YOUR FACE IS PROBABLY MORE PRIMITIVE THAN A NEANDERTHALS

The face of a modern human is almost uniquely flat and extraordinarily expressive. But our
remarkable faces may not be as "modern" as we think

By Richard Gray

15 February 2017

"It looks like a monkey," exclaims an excitable young boy, looking at a replica of a skull.

We are standing in a busy gallery at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. Here, a
selection of skulls that once belonged to our prehistoric ancestors have been cast in
metal and put on display. Children run their hands over the skulls' heavy brows and
protruding jaws.

These reconstructed faces look impassive, but a range of emotions are painted onto the
visitors' faces. One small girl looks shy as she peeks around the legs of an adult. Joy
covers the faces of three boys running wildly past, anger flickers onto the face of the
teacher who scolds them, and tears flood from another child who was pushed over in
their haste.

The children are all living, breathing examples of how extraordinarily expressive our
faces are. Human faces convey a huge range of emotion and information through subtle
shifts in the muscles around our eyes and mouth. No other animal has such an
expressive face.

What's more, each of us can instantly recognise another member of our species with a
glance at their face. No other species shares our flat face, high forehead, small jaw and
jutting chin not even the many human-like species that went before us.

The question is, when did humans start to look like we do today? New scientific
techniques and discoveries are starting to provide answers. But they are also revealing
 that our distinctive facial features may be far older than many anthropologists originally
believed.

"As the last surviving species of humans on the planet, it is tempting to assume our
modern faces sit at the tip of our evolutionary branch," says Chris Stringer, an
anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, as he joins me in the gallery.

The Neanderthal face was huge, with an enormous nose

"And for a long time, that has been what the fossils seemed to indicate," he continues.
"Around 500,000 years ago, there was a fairly widespread form of Homo
heidelbergensis that has a face somewhat intermediate between that of a modern
human and Neanderthals. For a long time, I argued this was our common ancestor with
Neanderthals."

Stringer shows me the cast of a real H. heidelbergensis cranium that was found at
Broken Hill in Zambia in the 1920s, and which is now kept safely in the museum's fossil
collection. It is the same skull that the little boy stood in front of earlier.

With a bit of guidance, it is easy to see why this species could be the common ancestor
of modern humans and our extinct cousins the Neanderthals, who died out around
40,000 years ago.

Modern humans have small noses and our jaws sit beneath the rest of our skull. Our
cheek bones are angled and each cheek has a distinctive hollow beneath the eye
socket, known as the canine fossa.

In a sinkhole in the mountains, fragments of a small, flat-faced skull were unearthed

 By comparison the Neanderthal face was huge, with an enormous nose and the front of
the face pulled forward. Around the cheeks the skull curved outwards, rather than being
hollowed out. To our eyes, this would have given them a puffy appearance. They also
had a far flatter forehead than we do, while above their eyes was a pronounced double
arch of the brow-ridge that hung over the rest of their face.

H. heidelbergensis had a slightly flatter face than the Neanderthal and a smaller nose,
but no canine fossa. They also had an even more pronounced brow-ridge than that
seen in Neanderthals.

For decades, most anthropologists agreed that Neanderthals had retained many of
these features from H. heidelbergensis as they evolved and developed a more
protruding jaw, while our own species went in a different direction. That was until the
1990s, when a puzzling discovery was unearthed in the Sierra de Atapuerca region of
northern Spain.

In a sinkhole in the mountains, fragments of a small, flat-faced skull were unearthed,

alongside several other bones. The remains were identified as belonging to a previously
unknown species of hominin. It was called Homo antecessor.

It was assumed that it would fill out and grow into something resembling heidelbergensis

The face of this new species of human ancestor appeared to be far more like our own,
and even had the distinctive hollowing of the canine fossa. Yet it lived 850,000 years
ago, well before H. heidelbergensis.

At first, this apparent contradiction was hand-waved away. The Atapuerca skull
belonged to a child, aged around 10 to 12 years old. It is difficult to predict what this
youngster's face would have looked like in adulthood, because as humans age their
skulls grow and change shape. "It was assumed that it would fill out and grow into
something resembling heidelbergensis," says Stringer.
 However, later discoveries suggest this is not the case. "We now have four fragments
from antecessor adult and sub-adult skulls," says Stringer. "It looks like they maintain
the morphology we see in the child's skull."

It is still difficult to make direct comparisons between hominin skulls. For one thing,
many are incomplete. But even setting that aside, a phenomenon known as allometry
means that changes in size also lead to changes in shape, because different body parts
grow at different rates.

It seems the Neanderthals are more evolved in their own direction than modern humans

To get around this problem, Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues have created
computer models that let them "grow" skulls virtually.

"When we do this, we can explain the variation in shape between Neanderthals," says
Hublin. "But if we grow a modern human skull to the size of a Neanderthal, we don't
have something that looks like a Neanderthal. You get something different."

Hublin thinks that modern humans have retained a lot of primitive features from our
distant ancestors. "It seems the Neanderthals are more evolved in their own direction
than modern humans," he says. "They would have looked very peculiar to our eyes."

In other words, the faces of modern humans may not be all that modern at all.

"The term 'modern' is somewhat misleading," says Hublin. "When you say 'modern',
people assume you mean 'more evolved', but in fact in our case it may mean 'more
primitive'."

Our bones are continually renewed and remodelled

Hublin and his team can also use their software to mature the skulls of children, giving
an idea of what they would have looked like when they became adults
 When they applied it to the skull fragments of H. antecessor, they got something
that looked both primitive and modern at the same time.

"The face has more prominence than modern humans," says Hublin. "But it doesn't
have the derived features we see in the Neanderthal."

Something even more surprising emerged when the fossilised skulls of H.

antecessor were placed under a microscope.

Throughout life, our bones are continually renewed and remodelled. This leaves distinct
patterns on the bone, which can reveal how it grew and formed. In particular, cells that
deposit bone, known as osteoblasts, create a smooth surface whereas those that
absorb bone, called osteoclasts, leave it pitted with microscopic craters.

In modern humans, the area beneath the nose and around the upper jaw known as
the maxilla is rich in cells that absorb bone. But in Neanderthals, H.
heidelbergensisand other early hominins like Australopithecus, this area had lots of
cells that deposit bone, causing the face to protrude forwards.

We last shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals around 700,000 years ago

"Modern humans show widespread areas of resorption all over the maxilla,"
says Rodrigo Lacruz of the New York University College of Dentistry, who has led
much of this work with his colleague Timothy Bromage.

"It is this resorption that helps maintain the human face where it is under the cranium,
rather than protruding far forward."

Similar patterns of bone resorption can be seen around the canine fossa in modern
humans, whereas Neanderthal skulls show widespread bone deposition.

So when Lacruz, Bromage and their colleagues popped the skull fragments from H.
antecessor under the microscope, they were staggered to find that the maxilla and
canine fossa were heavily pitted. Not only that, but the pattern of bone reabsorption
they noticed was similar to that seen in modern humans.
 "These similarities suggest that one of the key developmental changes responsible for
the characteristic face of modern humans can be traced back to H. antecessor," says
Lacruz. "This is important, because antecessor not only showed this human-like growth
pattern, but also shows some human-like morphology around 800,000 years ago."

That date is significant, because the most recent studies of the human family
tree suggest that we last shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals around 700,000
years ago not long after H. antecessor's time.

Faced with all these findings, Stringer and many of his colleagues are now reassessing
their ideas about the evolution of the human face.

Speaking at a conference in Madrid in September 2016, Stringer and several other

leading experts argued that H. antecessor, or a close relative yet to be discovered, may
be a better fit as the common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals than H.
heidelbergensis.

H. antecessor is thought to have appeared at around the time of the first exodus of
hominins from Africa, between 1.8 and 0.8 million years ago.

This would mean that our face is actually quite primitive compared to H. heidelbergensis and
Neanderthals

Some of the oldest footprints to be found in Europe discovered at Happisburgh in

the UK in 2013 are thought to have been left by H. antecessor.

Some Spanish remains also initially attributed to H. antecessor a molar and part of a
mandible have been dated to 1.2 million years ago, although the team that
discovered them has since become more cautious about their identity.

Under the new evolutionary tree that is being proposed, our species evolved from H.
antecessor. Meanwhile, H, heidelbergensis diverged around 500,000 years ago and
evolved independently, leading to Neanderthals.
 "This would mean that our face is actually quite primitive compared to H.
heidelbergensis and Neanderthals," says Stringer.

If that is true, it would help to explain many of the differences we see between us and
our evolutionary cousins.

While modern humans and Neanderthals both evolved big brains, made tools, hunted,
used fire, created jewellery and developed culture, our bodies evolved in different ways.
Even our brains were different shapes.

Something in those archaic hominins required them to have a large nose

Paul O'Higgins of the University of York, with Ricardo Godinho and Penny Spikins,
has tried to unravel why these differences appeared. Using engineering principles, they
have analysed the fossilised remains of prehistoric hominins, and modern
humans, using 3D computer models.

The team was surprised to find that, despite their big jaws, H. heidelbergensis were
much less efficient at biting than modern humans with our smaller, flatter faces. The
shape of the H. heidelbergensis skull and the position of its muscles means they cannot
physically generate intense bite forces, even though their bones are capable of
withstanding them. Similar work has shown the same pattern in Neanderthals.

"The bone in modern humans fractures much earlier," says O'Higgins. "It suggests
efficient biting we get from our flat faces was not the result of natural selection, but
something else."

It now seems that our powerful bites are related to the size of our noses.

"H. heidelbergensis and Neanderthals had gigantic brow ridges," says O'Higgins. "It was
like having a peaked cap on the top of the forehead."

With big brow ridges, the movement of the eyebrows is limited

 In research presented at the Madrid conference, he and his colleagues used their
computer models to shave away the brow ridges, then looked at how this affected the
structure of the face and skull. They found that the brow ridges did not provide any
structural advantage. Instead, they believe these prominent arches of bone above the
eyes may have served to signal dominance to other members of the species, much like
the huge antlers of modern male moose.

Stringer has also suggested this, comparing ancestral hominins to olive baboons.
These monkeys raise their eyebrows as part of their dominance displays.
Similarly, mandrills also use bright colours on their eyebrows and snouts to indicate
their rank in their group.

At the 2016 meeting, O'Higgins and his colleagues presented preliminary findings
suggesting that, when our ancestors lost these aggressive-looking brow ridges, they
gained a subtler form of communication.

"With big brow ridges, the movement of the eyebrows is limited," says O'Higgins. But
that changes when the ridges disappear. "When you have a flat face, you have a
vertical forehead and suddenly you can move your eyebrows up and down. This means
you introduce much more nuanced social communication. You can tell if someone is
cross, happy or angry."

Our faces are among our most valuable tools

If that is true, it implies that it was our status as a social, cooperative species that led us
to keep our primitive faces.

Our facial expressions form a key part of our social interactions, helping us instinctively
work out what someone is feeling or thinking. O'Higgins's research suggests that we
would not be able to do that if we had evolved faces like those of the Neanderthals.

Ultimately, research like this could tell us which of our hominin ancestors were able to
smile, frown or show disgust with their faces as we do.
It is also a reminder that our faces are among our most valuable tools. If they were
different, we could not communicate with each other as effortlessly as we do.

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