Posted on 01/25/2006 8:52:48 AM PST by blam
Time changes modern human's face
By Rebecca Morelle
BBC News science reporter
Our ancestors had more prominent features but lower foreheads
Researchers have found that the shape of the human skull has changed significantly over the past 650 years.
Modern people possess less prominent features but higher foreheads than our medieval ancestors.
Writing in the British Dental Journal, the team took careful measurements of groups of skulls spanning across 30 generations.
The scientists said the differences between past and present skull shapes were "striking".
Plague victims
The team used radiographic films of skulls to record extensive measurements taken by a computer.
They looked at 30 skulls dating from the mid-14th Century. They had come from the unlucky victims of the plague. The skulls had been excavated from plague pits in the 1980s in London.
Another 54 skulls examined by the team were recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose which sank off the south coast of England in 1545.
All the skulls were compared with 31 recent orthodontic records from the School of Dentistry in Birmingham.
"This new research shows how bones... can provide more knowledge to the scientific community, and ultimately the public"
Professor Robert Foley, Cambridge University The two principal differences discovered were that our ancestors had more prominent features, but their cranial vault - the distance measured from the eyes to the top of the skull - was smaller.
Dr Peter Rock, lead author of the study and director of orthodontistry at Birmingham University, told the BBC News website: "The astonishing finding is the increased cranial vault heights.
"The increase is very considerable. For example, the vault height of the plague skulls were 80mm, and the modern ones were 95mm - that's in the order of 20% bigger, which is really rather a lot."
He suggests that the increase in size may be due to an increase in mental capacity over the ages.
Repatriating bones
The study of human remains has previously fallen into controversy, and a report commissioned by the UK government called for human remains to be repatriated where possible.
The ancient skulls used in this study, from which the radiographic films were taken, have either been reburied or are now housed in museums.
Professor Robert Foley is director of the Leverhulme Centre for Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University, and sat on a government working group which has drawn up guidelines on working with human remains.
"The study of human remains can provide vital information about our past. There is a huge interest in our biological past - both from an evolutionary and a historical point of view - and research into human bones can tell us a great deal," he said.
"This new research shows how bones, and even the records of bones, can provide more knowledge to the scientific community, and ultimately the public."
What does he mean by "mental capacity"? Does he mean the volume of information storage capacity? If he means level of intelligence (We are smarter now!) then the evidence from ancient history does not support this.
The Mary Rose was an English ship, presumably carrying English people. The London plague pits were definitely full of English people (that is to say, of Anglo-Saxon descent).
Where are they getting the skulls that they are comparing these 650 yr old skulls against? Modern Europe and modern England are all inevitably a mix of many diffferent genetic groups (Celts, Franks, Goths, etc, not to mention more recent immigrants). Why couldn't that be behind the differences?
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The Judge is one of the brightest and most well-read personalities on satellite. And he's a great guy! I'd love to have dinner with him sometime.
Sorry ID people, but here is an example of evolution.
Evolution-in-action ping.
Well, mine sure doesn't look like it used to!
That's not a forehead, it's a FIVEhead! ;)
Your comment suggests that evolution occurs much faster than the millions or thousands of years normally posited in the Darwinian theory that evolution works to improve the breed according to natural selection caused by adaptation to environment and/ or events.
How to account for a change of 20% in only a few hundred years? Wouldn't this be mainly due to diet improvement and simply create bigger bone structures rather than any particular increase in mental ability?
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If you check out the portraits of English royalty, many actually were "high brow". (Of coarse they were all cousins.)
I suspect this has more to do with who was thought to be the hunks or the babes.
Or, that those who have some degree of inherited reistance to the plague (as well as to cholera, typhoid, typhus, AIDS, etc.) simply have rounder, larger heads ~ rather like the heads of those in populations we know have a high incidence of such resistance ~ we could have a "replacement" situation, or simple selection.
Otherwise, you have nothing more than variation within a species.
Now what was it Darwin titled his famous book?
(Not just cousins ~ sometimes aunt and nephew, or uncle and niece, or even brother and sister).
In fact, there's even debate of what constitutes "a plant" ~ is it the flower, the leaves, the woody stem, etc.
In the fall, many of my neighbors consider the leaf to be a malevolent critter, for example.
The "isolated breeding group" concept (noted in that article) is the definition used by the environmental extremists to prove the existence of thousands of species of salmon ~ it is "faulty".
That's why I'm sticking with my own, and Darwin's, understanding of species ~ that you can produce fertile offspring.
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