Scientists Show We've Been Losing Face For 10,000 Years

The Times (UK) ^ | 11-20-2005 | Jonathan Leake

[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.”

[Pharmboy]

Have a look here. The timing is a bit shorter.

[ValerieUSA]

Your post in reply to mine:

V: There is actual evidence that mankind "domesticated" some wolves hundreds of thousands of years ago?

Ichneumon: Yes, there is.

V: I don't think so.........

Ichneumon: 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?

(still Ichneumon:) [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.]

[ValerieUSA]

Excuse me if I am not grateful for your lesson.

[Mamzelle]

re: I don't think we lived long enough to lose many teeth back prehistory)))

Excellent point. Makes it hard to select out for type, when you've already reproduced and died before the natural selection sets in?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Mutation proposes; selection disposes.

[Pharmboy]

...and the result is change in gene frequency which is evolution.

[mikegi]

No.

Do you deny that there are both good and bad mutations?

[r9etb]

This is not evidence of evolution. Is it? If, it is, some people are going to be somewhat disappointed.

Depends on what you think selective breeding is ... a version of ID, or a version of evolution, or some combinatin of the two.

At any rate, I think it is a case of selective breeding, based on conceptions of beauty. (According to these people, there's a mathematical description for "beauty" that seems to be consistent through history, and it seems to show a preference for smaller faces

[js1138]

10,000 clergy placemarker

[SunkenCiv]

Ichikoo Park is where I'll be.

[editor-surveyor]

"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."

Have you noticed that you're the only one that seems to be titilated by this?

Do you wonder why? Could it be that the rest of the gang are able to recognize when hyperbole is used in rhetoric? (consider that there are only about 70,000 reasonably active freepers to start with)

But more to the point, surveys of the general public have been done, and posted here too, and guess what? Even when the liberal dumacrats are included in the mix the evos are decidedly in the minority. And among conservatives, the surveys say over 78% don't buy the evo fantasy, so I guess you caught me, it's not 10,000:1

[manwiththehands]

No. Is this going somewhere?

[SunkenCiv]

That does it. I'm going to eat some yogurt with live cultures.

[js1138]

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...

My WAG is that Freepers are more likely to oppose evolution than the general population, but only slightly. A large percentage of the the evolution critics on FR are ID advocates, and ID accepts the historic fact of evolution.

Some YEC FReepers have given up trying to argue science and have started their own series of threads that usually end before 50 responses.

[editor-surveyor]

"A large percentage of the the evolution critics on FR are ID advocates, and ID accepts the historic fact of evolution."

You need to refine that statement a bit. Most of the ID people that accept evolution are the ones that believe that the "intelligence" of ID came here in a flying saucer, which merely moves the 'origin' far enough away to make it beyond examination; i.e. intellectual dishonesty.

[longshadow]

Great post, and your reposting of my essay is appreciated.

On to more important matters; in regard to your interlocutor's assertion regarding 1 in 10,000 FReepers supporting evolution, I should like to call everyones attention to the ONLY poll of which I am aware that was ever conducted on the subject here on FR. I reproduced the results exactly as it was posted originally; it is extremely informative, in more ways than one:

---

To: Godel, physicist

I want to take a few minutes to thank all of you for your input. This poll was more popular than I had thought and I appreciate even your criticism of the questions (can't please everyone).

I'm taking down the poll now because although I didn't get exactly the information I had been expecting, as often happens in the field of discovery, I learned some very interesting things nonetheless.

The final results of the poll are as follows:

Which do you believe?

Evolution.

13.0%

(225)

Creation.

86.7%

(1501)

I don't know/care.

0.3%

(6)

Total votes: 1732

Below are a list of those posters who attempted to violate the integrity of the poll. The last byte has been changed to protect the guilty (but if you mail me I will talk):

165.76.125.*** - Voted for Creation 990 times.
63.175.96.*** - Voted for Creation 399 times.

This is a somewhat appalling revelation about the honesty of certain extremists of the Creationist side. I admit I had not expected this, if anything I would have expected those who place such a high value on literal interpretations of the Bible to have a well developed sense of ethics and not desire to dishonestly inflate the prominence of their beliefs. I am enlightened by this experience.

For those who are interested the adjusted results after discarding the 1387 false votes by these 2 most egregious respondants are:

225 - Evolution
114 - Creation

137 Posted on 03/01/2001 11:02:59 PST by Godel

So, in contrast to your interlocutor's assertion that only 1 in 10,000 FReepers supports evolution, we see that in fact the ratio, as of 2001, was roughly 2:1 IN FAVOR of Evolution over Creationism. It would appear your interlocutor's estimates for the support enjoyed by Evolutionary Theory in FR is no less than several light years removed from reality.

We also learned that a small number of Creationists, about 2%, were mendacious enough to try to queer the outcome of the poll in a sizeable way.

[andysandmikesmom]

Well, quite frankly I would disagree with your statistics...because you see, I also read a large survey done, ,which showed three specific things...how many believed in God, how many believed in evolution and how many believed in creationism/ID

Now, by far the majority of people who responded said they believed in God...but when it came to saying whether they believed in evolution or ID/creationism, the majority was definitely a much higher percentage believing in evolution rather than in ID/creationism...its as if, all the ID/creationists think that because one says they believe in God, that they also believe in ID/creationism...this is not the truth...its the same thing as declaring that all who believe in evolution are atheists...this is also another lie..many people believe in God and also believe in evolution...and that is not hyperbole...

I did not see the survey I am talking about on the internet, but rather in the newspaper, it was from a while back....I will have to look in my garage and see if we still have that paper, and then I will report back...So your survey shows one thing, and a survey I read recently in the newspaper shows something completely different...

You may call it hyperbole, I call it trying to skew the truth...and I was not the only one responding to that...a few other posters responded to you as well about that...so you are the one that is caught, for sure...

[js1138]

Michael Denton, author of "Evolution, a Theory in Crisis, has written a new book, "Nature's Destiny," on intelligent Design. In it he says this:

"it is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science - that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes.

This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called "special creationist school". According to special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the result of a series of supernatural acts, involving the suspension of natural law.

Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world - that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies."

Behe, the chief defence witness at Dover, has this to say about evolution:

I didn't intend to "dismiss" the fossil record--how could I "dismiss" it? In fact I mention it mostly to say that it can't tell us whether or not biochemical systems evolved by a Darwinian mechanism. My book concentrates entirely on Darwin's mechanism, and simply takes for granted common descent.

[dsc]

"If the facial type is selected for, like selecting for short legs in Bassett Hounds--it's not because the food is closer to the ground...sheesh...."

Basset hounds didn't evolve; they were deliberately bred.

[andysandmikesmom]

Bravo to you for for your last post ...I guess there is no way to prevent people from dishonestly voting time and again, and trying to skew the poll...I am glad that someone was able to untangle such a web of deceit, and provide an accurate poll...