Your face sounds familiar to me … We all know that facial features are, above other personal characteristics such as gait or voice, the main clue to identify a fellow man. Other animals, on the other hand, are guided by smell and sound. That is why humans have developed the gestural and physical repertoire in the broader face of the terrestrial fauna.
Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley set out to find out if this variability is truly a result of our evolution as hypersocial beings that use sight to recognize themselves. The results have just been published in the journal Nature Communications .
First, the researchers confirmed that the facial features are the most varied. To do this, they relied on a database of body measurements compiled by the United States Army in 1988 in order to design military equipment. Thus they verified that characteristics such as the distance between the eyes or the width of the nose actually change more from one subject to another than, for example, the size of the hands. The triangle formed by the eyes, the mouth and the nose is the area with the most variability.
In addition, the differences in the face are not related to other parts of our physiognomy , as they do in the rest of the body: someone with long arms tends to also have long legs, for example.
Finally, and to complete the study, the experts investigated the database of the 1000 Genome project, which has sequenced the genomes of a thousand people since 2008. And as they had predicted, they found that the genes related to facial appearance presented more variability than others, such as those that determine an individual’s height. This indicates that having a unique and recognizable face is an adaptive advantage, favored by evolution.
