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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

There is a brief interview over at NPR [npr.org] with James Pampush, who recently published a paper [wiley.com] in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology [wiley.com] titled The enduring puzzle of the human chin. This paper is based upon his dissertation work about why homo sapiens have chins at all.

The conclusion of the article is that it appears that the chin perhaps points to some deeper insight into what it means to be human:

Well, if you're looking across all of the hominids, which is the family tree after the split with chimpanzees, there's not really that many traits that we can point to that we can say are exclusively human. Big brains - Neanderthals had larger brains than us. All those animals all walked on two legs. The one thing that really sticks out is the chin.

Paper abstract:

Although modern humans are considered to be morphologically distinct from other living primates because of our large brains, dexterous hands, and bipedal gait, all of these features are found among extinct hominins. The chin, however, appears to be a uniquely modern human trait. Probably because of the chin's exclusivity, many evolutionary scenarios have been proposed to explain its origins. To date, researchers have developed adaptive hypotheses relating chins to speech, mastication, and sexual selection; still others see it as a structural artifact tangentially related to complex processes involving evolutionary retraction of the midfacial skeleton. Consensus has remained elusive, partly because hypotheses purporting to explain how this feature developed uniquely in modern humans are all fraught with theoretical and/or empirical shortcomings. Here we review a century's worth of chin hypotheses and discuss future research avenues that may provide greater insight into this human peculiarity.

Original Submission