Combs
Andre Willers
24 April 2008

The oldest profession .
Hair Dressing and Grooming .

The time-traveller with hairdressing and grooming skills can get a job anytime back to hominid days . Beats plumbing any day .

This partially explains the queer gene : Faux-queer . A cunning stratagem to get close to females without the usual male chest-beating .

Discussion:

Grooming is built-in to the hair of mammals .

Hairs get tangled and knotted ( see Theory of Knots) . Your personal experience is that after day’s activity and a night’s sleep , your hair gets tangled and knotted . The theory shows that it is nearly certain that this will occur in any system with three degrees of freedom .

Tangled hair is a bit of no-no to our homonin . It shows that it cannot get a grooming partner . Parasites also have access to unprotected skin .

Chaos first did the weaving with knots and tangles .

Un-weaving was then invented .

Initially fingernails , then a sharp , hard pointed stick ( a one-toothed comb) to tease the knots apart ..
When a favourite stick was kept , it became a tool .

A one-toothed comb .

Found all over in old sites , but usually called something else .

Plaiting of hair followed . Then some unsung woman genius inverted it and plaited grasses and other fibrous growths . Ropes and nets were invented .
Physical strength became unnecessary .
Mk I humans followed .

MkII humans followed after Toba , when weaving was invented as insulation (clothes) . So was fashion , and the world was never the same .

From the evidence , fashion seems to be a more powerful driver than anything . I would like to put an “except” here , but from the Greenland evidence where people starved to death because eating abundant fish around them was “out of fashion” with some old bishop I cannot .

What is of interest is that un-weaving was invented first , then weaving .
Note the correlation of Peace being invented before War .

Multiple-tooth combs .
An invention so ubiquitous that every human on the planet today has one and uses it at least once a day .

It enables an individual to self-groom . You can comb out the tangles in your hair or pelt by your own , without help .

This had an enormous effect on the development of civilization . The very concept of individualism is predicated on the existence of combs .

It frees the individual from the tyranny of the group .

An unkempt individual is excluded . No ifs or buts . Look around you at the homeless people . Once grooming is lost , so is social acceptance and survival . Hence the large number of spaza-hairdressers . It is not an affectation , but sheer survival .

See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Super Refugee”

Note the insistence of disciplined groups like the military or police to hair grooming . Or the inverse , the trust civilians have for anybody with a taut haircut .

See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Old Age Markers”
Note the hairstyles of the Mandarin class in China : shaven in front , denoting wisdom from survival , and extravagant hair (plaits) at the back , denoting humanity .
Hence , a monk will shave his head denoting a divorce from human concerns .

If someone obviously not in a religious order shaves his head (like bouncers , etc) they signal an indifference to the grooming order . They are essentially doomed . An extremely interesting feedback cycle is initiated that ends in the marginalization of such individual . They tend not to have children .


It must be noted that these are universal hominin markers , operating at well below conscious perception .

Andre