The living face is the most important and mysterious surface we deal with.
It is the showcase of the self, instantly displaying our age, sex, and race, our health and mood.
It can send messages too elusive for science, and it bewitches of us with its beauty.
Every face is unique. 6 billion or so adorn the earth.
It is a magnificent surface,
and in the last 20 years we've learned more about it then the previous 20 millennia.
The face of everyone began in the sea. A true face bundles mouth and sense organs, and it may be older than shell or bone. The origin of the face is a child of motion. When an animal swims regularly in one direction, the head becomes its leading edge. A forward mouth swallows food easily, through simple momentum. A head also contacts nonstop novelty, so the sense organs cluster up front, like the guidance system of a missile.
The brain controls the facial senses. In theory it can go anywhere, but with biological wiring being frail, it is lodged up front near the senses. And since it is then so vulnerable as a choice killing point, fish evolved a hard covering for the brain, its skull and bone began the foundation of the face.
We see the same T pattern of 2 eyes, a nose, and a mouth in some many creatures from eel to Einstein. It means that evolution has crushed other designs in favor of this harden over time one. What make’s it so durable? Why no eyes in the back of the head, or nose under the mouth?
The quest for food has sculpted the face more than anything and the mouth dominates everywhere – in almost all animals. The mouth of dominates everything, it is the portal where an animal assimilate its world, begins to change it from non-self to self. Hazards abound everywhere so 3 checkpoint senses, taste, smell, and sight are nearby to reject poisons and generally tell food from predator. The taste buds lie within the mouth, and the nostrils sit just above, and the eyes perch a tier higher. Why eyes above the mouth – for vertebrates in general, it sets the eyes above falling food and out of the shadow of the body. Fish especially need the eyes oriented to sunlight, which fades rapidly.
Some creatures have other senses:
-
Rattlesnakes have dimples that register shifts in heat as slight as .002 degrees
which helps it strike rodents in dark burrows.
- Sharks have a bulb of flesh called the ampullae of Lorenzini which
sense electrical pulses of living creatures
Carnivores like cats and bears have frontal eyes like headlights to give them binocular vision, which sharpens their sense of 3D – which makes them better hunters. But this pairing narrows the visual field, so they often compensate with swivel necks and eyes that rotate in their sockets. So we do not have eyes in the back of our heads because by turning our head and necks we can see everywhere.
Prey, however, need a faster early warning system. Many like gazelles, have eyes on the sides of their heads, to scout a wider range and spot cheetahs earlier. Some bottom feeding fish have their face split. The ray has a mouth and two nostrils on his belly side where he eats, but his eyes are on top so he can see enemies from above.
There
are other deviations from the norm –
- Whales and dolphins have there nostrils on top – blowhole
to breath easily while on the water surface.
- The elephant grew it nose long because it’s head could not touch the
ground.
- The hammerhead shark evolved a great flanged face to separate
the nostrils detect direction of odor.
Hair
coats the faces of almost every mammal.
We have a bare
face, and this apparently trivial fact have shaped our very nature.
Why is this so. In most
mammals, the upper lip clings tightly to the gums. But in monkeys the upper
lip is free and moves about. It lets the faces take on many shapes and each
can be a signal. The face grew more articulate. And since the signals must
be visible, the fur withdrew. Our faces are bare so others can read them. Other
animals communicate mainly by odor.
The earth abounds
with social creatures like dogs and lions, and they too have face signals.
But the smooth face greatly expanded the vocabulary, made messages clearer,
and more varied. It hooked monkeys into a dense, rapid information web and
led to super social creatures. Chimps console each other and play intricate
political games, and we humans are the virtuosos of cooperation. Our ability
to gauge trust and work with others depends partly on the face.
The hair less face
was the first-up to civilization.
Where did the shape of modern
man's face come from. Our
faces stem partly from the product of our minds.
Each of us has a smart
face, bread from weapons, fire and desire.
We
began from walking Apes some 1.3 million years ago.
Our upright
stance demilitarized the face. A four legged animal’s jaws and teeth reach forward
and make the face a natural weapon. A wolf for instance lopes along with its
fangs in front, even chimps routinely nip their rivals. On two feet, with the
head atop the shoulders, early man not only lost this protective design, but
left their whole bodies open to attack. How did we fend off carnivores. It is
almost certain with weapons. So our faces began to drift towards modern human
- our foreheads lifted, our muzzle slimmed and our teeth shrank.
From early man to
us, four key changes occur:
The face flattens
The forehead rises to house the large brain
The nose juts out
The chin appears
With
fire, food softened and there was less of a need for a giant strong jaw and
teeth.
With weapons
and tools, we didn’t need a muzzle anymore.
But why did we specifically
lose it.
The
best explanation invokes desire and centers on the allure of the childlike face.
We find babies winsome; we need to if we wanted to survive. This attraction
carried over to baby faced grownups. They looked more appealing, reproduced
more often and passed on more baby face genes. The muzzle sank and the face
got more infantile.
Weapons, fire and desire had a lot to do with sculpting the modern human face.