When We Were Dolphins

No one knows why we became naked three million years ago -- theories concerning looking good to the opposite sex and cooling off have but debunked. But one of the more promising explanations described in a recent New Scientist article suggests that we might be relatively hairless for the same reasons that dolphins and whales are:

None of this affects Hardy's theory that humans lost their body hair during an aquatic interlude. But his theory claims to offer one explanation for a whole range of enigmatic human features: bipedality, hairlesslessness, fat layer, descended larynx, loss of olfaction, and so on. If it turns out that the big two - bipedality and nakedness - arose at roughly the same time, that might shift the balance of probability some little way toward Hardy.

Martinis by the pool, anyone?