-PJ
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.”
Natural selection changing the genes that get inherited, regardless of cause or motivation, is one of the two key components of evoluation. The other, of course, is genetic change (the source or cause of which is mathematically irrelevant.)
No it isn't ... preferential breeding does not change one species into another.
Humans with large faces to humans with small faces is not evolution, just variations within a species.
I think Blam and Sunken Civ will have a better clue about those ancient artifacts than I.
Wouldn't that be more specifically Darwin's "sexual selection", rather than the more general "natural selection"?
If faces change to a softer shape--I think it might have to do with the male attraction to childlike faces. Hardwired for the fecund and the nubile--and might go a long way towards explaining the intractability of the seduction of the adolescent. Yet again, in this article, the muddling-up of selection for type and "evolution."
That does not explain the "evolution" of bacteria changed into a variety of fish changed into a variety of mammals....
Isn't the idea that prefered breeding over an extended period of time (i.e hundreds of thousands or millions of years) creates a new species?
-PJ
ID deniers will have a hard time attacking this.
Face shrinkage here has nothing to do with survival, imo. Much with politics and sin, imo...like the Chinese not marrying girls with big feet....though I do like those hungarians and people with narrow eyes look crosseyed stupid, imo.
To me it seems, in any case, that it has nothing to do with survival, but an appropriate fit to a more graceful life, something Darwinism rejects as a factor....well, they do have fixes such as motherly instinct and looks for survival...but this goes into a realm that is much more subjective, imo.
That's the essence of evolution.
"I don't buy everything about evolution personally, but you just gave a text book definition of the theory.
Choosing a mate because she has a pretty face is natural SELECTION, NOT "evolution".
Seems to carry a hint of Lamarkian Evolution.
Darwinists claim that good looks suppresses your immune system, and, thus, those surviving with good looks must be very strong in immunity. Eg. the peacock with the biggest feathers gets chosen coz that's the strongest who can fight the immune supression best.
However, let us not confuse Darwinism and materialism, ie. as in materials precede thought etc...
Many materialists have hijack darwinists and used them for their own Marxist political purposes...and FR reeks with such.
Not everyone gets wisdom teeth? Rats, why was my family so unlucky, we've paid a fortune to have them removed from ourselves and our children.
women might have looked more like Camilla [the Duchess of Cornwall]. >>>
Or more accurately like her horse.
Unless you mean that evolution means selection for type? I've been given lots of vocabulary by evos in the attempt to bridge all these uncomfortable, contingent gaps between the species..Evos make so many assumptions--round faces do not new species create.
No, it isn't.
Stopped reading when I got to this second sentence.
The surge in dental problems is because the last 10,000 years our face has changed?
Why didn't our teeth adapt also???
It stands for Gods, Graves and Glyphs, an archaeology - anthropology and ancient history ping list.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.