Here’s a cool slide that was shown during the Ancestral Health Symposium. It’s the average of many female faces from different countries in Europe.

As you can see an average face tends to be beautiful, in every country. But that’s not the point that this slide was supposed to make. This is evolution at work.

All these women have common ancestors, but a few thousand years of semi-isolation has led to a divergence of their genetic averages. Continuing isolation would eventually lead to these people diverging into different species of humans. I guess that would take hundreds of thousands of years of isolation though. Not likely to ever happen.

Another piece of information from the conference: Only 14% of the American population completely believes in evolution. If you happen to belong to the other 86%, then feel free to make up another story about the faces.

PS

Do you want to see average female faces from across the world? Here’s a bigger and better-quality picture.



Update august 19

WOW! A huge number of people are reading this post as it just went viral on Reddit. I decided to do an update.

If the women at the top demonstrate the difference after a few thousand years of divergence, what would happen after tens of thousands of years?

This:

Average female faces across the world

This is the result of roughly 40,000 years of evolution in semi-isolation.

What kind of difference can result from millions of years of genetic divergence? Here’s an example:

Distant cousins

This is a chimpanzee and a human – distant relatives. Our last common ancestors lived around 5 million years ago, maybe somewhat more.

How will humans evolve in the next five million years? Nobody knows.

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