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.”
And please don't tell them. They've already cost me tens of thousands.
I don't think we lived long enough to lose many teeth back prehistory. I'm not sure where you're going with this.
susie
I have no way of knowing if that is true or not...but if bad genetics, make a young person die much younger than others, he has zero chance of passing on the bad genetics...a young person with good genetics, who may have died in an accident, is just another young person among millions of young persons with good genetics who dies...he may not pass on his personal genetics, but the millions of others with the good genetics will make up for this...
There is just a difference in behavior and in medical conditions, and that is all I am saying...
Are Warthogs allowed in Islamic airspace?
Your post #238 was most interesting...thanks for the information....
My statement was intended to be funny. It was not posed, framed, articulated or intended as a serious argument or criticism--although I admittedly have a critical preference for evolution over any and all competing theories.
Ichneumon is quite a monkey when it comes to copying and pasting. He rules that space. All the evo's love him for it.
Nice refutation of his logic and data (not).
[Hint, you lost that round on a TKO.]
Change is a perfectly good word for change.
Evolution is about explaining some mighty huge differences between species as "change," rather than saying they are different as part of a creator's plan to make different species. Evolution is about denying the existance of a creator, a designer, a planner or a plan... and boiling every life form back down to the happenstance primordial soup from whence we came.
Ichneumon can post his own response, but I'll give you Darwin's view of it, and he knew nothing about genetics. This is from Origin of Species (6th ed.), Chapter 2 - Variation Under Nature:
The many slight differences which appear in the offspring from the same parents, or which it may be presumed have thus arisen, from being observed in the individuals of the same species inhabiting the same confined locality, may be called individual differences. No one supposes that all the individuals of the same species are cast in the same actual mould. These individual differences are of the highest importance for us, for they are often inherited, as must be familiar to every one; and they thus afford materials for natural selection to act on and accumulate, in the same manner as man accumulates in any given direction individual differences in his domesticated productions.Variation and natural selection. That was Darwin's theory.
I think Darwin would agree with me. ( :-D
That's why chicken soup is so good for you when you're sick.
I may have misunderstood the thrust of your earlier question -- it seemed that you were asking about whether there was any evidence that humans "made" dogs by domesticating wolves and triggering the subsequent evolutionary change (as opposed to the common AECreationist claim that dogs were "separately created").
After seeing your recent post, however, it looks as if your question may have been about the *timing*.
If so, you're right -- oblomov's mention of "over hundreds of thousands of years" stretches things a bit. The growing evidence points to domestication of the earliest dogs around 15,000 years ago.
See for example:
Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs
As of June, 2003, the oldest human skulls discovered were estimated to be between 156,000 and 160,000 years old,
Oldest *modern* humans. Pre-modern humanity has been around a lot longer than that.
and no canine skulls were discovered at that Ethiopian site.
There are far more ways to establish domestication than just that one simple method.
LOL! That's why we have "feminists". :-)
I was very clear in my question. You were too busy mocking my "ignorance" to see it. It was you who asserted that there is evidence that wolves/dogs were domesticated hundreds of thousands of years ago, and I found none. Now evidence is not important?
No.
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