The study’s claims open the door to the possibility that our Neanderthal ancestors may have used body paint to gain the ‘zebra advantage’, where the striped equines had less flies than both darker and lighter coloured horses. The beige model used in the study, while considerable less attractive to the insects compared to the dark-skinned one, nonetheless attracted twice as many as its dark-skinned, painted counterpart. The study claims that our ancestors may have used body paint not just for cultural reasons but also because it may have served “a function in heat regulation or as camouflage” that makes the insects ten times more interested in a dark-skinned human with no body paint compared to one with said cultural markings. Their new research involving different coloured mannequins and published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society shows that the biting insects with a preference for darker horses may well have been behind the origins of body painting, as they also appear to prefer darker skinned humans. The newest study revealed that painting a body with stripes was the most effective against insects
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