According to the latest study, scientist claim that the reason why modern humans have chins is because we became more social, not because we started eating soft food.
Nathan Holton, anthropologist at the University of Iowa, and his colleagues examined x-ray images from the Iowa Facial Growth Study. which tracked children’s skull development from age 3 into adulthood. Using 292 measurements from 18 females and 19 males, the researchers tracked jaw development and bone distribution associated with protecting against various kinds of stresses, according to Discovery News.
Study showed that chins became prominent with age, but there was no connection between chin prominence and resistance. On the contrary, jaws are better at resisting some types of forces at age 3, when chins are not developed, compared to adulthood.
[quote text_size=”small” author=”– Nathan E. Holton” author_title=”Anthropologist at the University of Iowa”]
If chins don’t confer jaw protection, the reason for the pointy human chin is something of a mystery. So why have faces shrunk? One possibility is that hormonal changes associated with reduced violence and increased cooperation had the side effect of “domesticating” the human face, thus shrinking it.
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James Pampush, TA and member of research team at the University of Florida, said that the reason apes and monkeys do not have chins proves they must have evolved after the ancestors of man split off from other branches of the primate family. He says that evolution of chin happened 77 times faster than the average genetic change, thus making it highly unlikely to have been random, as reported by Daily Mail.
As modern humans evolved from being isolated hunters to more sociable, they were less likely to fight over territory. This resulted in reduced testosterone levels which caused the skull to shrink and chin to become more prominent.
Last month Immortal News covered a story about the findings in Croatia claiming that Neanderthals wore eagle talon jewellry 130,000 years ago.
What are your thoughts on prominent chin of modern humans and the reason behind it?
