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Mutton, an Indigenous woolly dog, died in 1859 − new analysis confirms precolonial lineage of this extinct breed, once kept for their wool

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Mutton, an Indigenous woolly dog, died in 1859 − new analysis confirms precolonial lineage of this extinct breed, once kept for their wool

Indigenous Coast Salish women wove woolly dogs’ fur into blankets.
Artist’s reconstruction by Karen Carr

Audrey T. Lin, Smithsonian Institution; Chris Stantis, University of Utah, and Logan Kistler, Smithsonian Institution

Dogs have been in the Americas for more than 10,000 years. They were already domesticated when they came from Eurasia with the first people to reach North America. In the coastal parts of present-day Washington state and southwestern British Columbia, archaeologists have found dog remains dating back as far as about 5,000 years ago.

Dogs performed many different roles in North American Indigenous communities, including transportation, that in other parts of the world were done by multiple other domestic animals.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Indigenous Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest had traditionally maintained a breed of long-haired dog for the purpose of harvesting their hair, or wool, for textile fibers. Along with alpacas and llamas, these woolly dogs are one of only a few known animals intentionally bred for their fleece in all of the Americas.

But the practice of keeping woolly dogs and weaving textiles made from woolly dog yarn declined throughout the 19th century, and the dogs were considered extinct by the beginning of the 20th century. What had happened to them?

dog paw on furry pelt with handwritten tag
Mutton’s pelt has been preserved at the Smithsonian Institution for more than 160 years.
Audrey Lin

Today, the only confirmed woolly dog specimen is “Mutton,” whose pelt has been housed in the Smithsonian’s collection since his death in 1859. In life, this “Indian dog” was the companion of George Gibbs, a naturalist working on the Northwest Boundary Survey expedition to map out British Columbia and the American Pacific Northwest. In death, Mutton offered the opportunity to learn more about woolly dog ancestry, selection and management.

We are an archaeologist, an evolutionary molecular biologist and a molecular anthropologist who are part of a large research team. It’s important to note that although we collaborated with a number of Indigenous people on our study, the scientists, including the three of us, are not Indigenous. Alongside historical documents and interviews of Coast Salish elders, knowledge keepers, weavers and artists, our team utilized “Two-Eyed Seeing” – viewing the world through the combined strengths of Indigenous knowledge and western science – to bring Mutton’s story and legacy back to life.

A prestigious part of Indigenous culture

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, there were several types of dogs in the Pacific Northwest: larger “village” dogs and hunting dogs and smaller woolly dogs, kept separately to prevent interbreeding. Woolly dogs were a little larger than the modern American Eskimo dog breed and had curled tails, pricked ears and a pointed foxlike face. Instead of barking, they howled.

Traditionally, only high-status Coast Salish women were allowed to keep woolly dogs, and a woman’s individual wealth could be measured by how many she had. Blankets woven of dog hair, often mixed with hair from mountain goats and waterfowl or plant fibers, were important trade and gift items.

Historians and economists, looking back, first claimed the disappearance of the woolly dog breed was the result of simple capitalist forces: The availability of cheap manufactured blankets offered by businesses like the Hudson’s Bay Company meant the Coast Salish didn’t need to make their own blankets. Why go through the immense time and labor in keeping wool dogs and crafting blankets in the traditional way when you could just buy a machine-woven blanket?

But the Coast Salish don’t agree. Debra qwasen Sparrow, a master weaver of the Musqueam Nation, explained to us, “The blankets really tell a story of our history, our families, the way in which they identified in the communities, (they’re) all reflected in the blankets.”

And Coast Salish people say they would never have willingly parted with their beloved canine friends. The simple economic explanation ignores the massive role colonialism played in the demise of the woolly dogs. Repressive government policies tried to control and subdue Indigenous cultural practices.

“They were told they couldn’t do their cultural things. There was the police, the Indian agent and the priests,” Stó:lō Nation elder Xweliqwiya Rena Point Bolton told our research team. “The dogs were not allowed. (My grandmother) had to get rid of the dogs. And so the family never ever saw them.”

Eventually, there were no more Coast Salish woolly dogs.

pelt fur-side down on a paper-covered table
Researchers used a portable X-ray fluorescence analyzer as part of their investigation of Mutton’s remains.
Audrey Lin

Piecing together a picture of Mutton’s life

We did have access to Mutton’s pelt, though, which had been archived for more than 160 years. No one knows exactly how Gibbs initially acquired Mutton, but it’s likely he got the dog while working with local communities in Stó:lō territory in present-day British Columbia. Using modern techniques, we set out to answer questions about Mutton’s breed and ancestry.

First we used stable isotope analysis, a chemical analysis of once-living tissues, to understand more about Mutton’s environment when he was alive: what kinds of foods he ate and the state of his health.

Interviews of the elders and knowledge keepers confirmed that the woolly dog diet was very different from village dogs, including special foods that kept the dogs healthy and their coats shiny. For example, salmon, elk or certain local plants would be set aside for the woolly dogs.

The stable isotope values of Mutton’s fur suggested he’d been eating maize for some time, but less and less up to the point when he died. The letters of one expedition member imply they were running low on cornmeal and supplementing their imported supplies by trading with locals. Although Gibbs noted in his journal that Mutton was ill before he died, there was no isotopic evidence to support chronic illness; Mutton may have become sick quickly.

Scientist with blue gloves uses a tool to lift a bit of hair from the pelt
Chris Stantis carefully removes a minimal sample from Mutton’s pelt for further analyses.
Hsiao-Lei Liu

Next, we turned to genetic analysis for insight into the dog’s ancestry to understand long-term management of this breed. We sequenced Mutton’s DNA and compared it with a contemporaneous village dog that was killed by the explorers in an unknown village in the Pacific Northwest. We also compared Mutton’s DNA with a genetic panel of many other modern and ancient dogs.

We found that Mutton is a rare example of an Indigenous North American dog with precolonial ancestry who lived well after the arrival of white settlers. Using a dataset of mitochondrial genomes from Mutton and more than 200 ancient and modern dogs, we made an elaborate family tree. Called a time-calibrated phylogenetic tree, it creates a diagram of the evolution of Mutton’s maternal lineage.

Based on the tree, we estimate that Mutton’s most recent common ancestor diverged from one other ancient dog from British Columbia between 1,800 and 4,800 years ago, corresponding with the known archaeological record. In other words, Mutton’s woolly dog lineage has been isolated from other dogs for millennia.

We see evidence of inbreeding in Mutton’s genome that can result only from careful long-term selective breed management. We identified variants of genes associated with hair and skin, including KRT77 and KANK2, which are linked to woolly hair in humans.

However, Mutton lived during a very volatile time period. For example, in 1858 more than 33,000 miners flooded into present-day British Columbia in search of gold. This influx left its mark in Mutton’s DNA, and we found that about one eighth of his genome – representating about one great-grandparent’s worth of DNA – came from settler-introduced European dogs.

Finally, we worked closely with a scientific artist, using archaeological dog bones and Mutton’s pelt, to reconstruct what these dogs looked like in life with scientific accuracy.

zig-zag patterened blanket with fringe on three sides
A Coast Salish classic-style blanket, which has woolly dog hair in the warp fibers that were stretched across the loom. Accessioned 1838-1842.
USNM E2124, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

What this woolly dog confirms about the past

With Mutton’s pelt, our team wove together these different ways of exploring the many lives of Mutton – his ancestry as an Indigenous dog, his life traveling with white settlers, and finally his time in the Smithsonian Institution.

Mutton is the latest dog we’re aware of with that much precolonial dog ancestry. European colonization was devastating to Indigenous people in North America. The fact that Mutton carries as much Indigenous dog DNA as he does is a testament to the care that Coast Salish people took to keep the woolly dog tradition alive.

Our Coast Salish weaving collaborators are very keen to learn more about how traditional blankets housed in museum collections are made – to inform efforts to revive complex techniques and better understand the unique materials used. With Mutton’s genetic sequencing, future researchers may be able to identify dog hair in heritage woven materials. Some Coast Salish would like to see the woolly dogs return to their families once again. There’s currently no way to bring back the original woolly dogs, such as by cloning Mutton, because his DNA is far too degraded after more than 160 years. But a new kind of woolly dog could be created in the future through selective breeding and care.

“But the thing that’s most important (is) that (the) wool dog created a gift to produce and to make something, to create something, to bring something alive,” Michael Pavel, elder of the Twana/Skokomish Tribe, told us. “Let’s do that. Let’s bring that back to life. … The wool dog is still very much a part of our life.”The Conversation

Audrey T. Lin, Research Associate in Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution; Chris Stantis, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah, and Logan Kistler, Curator of Archaeobotany and Archaeogenomics, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Colors are objective, according to two philosophers − even though the blue you see doesn’t match what I see

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theconversation.com – Elay Shech, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University – 2025-04-25 07:55:00

What appear to be blue and green spirals are actually the same color.
Akiyoshi Kitaoka

Elay Shech, Auburn University and Michael Watkins, Auburn University

Is your green my green? Probably not. What appears as pure green to me will likely look a bit yellowish or blueish to you. This is because visual systems vary from person to person. Moreover, an object’s color may appear differently against different backgrounds or under different lighting.

These facts might naturally lead you to think that colors are subjective. That, unlike features such as length and temperature, colors are not objective features. Either nothing has a true color, or colors are relative to observers and their viewing conditions.

But perceptual variation has misled you. We are philosophers who study colors, objectivity and science, and we argue in our book “The Metaphysics of Colors” that colors are as objective as length and temperature.

Perceptual variation

There is a surprising amount of variation in how people perceive the world. If you offer a group of people a spectrum of color chips ranging from chartreuse to purple and asked them to pick the unique green chip – the chip with no yellow or blue in it – their choices would vary considerably. Indeed, there wouldn’t be a single chip that most observers would agree is unique green.

Generally, an object’s background can result in dramatic changes in how you perceive its colors. If you place a gray object against a lighter background, it will appear darker than if you place it against a darker background. This variation in perception is perhaps most striking when viewing an object under different lighting, where a red apple could look green or blue.

Of course, that you experience something differently does not prove that what is experienced is not objective. Water that feels cold to one person may not feel cold to another. And although we do not know who is feeling the water “correctly,” or whether that question even makes sense, we can know the temperature of the water and presume that this temperature is independent of your experience.

Similarly, that you can change the appearance of something’s color is not the same as changing its color. You can make an apple look green or blue, but that is not evidence that the apple is not red.

Apple under a gradient of red to blue light
Under different lighting conditions, objects take on different colors.
Gyozo Vaczi/iStock via Getty Images Plus

For comparison, the Moon appears larger when it’s on the horizon than when it appears near its zenith. But the size of the Moon has not changed, only its appearance. Hence, that the appearance of an object’s color or size varies is, by itself, no reason to think that its color and size are not objective features of the object. In other words, the properties of an object are independent of how they appear to you.

That said, given that there is so much variation in how objects appear, how do you determine what color something actually is? Is there a way to determine the color of something despite the many different experiences you might have of it?

Matching colors

Perhaps determining the color of something is to determine whether it is red or blue. But we suggest a different approach. Notice that squares that appear to be the same shade of pink against different backgrounds look different against the same background.

Green, purple and orange squares with smaller squares in shades of pink placed at their centers and at the bottom of the image
The smaller squares may appear to be the same color, but if you compare them with the strip of squares at the bottom, they’re actually different shades.
Shobdohin/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

It’s easy to assume that to prove colors are objective would require knowing which observers, lighting conditions and backgrounds are the best, or “normal.” But determining the right observers and viewing conditions is not required for determining the very specific color of an object, regardless of its name. And it is not required to determine whether two objects have the same color.

To determine whether two objects have the same color, an observer would need to view the objects side by side against the same background and under various lighting conditions. If you painted part of a room and find that you don’t have enough paint, for instance, finding a match might be very tricky. A color match requires that no observer under any lighting condition will see a difference between the new paint and the old.

YouTube video
Is the dress yellow and white or black and blue?

That two people can determine whether two objects have the same color even if they don’t agree on exactly what that color is – just as a pool of water can have a particular temperature without feeling the same to me and you – seems like compelling evidence to us that colors are objective features of our world.

Colors, science and indispensability

Everyday interactions with colors – such as matching paint samples, determining whether your shirt and pants clash, and even your ability to interpret works of art – are hard to explain if colors are not objective features of objects. But if you turn to science and look at the many ways that researchers think about colors, it becomes harder still.

For example, in the field of color science, scientific laws are used to explain how objects and light affect perception and the colors of other objects. Such laws, for instance, predict what happens when you mix colored pigments, when you view contrasting colors simultaneously or successively, and when you look at colored objects in various lighting conditions.

The philosophers Hilary Putnam and Willard van Orman Quine made famous what is known as the indispensability argument. The basic idea is that if something is indispensable to science, then it must be real and objective – otherwise, science wouldn’t work as well as it does.

For example, you may wonder whether unobservable entities such as electrons and electromagnetic fields really exist. But, so the argument goes, the best scientific explanations assume the existence of such entities and so they must exist. Similarly, because mathematics is indispensable to contemporary science, some philosophers argue that this means mathematical objects are objective and exist independently of a person’s mind.

Blue damselfish, seeming iridescent against a black background
The color of an animal can exert evolutionary pressure.
Paul Starosta/Stone via Getty Images

Likewise, we suggest that color plays an indispensable role in evolutionary biology. For example, researchers have argued that aposematism – the use of colors to signal a warning for predators – also benefits an animal’s ability to gather resources. Here, an animal’s coloration works directly to expand its food-gathering niche insofar as it informs potential predators that the animal is poisonous or venomous.

In fact, animals can exploit the fact that the same color pattern can be perceived differently by different perceivers. For instance, some damselfish have ultraviolet face patterns that help them be recognized by other members of their species and communicate with potential mates while remaining largely hidden to predators unable to perceive ultraviolet colors.

In sum, our ability to determine whether objects are colored the same or differently and the indispensable roles they play in science suggest that colors are as real and objective as length and temperature.The Conversation

Elay Shech, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University and Michael Watkins, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University

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Perfect brownies baked at high altitude are possible thanks to Colorado’s home economics pioneer Inga Allison

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theconversation.com – Tobi Jacobi, Professor of English, Colorado State University – 2025-04-22 07:47:00

Students work in the high-altitude baking laboratory.
Archives and Special Collections, Colorado State University

Tobi Jacobi, Colorado State University and Caitlin Clark, Colorado State University

Many bakers working at high altitudes have carefully followed a standard recipe only to reach into the oven to find a sunken cake, flat cookies or dry muffins.

Experienced mountain bakers know they need a few tricks to achieve the same results as their fellow artisans working at sea level.

These tricks are more than family lore, however. They originated in the early 20th century thanks to research on high-altitude baking done by Inga Allison, then a professor at Colorado State University. It was Allison’s scientific prowess and experimentation that brought us the possibility of perfect high-altitude brownies and other baked goods.

A recipe for brownies at high altitude.
Inga Allison’s high-altitude brownie recipe.
Archives and Special Collections, Colorado State University

We are two current academics at CSU whose work has been touched by Allison’s legacy.

One of us – Caitlin Clark – still relies on Allison’s lessons a century later in her work as a food scientist in Colorado. The other – Tobi Jacobi – is a scholar of women’s rhetoric and community writing, and an enthusiastic home baker in the Rocky Mountains, who learned about Allison while conducting archival research on women’s work and leadership at CSU.

That research developed into “Knowing Her,” an exhibition Jacobi developed with Suzanne Faris, a CSU sculpture professor. The exhibit highlights dozens of women across 100 years of women’s work and leadership at CSU and will be on display through mid-August 2025 in the CSU Fort Collins campus Morgan Library.

A pioneer in home economics

Inga Allison is one of the fascinating and accomplished women who is part of the exhibit.

Allison was born in 1876 in Illinois and attended the University of Chicago, where she completed the prestigious “science course” work that heavily influenced her career trajectory. Her studies and research also set the stage for her belief that women’s education was more than preparation for domestic life.

In 1908, Allison was hired as a faculty member in home economics at Colorado Agricultural College, which is now CSU. She joined a group of faculty who were beginning to study the effects of altitude on baking and crop growth. The department was located inside Guggenheim Hall, a building that was constructed for home economics education but lacked lab equipment or serious research materials.

A sepia-toned photograph of Inga Allison, a white woman in dark clothes with her hair pulled back.
Inga Allison was a professor of home economics at Colorado Agricultural College, where she developed recipes that worked in high altitudes.
Archives and Special Collections, Colorado State University

Allison took both the land grant mission of the university with its focus on teaching, research and extension and her particular charge to prepare women for the future seriously. She urged her students to move beyond simple conceptions of home economics as mere preparation for domestic life. She wanted them to engage with the physical, biological and social sciences to understand the larger context for home economics work.

Such thinking, according to CSU historian James E. Hansen, pushed women college students in the early 20th century to expand the reach of home economics to include “extension and welfare work, dietetics, institutional management, laboratory research work, child development and teaching.”

News articles from the early 1900s track Allison giving lectures like “The Economic Side of Natural Living” to the Colorado Health Club and talks on domestic science to ladies clubs and at schools across Colorado. One of her talks in 1910 focused on the art of dishwashing.

Allison became the home economics department chair in 1910 and eventually dean. In this leadership role, she urged then-CSU President Charles Lory to fund lab materials for the home economics department. It took 19 years for this dream to come to fruition.

In the meantime, Allison collaborated with Lory, who gave her access to lab equipment in the physics department. She pieced together equipment to conduct research on the relationship between cooking foods in water and atmospheric pressure, but systematic control of heat, temperature and pressure was difficult to achieve.

She sought other ways to conduct high-altitude experiments and traveled across Colorado where she worked with students to test baking recipes in varied conditions, including at 11,797 feet in a shelter house on Fall River Road near Estes Park.

Early 1900s car traveling in the Rocky Mountains.
Inga Allison tested her high-altitude baking recipes at 11,797 feet at the shelter house on Fall River Road, near Estes Park, Colorado.
Archives and Special Collections, Colorado State University

But Allison realized that recipes baked at 5,000 feet in Fort Collins and Denver simply didn’t work in higher altitudes. Little advancement in baking methods occurred until 1927, when the first altitude baking lab in the nation was constructed at CSU thanks to Allison’s research. The results were tangible — and tasty — as public dissemination of altitude-specific baking practices began.

A 1932 bulletin on baking at altitude offers hundreds of formulas for success at heights ranging from 4,000 feet to over 11,000 feet. Its author, Marjorie Peterson, a home economics staff person at the Colorado Experiment Station, credits Allison for her constructive suggestions and support in the development of the booklet.

Science of high-altitude baking

As a senior food scientist in a mountain state, one of us – Caitlin Clark – advises bakers on how to adjust their recipes to compensate for altitude. Thanks to Allison’s research, bakers at high altitude today can anticipate how the lower air pressure will affect their recipes and compensate by making small adjustments.

The first thing you have to understand before heading into the kitchen is that the higher the altitude, the lower the air pressure. This lower pressure has chemical and physical effects on baking.

Air pressure is a force that pushes back on all of the molecules in a system and prevents them from venturing off into the environment. Heat plays the opposite role – it adds energy and pushes molecules to escape.

When water is boiled, molecules escape by turning into steam. The less air pressure is pushing back, the less energy is required to make this happen. That’s why water boils at lower temperatures at higher altitudes – around 200 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver compared with 212 F at sea level.

So, when baking is done at high altitude, steam is produced at a lower temperature and earlier in the baking time. Carbon dioxide produced by leavening agents also expands more rapidly in the thinner air. This causes high-altitude baked goods to rise too early, before their structure has fully set, leading to collapsed cakes and flat muffins. Finally, the rapid evaporation of water leads to over-concentration of sugars and fats in the recipe, which can cause pastries to have a gummy, undesirable texture.

Allison learned that high-altitude bakers could adjust to their environment by reducing the amount of sugar or increasing liquids to prevent over-concentration, and using less of leavening agents like baking soda or baking powder to prevent dough from rising too quickly.

Allison was one of many groundbreaking women in the early 20th century who actively supported higher education for women and advanced research in science, politics, humanities and education in Colorado.

Others included Grace Espy-Patton, a professor of English and sociology at CSU from 1885 to 1896 who founded an early feminist journal and was the first woman to register to vote in Fort Collins. Miriam Palmer was an aphid specialist and master illustrator whose work crafting hyper-realistic wax apples in the early 1900s allowed farmers to confirm rediscovery of the lost Colorado Orange apple, a fruit that has been successfully propagated in recent years.

In 1945, Allison retired as both an emerita professor and emerita dean at CSU. She immediately stepped into the role of student and took classes in Russian and biochemistry.

In the fall of 1958, CSU opened a new dormitory for women that was named Allison Hall in her honor.

“I had supposed that such a thing happened only to the very rich or the very dead,” Allison told reporters at the dedication ceremony.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.The Conversation

Tobi Jacobi, Professor of English, Colorado State University and Caitlin Clark, Senior Food Scientist at the CSU Spur Food Innovation Center, Colorado State University

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Why don’t humans have hair all over their bodies? A biologist explains our lack of fur

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theconversation.com – Maria Chikina, Assistant Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh – 2025-04-21 07:33:00

Some mammals are super hairy, some are not.
Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

Maria Chikina, University of Pittsburgh

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.


Why don’t humans have hair all over their bodies like other animals? – Murilo, age 5, Brazil


Have you ever wondered why you don’t have thick hair covering your whole body like a dog, cat or gorilla does?

Humans aren’t the only mammals with sparse hair. Elephants, rhinos and naked mole rats also have very little hair. It’s true for some marine mammals, such as whales and dolphins, too.

Scientists think the earliest mammals, which lived at the time of the dinosaurs, were quite hairy. But over hundreds of millions of years, a small handful of mammals, including humans, evolved to have less hair. What’s the advantage of not growing your own fur coat?

I’m a biologist who studies the genes that control hairiness in mammals. Why humans and a small number of other mammals are relatively hairless is an interesting question. It all comes down to whether certain genes are turned on or off.

Hair benefits

Hair and fur have many important jobs. They keep animals warm, protect their skin from the sun and injuries and help them blend into their surroundings.

They even assist animals in sensing their environment. Ever felt a tickle when something almost touches you? That’s your hair helping you detect things nearby.

Humans do have hair all over their bodies, but it is generally sparser and finer than that of our hairier relatives. A notable exception is the hair on our heads, which likely serves to protect the scalp from the sun. In human adults, the thicker hair that develops under the arms and between the legs likely reduces skin friction and aids in cooling by dispersing sweat.

So hair can be pretty beneficial. There must have been a strong evolutionary reason for people to lose so much of it.

Why humans lost their hair

The story begins about 7 million years ago, when humans and chimpanzees took different evolutionary paths. Although scientists can’t be sure why humans became less hairy, we have some strong theories that involve sweat.

Humans have far more sweat glands than chimps and other mammals do. Sweating keeps you cool. As sweat evaporates from your skin, heat energy is carried away from your body. This cooling system was likely crucial for early human ancestors, who lived in the hot African savanna.

Of course, there are plenty of mammals living in hot climates right now that are covered with fur. Early humans were able to hunt those kinds of animals by tiring them out over long chases in the heat – a strategy known as persistence hunting.

Humans didn’t need to be faster than the animals they hunted. They just needed to keep going until their prey got too hot and tired to flee. Being able to sweat a lot, without a thick coat of hair, made this endurance possible.

Genes that control hairiness

To better understand hairiness in mammals, my research team compared the genetic information of 62 different mammals, from humans to armadillos to dogs and squirrels. By lining up the DNA of all these different species, we were able to zero in on the genes linked to keeping or losing body hair.

Among the many discoveries we made, we learned humans still carry all the genes needed for a full coat of hair – they are just muted or switched off.

In the story of “Beauty and the Beast,” the Beast is covered in thick fur, which might seem like pure fantasy. But in real life some rare conditions can cause people to grow a lot of hair all over their bodies. This condition, called hypertrichosis, is very unusual and has been called “werewolf syndrome” because of how people who have it look.

A detailed painting of a man and a woman standing next to one another in historical looking clothes. The man's face is covered in hair, while the woman's is not.
Petrus Gonsalvus and his wife, Catherine, painted by Joris Hoefnagel, circa 1575.
National Gallery of Art

In the 1500s, a Spanish man named Petrus Gonsalvus was born with hypertrichosis. As a child he was sent in an iron cage like an animal to Henry II of France as a gift. It wasn’t long before the king realized Petrus was like any other person and could be educated. In time, he married a lady, forming the inspiration for the “Beauty and the Beast” story.

While you will probably never meet someone with this rare trait, it shows how genes can lead to unique and surprising changes in hair growth.


Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.The Conversation

Maria Chikina, Assistant Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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