Scientists show we’ve been losing face for 10,000 years

The Sunday Times; November 20, 2005

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.”

The aquatic tribe

From: The Sunday Times (UK), November 20th 2005

The life aquatic

They can swim before they can walk, and have an extraordinary ability to see clearly underwater. But the mysterious Moken people of the Indian Ocean are unique in another way - they predicted the Asian tsunami. The photographer Andrew Testa went to meet them in their watery domain [to see the photographs, please buy the newsprint edition of The Sunday Times]. Report by Scott Athorne

When the tsunami struck southeast Asia on Boxing Day last year, leaving a quarter of a million dead, one tribe was unsurprised. More than that - they had been expecting it. The Moken, also known as 'sea gypsies', are a nomadic people living off the coasts of Burma and Thailand. They detected the danger before any western electronic aids, and saved hundreds of lives.

A people intimate with the ocean, the Moken live on hand-built boats for most of the year, apart from the monsoon months, and learn to swim before they learn to walk. A Moken legend tells of the 'laboon', a giant wave sent by angry ancestral spirits that eats people. Before it comes, the sea recedes, then the waters flood the Earth, destroy it and make it clean again. So when, last December, the sea began to recede, the Moken knew what to do. On Phi Phi island, off Thailand, in the crucial minutes before the disaster, their elders noticed unusual movements in the sea and urged Thai villagers and tourists to seek safety on a nearby hilltop, just before the largest of three waves flattened the low-lying island. Dozens of lives were saved. Further north, on South Surin island, it is thought about 200 Moken living on the beach escaped to the hills, all except a disabled boy left behind in the rush to higher ground.

The Moken are private people, apolitical, non-violent, generous and with few material possessions - there is no word for 'want' in their language. They have curly hair, bushy eyebrows and darker skin than the Thai or Burmese with whom they share the Mergui archipelago, some 800 islands scattered along 250 miles of the Andaman Sea, part of the Indian Ocean. Anthropologists believe they may have migrated from southern China 4,000 years ago.

These people also possess extraordinary visual powers. Research by Dr Anna Gislen, of Lund University in Sweden, shows that Moken children can see twice as well underwater as Europeans of the same age. 'They use their eyes to the limit,' she explains. 'When you or I open our eyes underwater, a reflex reaction limits our vision. Moken children learn to control this reflex and muscularly change the shape of the eye's lens so as to increase light refraction.' This allows them to dive totally unaided to depths of 75ft - without snorkels, flippers or air cylinders. They comb the sea floor for sea snails, oysters and mussels.

'It's an amazing sight,' says Andrew Testa, the British photographer who took these rare pictures of the tribe. 'In the water they reminded me of a bunch of otters or fish. They were unbelievably skilled. They are also very happy people - though their way of life is under threat.'

Ten years ago, some 2,500 Moken led a traditional seafaring life in this archipelago; now the figure is just 1,000. Alcohol and cigarettes are commonplace, and some displaced Moken women have turned to prostitution. In the past five years, five of the Moken living on one of the two Surin islands have died of Aids, among them the chief's son. On Phi Phi island, Moken live in squalor and have become a reluctant tourist attraction. They also face pressure to convert to Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, though most retain their animist beliefs.

The elders do their best to keep the old way of life alive, through song and dance and stories handed down through the generations. The legend of the laboon is just one. Unlike most tsunami survivors, the Moken do not question how something so terrible could happen. 'The wave is created by the spirit of the sea,' said Saleh Kalathalay, a spear fisherman. 'The big wave had not eaten anyone for a long time, and it wanted to taste them again.'

The patron saint of mind enhancement?

I've just been reading about a pretty amazing character from history who had some good ideas for making decisions and using your mind's powers to help you in life.

You see, many ideas put forward by today's psychologists actually have their roots back in history.

An example is in decision making. Most people have heard of the idea of listing the pros and cons of each alternative choice when trying to make a hard decision. This apparently modern psychological technique can actually be traced back to St Ignatius of Loyola, who wrote/inspired 'The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola'.

He taught a number of exercises to help you make decisions – and for keeping yourself mentally healthy.

His techniques used thinking and imagination in tandem.

An example of this is his technique for weighing up the pros and cons of a possible decision. This is how it works: First consider the possible options available to you. Then take each one, one-by-one, and imagine you had taken that choice and live with it for three days, and pay attention to how you feel about it.

He claimed that this would help one deeply discern which was truly the best choice in line with one's deepest values.

Its probable that St Ignatius was adapting earlier techniques. For instance, another exercise was the examen of conscience. He believed that this exercise would maintain his monks mental and spiritual wellbeing amidst all troubles. This is how the technique works: Last thing at night, before you go to sleep, you review the day (like watching back a video of it in your mind). First you notice what was good, and be grateful for it. Then you look at was not so good, objectively and without judgement (try imagining looking at it from a distance). One accepts what has happened and hands the problems that are ongoing to (in his value-system) God.

This technique was also used in the past by the Tibetan Buddhists who would review the day in a cool, dispassionate way.

Interesting optical illusion

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html

Interesting!

Image streaming

I’ve always been fascinated by the untapped powers of our minds. In this short article I’d like to introduce you to a way to use these powers to generate ideas and solve any problem you may have in your life. Just think, your own mind contains a wealth of resources and solutions, if only you just take the time and effort to tap into them! And this technique is the perfect method for doing so.

Psychologists now believe that the vast majority of our thinking is unconscious, an idea that fits with the reports of countless writers, scientists, artists and composers throughout history who claim that their inspiration comes from parts of their mind that they are not consciously aware of. Therefore your unconscious mind is far more likely to come up with powerful solutions and creative ideas than your conscious mind is.

In their book ‘The Einstein Factor’, Win Wenger and Richard Poe teach a practical technique for tapping your unconscious mind for ideas; they call it image-streaming.

The biggest mistake you can have with image-streaming is to dismiss it as ‘just another mental technique’. This one is special. This works and its very powerful. All that you need to do is actually try it, and practice with it.

Image-streaming is based on the idea that just as you have a constant inner stream of words (your conscious mind, when you are talking to yourself), you also have an unconscious stream of thought in images. But most of the time we are not even aware of it! By closing your eyes and paying attention you can cultivate your ability to tap into this stream of images.

Most of us have become so used to thinking in words – talking to others constantly, talking to ourselves – that we forget that we also have a non-linguistic intelligence. A picture can say a thousand words, and this is often the case with the images that your unconscious mind produces.

This is how you do it: get a tape recorder or Dictaphone that you can talk into and make a recording. Then sit down somewhere where you can relax and will not be disturbed. Close your eyes and ask yourself the question that you wish to find the answer to. Then pay attention to any imagery that pops up. To begin with you will probably find it hard to see anything. Keep practising, and the images will get stronger. Afterwards listen to your recording and jot down some notes on what you think it means. You’ll find that sometimes the images suggest a literal answer, other times they are more cryptic. If no apparent solutions are forthcoming, or you don’t understand the images you’re getting, simply try again.

This method allows you to make use of the extraordinary power of feedback. We tend to learn things at an accelerated rate when we have good, accurate feedback. By hearing yourself describe your inner imagery, your ability to become aware of that imagery starts to increase massively.

Here are three more tips for making image-streaming work:

Don’t just describe the basics of what you see, try to include any details on movement, colour, brightness, and even texture, temperature and sound. Use all your senses.

Stick to describing the sensory details of what you’re experiencing, and leave analysing what they mean until afterwards.

The answers you get will be as specific or vague as your question: be as detailed as possible in how your frame your question. So, rather than ask “How can I earn more money?” a more useful question might be: “How can I earn at least £1,000 a month, working at home using my computer part time at weekends?”

Ultimately, like any technique, it will only work if you use it. The more effort you put into it, the more you will get out of it. Finally, there is also an audio course on image-streaming available if you wish to go a lot deeper into the subject. It’s available in the UK from www.Lifetools.com and the deluxe edition has some very interesting tapes of a Scottish image-streaming teacher called Michael Campbell. However, the course is pretty expensive compared to the price of the paperback book, and – in my opinion – doesn’t give all that much more information.

Even if your sceptical, please give it a go, you may be surprised at the results!

Finally, if you have tried this technique, or begin to try it after reading this email, please send me a note to let me know how useful you found it!

‘The Einstein Factor’, Win Wenger and Richard Poe (1996), Prima Publishing, New York.