UFC president Dana White frequently refers to fighting as being in our DNA. It is not a metaphor.
A new theory published in the journal Biological Reviews, argues compellingly that fighting drove key evolutionary changes in our distant ancestors. It suggest that certain robust facial features, notably in men, developed as a defense against fist fights. The bones most commonly broken in a fight are precisely those that show great strength in australopiths, the immediate predecessors of the human genus Homo.
This is two human beings fighting.
This was the result.
Struve had surgery, and had not a heart defect been discovered, he would have been back in the cage well within a year. However, x-rays were only discovered in 1895.
“Jaws are one of the most frequent bones to break – and it’s not the end of the world now, because we have surgeons, we have modern medicine,” explains Dr. David Carrier, the new theory’s lead author and an evolutionary biologist at the University of Utah. “But four million years ago, if you broke your jaw, it was probably a fatal injury. You wouldn’t be able to chew food… You’d just starve to death.”
However, if Hunt hit Paranthropus boisei or ‘Nutcracker man’ in the jaw, it is his hand that was most likely to break.
Science reporter for the BBC News Jonathan Webb has the story.
For many years, this extra strength was seen as an adaptation to a tough diet including nuts, seeds and grasses. But more recent findings, examining the wear pattern and carbon isotopes in australopith teeth, have cast some doubt on this “feeding hypothesis.”
“In fact, boisei, the ‘nutcracker man’, was probably eating fruit,” said Dr. Carrier.
Instead of diet, Carrier and his co-author, physician Dr Michael Morgan, propose that violent competition demanded the development of these facial fortifications: what they call the “protective buttressing hypothesis.”
In support of their proposal, Carrier and Morgan offer data from modern humans fighting. Several studies from hospital emergency wards, including one from the Bristol Royal Infirmary, show that faces are particularly vulnerable to violent injuries.
The jaw, cheek, eye and nose structures that most commonly come to grief in modern fist fights were also the most protected by evolutionary changes seen in the australopiths.
Furthermore, these are the bones that show the most differences between men and women, as well as between our male and female forebears. That is how you would expect defensive armor to evolve, Prof Carrier points out.
“In humans and in great apes in general… it’s males that are most likely to get into fights, and it’s also males that are most likely to get injured,” he told BBC News.
Interestingly, the evolutionary descendents of the australopiths – including humans – have displayed less and less facial buttressing.
This is consistent, according to Dr. Carrier, with a decreasing need for protection: “Our arms and upper body are not nearly as strong as they were in the australopiths,” he explained. “There’s a temporal correlation.”
The facial buttressing idea builds on a previous observation by Prof Carrier and Dr Morgan that the early hominins were the first primates to evolve a hand shape compatible with making a fist – and thus, throwing a punch.
“The historical record goes back a short time, the archeological record goes back a few tens of thousand years more,” said Dr. Carrier. “But the anatomy holds clues to what selection was important, what behaviors were important, and so it gives us information about the very distant past.”
