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.”
It's all black and white to me, Mamzelle, but then I'm a zeebra.
This is what I was taught, and what I believed was the plain definition of evolution. Now I discover that there's something about defining evolution--period--which is deeply upsetting to the evos.
Interesting.
I had my wisdom teeth removed in my second year of high school, and they had been acting up for a long time before that...they were painful, and my face was swollen with them...
My girlfriend with the 4 impacted wisdom teeth also had them removed during her second year of high school...she was even more miserable than I was...double the impacted wisdom teeth, double the pain...
Now, certainly at the age that we were at, around 15, we were able to bear children...of course, we did not, as we never had sex at such an age..but had neither one of us had our impacted wisdom teeth removed when we did, who knows what sort of infection could have taken hold? And possibly killed us...it does happen, that infections in the gums and teeth can become life threatening, and both I and my girlfriend had problems with impacted wisdom teeth, long before either one of us had children...
Depends on what you mean by "valid." If you mean whether or not humans definitely evolved from the primordial soup, you're right: we don't "know" that as an indisputable fact.
However, if by "valid" you mean "known to be possible," then you could not be more wrong. Genetic algorithms are an undeniable and incontrovertable existence proof that humans could have evolved from non-humans. Failure to acknowledge that fact removes one from the communuty of rational and reasonable discourse.
Yes and I almost died of the flu when I was 18. We would have been just victims of death. There must be millions of ways to die, and teenagers are high risk.
It was actually when I was doing research on my fathers ancestors, that I came across a site, run by a man, who had traced his relatives back to the early 1700s...come to find out, his male relative from that time, and my male relative from that time, were brothers...
As I traced the line from my male relative, I was flabbergasted to all of sudden see my great grandparents, and grandparents and all my relatives mentioned, by a man I never knew...he was the one who found out about some of my great grandmothers children who died young, children even my dads generation knew nothing about...it kind of blew me away...finding a relative I did not know, whose link to me was established in the early 1700s, was really an exciting day for me...
Ancestry dot com. I found my Dad's earliest in the 1400's. Catholic Church records.
Indeed, there are many ways to die...but having infected wisdom teeth, adds another dimension to the odds of dying...
Well in reality, so does lots of things. I drove a car into a tree speeding. Now that was dumb.
Well, I have not gotten back that far yet, but am hopeful..doing geneological research is fun, and informative...
Yawn. Do even you anti-evos believe these goofy conspiracy theories and silly stuff you guys post?
About 1 in 10,000 freepers believes that evolution is even possible,
Wow, another blatant lie from an anti-evo. Who'da thunk it? Sorry, but the number of posters on each "side" on these threads is roughly 50/50 -- did you have trouble in gradeschool math class or something?
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 have ceased to be amazed by the utter inability of the anti-evolutionists to perform the most elementary analysis or reality-checks -- it practically seems to be a *requirement*, probably because people who can actually analyze the evidence accept that it points overwhelmingly to evolution -- but I never stop getting the giggles out of it. Watching you guys trying your best to "reason" and present "facts" is some of the finest amusement available anywhere at any price.
and Ich aims to change that.
All I "aim to change" is to get you folks to stop posting lies and disinformation about science. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is.
The really laughable thing is that the handful of evos here are constantly trying to forge a link between evolution and biology, which is absurd on it's face since biology is all about what is really alive, not what someone chooses to imagine once was alive.
Wow, what a... bizarre misunderstanding of biology.
Evolution is clearly a deviant philosophy/religion issue, not science.
Funny, that's not what these ~10,000 Christian clergy have to say (are you sure you know what in the heck you're talking about?):
The "Clergy Letter Project": An Open Letter Concerning Religion and ScienceBut hey, I guess *you* know better than ~10,000 Christian clergy, eh?"Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
"We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.
[As of 20 November 2005, there are 9,945 signatures collected to date]
Click the links that follow to see the alphabetical lists of clergy members who have endorsed this letter
A to E - F to J - K to O - P to S - T to Z
Listing by States
...or are they all part of the "vast Darwinian conspiracy" too, who are likewise "professional propagandists that are assigned to twist" things in your paranoid world?
Hey, here's an essay by Freeper "longshadow" -- sound like anyone yo know?
It's worse than that; much worse. In the history of the world, only a tiny fraction of all the people who ever lived have had the opportunity to ask highly qualified scientists direct questions, and learn from their wisdom. Happily, because of the internet and places like FR, it is now possible for people from all walks of life to converse directly with all sorts of scientific experts; we have physicists, microbiologists, mathematicians, astronomers, and chemists, to specify but a few, roaming these threads, and eager to explain what they know and how they know it to virtually anyone willing to ask an intelligent question.
But there is another segment of people on these threads who, instead of asking these learned folks intelligent questions and thus expanding their knowledge and understanding, insist instead upon bludgeoning them with their ignorance, and questioning the patriotism, honesty, and intellect of people who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
I submit that such people are not here to learn anything, but are in fact interested in quite the opposite. I submit they are here to interfere with the dissemination of scientific knowledge that they find offensive. They don't want other people to ask the experts questions and learn from them; no, they are hear to attack the experts and cast doubt upon their wisdom, in the desperate hope that others will turn away and not listen to them.
IMHO that is why the same people show up over and over again parroting the same refuted diatribes and misinformation, and spewing the same bogus out-of-context quotes designed specifically to disrupt the dissemination of scientific knowledge. That why the same people show up over and over again misrepresenting what scientific theories and laws are, despite having had it explained to them 1720th time; they are here to instill confusion and spread their ignorance, not to disseminate knowledge.
The experts here on these threads ought to be revered and thanked for sharing with us their insights and explanations of the natural world around us; instead scorn is heaped upon them and their knowledge by the belligerently ignorant. I submit that these purveyors of unknowledge should be treated for the intellectual disruptors that they are. The stare the best opportunity any of us will ever have to gain more insight and understanding in the face, and spit in the eyes of those who offer and have the knowledge to help make that a reality.
Yes, but difference between having infected impacted wisdom teeth and driving a car into a tree are two different things...driving the car into a tree was behavior, which maybe could have been prevented, my having impacted wisdom teeth was a medical fact I could not have prevented...
There really oughtta be a law against speeding trees.
Making an argument of necessity and an argument to possibility are two very different things.
Since you can use the qualifier "could have"--like someone who expects and perhaps even welcomes a challenge--maybe you can entertain a discussion of my ultimate problem with the theory of the evolution/progression of the species. (I've provided a simple definition in posts above)
I've named it, even--"the problem of fortuitous coherence." You may know about what is called "coherent light"--for those who don't, and it's great fun, since it's where lasers and holographs come from--most light is made up of different waves flipping about in different directions at differing speeds. If you can stack the light waves like you'd stack corrugated aluminum roofing--all the waves the same size going the same way--you'd get a powerful beam of zap.
Evolutionists not only expect fortuitous accidents to happen in fortuitous order (and millions of them)--they suggest "fortuitous coherence"--stacks of accidents on top of each other at the same time, and the same size and speed.
But perhaps the behavior of brushing your teeth regularly prevented some of them from falling out, thus not naturally making room for your wisdom teeth to grow in fully.
I have been waiting a very long time for editor-surveyor to produce his survey, which supports his claim that only 1 in every 10,000 Freepers believe evolution is possible...I suspect now, as I did some time ago, that editor-surveyor likes to make things up, skewed by his own wishful thinking...
Should he produce a valid survey which proves me wrong, I will apologize..until then, I think he is just saying what makes him feel comfortable...
Yawn. The only thing "deeply upsetting" (actually, just plain annoying) is watching you folks make false accusations like this over and over again.
Those of us who actually care about *truth* and honesty take exception to such blatant and unashamed lying.
And this *amuses* you for some reason, so you go out of your way to keep making more false claims on different threads in order to annoy people by lying about them and about subjects they know about. How sick is that?
Well I think so. It jumped right into my car!
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