Fed II Star - February 5, 2006

REAL LIFE NEWS: CHANGING FACES

Over time, the shape of human faces has changed considerably. We're talking about the past 650 years here. It seems our medieval ancestors had lower foreheads and more prominent features that we do today.

This research is from a team of scientists who examined a group of skulls spanning across 30 generations, taking careful measurements. They discovered that the differences between past and present skull shapes were "striking".

The team looked at 30 skulls dating from the mid-14th Century, from the unlucky victims of plague, which had been excavated from plague pits in London about twenty years, as well as 54 skulls from the wreck of the Mary Rose ship which sank in 1545. All these ancient skulls were compared with 31 recent orthodontic records from the School of Dentistry in Birmingham.

The two principal differences discovered were that our ancestors had more prominent features, but that the distance from the eyes to the top of the skull (which is called the cranial vault) was smaller. Modern skulls have a vault height about 20% larger than the old ones. The lead author of the study suggests the increase is size may be due to an increase in mental capacity over the ages. Good news: we have got smarter over the centuries!