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Dr. Nina Jablonski, primatologist, evolutionary biologist, and paleontologist, is professor and head of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Jablonski kicked off Day3 of Pop!Tech conference with a talk on the meaning of human skin, a subject that she addressed in great detail in her book “Skin: A Natural History”, offering the first comprehensive theory into the evolution, biology, and the effects of skin color on humans—from prehistoric to modern times.

Jablonski, a gray-haired and black-clad woman in her fifties, provocatively started her Pop!Tech talk by saying what “a phenomenal and exceptional group of primates” all of us in the audience were. She then quickly asks each of us in the audience to look to our neighbors and touch them for about 20 seconds.

Jablonski suspects that some of us didn't do this earlier this morning; she worries that we are too wired, surrounded by our cell phones and technology to even think about the great emotional power of the human touch. She says that we've lost the capacity to observe each other and wishes for a return of times when we did more things of this kind.

 rimates are remarkably observant kind of animals, says Jablonski. We touch one another, we inspect one another, and thus we learn from one another through observation. Primates are extraordinary among mammals in that our main sense is the sense of vision – that's the sense on which we depend most, for our information gathering. The second is the sense of touch equal to that of hearing. Far below that is the sense of smell, which is inferior and doesn't tell you much about the environment.

If one closely examines human beings, what one sees is very large amounts of what Jablonski dubs “real estate” devoted to receiving information from our eyes. What she means by this is a big part of the brain that receives information from our eyes – and there is a very large area that is devoted to receiving information from our sense of touch.

Despite the fact that human skin is extraordinary in many aspects, it is still something-- like many other parts of the body--we take entirely for granted, but we know very little about. It's out there for everyone to see, it's mostly naked, and it is extremely sensitive. It comes in the natural range of colors, it's something that we use as a canvass for expressing ourselves.

Our skin also helps us gather an enormous amount of information from and about our environment. Our hands have some of the most sensitive skin on our bodies it the skin of the hand – constantly sensitive, equipped with a variety of types and nerves that detect pain, touch and temperature and send that information back to our brain.

Next, Jablonski shows the picture of a cartoonish creature she calls “the human sensory homunculus”, whose body parts are proportional to the skin sensitivity they have (not surprisingly, hands is disproportionately the biggest part of its body). The picture reveals that our lips and tongue also quite come close.

As primates, we touch one another quite a lot, says Jablonsky, and we do that in rather meaningful-- and not at all random-- ways. This importance of the sense of touch – the mother of all senses, says Jablonski–forms an important part of our economy from the moment we are born. All primate species start to engage in very detailed types of touching with their mother. When they touch their mother and the mother touches them in return, the bond of motherhood is reinforced.

Jablonski quotes a famous experiment from the early 1960s when the psychologist Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments, which are now infamous, but still highly informative – that attested to the importance of touch. Harrow took baby monkeys away from their mothers and put them next to two mechanical surrogate mothers. One was soft, had some sort of a pillow attached to it, but had no milk. The other was made up of wires only, but it did have milk. The baby monkeys spent all of her time with the "milkless mother", making only very short trips to the wired one to get fed. Reassurance and warmth of the "milkless mother" was more important.

Yet, there are other ways in which primates use touch. One of them is to to cement alliances. Jablonski presents a picture of two chimpanzees, who are touching each other trying to patch things up and get over their arguments.

Grooming is incredibly soothing, says Jablonski, as both participating animals gain a tremendous amount of relaxation. Their levels of stress hormone both decline. Yet all of us humans feel that we are very sophisticated primates-- that we don't need groom one another – we pay a lot for grooming, although we may not call it such (think spa massages and facials that are often given to us by completely strangers).

Modalities – the touch, the reassurance of touch – have been with us for a long time. All of us share the same sensitivity, the same bonding ability through the sense of touch; even our older relatives had this – this has been with us for 4 million years. This is a remarkable legacy to ignore.

Jablonski says that when she asked the audience to conduct that touching experiment at the very beginning, we must have noticed the differences in each other's skin color, from the very light to the very dark ones.

What does it mean, asks Jablonski? Why did that evolve in this particular way?

It has to do with this wonderful pigment in our skin called melanin of which there are different amounts in each of us. Tracing the different distribution of melanin around the world can help us imagine how skin color of different peoples around the world looks like. For example, we observe more dark-skinned people near the equators, while we see more light-skinned people near the poles. Jablonski compares the distribution of colors of human skin to that of chocolate – she likes to think of skin color as its flavors, ranging from white to dark chocolate. “Comparison with chocolate is particularly sumptuous”.

Today, however, we start to observe more darkly pigmented people living outside of Africa, for example, and more and more people with lightly pigmented skin living outside of their traditional areas. These people must be having quite a different skin experience with their environment. Both types suffer from various health problems: dark-skinned outsiders have difficulty producing sufficient vitamin D, while light-skinned people can't really adapt to the strength of radiation. Both of them need to consider their health when transferring themselves to distant areas.

Another thing that we may have have noticed while touching our neighbor, says Jablonski, is that the person sitting next to us may have had some cosmetics or may even have a tattoo. This happens because we like to decorate ourselves. “Humans are self-decorating apes”, jokes Jablonski. We do this decoration with great intention and meaning ; cosmetics, for example, are used to highlight certain features, particularly the ones that are sexually attractive.

Tattoos appear for a variety of reasons but almost always they signify some truly important thing, that we want to make permanent on the surface of our bodies”. Tattoos are usually chosen with extreme deliberation and represent a different type of cultural statement than cosmetics.

It's important to recognize that none of this is a recent phenomena, as many purists would love us to believe. We know from the study of classical and pre-classical Egypt that the cosmetics industry existed for many years there (particularly in the form of eye-shadow and eye-liners, as well as a mirror that was used to help apply them in beautiful and artistic ways).

Those who believe that tattoos first appeared among sailor's and other peripheral elements of society only a hundred years ago, need to learn more history, says Jablonski. An ice man that was found in the Tyrolean Alps had a number of tattoos; he'd been preserved for more than five thousand years.

Next Jablonski shows a drawing of a man that is holding his skin in his hand, as if it where his clothes. “Stripped of skin, we are all alike”, says Jablonski.

Concluding her talk, she appeals to the audience to think about our skin, think about hundreds of thousands of years of its evolution, and about how we used to communicate with each other by touching our skin. For many years, we lived in groups like that were in constant contact with one another – and Jablonski emphasizes that that kind of contact was physical rather than electronic.

So, before you insert the next emoticon in your email and before you use your wonderful phone to take a picture for somebody – perhaps, your best friend, think about how important it is not to forfeit your “primateness”- think about the sense of touch as a means to converse with one another. We shouldn't ignore 40 million years of evolution and instead use all the richness of our senses to communicate with one another.

Answering questions from the audience, Jablonski also shed some light on how the gender dimension to the notion of touch and how different nations react to touch. “America is a touch-averse society, mostly because of the layers of litigation that have come to prevent us from touching in most public spaces and in the work place”, says Jablonski.