Million Dollar Question: What's the Evolutionary Purpose of a Hymen?

christianity should disown comfort and cameron for being such cretinous imbecile.

 

perhaps they don't have much else

 

The human being is not the only animal with Hymen retention past the embryonic stage.

Some species of animal that retain a hymen:

horses, whales, moles, mole-rats, hyenas

In some of the species the hymen isn't completely destroyed until childbirth. (e.g. the great fin whale)

It has been speculated that it was retained to keep out water and irritants in water and underground creatures and simply not yet removed by natural selection in many species. A carryover from previous steps in the evolutionary ladder where our "ancestors" dwelt in water or a more dirty environment.

However all ideas about this are from speculation, which is what Doctors will do when they are tired of talking about themselves during a boring date. They are certainly not based on testable hypothesis.

 

Okay this question made me scratch my head and say hmmm, so here's one explanation that makes sense:

Some of the last cells to mature in the female body are the cells of the cervix. Before these cells have matured the cell membranes are particularly vulnerable to being breached by pathogens, and the cervix remains very vulnerable to infection. It has been hypothesized that the hymen originally exists to protect the developing tissues of the vagina and cervix from dirt and pathogens during childhood, until the cells of the cervix and the cells of the vagina mature fully and start secreting the mucus which protects them in later life.

In our modern day of bathing and wearing clothes, this is probably not nearly as important as it was to our unbathed, pre-clothing primate ancestors.

There *is* some evidence for this function, however, as girls who start to have sex before age 16 are vastly more prone to pick up STDs or infections from more general pathogens such as strep and staph (oh yes, you can get a strep infection "down there"), and roughly 5x more likely to contract human papilloma virus, which specifically infects the cervix, and it isn't all to do with unprotected sex or risky behaviors, either.

 

That's very interesting !

 

Are you a hymenologist?

 

Please tell us more about this discipline