Why Do Desert People Cover Up When You'd Strip Off?

Why do desert people wear more clothes in extreme heat? At fifty degrees in the Sahara, the Bedouin and the Tuareg cover every inch of skin — and they are not enduring the heat despite the robe. They are beating it with the robe. Your instinct to strip off is not stupid. It is just built for the wrong country. Below about thirty-seven degrees, bare skin sheds heat into cooler air. Above it, every breeze on bare skin is delivering heat into you instead — and the sun arriving straight down as radiation does not care about wind at all. So the robe is not insulation against cold. It is a way of running your body's cooling system at a price the desert can afford. The gap between cloth and skin holds still air. The sun and the fifty-degree air land on fabric instead of you. Far less heat reaches your body in the first place, which means far less sweat to hold the same temperature — and in a place with no water, water is the whole game. Then there is the part nobody believes until they see the data: the robes are often BLACK. In 1980 Amiram Shkolnik and Arieh Borut put Bedouin volunteers in black robes and white robes in the Sinai and measured them. The results are in this video. CHAPTERS 0:00 The thing that makes no sense 1:05 Your instinct 2:10 The first enemy 3:15 The second enemy 4:20 So you cover up 5:25 The air in the gap 6:20 What happens in the room 7:25 And it costs you less water 8:25 And it breathes 9:25 The black robe 10:30 Everything else it does SOURCES Shkolnik, A., Taylor, C. R., Finch, V. & Borut, A. (1980) — Why do Bedouins wear black robes in hot deserts? Nature 283. Standard desert thermoregulation literature on radiant load, convective gain above skin temperature, and evaporative water cost. Ancient You Explained — why ancient humans did the things you still do. New videos Monday and Thursday.