Adding a twist to the long-held thought that there are cultural preferences for facial features that determine universal attractiveness, the researchers discovered that chins do not fit into a neat category. Dartmouth’s Seth Dobson, assistant professor of anthropology, and co-author Zaneta Thayer ’08 tested the concept of sexual selection based on beauty by examining the chins of 180 male and female skeletons from Australia, Asia, Africa and Europe, Medical Daily reports.
“If people from all over the world exhibit similar chin shape preferences … and if mating preferences influence morphological evolution, as implied by sexual selection theory, then we would expect to see negligible geographic variation in chin shapes,” Medical Daily quotes the researchers as saying. “Our results suggest that this is not the case.“
Read the full story, published 4/9/13 by Medical Daily.
