Hairy Babies!

Apologies, (Fossil) Phil, for once again dredging up a malaprop that I'm sure you'd just as soon we all forgot about, but I heard this story (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623059/description#description) on the news this morning and I really felt I'd be doing you all a disservice by not bringing it to everyone's attention. The long and short of this article is that it's been hypothesized that the reason modern humans are hairless is because Cro-Magnon mothers might have selected their more hirsute offspring for infanticide. As far as I can tell, there's not a scrap of real evidence anywhere, but I suppose that's what you should expect from a journal called "Medical Hypotheses" and an author who's address is some town in New Jersey. At the very least, though, it emphasizes the potential importance of hairy babies in human evolution, a subject left strangely unadderessed by most prior paleoanthropological studies...