She's possessed!
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.”
Nah, you'll look like a lamprey.
I think she's in love with you.
I think that it's a defense mechanism, trying to justify the sight of so many people who clearly don't agree with them and trying to justify the fact that their "logic" never seems to convince anyone. Years ago there was a similar claim made about atheists in the newsgroup alt.atheism.
It's interesting that Darwin put off publishing for twenty years because he anticipated people like our creos who would judge the merits of the idea by its imagined consequenses.
Demented. Maybe she's perfect for Dimensio? :-O
Nah. Dimensio actually comes from the word "Dimension". I used to go by that handle on IRC, but one day I accidentally left off the 'n' and it stuck.
Not real hard to figure out. And one of them is rather proud of it.
Sure. And we're supposed to believe that. Are you sure you didn't mean ICR?
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
Spot on!
What a pant load.
Consider the source - more like a diaper load.
Well done!
So I was half right; one of the two was subsequently banned, the other hasn't posted in several years....
I'm surprised effdot managed to remember which side he was voting for. The voices must have been taking a break that day.
David Steinberg used to do a routine about Jewish people and nose jobs. Something like "Great big eyes, great big cheekbones and a little teenie nose. And then they have a baby with a nose like a macaw. It's God's way of going Booga, Booga, booga" (Quote not accurate but close enough).
If you have time to dig out these symmetry studies, they are quite interesting.
LOL!
Proof positive I am right.
"If you have time to dig out these symmetry studies, they are quite interesting."
Any idea where I start looking?
Here's another:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10828557&query_hl=2
When you go there ask it to display "Related Articles" and check out the citations.
20 years ago there was one guy in New Mexico talking about this and now there's hundreds. I don't know what you have available. I've seen articles in Science News and Science about this.
Then why do we still have TEETH!?
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