The evolution of human facial diversity

Signalling individual identity is critical in many aspects of human social interaction (click for video!).

We all rely on our ability to recognize other people’s faces to get along in the world. Most people don’t think too hard about this, it’s so fundamental to our existence. But it turns out that in order to stand out in the crowd, you need to be, well different. A recent study shows that human faces are in fact, much more different from one another than other traits, and suggests that this high facial diversity has evolved specifically to signal individual identity. It’s a pretty interesting story, and I look forward to digging into the details.

Check out this NatGeo piece on the work, and the original publication (paywalled).

Literature Cited:

Sheehan, Michael J., and Michael W. Nachman. “Morphological and population genomic evidence that human faces have evolved to signal individual identity.” Nature Communications 5 (2014).