Posted on 11/20/2005 1:21:49 PM PST by blam
The Sunday Times November 20, 2005
Scientists show we’ve been losing face for 10,000 years
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
THE human face is shrinking. Research into people’s appearance over the past 10,000 years has found that our ancestors’ heads and faces were up to 30% larger than now. Changes in diet are thought to be the main cause. The switch to softer, farmed foods means that jawbones, teeth, skulls and muscles do not need to be as strong as in the past.
The shrinkage has been blamed for a surge in dental problems caused by crooked or overlapping teeth.
“Over the past 10,000 years there has been a trend toward rounder skulls with smaller faces and jaws,” said Clark Spencer Larsen, professor of anthropology at Ohio State University.
“This began with the rise in farming and the increasing use of cooking, which began around 10,000 years ago.”
His conclusions are based on measurements from thousands of teeth, jawbones, skulls and other bones collected from prehistoric sites around the world.
Skulls from the site of a 9,000-year-old city in Turkey — thought to be the world’s oldest — show that the faces of city-dwellers had already begun to shrink compared with contemporaries who had not settled down.
Details will be reported at a forthcoming conference on the global history of health. Larsen will suggest that a typical human of 10,000 years ago would have had a much heavier build overall because of the hard work needed to gather food and stay alive.
He said: “Many men then would have had the shape of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head while women might have looked more like Camilla [the Duchess of Cornwall]. By contrast, Tony Blair and George Bush are good examples of the more delicate modern form.”
Other studies are confirming Larsen’s findings. George Armelagos, professor of anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has made extensive measurements on people from Nubia in modern Egypt and Sudan to see how their appearance has changed.
He found that the top of the head, or cranial vault, had grown higher and more rounded, a pattern also seen in human remains found at sites in other parts of the world.
Charles Loring Brace, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, said: “Human faces are shrinking by 1%-2% every 1,000 years.
“What’s more, we are growing less teeth. Ten thousand years ago everyone grew wisdom teeth but now only half of us get them, and other teeth like the lateral incisors have become much smaller. This is evolution in action.”
Softer food may not be the only cause. Some scientists blame sexual selection — the preference of prehistoric people for partners with smaller faces.
Dr Simon Hillson, of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, has studied humans living from 26,000 years ago to about 8,000 years ago. He measured 15,000 prehistoric teeth, jaws and skulls collected by museums around the world and found the same pattern of shrinking faces.
He said: “The presumption is that people must have chosen mates with smaller, shorter faces — but quite why this would be is less clear.”
BTW--we can add arkenologist (darn, I used to be able to spell that) to his list of experts.
It's 322 as of today. It grows about 10 per month, more or less. And in a recent thread about ping lists, it turns out that the evolution list is one of the largest.
That does not make any sense at all...not brushing my teeth, so as to allow some of them to fall out, thus accomodating my wisdom teeth is silly...that is like cutting off my nose so as to spite my face...
Sorry, but your argument falls short...
Here's what's wrong:
1. "Selection for type" is an incorrect description, and in any case selection is only one of the driving forces of evolutionary change.
2. Geographic isolation is one factor which can facilitate speciation, but is only one, and is in no way required.
3. Speciation doesn't take "beelions of years".
4. Even the term "independent species" is incorrect and misleading, divergent species are often not "independent".
5. Evolution encompasses many kinds of genetic change in populations, including those which do not involve speciation at all.
If that's all of "what you were taught" there was to evolution, then either get your money back, or go back and pay more attention next time.
Go right ahead. I don't think of you at all.
Then we have the perfect relationship
Of course, behavior kills lots of young people, no one is disputing that...I am just saying that behavior is not the same as a medical condition...
That's a pretty good description of almost every anti-evo I've ever met, actually (and I've been debating this issue with hundreds of them for more than twenty years), which is very sad indeed.
Are you denying that there are mutations in the genetic code during reproduction?
LOL--well, this story may make you sad, but it could be a source of amusement to others.
There was an article posted here, I think, just a couple of weeks ago, that purported that the most significant cause of differences in female face size is level of estrogen and testosterone.
In females with smaller faces, supposedly larger stores of estrogen caused the browbone and jaw to stop growing fairly early on. With women who had decreased amounts of estrogen or increased amounts of testosterone, the opposite was true.
So, maybe girls with small faces are more fertile too?
"Heck, the pro-evolution ping list has *320* names on it. Is it really your bizarre contention that there are at least 3,200,000 registered Freepers total, and that EVERY ONE who didn't sign up for the pro-evo ping list is, without exception, anti-evolution? Because that's the *only* way your fantasy claim could be true."
I've got my own ping list (the video game ping list), and from my experience the percentage of people who sign up for the list compared to the number of people who I see on this forum who play video games is pretty small (I'm not actually on the Evo ping list either, the threads get enough posts so that they're easy to spot without it).
I still have not seen evidence of domesticated wolves/dogs from hundreds of thousands of years ago.
As of June, 2003, the oldest human skulls discovered were estimated to be between 156,000 and 160,000 years old, and no canine skulls were discovered at that Ethiopian site.
Yes, but if statisticly, if it's true that accidents are the leading cause of death among teenagers and young people, then you have the prime breeding age for the species at risk. And it's probably been like that forever. So impacted wisdom teeth, flu, accidents they'd all be grouped together, none being more lethal than another.
It's neither. I's either lookism or sexism and not PC. It must be stopped, LOL.
Usually I dont get too involved in evolution vs ID/creationism threads...tho lately, I have taken more and more notice of them, and its very interesting to see...I like to get correct information from both sides and then weigh the two...
Remarks like that coming from editor-surveyor, tend to make me want to not even read his posts, because I see that he obviously makes things up....
lol. It is funny isn't it?
Sorry, but your argument falls short...
Have not read most of this thread, but the wisdom teeth comment stirred a memory.
The reason we have problems is the lack of interproximal wear (that is, wear between adjoining teeth). That wear was caused by chewing tough foods, not the slop we eat today. Teeth flexed slightly up and down in the mandible and maxilla, causing slight wear between teeth. This interproximal wear, in prehistoric peoples at least, caused the teeth to drift forward slightly over time, creating just enough room for the molars when they erupted.
Problems can be reduced by disking between the teeth, that it, abrading a slight amount of enamel between adjoining teeth, creating extra room for tooth to drift forward. Few dentists have even heard of this.
Oh, yeah...that really shows that humans are evolving into something else. Why, before you know it, we won't have faces at all. Please.
/heavy sarcasm off
Brushing teeth is cultural behavior - it is counter natural. The natural condition is to lose teeth. Our evolutionary response to that was to grow in wisdom teeth. Now have our dental hygiene habits triggered an evolution toward no wisdom teeth? Or do people who lack wisdom teeth belong to the earlier category of human evolution prior to the development of wisdom teeth?
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