Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. Lauren bog Obam here with a classic episode from our erstwhile host, Christian Sagar. This is what I've been thinking about because of all the time I've been spending when I am out in public interacting with people who are wearing a covering over the lower half of their face. The question of the day is why do we have eyebrows? Hey, brain stuff? It's Christian Saga, and I'm here to tell you why human beings have eyebrows,
because look at them. Take clus look, go over to the mirror. Look, aren't they just ridiculous? I mean, they're also very well manicured, but they're also ridiculous. Now, scientists aren't entirely sure why we have this hair, but they have a pretty good guess. The arch shape of the eyebrow diverts rain or sweat around to the sides of our face, keeping our eyes relatively dry, and the most obvious advantage of this is that it allows us to
see clearly even when we're sweating a lot. Diverting the sweat away is also good because the salt in sweat irritates our eyes. But just to test things. I shook a salt shaker into my eye and take it from me. It burns like hell fire. Eyebrows are a very significant aspect of our appearance. They are one of the most distinctive features that make up our faces, and we pay a lot of attention to them and look. Eyebrows are
also one of the most expressive facial features. One of the clearest ways we're telling somebody what we're thinking is to simply move our eyebrows up and down. But what
if we didn't have eyebrows. Scientists have thought about this as well, and they think that if we didn't have eyebrows, we would have gotten instead these long snuffle luck bagus style eyelashes, as well as far protruding foreheads, which could have been kind of useful because we could put things up there I don't know, like like our keys, but rain or sweat would then drop from that ledge on our face straight away down onto the rest of our
face without getting into our eyes. So all right, way to go, evolution for not making us look like that. Today's episode was written by someone I could not figure out who, but it was produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com brain Stuff is production of I heart Radio for more podcasts to my heart Radio. Is it the heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,