Straight hair is not special. Every animal on earth and even almost all humans have straight hair, except the black people. Curly hair that is what some Africans have is actually quite unique. But can black people have straight hair?
In order to answer this question, we must make it clear what is black people. Is the race whose skin is dark? Or the people from Africa? It’s all a matter of definition. If you ask me whether people with dark skin can have straight hair, I can confidently give out my answer: yes. In India and some southeastern countries, people can have skin as dark as Africans, but they have a variety of hair textures. Even in places like Melanesia, a group of islands in Pacific, many people have dark skin, but straight hair as the Europeans and the Asians.
However, in the world of many western people, “black” is confined to negroid race that is mostly found in Africa. More precisely, it is the west central Africa which is most colonized and used for European and American slave markets. In almost all people’s mind, one person can not have natural straight hair if he or she is African. And in most cases, it is likely to be true, because we rarely see people from Africa with straight hair in life.
But why? One thing that may be involved is heat protection. White people sweat, and the sweat just drops off and doesn’t cool the body by evaporating on it. People who go into desert environments are advised to wear long sleeves and long trousers, because they absorb the moisture and the moisture will then evaporate, thus it cool the skin or at least cool the air between the body and the clothing. While Africa is known for its extremely hot, and straight hair just drips sweat. A person with kinky hair around the head will be cooled by evaporation.
Thousands of years ago, there may be different people with straight, wavy straight, wavy, wavy curly, very curly and kinky hair in this mainland. Once you get outside for food or water, your scalp will be exposed to the sun. But different hair has different ability to protect skin, and straight hair would seem like a disadvantage. From generation to generation, natural selection gradually drove out straight hair, just because it interfered with the body’s ability to cool off. Therefore, the God left a population of mostly people with curly hair, producing offspring with even more kinky hair than the previous generation until about everyone in that population had the same gene of kinky hair.
Nevertheless, there should always be exceptions to the rule. Even if all Africans have curly hair, there are still one or two exceptions with straight hair. East Africans most commonly vary in hair texture, especially Ethiopians, Somalis and Eritreans. For instance, the former President of Somalia, Abdullahi Yusuf, has natural straight hair and he is completely an black African.
