That scratch on your arm, that scrape on your knee — they’re taking their sweet time to heal, and it’s likely the fault of your fur, or, really, your lack thereof. Testing the speed of skin healing in an assortment of animals, a team of researchers has found that skin takes a lot longer to heal in humans than it does in other primates and mammals.
Publishing their results in a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the researchers say that the reason may be because of the loss of fur in humans around 2 million years ago.
“Human wound-healing rates were found to be markedly slower,” the researchers report in their study. In fact, the rates were “approximately three times slower than those observed in non-human primates.”
