Time changes modern human's face

[eufrenio]

Time changes modern human's face

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4643312.stm

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".

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4643312.stm

[eufrenio]

Evolution is still at work:

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

Agrippa vindicated?

[nockwasright]

It's only 80 skulls of some Englishmen compared to 30 skulls of other Englishmen. Seems not enough to draw any human race conclusion.
If the researcher thinks evolution is favoring intelligence in the last few hundreds years he needs a teaching in history.

[Jack Reed]

nockwasright said:

It's only 80 skulls of some Englishmen compared to 30 skulls of other Englishmen. Seems not enough to draw any human race conclusion.
If the researcher thinks evolution is favoring intelligence in the last few hundreds years he needs a teaching in history.

That's true. The samples seem too narrow to draw wide conclusions from them. It's hard to believe that there could be such major changes over such a relatively short period of time. The medieval samples and modern samples might be atypical as well.

[Agrippa]

I read about that on Skadi, and that were my first thoughts:
I'd assume if we would look at the details that we could prove Denordisation and contraselective trends rather than something else if looking at this remains. Furthermore braincase size is not determined by the height alone...s

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.

Well, even in our Christian times people were not that hypersensitive and considering what happens in our hospitals and cemeteries every day such scruples are ridiculous and just show how hypocritical and weak our times are. Maybe future analysis should be put on hold in general so that no new results can come up and our "great reverence" is saved whereas real dignity is a strange word and content for the West since decades... :thumbdown

Back to the topic this threads are of major importance for every consideration:
forum.skadi.net/showthread.php?t=44948
forum.skadi.net/showthread.php?t=38300
forum.skadi.net/showthread.php?t=42641
forum.skadi.net/showthread.php?t=46860

However, we should consider environmental factors like bad nutrition too.

This is interesting:

The scientists took samples from a sunken ship, the Mary Rose, and from plague victims. The latter sample might be biased, since different head shapes have been shown in the past to have better chances of survival; however, the sample from the Mary Rose should be random, and the two historical samples tend to agree in their differentiation from modern populations.

dienekes.blogspot.com/2006/01/expanding-heads-and-shrinking-faces.html

Especially studies of the survival rates of different skull shapes would be interesting. Generally its believed that brachcranic individuals were better off and that pyknomorphy in general might be positively correlated with higher survival rates for certain plagues, they are earlier mature since they dont fully mature at all, if comparing their proportions with leptomorphic-mesomorphic individuals, and have less of a problem with respiratory diseases on average, especially tuberculosis and pneumonia.

Considering nutrition and general health status, measurements from the body skeleton would be very interesting, especially height, limb height (very important because healthy leptomorphs have generally longer than other variants of related racial types) and bone degenerations, pathological developments etc.
Comparing this results with the average of now and then would be interesting, as well as past and current variation.


Its still too early for final conclusions from such samples alone, though the general trend is obvious for many European regions.

Its interesting to note that in ancient Egypt it was partly the other way around, with heads starting high and head height decreasing in predynastic and dynastic times, whereas other measurements, especially head breadth, increased.

[mhagneto]

eufrenio said:

Time changes modern human's face

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4643312.stm

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".

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4643312.stm

/

Don't results like these create suspicions about any studies that make conclusions based on comparing phenotypes? Shouldnt we rely more on the results of genetics and more or less "dispense with the bones" when asking the usual taxonomic questions? (I'm assuming that geneticists eventually will acquire a great degree of precision and conclusiveness, if they havent already).

[Agrippa]

Whats about genes with no function? They are practically worthless only useful for making ancestral trees, but they dont show us a change if its about evolution and racial specialisation. So the contrary is true, we must look more careful at the physical remains and reconstruct with the help of genetic results ancestry to explain how variants came into existence, both from which base and for what reason - which selective pressures worked on it.

[mhagneto]

agrippa said:

Whats about genes with no function? They are practically worthless only useful for making ancestral trees, but they dont show us a change if its about evolution and racial specialisation. So the contrary is true, we must look more careful at the physical remains and reconstruct with the help of genetic results ancestry to explain how variants came into existence, both from which base and for what reason - which selective pressures worked on it./

OK, granted, for understanding selective pressures you need both genes and bones, but somebody has to come up with an adequate theoretical model before you can cull the confusion from the mass of data. There's a lot of intelligent speculation, but the farther we go back in prehistory the less certain we are of specific conditions, and cant know the forces at work.

[Agrippa]

There's a lot of intelligent speculation, but the farther we go back in prehistory the less certain we are of specific conditions, and cant know the forces at work.

Thats true but we know quite a lot about certain times, the climate, the basic subsistence, nutrition, diseases even, social structures to some degree, movements etc.
There is a lot of work to do in this field, without limitations, without PC-trash, but there was already a lot done and understood too.
We just have to look at the changes unbiased. I mean it could be pure change if the climate changed and the subsistence pattern and suddently the racial type changed too, but its fair to say there was a direction correlation in most of the cases.