NEANDERTHALS, bless鈥檈m, were never going to win any beauty contests. Now scans of their skulls show their robust faces, with wide noses and prominent cheekbones, weren鈥檛 even adaptations to the cold.
The Neanderthal face shape was thought to be a result of the growth of large sinuses, which warm inhaled air. To find out how big their sinuses were, Todd Rae at Roehampton University in London and colleagues analysed data from X-rays and 3D CT scans of Neanderthal skulls. When the team compared these scans with those of the skulls of Homo sapiens from temperate regions, they found Neanderthals鈥� sinuses were only bigger because they had bigger faces; the two species鈥� sinuses had the same relative size relationship (Journal of Human Evolution, ). This suggests that their faces were not shaped to deal with extreme cold, the team say. In the image above, the skull on the right is a Neanderthal, that on the left is Homo sapiens.
Rae says we can now dismiss the cold adaptation idea. 鈥淭his allows us to think about Neanderthals and their lives in new ways.鈥�
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