Thousands of years later, we’ve moved on from garlands and revolting concoctions to expensive creams, tonics and shampoos, and last resorts of toupes, pills and surgery. Today you can attend a hair loss clinic, sign up for hair-loss counselling and it’s not unusual to see adverts telling balding men to “see their doctor”. Papers discuss balding in epidemic terms, meanwhile the phenomenon even has a new scientific-sounding name, “androgenic alopecia”. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might think it was a medical condition.

Accordingly, across the globe, we spend $3.5bn (£2.7bn) on baldness cures every year. That’s more than the entire national budget of Macedonia or, as Bill Gates pointed out last year, significantly more than we spend on the control of malaria (just $200m (£154m) per year).

And what today’s treatments lose out on in ingredients they make up for in unpleasant side-effects. Sales of the anti-hair-loss drug Propecia, which has been linked to impotence, hit a record high of $264m (£204m) in 2014. Hair transplants, meanwhile, are notoriously bloody and have been known to make grown men cry. According to a 2009 survey by the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, almost 60% of men would rather have a full head of hair than money or friends.

Have we got it all wrong?

There’s mounting evidence that bare heads aren’t a spectacular evolutionary accident after all. Bald men are seen as more intelligent, dominant and high status; their shiny scalps may help them to seduce women or even save lives.

Before we can get to grips with what makes balding so great, first we need to set the record straight.

Contrary to popular wisdom – and the existence of super-macho baldies such as Bruce Willis – the propensity to lose your hair doesn’t make you any more of a man. Bald men are no more virile and they don’t have higher testosterone levels, though they do tend to have hairier arms, legs and chests. Perhaps most surprisingly, bald men don’t actually have any fewer hairs on their heads.