Frankly, I have nothing but respect for the authors of that paper after reading that comment. Even if they're wrong, which they admit they might be, at least they're working hard to evaluate their hypothesis, and their opponents are a bunch of journalists and internet commenters using terms like "their article is just 'bro science'." Despite the critics' lack of respect, the authors response is polite and informative.
There is a culture of no respect of negative results in science. Although they are as important as positive, for some reason even scientists are actively avoiding to, for example, test old results to confirm them right or wrong, and instead they feel like they must do something absolutely new. After that there comes many contradicting studies and nobody putting much effort in resolving them.
Carrier's hypothesis is interesting and well argued, but only time will tell if it stands up to further scrutiny. This is the scientific process. Yong, on the other hand, is just defending his own preconceptions. While I agree with him that the established theory of changing diet/changing dentition is very well supported, Carrier's theory doesn't necessarily contradict it. Both of these theories could have shaped the faces of our ancestors and, eventually, us.
I would love to see models testing how well the skulls of different human ancestors and humans themselves stand up to blunt blows, both head-on and oblique ones. It's possible that the skulls of modern humans, despite being more gracile, might perform surprisingly well thanks to the force-spreading properties of our parabolic dental arcades. i.e. If you hit a human in the side of the jaw you're hitting a self-buttressing arc of bone and teeth. If you hit the U-shaped jaw of an australopithecine on the side, you're hitting a straight wall.
Yong, on the other hand, is just defending his own preconceptions.
When I take into account that the author of the submitted article is science writer on evolution topics Brian Switek and not general science writer Ed Yong, I wonder what defending of preconceptions is going on in your comment.
AFTER EDIT: After I first posted this, I looked up how the first attested use of stone tools by early hominins compares in time with the hypothesized change in facial features discussed in the article, and I see there is some dispute about the very earliest regular use of stone tools, but that definitely precedes the emergence of Homo sapiens by far, and may go back to the time of some of the later australopithecines. Using stone tools as weapons (even just picking up and throwing rocks) was surely a game-changer in fights.
> Carrier's hypothesis is interesting and well argued, but only time will tell if it stands up to further scrutiny.
I have experience of martial arts, on and off, for fifteen years. A few months ago I was having a go on a punch bag, which weighed over 100 pounds. The elbow strikes I was swinging at it would make it rise about 4 to 5 feet in the air, almost above the fulcrum. I was afraid that I might rip the rope it was attached to.
If I were to elbow this hypothesis it would never stand up again, and unlike my fist it wouldn't break.
As human ancestors became more adept at tool usage, one would expect any evolved skull defenses to crumble.
No amount of skull reinforcement will stand up to a solid strike from a club. And even if it did, it wouldn't matter - our huge brains concuss easily, meaning that even if the bone structure itself remained intact following a club blow, the brain it protects would be quite damaged.
Human weapon use has been discussed as one reason why humans are less sexually dominant than many other primate relatives. Beta chimps don't have the ability to easily murder the reigning alpha chimp in his sleep. Humans do.
This, along with the fragility of the bones in the human hand and the hardness of the skull, make it pretty clear that we aren't evolved for punching or being punched. Boxing was developed specifically to get around the many problems with punching: protecting the hands from being broken, and developing defensive strategies to avoid blows from even padded fists. Barehanded boxing is worse. If you want to hurt someone with impunity and ensure you win, grab a stick.
If anything, the evolution of humans as bipedal creatures should have made the legs into the weapons of choice, since they are not only stronger and larger but can be wielded with momentum for increased force. But the legs make for poor weapons because all the vulnerable targets are up high. While the most direct way to hurt someone is actually a straight movement towards someone, our limbs are designed to swing and swivel, not shoot out forward.
If hands were for punching, then the tissues attaching our arms to our bodies would have been designed to issue strikes faster and more powerfully. Currently it's very difficult for humans to issue incredibly rapid strikes with power; we have to use our lats, core, legs, and hips to rotate our bodies to increase momentum in a punch and line up the shoulder with the target, lest you deliver with reduced power. In contrast, kicks can be issued just as fast and with greater power, so one would think that naturally humans would have gravitated to kicking each other rather than punching, but the opposite seems to be the case.
IMHO, the most ideal strike a human can give without injuring themselves would be from the shin or heel. If you look at animals that don't have sharp teeth or claws, often they'll use their hind legs in a kicking motion to provide the most powerful hit, while moving their sensitive head/neck/chest away from the target. A few human groups developed fighting styles this way, but for millenia we've still been fighting standing up. I can only assume this is because we got so used to being bipedal that we adapted our fighting to it. I think our evolution probably prompted us to develop new ways of fighting that were comfortable to our bodies, rather than vice versa.
> "IMHO, the most ideal strike a human can give without injuring themselves would be from the shin or heel. If you look at animals that don't have sharp teeth or claws, often they'll use their hind legs in a kicking motion to provide the most powerful hit, while moving their sensitive head/neck/chest away from the target. A few human groups developed fighting styles this way, but for millenia we've still been fighting standing up. I can only assume this is because we got so used to being bipedal that we adapted our fighting to it."
Most fights between people end up on the ground very quickly. Optimizing for full-stroke punches and kicks effectively forces your strategy to be "debilitate the other guy before he can get inside and close". The difference between humans and the non-toothed/clawed animals you mention is that humans have arms and hands that can defend against the slower knockout blows you mention.
Wrestling is a more accurate sports approximation for how humans "naturally" fight (assuming 1-on-1).
Depends. Two guys who just want to fight are probably going to have a shoving match which will end when one gets pinned and the other guy gets pulled off.
Two groups of guys who have some need to fight over are more likely to use tools.
If two people are having a shoving match, they don't really want to fight. A fight implies you want to hurt the other person, not escalate the situation until one of you gathers the courage to strike the other.
One of the reasons for the excellent track record of safety in Mixed Martial Arts is the lack of reliance on heavy padded gloves.
A traditional boxing glove spreads the impact across a wider area resulting in greater likelihood of brain swelling and life-threatening injury.
Lighter gloves or bare knuckle impacts result in less internal swelling but greater likelihood of skin tears, cuts or out right deflected strikes.
Other myths you have posted -
If anything, the evolution of humans as bipedal creatures should have made the legs into the weapons of choice
Nope. Bipedal animals, particularly humans, are not evolved for effective lower leg striking. It takes years of training to be able to throw a kick which balances effectiveness, accuracy and power versus the risk of leaving oneself vulnerable.
You throw a kick and I will try and gouge your eyes out with my thumbs by grappling you. Let's see who has evolved the greater defence.
While the most direct way to hurt someone is actually a straight movement towards someone
Again, most martial artists and boxers will agree that an effective straight line jab is far less powerful than a hook or uppercut thrown with precision to the lower chin, lower jaw or temple. Very few knockouts ever arise from a straight line punch.
Even gated martials arts such as Wing Chun advocate coming in at an oblique angle whereever possible.
IMHO, the most ideal strike a human can give without injuring themselves would be from the shin or heel
In close quarters the most effective strike you can deliver to a standing human opponent is a knee strike or elbow strike. It takes repeated shin strikes in Muay Thai to weaken or disable the upper thighs or ribs.
I meant barehanded is "worse" in terms of it being easier to break the tiny bones in your hands. Even if you strengthen your fists over years, they're still weaker than other body parts you could strike with. The skull is a lot more difficult to break (unless you hit the temple and your knuckles are calcified as fuck)
All the rest of your descriptions of fighting are based on the evolution of martial arts or a skilled practitioner. What i'm talking about is people who have zero formal training, save for perhaps getting in lots of fights. You seem to overlook the rest of what I wrote, where I describe how people are not built for straight-line strikes, how animals might kick with their hind legs but we don't find that to be natural, how kicks are more difficult to use against higher vulnerable targets, etc. We're basically agreeing, but with different words :)
I don't know why anyone goes for the ribs with a roundhouse if it can just be checked with shins or forearms (and takes more energy for the kicker). If you just make repeated blows to the IT band, even if they can stand the pain, very soon they won't be able to stand on that leg. Same for hooks to the radial so they can't lift their guard or keep their wrist straight. Close fighting is also a bit silly in terms of natural/practical fights; if you're close enough to connect with an elbow, you might as well go for the eyes or throat or work around to a rear naked choke, or something.
> Boxing was developed specifically to get around the many problems with punching: protecting the hands from being broken, and developing defensive strategies to avoid blows from even padded fists.
Perhaps that's true, but isn't it also true that fisticuffs were a "natural" way for impromptu humans fights? I highly doubt that boxing was the first invention of fighting by standing up and punching the other person. It seems more likely that human already tended to fight that way when genuinely angry at each other, and as people began to be interested in fighting prowess, the protective rules of boxing were developed to allow experts to fight for longer.
And, like in any discussion regarding evolution, it's important to point out that phrases like "if hands were for punching" are dangerously close to being deceptive because of the implied attribution of purpose to the evolutionary process.
In my school years, there were quite a few "impromptu" fights. For whatever reasons my school system was pretty ineffective at stopping them. I ended up in dozens if not hundreds. They pretty much always go the same way -- punch thrown, usually dodged or blocked but sometimes connecting for quite a bit of pain. Followed by lots of wrestling.
Yes, fisticuffs were common for impromptu human fights. But the stuff with evolutionary implications usually resulted from ambushes: People hiding in the bushes with sticks and stones, waiting for one and his buddies to walk by.
Or just hitting him over the head with a rock while he slept.
Forager societies more closely resemble middle school than modern life. In modern life, you can get in a fight at the bar and not see the person you lost to for weeks - if ever. In middle school, you lose a fight and you have to see that person every day for the rest of your life - unless you skip town (leave the tribe) - which appears to have been somewhat common.
Thus any fisticuffs victory will be hollow, as the loser can simply murder you one day when you least expect it.
You guys know that the type of fight that goes like "guys get angry, guys punch each other a few times" aren't always the same as "guys get angry, one guy kills the other"?
I'm not one for hypothesizing based on hunches that look evolutionarily plausible, but, given that for a long time humans lived to 20, 25 years old, consider the types of fights teenagers and kids get into these days. A few punches, somebody (or both people) loses with some bruises, nobody dies, nobody gets seriously hurt.
We're comparing those types of fights with murders here. Apples to oranges.
Professional fighting should select for fighters more adapted to giving and taking punches similarly to species-wide evolution. Comparing the best fighters to the average human should reveal physical differences that make the fighters better at giving and taking punches.
Those differences should have similarities to the ones that are claimed to have naturally occurred in prehistoric man.
I worked at an oral surgeons office for a few years. Everytime we performed jaw surgery on someone who was in a fight, 9/10 times they also had a broken hand.
As a trained boxer I just hope I never get in a fight because at the speeds/power I can punch with my wrists will just shatter. Even with huge padded boxing gloves and wrist wraps it takes a month off training before my wrists stop hurting.
I've studied Martial Arts for about 12 years. You're totally right. It takes years of training to learn how to properly throw a punch such that you harm your opponent and do not break your own hand.
And part of that is not attacking targets where you're likely to significantly injure yourself as well as your opponent. There's a lot to be said for not punching someone in the jaw.
It is still possible to knock someone out with a slap. Some bouncers in the UK recommend it as a) it doesn't hurt your hand so much and b) telling the police you just slapped someone doesn't sound so bad. Plenty of videos on youtube of people being knocked out with a slap.
being knocked out is related to the brain hitting the walls of the skull, it has very little to do with what caused that. Slap, Fist, head-butt, concrete, car crash etc.
But I was responding to the claim slapping is equivalent to punching.
Depends on the goal. You're right about it being less likely to break a bone (on the target) or cause bleeding (again, on the target), but a solid slap will cause similar secondary impacts (brain hitting the skull)
I'll take a KO after some body shots and two working hands over a bloodied up opponent and a broken hand. There are much better tools to use against a skull, like elbows (less delicate than hands), but you need to account for range and movement.
Just so we're talking about the same kind of slap. If I had to guess, and I can only guess at this point, you're thinking... like... a slap, a swing with an arm.
I'm talking more like an open handed punch, complete with torso rotation and a pivot. Like a hook, just no fist.
oh, oh, got another one.
Look into the impulse of the strike, and the pressure area. Here, you're going to see a big difference, in favor of your position.
You'll have the same amount of force, probably with a significant increase in the speed that force transmits into the struck area. You're right. Past a certain point, though, someone doesn't get /more/ unconscious.
And, to anticipate your possible response, yes, they can end up /more/ unconscious to the point of death, but, cement does a much better job of that than any human body part.
There are completely different mechanics in a slap though. With a punch you have different delivery options (looping vs linear vs uppercut etc) all of which affect the way in which the force is generated. With a slap you're pretty limited.
That said, getting slapped has a psychological effect you don't get from a punch, which can be exactly what you want.
Hominids have been using tools for a very long time. Hypothesis: facial adaptations provide some protection from blunt weapons like wooden sticks. EDIT: and rocks.
What's silly to me about the original argument is that the authors think that our ancestors fought in a kind of "put your dukes up" kind of fighting where only punches are thrown. While not an expert in the subject, I feel it's safe to assume that fights for mates and territory where the loser dies would not be fist fights but rather full-on fights to the death using every biological weapon available, including feet and teeth.
Such duels are often heavily ritualized, they aren't necessarily lacking in rules. The victor doesn't want to kill the opponent, they want to prove their social standing. For example wolves have a submissive signal they can show, that stops a fight in the middle, avoiding serious injury or death. If every such duel ended in a death, the population would quickly shrink.
I think that winning is what is important in an on-going war that is fought on a daily basis, the prize being females/territory.
I base my opinion on the antics of the foxes fighting outside my window right now. I am fairly sure I won't find a dead fox on my doorstep in the morning and I am fairly sure tomorrow will be another chapter in the on-going duel. Their fighting is truly no-holds barred however killing is not necessary to win females/territory. A given territory only supports a given quantity of a given species, a given territory can only be defended up to a certain area, so there is no concern needed to only fight so far lest the population/gene pool be diminished.
As for us humans and how we fight, we are pack animals that can augment our fights with words. This applies okay in pub brawl situations, however, we have no hesitation at all when it comes to wiping out rival tribes. This has applied historically, I think that Hitler bloke was quite keen on wiping out the Jewish tribe and, although worded differently, Bush and Blair had no qualms when it came to wiping out tribes of people in more recent times. We also have class hierarchy so the rich have no problems sending millions of their own off to certain death, e.g. WW1, because they are a different tribe within a tribe. Concern for population depletion really matters not.
I do not want to contradict the research by this, but our heads certainly aren't all too well adapted to punching. The brain is to a large extent floating quite freely in the cerebrospinal fluid in the skull, and when the head is punched it experiences an effect similar to a passenger in a suddenly breaking car - it is smashed against the skull as a result of inertia, often resulting in permanent brain trauma:
It's worth noting that both Dementia Pugilistica and CTE seem to take a decade or longer to appear in affected individuals, which means it is unlikely that they would have a significant impact on an individual's ability to reproduce (especially if winning a fist fight led to immediate opportunities to mate).
Interesting. I would think that pre-modern humans would be unlikely to strike each other with very much force, simply because they were so strong that one or two blows would debilitate if not kill the opponent.
The Neanderthals are thought to be many times stronger than modern humans, judging by the thickness of their bones and the size of the muscle attachment sites, as well as their likely lifestyles in the brutal Pleistocene era.
If one male were to strike another with full force, it would more than likely cause concussion if not death. In those days, you couldn't afford to lose a healthy male from the tribe, even one you're pissed off at for wanting to mate with your woman.
Probably ditto for other ancestral variants such as homo erectus. They weren't exactly sophisticated, but you have to logically assume that a population that tolerated high levels of violence would be more likely to die out. A population that tended to resort to symbolic confrontations like shouting and gesturing and jumping would be more successful.
Wouldn't their increased strength and size also offset the increased force of the blows to make it about the same as the current situation?
In my head I'm comparing it to something like: If a 250 lb NFL linebacker tackled me at full speed I am pretty sure I would break multiple bones. But NFL running backs take that kind of beating 40-50 times a game, 20 games a year.
This is actually why I much prefer watching lower weight MMA fights to the bigger guys. The fights tend to go on longer and are more dynamic. With the bigger guys, one solid punch to the head and it's often game over.
Interesting stats. I'm not sure it completely explains the higher weight divisions though, since if you look at the rate at which the heavier fighters get tired and start lowering their guard, it's much higher than in the lower weight divisions, leaving them more susceptible to the KO/TKO.
It's the cube square law in action. Elephants can seriously injure themselves from falling over. If I fall over I get a sore butt. Yet if you were to scale me to the kind of weight an elephant has, I'd have a far larger fall, so obviously scale has a real effect.
I think the thing is, NFL running backs are trained to survive that kind of abuse.
This is an exaggeration -- if they were getting 40-50 touches per game they'd never survive the season.
300 carries per season is regarded as a heavy workload, and that works out to about 20 carries per game. Of course, running backs can also catch passes, but they guys that are the featured backs in a run heavy offense rarely catch more than a pass or two per game.
Edit: I found a list of the highest numbers of rushing attempts in an NFL game since 1960. The record is 45.
This is dumb. If a single human survived a punch that otherwise would have killed them before breeding age than Yes, we did "evolve" to handle punches.
Evolution is not driven, it is all the little things that worked over a long period of time. The sum of all factors.
There will be no smoking gun that says we did this or that for this or that, only our modern form that says "this worked".
I sometimes think even most biologists don't understand how evolution works. Especially when I read about people taking the idea of spandrels seriously.
Legs didn't evolve "for" walking, ancestors with leg like appendages survived better than those who didn't have them in the Savannah. It didn't matter if they did that by walking, swimming, running or kicking threats and opportunities as they came along.
The same is true of fists and skulls. They didn't evolve for punching, but any ancestor who threw a punch - even if by accident - and didn't have their hand broken, and anyone who received one and didn't have their skull broken had a better chance of survival that those who did.
The only question is if this happened often enough to warrant the extra resources that went into strengthening the bones of the hands and skull compared to using those resources into some other area of the body.
Saying that "legs evolved for walking" is a completely legitimate statement.
Something can be said to have evolved for a purpose -- as a short-hand for saying that random changes that helped that purpose increased fitness and were selected for by natural selection.
If legs evolved for walking why are they so useful for swimming?
There is a set of genes that encodes for the behavior of walking or allows us to learn it and a whole other host of adaptations from our vestibular system to the angle at which our neck connects to our skull that taken together as a whole are adaptations for walking.
Each on its own has many, many other uses that have nothing to do with walking and provide benefits that have nothing to do with walking. So no, legs didn't evolve for anything. But in combination with a lot of other adaptations they make walking easier than would be the case without them.
I agree that legs didn't actually evolve for walking exclusively. They evolved for a myriad of purposes, including walking, running, jumping, swimming, and more.
The fact other parts of the body also evolved to facilitate these features is not a contradiction.
Evolution is like a parallel computation looking for a local optimum. When climbing the hills of the possibility landscape, various features that exist at the top of these hills can be described as the purpose of a particular search path.
How would you determine whether the cause of them not dying was 'the shape of their foot', and not any of thousands of other features you could arbitrarily pick, such as 'the balance of their skeleton', or 'their gait', or 'the thickness of their skull' or 'the responsiveness of their reflexes'?
All that the DNA knows is that it got into the next generation and it will keep doing whatever it was doing before plus or minus a few small random mutations.
The variety of banana (Gros Michel) that was commonplace when the "slip on a banana peel" comedic device was invented was a different breed than the one that is commonplace today (Cavendish.) The Gros Michel peel was reportedly very slippery.
as an addendum to that, the reason you don't see Gros Michel today is because "Panama disease" (a wilt fungus) wiped out most of the plantations in South America/Africa. You can still find Gros Michels in Thailand today. Someone should write myth busters, maybe they could import a gros michel to test it.
Honestly, this article just feels like an overreaction / rant the other direction. That there is No way that fist combat could have affected skull morphology. Like alot of evolution, it mostly comes down to a) does a trait make you more likely to have sex / better or more effective sex? b) does a trait make it more likely you'll survive to have sex? I find it hard with this amount of evidence to say that fistfights could be a driving trait, that would single-handedly shape survival / mating statistics, but I could see it being a contributor, something that helps other factors dominate survival / mating statistics. Perhaps our skull features are mostly for effective eating, but have an ancillary benefit to survival / mating when it comes to fights.
I don't know, to me he presents at least one pretty compelling point indicating that point. The species which exhibit the exaggerated facial features could not even form a fist with which to fight.
He said that punches driving facial evolution was fine as a hypothesis, it just needs evidence and he hasn't seen any.
His characterization of this as a just-so story, glib and light on evidence, doesn't just accurately describe this one specific claim; there are dozens or hundreds more just like it. On any given day, you can probably find an equally vacuous story about evolutionary psychology in some newspaper. It's a lame excuse for science.
The problem is that humans are woefully designed for combat. Our hands break, and our skulls are paper thin. Compare these aspects to animals that actually fight with horns, cushioned brains, fangs and so on, it's clear to see that fighting is a spectator sport for us.
My guess on the contrary is we are well designed for combat but designed to use weapons. Look at the historic interaction between humans and pretty much any large animals - usually we wipe them out.
"Given the very few fossils of the australopith face, I am not optimistic that evidence of…"
That is the primary reason you shouldn't put much faith in anything you read about most early humanoids, especially not the parts that reach general audiences. We simply cannot know much from the samples we have. Yet, scientists feel the pressure of having to publish, and cannot just publish new measurements, so they hypothise away.
This, like many in the field, mostly is a "we cannot rule out that" paper; all evidence is circumstantial. It may be truly insightful or it may not be, but we simply cannot know at the moment.
Can we blame the scientists? No, but I wished we educated fewer in this field and/or told those working in the field "feel free to think, study and experiment for a few decades and publish something when you are certain you have a convincing argument"
On the other hand, it is intriguing to read about the latest ideas in the field, just like it is to read about our new thinking about dinosaurs, even if experience tells us our ideas about both will swing heavily (in a few decades, what color will dinosaurs be? Will they be warm-blooded? Will all of them have feathers?)
I recently dismantled a human skull, cutting the entire mass into 2mm squares. The face is definitely one of the more delicate bits.
I suppose the argument could be made that it is a crumple zone designed to absorb shocks that might otherwise damage the brain. However, it seems far more likely that like the rest of the skull the face evolved to facilitate the birth of a bipedal creature with a ginormous brain.
Most studies of rapid human encephalization and obstetrics also seem to lean towards this conclusion.
Having lived up north in t'UK, I would say some peoples bodies have evolved in interesting ways. Drunken fights seem common here, and seems evolution has provided enough protection.
Also, evolution seems to have made them quite supple, evidenced with the "T'Northern Yoga", which is basically the awkward body poses they pull off when passed out drunk in the Town Square.
I know you're probably joking, but on hacker news I usually don't have to sort though a bunch of "interesting" articles to find relevant news. Another distinction is that I read hackernews on the clock, but not reddit.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/10/our-skull...