About nudity

[Anomalocaris]

Humans are the only animals on Earth who produce clothes. Other animals may wear clothing only if we dress them up. Also humans are the only animals who feel ashamed if not wearing clothes. Why are we ashamed of our own bodies? Babies don't feel ashamed if naked and there have been tribes that wear little to no clotes. 
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that we should stop wearing clothes, they protect us from high or low temperatures, filth and other things and they can look good (what looks good is subjective, of course). But should we feel ashamed if it happens to be seen naked?

1.  We are the only animals with the manual dexterity to produce cloth.  So it seems a little odd to harp on the fact that no other animals wear cloth.  No other animals can come to possess cloth except through our intervention or truly freakish coincidence.

2.  Actually, there seems to be no conclusive evidence I remember seeing presented that any other animal is capable of being ashamed.  So again it seems a little odd to harp on the fact that no other animal would be ashamed of nakedness.  They are incapable of being ashamed of anything.

3.  I don’t recall seeing any evidence that Amazonian Stone Age tribes that go naked all the time all throughout life feel ashamed all the time.  So I would not say we unavoidably and reflexively feel ashamed if we are seen naked.  

However, I would not go as far as saying feeling ashamed of nakedness is truly a completely social phenomenon either.   Many of the situational emotions our society encourages us to feel actually seem to have at least some basis in some deeper cognative pre-programming.   The pre-programming does not doom us to feel a certain way in a certain situation.  But it may give us some slight pre-disposition to feeling a certain way that could then either be encouraged or discouraged by social pressure.

Genetic evidence from the species of lice that are unique to humans offer strong evidence that our relative lack of body hair is quite an ancient trait in the human lineage, and that clothing is not all that recent an invention either.    It certainly seems to me there have been enough time since the widespread adaptation of clothing for certain behavior involving clothing, like a discomfort with being seen naked when one is not in the mood to show off, to have acquired some deeper genetic basis.