Research Humans’ wounds heal much more slowly than other mammals’

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/scien...=url-share

EXCERPTS: Compared with her own experiences with nicks and cuts, the baboons’ ability to heal seemed like a superpower.

In a study published on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Dr. Matsumoto-Oda and her colleagues compared the healing rates of humans, chimpanzees, monkeys and mice. They found that human wounds took more than twice as long to heal as wounds of any of the other mammals. Our slow healing may be a result of an evolutionary trade-off we made long ago, when we shed fur in favor of naked, sweaty skin that keeps us cool.

[...] What surprised Dr. Matsumoto-Oda more was the consistency between the healing rates of the animal subjects, including chimpanzees. There was no significant difference in the speedy skin regrowth among different primates, which grew about 0.62 millimeters of new skin per day, or between primates and rodents. Humans were the clear outliers.

Elaine Fuchs, a stem cell biologist at the Rockefeller University who studies skin growth and repair and was not involved in the new research, said the results were what she would have expected. That’s because skin healing depends on hair.

Each hair grows from a hair follicle, which also houses stem cells. Normally, those stem cells just make more hair. But when called upon, they can grow new skin instead. “When the epidermis is wounded, as in most kinds of scratches and scrapes, it’s really the hair-follicle stem cells that do the repair,” Dr. Fuchs said.

Furry animals are covered in follicles, which help quickly close up wounds in mice or monkeys. By comparison, “human skin has very puny hair follicles,” Dr. Fuchs said. And our ancestors lost many of those follicles, packing their skin with sweat glands instead. Sweat glands also have stem cells, but they’re much less efficient at repairing wounds, Dr. Fuchs said... (MORE - missing details)

[Zinjanthropos]

Since we are the most dangerous animal on Earth it might mean that a predator smelling human blood would perhaps think twice about us being on their menu. This would buy us more time to heal properly perhaps?


AI says:

Yes, many predators can detect the scent of blood, including from cuts, and this is a key factor in their hunting behavior. The scent of blood is an attractive signal for predators like wolves, tigers, and wild dogs.

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Since we are the most dangerous animal on Earth it might mean that a predator smelling human blood would perhaps think twice about us being on their menu. This would buy us more time to heal properly perhaps? [...]

If so, it took a long row of hoeing over the millennia to finally achieve that fear.

[Zinjanthropos]

Since we are the most dangerous animal on Earth it might mean that a predator smelling human blood would perhaps think twice about us being on their menu. This would buy us more time to heal properly perhaps? [...]

If so, it took a long row of hoeing over the millennia to finally achieve that fear.

Just speculating…..I would wager animals know where we are way before we know where they are, if at all. If one critter can sense us then I would think there’d be many, ones that we don’t detect at all. No doubt humans were predated but like today, the killers were tracked and eliminated. It’s not a good thing to sense a human and then attack. Usually means death to the predator and the attack trait not passed on. Maybe it’s only those animals that we share a common environment with….thinking of how hard it might be to track sharks and gators…lol

[confused2]

Once you start killing with sticks and stones you don't need to come into direct contact with teeth, claws, hooves etc.