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Lifestyle could change your jaw shape

24.11.2011 [11:22]
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Baku, November 24 (AZERTAC). Lifestyle is known to affect many aspects of health but now a UK anthropologist says it could even change the shape of our jaws.

Dr Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel of the University of Kent reports her findings in this week`s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

She made detailed measurements of the skulls and jaw-bones (mandibles) of nearly 300 individuals from 11 different subsistence cultures - some from hunter-gatherer societies and some from societies with primitive agriculture.

The measurements were of skulls in museum collections, which were from people who lived in the past couple of thousand years.

"These people are likely to be analogous to people living today," says Cramon-Taubadel.

She found that people from hunter-gatherer societies had narrow, long mandibles, whilst people living an agricultural life tended to have short, broad jaw-bones.