Wrestlemania!

A week or two ago, HBD Twitter (now under target by Stasi) floated a theme that beards developed in fistfighting culture. Men and women prefer not to settle their mutual differences by punches to the face; ditto women and women. Man to man, by contrast, sometimes do go mano a mano. The Greeks notably included boxing in their Jeuses Olympiques, and we had the Marquess of Queensbury in England.

It all looked Too Good To Check so I did my usual brave thing of not paying attention. Until today! h/t HBDchick and screw the Stasi.

This thesis turns out to be testable - amongst survivals of the Pleistocene today (or throwbacks thenceto): hunter-gatherers. It turns out that the Sirono... don't box. Unless some idiot gets drunk. And then the rest of the tribe mocks him for fighting like white men. Nah - for the Sirono, decent men wrestle.

If we're talking actual savages, like Steve Pinker noted in Better Angels: those guys will come at you with sharp objects or clubs. Your beard won't help with either. (Although kinky scalp hair might, until - hopefully - you get old enough not to get into clubfights.)

We might raise this up to Asian culture whose martial arts are defensive (judo, jiu-jitsu, aikido) or use feet a lot. You could get punched in the face... but more likely you're breaking some ribs. Or an arm when your punch gets blocked and twisted.

So maybe the beard developed specifically in boxing cultures. The Greeks, then, will have been Olympian fistfighters from since before the Bronze Age; ditto, the Ainu and maybe the Jomon. I suspect the Semites also. And Julia Lovell's weightlifters of 307 BC western China like Wu king of Qin - who (I suspect) was R1b (likely over the Iron Age - there's some late-breaking news about the Bronze Age). The Siberians before entering Beringia never boxed, and once in the New World whoever did box didn't do it for long enough to change their genome.