The faces of human ancestors evolved to minimise injury from punches, according to new research.
In a study titled “Protective buttressing of the hominin face” and published in the journal Biological Review, researchers found that the faces of ape-like human ancestors, australopiths, developed to improve fighting ability, with the areas of the face most often targeted in a fight seeing the greatest increase in robusticity.
David Carrier and Michael H. Morgan propose that the evolution of the human face was not due to the need to chew hard to crush foods such as nuts, but instead to defend the brain against fists, which also evolved to be able to be used in a club-like fashion as weapons.
Carrier said:
“When modern humans fight hand-to-hand the face is usually the primary target. What we found was that the bones that suffer the highest rates of fracture in fights are the same parts of the skull that exhibited the greatest increase in robusticity during the evolution of basal hominins. These bones are also the parts of the skull that show the greatest difference between males and females in both australopiths and humans. In other words, male and female faces are different because the parts of the skull that break in fights are bigger in males.”
This theory adds to the idea that much of human evolution was defined by violence ans the “dark side to human nature”, as Carrier commented:
“The hypothesis that our early ancestors were aggressive could be falsified if we found that the anatomical characters that distinguish us from other primates did not improve fighting ability. What our research has been showing is that many of the anatomical characters of great apes and our ancestors, the early hominins (such as bipedal posture, the proportions of our hands and the shape of our faces) do, in fact, improve fighting performance”
