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.”
Devolution at work...
Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous "falsehoods and manipulations". According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man's development will have to be rewritten.
Asked why he had perpetrated such a deceit, Fujimura answered tearfully, “The devil made me do it”.
Japanese archaeologist who fooled so many for so long leaves dark legacy of flawed theories
What I like, is the inference from the first article, that now someone else is going to have to re-write the story, ie, just make up a new one! Hilarious!
Ping to above. Seems someone is lying and it's not the Christians.
Here's a way to.
There is the rub. I am neither lazy or stubborn nor annoyed.
I am skeptical
You see, I am one of those people who have read several scientific papers to keep an open mind on both sides of the subject and still think the evolutionist still only have about 20 % of the answers about the origins of human kind, yet refuse to acknowledged that the 80% of the rest is pure unaldultered faith in the theory.
The truly annoying characteristics of the people on the evolution side of the discussion are: they simply are some of the most rigid, inflexible, condescending individuals who because of people like myself who are incredulous or simply skeptical about the theory of evolution, they resort to the last refuge of a weak argument:
Name Calling
Big belfry big brain better burial bolt
What I like, is the inference from the first article, that now someone else is going to have to re-write the story, ie, just make up a new one! Hilarious!
Scientists who lie or fabricate data are driven from the profession in disgrace and the errors they perpetrated are corrected.
Your comment "now someone else is going to have to re-write the story, ie, just make up a new one" is an unwarrented insult to me and to all of the other honest scientists out there; it brings no credit to you or your side of the argument either.
To gnaw on the occasional creationist.
Mamzelle, I wonder why you are so interested in why certain posters may post much of their time on FR, on only certain particular threads...I see no problem at all with that...I lurk on the creation/ID-evolution threads, and do notice many of the same people there, on BOTH sides...and I personally appreciate any of them from either side, who makes cogent, informative, posts, regardless of their position...
Its the same on the religious threads, where I also lurk very often...its many of the same people who are there...
Its the same with the current Terri Shiavo thread that is running...
Many people have certain specific topics that interest them, while other topics may interest them little...I fail to understand why you feel you must need to mention it...
Nice try to your attempt to try to somehow intimate, the the 'few' evos, are operating under multiple personas to make their numbers look more significant...that would probably be your wishful thinking...
And yes, there are many conservative Christians on FR and many on other websites...and whether you like it or not, many Christians do accept evolution as being compatible with God as the creator, ,and with the truth of the Bible...some object to that as being ridiculous, but that problem needs to be resolved by the one doing the objecting....
Personally I appreciate all the information from informed people, whether on a religious thread(where all the posters are coming from a different perspective), or a evolution/creationism thread(where again, ,many of the posters are coming from different perspectives)...what I cannot stand, is a poster who throws insults, posts stuff that is old, and antiquated, and meaningless, or a person who has nothing to contribute other than needle other posters...good information, personal views, and links to other informative sources are appreciated by me, and I am primarily a lurker...but I would bet there are many more lurkers just like me, who do appreciate the time and effort put forth on these thread, by those who would seek to provide education and information...
The problem is, it often takes *many* years before the errors and outright lies are found. In the meantime, the information is printed in millions of textbooks.
Why does it take so long for scientists to find the errors?
Of course, the historians here are likely to tell me I'm out to lunch and I'll have to rethink my hypothesis.
No, that doesn't prove anything.
Toss some fermented berries into the mix and you never know what a male chihuahua can get a drunken female great dane to agree to do.....
Depends on the field. Some disciplines have only one or two experts within a very narrow subfield, and they, as in the German paleontologist, can apparently bluff for a while. Other fields are more active, and have a lot more researchers within a specific subfield. Things can't be missed as easily there. Look at cold fusion, as an example. A number of other labs tried to duplicate the experiment within weeks, and within a few months it was becoming clear there was a problem.
Paleontology is a little different; it is not experimental and there are often very few people within an area/subfield. But there is no way for a mistake or fraud to last too long. The most famous one, Piltdown Man, was distrusted by many from the beginning. Only the British really liked it. By the time the South African fossils came on line it was clear one or the other was wrong, and so many folks just ignored Piltdown. A few, including Friedrichs and Weidenreich both, by about 1932, published research suggesting the lower jaws and molars were that of an orang (E.A. Hooton, Up from the Ape, revised edition; The MacMillan Co., 1946). This is what a 1946 textbook shows, several years before the claims for Piltdown were completely falsified.
With the internet, communication is much faster, and it takes a very narrow subspecialty, such as this German was in, for fraud to last very long at all.
So I hope this answers your question.
What does it matter if post #257 is not condescending -- with that post he is attempting to correct his extremely insulting and very mistaken prior post.... which was one among many that deserve that characterization.
Yes, your honor, I know I was issued 4 speeding tickets on my way to work on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday last week, but I did not speed on my way to work Wednesday morning, and I did not work on Sat and Sun, so we should negate three of those tickets for the days I didn't speed.
I'll give you a couple of things I'm sure you already know about.
1. Perfumes
2. Deodorants
3. Cosmetics
4. PHERMONES
I can guarantee you that if a woman had hair on her back and howled, there'd be a long line to "service" her if she overproduced pheromones. Now they are covered up by assorted other "stinks".
And you add that the "preferred" ones now are so wrapped up in conquests and notches on their belts (both sexes) because of birth control and you get the ugly reproducing and happy and the "pretty" ones sterile and empty. Maybe we have a negative selection going on. I think having a really beautiful daughter or handsome son can be more a curse. My experience is that the really pretty people are so wrapped up in being looked at that they neglect their heads. Society has gotten in the way of Nature.
So the ugly ones sneak under the radar screen and pass on their genes. Many pretty ones end up old and flabby and alone.
And I can't type too - PHEROMONES
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