Next time you're at a bar, or grocery store or even at work - look around. Do all the guys look the same? Are they mostly sporting dark-rimmed glasses, a beard, a plaid shirt, skinny leg pants and a (oh God, no) wool cap? Facial hair may have made a comeback in recent years, but it isn't new. In fact, facial hair is used by primates to help them identify each other, according to Discovery News.
New research published by Proceedings of the Royal Society B discusses the visual social network primates use. (Frida Kahlo and Sam Waterston would have been Top Friends, in the MySpace of monkeys).
"Primates are a visual group that have lots and lots of face-to-face interactions," study co-author James Higham told Discovery News. "The evolutionary history of primates is one of increasing reliance on vision at the expense of olfaction, which is the sense that is used more ancestrally among mammals."
