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.”
Yup--you're certainly living proof of THAT.
Note the confusion of the anti-evolutionist -- they don't even know the field they attack well enough to know what it is and what it isn't. Evolution is genetic change across generations, period. Such change, large and small, is *all* evolution. It is entirely accurate to describe a trend in morphological change such as shrinking faces (or longer tails, for that matter) as evolution, because it is.
Only the anti-evos are ignorant enough about the field to think that evolution is *only* speciation. They can't even have a conversation about changing morphology without panicking about the fact that correctly calling that "evolution" might make the reader ponder about speciation as well.
Undoubtedly this study was skewed by the fact that mostly Europeans remains have been studied IE: the Cro-Magnon people of Northern Europe who have still today, larger faces than Asians or other peoples. How many Asians are in the fossil remains? Another point to consider suppose the genetic factors where split 50-50, farming allowed more smaller faced people to survive and past on their genes this would be perhaps be survival of the unfitest.The same arguments could be made about eyesight and an extremely slim build, my slim near sighted brother inlaw would have died in the first famine of childhood if he hadn't fallen off a cliff or been eaten by a lion earlier!
No, I'm not.
...it was posted by someone making a pun, not being defensive. Get a grip. And a sense of humor. And an education. And switch to decaf or something.
It may well look "silly" to someone ignorant of the massive evidence and research, I suppose.
No, we want readers to consider that the all-encompassing term "evolution" that seems acceptable at this level, is the same term that includes wild assumptions about new species' emerging from old.. and all from one.
I can't help but laugh- you sound like Steve Irwin, prodding the creationist while explaining it to the camera.
Okay, I'll change my word from "defensive" to deliberately "offensive."
Keep on provoking.......
You don't like a practical definition that most people understand?
If your theory is NOT that species emerge from other species, due to selection-out for enough new types, in geographic isolation, over long geological time...
Well, then WHAT IS IT YOU'RE SELLING, anyway?
I'll play your game .... Check post #89
No, he's not.
Something is impossible for evolution to accomplish?
Sure. By the way, your pointless sarcasm only makes clear how little of substance you actually have to add to the discussion.
How about the very development of teeth?
That was no problem for evolution, and the evolutionary development of teeth can easily be traced through both the fossil record (teeth fossilize very well) and through genetic analysis across lineages which reveals the biochemical evolution of the development of teeth.
Of course, if you had actually bothered to *learn* about the subject before you decided it was all just "silly", you'd have *known* that already.
Instead, your arrogance in your ignorance just caused you to make a fool of yourself.
You contradict yourself
No, he doesn't. Where do you hallucinated that he did?
and explain it away with millions of years. Very convenient.
Yawn. He bases it on enormous volumes of actual evidence and research, hon. That's "very convenient" indeed for the biologists, and very inconvenient for the anti-evolution Luddites.
Oh, "hon", now? Losing a little scientific reserve, aren't you--try that on a student, and see what happens at our modern universities...
So were are the 10,000 year old faces they are comparing us to ?
There is actual evidence that mankind "domesticated" some wolves hundreds of thousands of years ago? I don't think so.........
Helen Thomas's?
It's not a game. I don't bother posting on these threads unless I see someone who looks like they are honestly looking for an answer to a real question. Die-hard creationists who refuse to listen to anything you try to explain to them are nothing but timesinks.
Okay, then why didn't the teeth regrow instead of just wear down and cause the people to need to cook their food and then lose face? Sharks have renewable teeth.
Yeah, can't risk actually learning anything, eh?
Patronizing eh?
I just think the science editor who wrote this piece would be a bit more careful with the English language
Maybe in your mind 10,000 years qualify as a "surge", but I don't.
If the second sentence makes me wonder if the guy is a hack, why should I waste my time finish reading it???
How long ago did mankind domesticate the wolf into dogs?
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