's a good friend calling one's voice rises several notches in pitch, running back down the age scale and giving a less intimidating signal. The net result is similar to shaving the chin to mimic the shiny chin of a juvenile.
Though vocal cords are not completely correlated with body size (there are some large people with high-pitched voices), there is a positive correlation. Small children, generally, have high-pitched voices. We grow up equating voice tone with age - parents, especially men, having low-pitched voices, younger siblings having high-pitched voices. So adults, we unconsciously ascribe status to variations in voice, even though we know there is no rational connection. Can you imagine a successful politician with a high, squeaky voice? Next time you hear an argument, listen to the changes in voice tone. The one who is righteously confident will have a quiet, deep voice. Once the argument starts to turn against him, he lowers his voice even further, in desperation. When it becomes apparent that he has lost, but he still continues to support his position out of principle, his voice tone rises in pitch.
Think how differently the church pastor spoke when he met you on the street and talked about things unrelated to the church. There is a special tone preachers and orators use - the sound of high dominance. But this analysis is not limited to a few oddities among us. It's about you and me. It's unnerving, once you tune your ear to pick up these changes, all of a sudden to catch yourself doing it; we do it all the time, but we've become so accustomed to operating this way that it's difficult to analyze ourselves.
Human beings don't differ from the general mammalian pattern in respect to voice quality and rank. Many mammals have voices that vary with age and sex - most primates, ungulates, carnivores, and many members of other groups. In most instances, voice changes are used in status displays. Loud utterances are important threats among primates, though the sounds, of course, have no direct value in actual fighting (as do beards). Their effect is psychological - it's part of the menacing threat. The human war cry, profanity, or the fencer's he la are similar in principle to the lion's roar. There is no rational connection between "Banzai!" and one's ability to shoot straight, yet these cries are not without effect.
The "ruggedness" of the jaws, forehead, and cheekbones of many males is connected to the depth and volume of sound that they can produce. The frontal and nasal sinuses are also social organs; remember that during your next bout with sinusitis. They function mainly as resonating chambers. The selection for deeper, louder voices creates larger sinuses accompanied by a more rugged, knobby face, along with a protruding Adam's apple from a larger larynx, and undoubtedly a larger mouth and jaws.
It is a military truism that traditional weapon use dies hard. Long after the popularity of fully automatic rifles, soldiers continued to carry a bayonet attachment at the muzzle, which converted the gun into a spear, and rifles were heavily constructed to make them useful as clubs. All of this was at the root of the heated M-14 rifle controversy in the 1960's. Biologically, weapon significance and tradition are also slow to change in their evolution. Not only do we still make a big social fuss over the weapon wielder - the chin, cheekbones, etc. - but we still hold a good set of teeth in high esteem, like the flashy but totally unusable sword of the officer.
The tooth, the killing tusk among mouth-killers, went out of fashion in Australopithecine times, both as a predation tool and as an actual social weapon. Among mouth-killers, the display of teeth was one of the more important threat displays; we still carry inherent parts of the primate snarl in our facial signals. Like deer who display useless vestigial canines, we have evolved away from our snarl's having any actual weapon value, but it still has tremendous social significance. The social flash of white teeth is inextricably rooted in our ancestry. But the decline in the value of the canine teeth, and perhaps its social grossness, have reduced it to the level of an incisor - an apple nibbler. Because of the need for more covert threat signals in a highly cooperative society, this ancestral primary weapon might have been the first to go - but it left a legacy. We've lost the protruding canine, but the value of those striking white teeth is still appreciated, as we appreciate the lines of a beautiful chin or high cheekbones.
Among the many forms of cultural alteration of teeth there are gradients between two extremes: (1) an artificial emphasis of the canine, causing an irregularity of the dental line - an ornamentation which attracts attention to the teeth; and (2) a disguising of the projecting canine, a smooth dental line - a general de-emphasis of the teeth. Basically, this distinction follows the cultural polarity between menace and appeasement.
There are customs in many cultures which exaggerate the canines. The most extreme of these is ablation - knocking out teeth, usually the incisors. It has occurred in some form or other in prehistoric Spain, England, Africa, Asia Minor, Japan, California, Florida, and Alaska. As a rule the upper incisors were the teeth most frequently removed, leaving the two canines framing a gap, much like a make-up for Dracula. Teeth were also notched or filed to points to create a similarly threatening appearance. The Mayas are renowned for their tooth mutilation. Filing teeth to a point was practiced widely, in Africa, Southeast Asia, Central, North, and South America, and among the Negrito pygmies in the Philippines. The inlaying of special stones or rare metals into teeth has been equally widespread. These mutilations were generally associated with high station, puberty rites, or wedding rites - the acquisition of status.
The beauty associated with tooth de-emphasis, on the other hand, has usually been linked, with a less threatening signal. The most extreme form is to dye one's teeth black (or red, to match the gums) with a paint, or to chew a material such as betelnut which gives the teeth a natural black tartar. This practice is most common among women (e.g., the Bontak of Luzon or the Japanese and Chinese). It returns the appearance to a baby-like one.
In unaltered teeth there are natural variations of protruding canines and smooth dental lines, or even sawtooth patterns. In most cultures today we admire the compromise of white threatening teeth, but with smooth, even edges - in the same sort of compromising way that a strong chin is admired above either extremes, a receding chin or a gross beard.
Cultural alterations of natural and artificial human teeth which affect status: (A) protruding canines; (B) even contour; (C) notched incisors which add to the irregular line; (D) ablation of upper incisors; (E) ablation of both upper and lower incisors; (F) inlay of tooth surface; (G) gold cap; (H) painting teeth with red or black dyes; (I) chewing plants which give the teeth a black tartar stain; (1) filing teeth to sharp edge; (K) filing notches in teeth; (L) filing teeth smooth.
The flash of dental white accents, as it did of old, many mouth expressions. Many mammals have what is known as a wide-mouthed "greeting-face" where the corners of the mouth are pulled backward and upward to reveal all the teeth - a gesture much different from a snarl. Ethologists have interpreted this as "See, here are my weapons, but they won't be used against you" (as in presenting one's hand to be shaken in a gesture of friendship - "I could hurt you with this, but instead it is being presented in a non-offensive way"). We have ritualized this in the military "presentation of arms" and the discharge of weapons as salutes.
You have probably seen the "greeting face" on dogs; most household pets use it many times daily. Primates also use it, and there is essentially no difference between this gesture and a smile. The status part of the tooth display is important in both masculine and feminine features. The Balinese even go so far as to file the teeth at puberty to an even profile, as a protruding canine is considered vulgar and ugly.
Most mammals that threaten with their teeth accompany the visual display with an auditory display. They grind and chatter their teeth, especially in what ethologists call defensive threat. We have lost this part of our display, but one can see a vestigial remnant of it in teeth chattering under extreme fear, or in the flexing of the jaw muscles by one who is irritated or nervous (he is grinding his teeth back and forth). We refer to these actions colloquially as "gritting one's teeth" rather than taking action, or as "gnashing of teeth" by the threatened subordinate.
Human beards, then, are part of a suite of anatomical, modifications around our ancient social weapon. The evolution of chins, teeth, voice, and beards has changed to modify the signals being transmitted from the mouth. Analogous to the caribou mane, human beards originated as a fake exaggeration of the weapon wielder. Though we have virtually abandoned the jaw as a physical social weapon, it still is an important signal source - and so is that chin-mane we call a beard.
Not all human hair tufts function as false contours or to dramatize weaponry. Some, like underarm and crotch hair, function quite differently. We use these hair patches, as another important vehicle of menace - odor.