By Reynaldo Mena
Daniela Ganoza has fought to embrace her curly hair. Being a television personality, it was not easy for her curly hair to be accepted on camera. This sparked the idea of reclaiming her identity and, we can say, her social movement.
“The idea of creating ‘Curly and Proud’ dates back to my early career experience. I had a very negative experience in one of my first jobs at a sports channel; they told me that my hair was a problem. I couldn’t believe it. In Peru, my birthplace, nobody had ever mentioned it. We know that in the Caribbean, it is normal to see people with curly hair,” Daniela Ganoza commented in a recent interview.
“We need to figure out what to do with your hair,” the Cuban producer told me. “I realized it was going to be a problem.”
The struggle had only just begun, as well as the task of reclaiming her roots.
“I always told myself, ‘I’ll pull it back, but I won’t change it,'” says the correspondent journalist for Primer Impacto on Univision.
“On Rojo Vivo and at the Premios Juventud, my colleagues started telling me that they were going to give me some advice. Imagine that! Their advice was that I had to change my hair. They said that focus groups indicated that people didn’t trust someone with my type of hair. That’s when Curly and Proud was born. I took on the task of reclaiming curly or wavy hair,” says Daniela Ganoza.
Well, her movement and struggle led to the possibility of more people appearing on camera. And now, that struggle goes even further. A recent study published in National Geographic revealed that “the curls on your head may have originally served as an evolutionary advantage for growing bigger human brains.”
“The brain is a large and very heat-sensitive organ that also generates a lot of heat,” explains Tina Lasisi, currently a postdoctoral researcher in biological anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. “So we figured, evolutionarily, this could be important—especially in a period of time when we see the brain size of our species growing.”
The new research shows that tightly curled hair better protects the scalp from solar radiation and doesn’t lie flat against the skin when wet. This is beneficial in hot conditions that can make humans sweat, like those encountered by our hominin ancestors in Africa millions of years ago.
An evolutionary advantage?
It’s even possible that curly hair might be one of the reasons why Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal and Denisovan species of hominins, which died out about 40,000 years ago.
Lasisi points out that if the genetic mutations for curly hair occurred before Homo sapiens left Africa but after our hominin ancestors did, it might have given early modern humans an evolutionary advantage. However, she doesn’t think that’s likely. Instead, the study proposes that genes for curly hair arose much earlier in human evolution, perhaps around two million years ago when Homo erectus was the dominant hominin. It suggests that as hominin brains grew bigger, the genes for curly hair, which protected the scalp from the sun, may have given those who had them an advantage.
As for straight hair, Lasisi says any genetic predisposition for curly hair among early hominins was probably variable. “We don’t expect that it would have been homogeneous,” she says. At a later point in our evolution, curly hair may have lost its evolutionary advantage, and straight hair may have been favored by different types of genetic selection.
“Maybe once we had those larger brains, we also had all these cultural adaptations to avoid overheating, like better sources of water,” she says. “And at that point, maybe there wasn’t such a selective pressure for curly hair.”
Daniela Ganoza has carried out her campaign through her company, selling different types of clothing and bags with various designs.
So, we can conclude that her struggle, even unknowingly, reveals an important part of civilization’s history.
