PARIS: The mystery of why humans are the only animals to have chins may have been solved by scientists who suggest that it is linked to the invention of cooking.
A number of different explanations have been put forward for the apparently useless appendage, including the idea that it helps humans attract a mate. But new research pours cold water on that theory – pointing instead to the way the jaw evolved and shrank to deal with the fact that cooking was making food softer. A paper from the University of Florida is the latest attempt to explain exactly why humans – unlike all other primates – have chins.
Author James Pampush points out that the fact that apes and monkeys do not have chins proves that they must have evolved after the ancestors of man split off from other branches of the primate family.
Some have argued in the past that the development of the chin could be a purely random example of ‘genetic drift’, with no evolutionary purpose whatsoever. However, the new research – published in the Journal of Human Evolution – says that because the evolution of the chin happened 77 times faster than the average genetic change, it is highly unlikely to have been random. Dr Pampush calculated that the chin began to emerge some time between 6 million and 200,000 years ago, with the most likely estimate being around 2million years ago.
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