Eve

It is a little known fact that Charles Darwin had a body hair fetish.

Which, in a roundabout way, might explain our glowing opinion of the genetic bard.

Scientific history works just like science itself, by cherry picking the facts that work and quiet suppression of those that don’t.

On the subject of body hair, for Darwin the fetish came first and then he went an ill-advised step further and attempted to merge this fetish with his then novel hypothesis for evolution.

In a nut shell, Darwin proposed that hairless apes (humans) resulted from a single genetic mutation and that this mutation was selectively expressed to the point of domination because the apes found nude more attractive.

This dodgy hypothesis has hardly survived history and it shows how we manage to suppress the facts that don’t fit the image that we want to project for our idols.

It does however beg the question, why are we nude?

Having pondered this for a while my best guess is that the mutation for something genuinely useful like speech also rendered us accidentally hairless, which must have actually been somewhat of a drawback before clothes were invented.

Eve may very well have been the first attractive, hairless and verbally expressive woman on the planet. She would also have likely been either very sunburnt or very cold, depending on where she lived at the time.