Human heads have changed shape a lot in the past 100 years
People who died a century ago had longer skulls from front to back Yotpisai/iStockphoto/Getty Images In the past 100 years, the heads of Japanese people have got rounder, with narrower cheekbones, wider upper jaws and slimmer, more prominent noses. While changes outside Japan may vary, the overall trend is probably common across the globe, says Shiori Usui at the National Research Institute of Police Science in Chiba, Japan. “It makes sense that similar morphological shifts are occurring worldwide, as lifestyles modernise globally,” she says. Scientists often use measurements from 19th- and early 20th-century human remains as references for “modern” humans, says Usui. But we know that people are generally taller and larger today than a century ago, due in large part to changes in their health, diet and environment. Usui and her colleagues suspected those same factors might also have an effect on head shape. To find out, the researchers carried out computed tomography (CT) scans on the skulls of 34 men and 22 women who died of natural causes between 1900 and 1920. Their …
