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.”
Now you have used my favorite doggie as an example...my Helga(my last and favorite basset, now gone but not forgotten), would have claimed that her legs were so short, so that she was closer to her food, but then again, she was only a dog...
Yes; I think "Godel" did FR a great service when he ran that poll, and documented the results, including the massive effort at fraud by two individuals on the Anti-Evo side. Sadly, though both individuals in question are (IIRC) no longer able to post on FR, their legacy lives on in the mendacity of others who still post here.
Animal and plant breeding provided much of Darwin's evidence for evolution. It provided the data for the range of variation in a number of species, and it provided a baseline for the rate of mutation. And, yes, breeders know the difference.
Without denying that, I think that the core of the theory of evolution is the premise that random mutations occur on the molecular level, with the harmful ones tending to die out and the helpful ones tending to persist.
A chihuahua, for instance, is bred through deliberate successive approximations, rather than a random process followed by natural selection based on survival value.
Most mutations are neutral. There are billions of humans, all unique (except for identical twins and triplets).
Of the harmful mutations, most block conception. A rather high percentage of sperm cells are incapable of reaching their target. Only one in a billion will achieve conception. After conception there's a pretty high percentage of natural abortions.
It really doesn't matter what is selected for or what the selector is. The process is the same. The genes of individuals that do not breed become less common in the population.
Yes (although of course there are additional complicating factors). Did it sound as if I was denying that in post #73? I wasn't. I was objecting to the claim that "Darwinism rejects" a "fit to a more graceful life". It doesn't.
I think you just uncovered evidence that some creationists are Democrats.
Actually, it is. These are symptoms of subclinical deficiencies of minerals, Vitamin D, etc, starting from the prenatal period. See the link in post 48 for details. We could ALL have perfect teeth, if we ate a primitive diet.
You are affirming that for 10,000 years we have been in a mist of change and all of a sudden we have a surge in dental problems???
"All of a sudden" is relative, when we're talking about spans of thousands of years.
In any case, "all of a sudden" is *your* term, not the author's.
I thought it was clear enough that the "surge" referred to a significant increase in *frequency* in dental complications, not a "sudden" appearance of them. The author was saying that over the past 10,000 years, there has been a large rise in the per-capita rate of "crowded tooth" health issues. He wasn't saying that it "suddenly" came on.
How about dental problems from changing eating habits, change of diet. Is this a world wide phenomenon or just a western civilization "surge"???
How about reading the research paper, which is likely to examine these potentially confounding factors?
[Yeah, can't risk actually learning anything, eh?]
Patronizing eh?
When you *start out* your post declaring that you had only bothered to read the first three sentences of the article and then felt justified when you "stopped reading" because of a trivial matter of word choice, then expressed incredulity about the subject of the article despite being too lazy or stubborn or annoyed to actually *read* it first to see how they might have determined such a thing... Yeah, you open yourself to being justifiably patronized.
And there's a great irony here -- *you* were being patronizing towards the author and researchers in your post, but heaven forbid anyone *else* return the favor...
I just think the science editor who wrote this piece would be a bit more careful with the English language
I think he was, and I think you misread it. That's not to say, however, that "pop science" articles aren't routinely poorly written. That has long been a pet peeve of mine.
Maybe in your mind 10,000 years qualify as a "surge", but I don't.
See above.
If the second sentence makes me wonder if the guy is a hack, why should I waste my time finish reading it???
I can think of several reasons:
1. To find out whether you've misunderstood the sentence by not reading it in the full context.
2. To find out whether your first impression was correct or was just a momentary slip.
3. To learn something from the article, despite any literary shortcomings it might have.
4. To glean all the information you can from the article *before* you ask other Freepers to fill in the blanks for you.
5. So you won't appear to be so obsessively hung up on word choice that you're unable to focus on ideas and discoveries.
My children's dentist did this not long ago with my 7 year old. Seems pretty logical to me...create a space and the teeth will shift. The small gap was closed within a week. I don't see how it has helped much, the poor child has a very crowded mouth.
Excuse me if your non-stop obnoxiousness, ill-informed questions/claims, and breezy sarcasm for the first 200+ posts of the thread led me to state the opinion I had formed of you, and your subsequent behavior has done nothing to change my conclusion.
I tried extending you an olive branch for a change in post #257 after I had misread one of your posts in haste (it's been a fast-moving thread and I was trying to keep up), and you spit on it. I won't make that mistake again, nor make the mistake of thinking that you actually care about learning anything -- you're just here to attack and mock. For example, your bizarre response to my informational post had absolutely no comment on the interesting research which was cited, but it did include this bit of insanity:
Now evidence is not important?
Of course it is, which is why I *provided* you with some in answer to your question. Your hysterical, irrational and somewhat hallucinatory reply shows quite clearly that you don't give a fig for actual research of any kind, you just want a cheap excuse to have a grievance and a lash out like a spoiled child.
I was right about you the first time, and it was a mistake for me to try to upgrade the level of our discourse. It won't happen again. Talking to you is like dealing with a petulant brat, since it seems that this is how you prefer to post, and refuse to be dissuaded from it. So be it.
(To: oblomov
For example, dogs are a unique species, that arose through the domestication of wolves (over hundreds of thousands of years).
There is actual evidence that mankind "domesticated" some wolves hundreds of thousands of years ago? I don't think so.........
115 posted on 11/20/2005 5:14:42 PM CST by ValerieUSA)
...And again in post #120 I clearly asked Sofa King, "How long ago did mankind domesticate the wolf into dogs?
Then I again said to Sofa King in post #126, "I am merely arguing against the earlier assertion that it has taken hundreds of thousands of years for this [to] happen...."
Yeah, it's my fault you couldn't understand that before your snide and mistaken answer in post #127. How obnoxious of me.
There was nothing hysterical in my response to your personal insults, and your patronizing tone is not fooling me into bowing to your "expertise".
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