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For Those Interested in the Research of Dr. Weston A. Price |
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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.”
Eventually it could. The genetic disparity simply has to get large enough. For example, dogs are a unique species, that arose through the domestication of wolves (over hundreds of thousands of years). Some dogs are capable of breeding with wolves, others are not.
Darwin wrote an entire book on selection based on phyical appearance. Darwin was the first to notice that females were in charge of mate selection.
>>Seems to carry a hint of Lamarkian Evolution.
Not necessarily. The stresses put on the body can alter its devlopment. For example, someone who does a lot of weightlifting or other strenuous exercise during puberty will tend to devlop a heavier frame and larger build in adulthood. The genotype is unchanged, but the expression of the genotype can be altered by the environment.
Do tell. Biologists will be amazed by your being able to show them something that isn't true.
Unless you mean that evolution means selection for type? I've been given lots of vocabulary by evos in the attempt to bridge all these uncomfortable, contingent gaps between the species..
Look, don't blame *us* for your failure to understand why the terminology is necessarily complex. And don't tell those tall tales about "uncomfortable, contingent gaps". There are no "gaps" which pose serious problems for evolutionary biology.
Evos make so many assumptions--
That's a big assumption you're making about biologists, Mam.
round faces do not new species create.
Not by itself, no, but then no one said that it did. Confused much?
No, it doesn't. It explains what is fashionable or attractive for the time, and that is all.
I suppose science will next prove that women's legs became short and stubby when they wore long skirts, because long shapely legs were not essential to attracting males... and when hemlines raised, evolution brought about longer, slimmer limbs.
Hmm... I wonder if evolution caused fruit trees to grow taller to protect the fruit from human pickers, and in response the ladder evolved?
Yeah, can't risk actually learning anything, eh?
The surge in dental problems is because the last 10,000 years our face has changed?
Yes.
Why didn't our teeth adapt also???
They are. As the article itself says, a genetic disposition for a lack of wisdom teeth is rising in the human population.
Nothing requires evolution to work in perfect synchronization when a change requires several components to change in order to achieve optimization. In fact, such perfect synchronization would be an argument *against* evolution.
All it requires is that stepwise changes be in the direction of increased net fitness, which the observations described in the article certainly seem to match. A shrinkage in jaws followed by a lagging adaptation of the teeth makes perfect sense biologically.
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For Those Interested in the Research of Dr. Weston A. Price |
Methinks it's time for a Weston A Price ping
Coming right up.
There is the most maddening gang of evo prats here on FR--they come here only to posture and insult and go to no other threads or discuss no issue except that of evolution.
I'd love to see them selected out into their own geographically isolated chat room here on FR, where they can preach endlessly to their choirboys. All two of them.
If you can't deal with a common-sense understanding of what evolution is-- species emerging from other species--why do you bother with us? This is the understanding which is under argument. Selection for type is something not denied by any farmer--the emergence of new species is the issue.
And you have not, nor has any other scientist as yet, has made a new species (under the common sense understanding of genus-species categorization) happen under lab conditions--your assertions are based on assumptions, which are worse than mythology.
An attractive smile is an important allurement for both men and women in breeding... softer foods is a stronger factor in evolution of facial appearance than the sexual attraction factor?
No, *a* surge in dental problems due to *cavities* is the proliferation of sugar in our diets now.
It is *not* the cause of the surge in dental problems due to tooth crowding, impacted wisdom teeth, etc.
Please learn about a topic before you make confident and incorrect pronouncements and conclusions about it.
That was not evolution either.
No one said it was.
It's surprising how so many people think everything is "evolution."
When it *is* evolutionary change, there's no sin in pointing it out.
That's what modern scientific education does for us...... sheeesh!
If you *had* a proper "modern scientific education", you wouldn't keep making so many elementary mistakes, and making so many cartoonish straw-man gripes about evolution and/or scientists.
Get enough cavities in your teeth and they fall out, making crowding a lesser problem than the lack of teeth.
Perhaps tooth crowding is a problem now because people have better dental care?
Check out the posting history--no interest in life or FR except singing that one note...poor needy thing. Methinks a marker of genetic weakness.
You're missing the fact that the anti-evolution people are *extremely* defensive, and hysterically attack anything that supports any aspect of evolutionary biology.
Thus all the screams about, "*that's* not evolution, *that's* only adaptation, it's not *real* evolution until something changes from a cat into a dog overnight!"
This only exposes their ignorance, of course, since genetic morphological change *is* evolution. Period.
Maybe he was the first guy to notice ...
Apparently you missed post #6, which defensively brought up the subject - and it was posted by .......... ?
Note the gross dishonesty of the anti-evolutionist. No one, not even any "evo", has ever claimed that a dog growing a longer tail is any kind of "miracle". It's simple biology. It's the *anti-evolutionists* who strain mightily at gnats. We evolutionists just report the research findings, then sit back and watch the anti-evos blow a gasket. It's pretty funny.
Oh, please. I'm using the exact current scientific definition of "new species". Your "common sense understanding of evolution" is the typical creationist stupidity/ignorance.
That goes without saying.
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