A new paper published this week by researchers from the University of Utah claims that human faces have evolved over time in order to minimize injury from punches to the face during fights.

The theory was outlined in the journal Biological Reviews this week. It presents a different view to the previously believed theories that the robustness of our faces resulted from the need to chew hard-to-crush foods.

Study authors of the new paper, University of Utah scientists David Carrier and Michael H. Morgan, claim that our ancestors were characterized by traits that would seem to have improved their fighting ability, including hand proportions that allow formation of a fist-effectively turning the delicate musculoskeletal system of the hand into a club for striking, according to a release issued by the university.

"If indeed the evolution of our hand proportions were associated with selection for fighting behavior you might expect the primary target, the face, to have undergone evolution to better protect it from injury when punched," said Carrier, lead author of the study, according to the release.

The rationale for the paper's conclusions came after determining a number of different elements, according to Carrier.

He said that the new work provides a different explanation for the evolution of the hominin face and also addresses the debate over whether or not our past was violent.

"When modern humans fight hand-to-hand the face is usually the primary target," Carrier added. "What we found was that the bones that suffer the highest rates of fracture in fights are the same parts of the skull that exhibited the greatest increase in robusticity during the evolution of basal hominins. These bones are also the parts of the skull that show the greatest difference between males and females in both Australopiths and humans. In other words, male and female faces are different because the parts of the skull that break in fights are bigger in males."

The new paper builds on the pair's previous work, which claimed that violence played a bigger role in human evolution than is generally accepted by most anthropologists.

Carrier previously investigated the habitual bipedal posture of hominins, the short legs of great apes and the hand proportions of hominins, according to the release.

"The debate over whether or not there is a dark side to human nature goes back to the French philosopher Rousseau who argued that before civilization humans were noble savages," Carrier said. "The hypothesis that our early ancestors were aggressive could be falsified if we found that the anatomical characters that distinguish us from other primates did not improve fighting ability. What our research has been showing is that many of the anatomical characters of great apes and our ancestors, the early hominins (such as bipedal posture, the proportions of our hands and the shape of our faces) do, in fact, improve fighting performance."

Morgan believes the new study provides interesting elements to the ongoing conversation about the role of violence in evolution.

 "I think our science is sound and fills some longstanding gaps in the existing theories of why the musculoskeletal structures of our faces developed the way they did," he said, according to the release.

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