Scientists show we've been losing face for 10,000 years
- From: ano457@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 20 Nov 2005 07:13:36 -0800
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."
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