Monday, October 7, 2024

Did prehistoric humans shave?

Men have been shaving since the Stone Age.

World History

L ong before the age of electric and five-blade razors, men still felt compelled to shave. The practice is so old, in fact, that it dates back to the Stone Age, roughly 100,000 years ago. The planet was quite cold at the time; somewhat counterintuitively, this made facial hair a liability rather than a way of keeping warm. A long, damp beard doesn't exactly feel good in the rain or snow, and in extreme enough conditions it could trap enough moisture to freeze against the skin and cause frostbite.

This necessitated the first instances of shaving, though our ancestors' methods were unsurprisingly primitive. Lacking more advanced tools, the first people brave enough to maintain their facial hair did so with seashells that essentially functioned as tweezers — they simply pulled their hair out. They later moved on to using obsidian shards, which sounds less painful and more effective. Copper razors appeared in ancient Egypt between 2686 BCE and 2181 BCE, with some featuring decorative flourishes such as goose heads and hippo-shaped handles, suggesting this more primitive method of shaving lasted longer than most of us would like to imagine.

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By the Numbers

Length of the world's longest beard

8'3"

Weight (in tons) of woolly mammoths

4-6

Did you know?

The Stone Age was the longest period in human history.

It isn't even close, either, as the Stone Age began an estimated 2.6 million years ago and ended about 5,000 years ago. The period has been described as the first 99% of human history. Homo sapiens weren't the only hominids around during this era, as the now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans were still alive at the time as well. Divided into three periods — Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic — the Stone Age came to an end when humans first started working with metal and began making tools and weapons out of bronze. It was followed by the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age.