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.”
Ha! I STILL listen to Itchycoo Park.
...and grossly misunderstood them, as on prior threads.
I guess you can play around with definitions--this is usually the escape hatch of evos.
Nice try, but that's actually the "escape hatch" of the anti-evolutionists, who keep playing the, "no, *that's* not 'evolution', *that's not 'speciation', at least not in the way *I* insist on interpreting the terms" game. Just look at this thread for numerous examples.
No one's buying it.
While you may decry the intelligence of those who doubt or merely challenge the "law" of evolution
...because of long experience with their inability to make correct statements about even the most elementary concepts in the field of science they attempt to critique...
--we just might have a common sense understanding of what evolution means--new species from old. You ain't got no NEW yet.
Sure we do, you folks just keep playing the "*that* doesn't count, I want to see something *different*..." game and move the goalposts.
That face isn't long its just sagging ;-)
hmmmm .. Valerie, you have a point there. The very ancient species, the shark, replaces worn and lost teeth - why do more advanced species lack this ability? Is that development the cause of the shark's stability as a species, whereas others must continually adapt in other ways to make up for lost teeth?
I am merely arguing against the earlier assertion that it has taken hundreds of thousands of years for this happen....
Yes, there is.
I don't think so.........
There is a vast range of things which "you don't think so" which actually turn out to be the case.
Next time, why don't you go and learn some of the vast evidence available in those "library" things you must have heard about, *before* you arrive at yet another false "don't think so" conclusion?
[Aside: I have never seen anyone so proud of their ignorance -- and so certain that having their minds "unpolluted" by actual scientific knowledge is a *good* thing -- as the anti-evolutionists. And yes, that includes the liberal nitwits.]
Thank you for revealing -- by your goofy examples -- yet more of your inability to grasp how biology actually works.
Show me the evidence that mankind was around hundreds of thousands of years ago. Where is the 330,000 year old human skull?
I define the Theory of the Origin of the Species thusly--you take issue with the particulars....
Honey.
1) One species at a time, to keep it simple.
2) Isolated by a river or a mountain, the species are separated.
3) long time passing...where have all the flowers gone. Species on the left side of the river-mountain adapt to circumstances by selecting out for successful traits. Species on the right side of the river-mountain do likewise, to different circumstances.
4) Enough time passes (no one ever explains enough, nor can it be duplicated in a laboratory) and the species are so different that they can no longer interbreed--but they have their own Mr's and Mrs's.
This is what I was taught by evos as being evolution. Of course, they also shoved a chart under my nose that had a monkey (with tail!), bigger monkeys, chimps, then finally a pencil-necked tenure-tinkerer at the end of the line. That chart has since been debunked and disgraced, but being a scientist means never having to say you're sorry.
So, what about that is NOT evolution?
Horse manure from start to finish, Mam.
I have no interest in "posturing and insulting". In case you haven't noticed, what I do is point out the gross ignorance and fallacies of the *anti-evos* who pop onto all these science threads to "posture and insult" modern science and its findings, to "posture and insult" anyone who (*gasp*) actually finds such research interesting and informative, and to "posture and insults" entire fields of human knowledge and anyone who subscribes to them.
And your false assertion that we "go to no other threads" is transparently false. I've run into the other "evos" on threads covering a vast range of other topics. Why do you insist upon lying about us? Never mind, I *know* why.
I'd love to see them selected out into their own geographically isolated chat room here on FR, where they can preach endlessly to their choirboys. All two of them.
Another lie. The pro-evolution ping list has *hundreds* of Freepers on it, child.
If you can't deal with a common-sense understanding of what evolution is-- species emerging from other species--why do you bother with us? This is the understanding which is under argument. Selection for type is something not denied by any farmer--the emergence of new species is the issue.
Your ignorance of evolutionary biology is near total.
And you have not, nor has any other scientist as yet, has made a new species (under the common sense understanding of genus-species categorization) happen under lab conditions--your assertions are based on assumptions, which are worse than mythology.
Enjoy your ignorance, as you clearly do.
The rest of us are following the vast mountains of real-world evidence, along multiply independent cross-confirming lines, to learn how the world *actually* works, instead of your method of rejecting any and all knowledge that clashes with what you *want* to believe.
No, because tooth crowding is a severe health-threatening problem long before one gets to the age when teeth are falling out, plus even people with lost teeth often get life-threatening complications from impacted wisdom teeth -- they quite simply emerge too far back in the jaw. Too far back for our *modern* jaws, anyway -- apes' wisdom teeth fit just *fine* in their long jaws. Hint, hint.
Yes, the need for humans to run is the evolutionist's explanation for the shape of our legs... but why not have 4 legs like horses and other mammals who need to run, especially our predators? Why not have 4 legs and 2 arms? Whose idea was this 2 legged liability of slow primates anyway?
Hey! How about a warning! Jeez!
I guess the head shrinkers around the equator would have a field day with Half-bright.
Are you a dentist now?
Wings are better than legs, so where's ours?
There are two types of evolution, micro and macro. But I'm sure you already know that.
susie
I hate when that happens.
susie
I think it came from climbing trees, but I sure miss that tail, like those monkeys in SA have. It was better than an opposing thumb!
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.