In recent years, biological anthropologists have initiated a deeper scientific inquiry into the evolutionary processes that have shaped the wide variety of skin pigmentation displayed by people from diverse places across the globe. However, very little attention has been given to the similarly broad varieties of human scalp hair.
In the latest episode of the Tracking Traits podcast, postdoctoral researcher Tina Lasisi relayed her aims as a scientist working on this issue, along with some of her findings and a burgeoning theory positing a possible evolutionary driver of tightly curled hair. Lasisi, who completed her doctorate in biological anthropology at Penn State in 2021 and is now working in quantitative and computational biology at the University of Southern California, began focusing on human hair variation during her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where she graduated with First Class Honors in 2014.
“What my research tries to do is to find ways to accurately and objectively measure scalp hair morphology, instead of us using these subjective terms, like curly, wavy, all of that kind of stuff,” said Lasisi. “Ultimately, one of the things that I want to do is to understand the genetics that underlie scalp hair morphology so that we can understand why it’s so variable across different human populations, and so that we can understand why it evolved.”
