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.”
I do not have access to your first link, and your second link is irrelevant. It refers to the dingo as a domestic dog which was transported to tasmania 3,500 hundred years ago, and then reverted to a wild state, and as of now it has not been successfully re-domesticated despite multiple attempts. This supports what point?
Because it is clearly an inadequate explanation of his hostility and self-congratulation in his post #127, which he subsequently blames on my first 200+ posts here.
If you find credibility and civility and evidence of his expertise in post #127, please point it out to me.
Stamp your tiny little feet and scream "No, it isn't!" -- then threaten to hold your breath until you turn blue.
I knew a picture of her was going to appear on this thread.
wow.
"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."
The difference is that when people are deliberately breeding for characteristics, they can become more common even though they confer less survival value.
He said: Choosing a mate because she has a pretty face is natural SELECTION, NOT "evolution".
You said: ...and the difference would be...?
I was explaining the difference. Perhaps I hit reply to the wrong post, but it had nothing to do with the "graceful life" stuff.
Err.. preferential breeding creates sub-species or develops and differentiates species. That's the basis of Darwin's theory.
I had forgotten all about that poll. Thanks for posting it. The names of those who tried to queer the poll got revealed later. I've forgotten who they were, but it doesn't matter. I think one of them is now banned. Maybe both. They opened everyone's eyes to the lying and fraud on the creationist side. A lesson that has paid off again and again.
Most of that stuff he cuts and pastes is actually his own original work. If it's recycled it's because the arguments to which he is replying are the same, thrice-refuted crap. Maybe if the anti-Evos come up with something new... but that would require actual research on their parts, and any anti-Evo that begins to do research runs the risk of no longer being an anti-Evo.
Maybe being called "honey" and "child?" I think that evolves from condescending clear into "jerk."
How is this "Current Events", anyway? Should have its own group--"evo chat"--
Breeding for type is about the only long-term lab of selection we have to look at. Everything else is surmise and assumuption.
I'd recommend the text "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" for its anthropological value alone, simply because it is unlikely that kind of study could every be done again. Price uses the language of eugenics in his discussion (as was prevalent in the early 20th cent) but was honest enough to follow where his data led. Absolutely fascinating on many levels.
Survival value is whatever contributes to an individual's reproductive success. It isn't inherent in the form.
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