The Awakened Ape by Jevan Pradas

Author:Jevan Pradas [Pradas, Jevan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-01-11T08:00:00+00:00

Beautiful Faces

What makes for an attractive face? For men, it is symmetrical features, a chiseled jawline, prominent cheekbones. A pretty woman has a face that is broad, symmetrical, with high cheekbones, a small nose, and wide-set eyes. Look at yourself in the mirror just as you have done thousands of times before and examine the dimensions of your face. How closely do they align with the standard of beauty? Has your attractiveness improved or waned over time? How did you end up with the face that you have now? Was it destined since the moment of your birth, or has your behavior and environment shaped the way your face has grown?

We all know that diet, posture and exercise can radically change the attractiveness of our bodies, but few realize that diet, posture and exercise also affect the attractiveness of the most visible appendage we have: the one positioned directly above the neck. According to Dr. Mike Mew, only a small percentage of people in modern society have properly formed faces: the Clint Eastwoods and Kate Mosses of the world. The other 95 percent of us poor schmucks have faces that range from slightly off-kilter to grossly hideous.

This is the exact opposite of ancestral society, where nearly everyone was good-looking. Or at the very least, they thought so. In a study done on the Maasai by psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener, every single one of the 120 people he asked said that they were “completely satisfied with their physical appearance.” Is there anyone you know in modern society who would make that claim?

When I visited the Waorani tribe of the Amazon, one of the first things that struck me about their appearance was their teeth. Were they brown, missing and crooked as you would expect a person who had never visited a dentist? No. They were perfect, not only in their color, but in their alignment. The best Beverly Hills orthodontist could not have done better. The Mew family agrees.

Mew is a third-generation orthodontist, and it was his father who traveled to the jungle of Kenya to find tribal people and study their teeth. What did he find? Not only did the majority have straight teeth, despite having never seen an orthodontist, but they also had their wisdom teeth intact. And, surprisingly, they even had 10mm of extra room behind their wisdom teeth.

When I got my wisdom teeth taken out as a late teenager, I was perplexed by the explanation that my mouth wasn’t naturally big enough to fit all my teeth. Why then did I have these extraneous teeth in the first place? Were they really a useless relic of our Cro-Magnon past? No, as a group of dentists and orthodontists have been finding out. The problem is that our faces have become unnaturally long and thin, leaving our jaws too narrow for our teeth to grow into place properly. This results in malocclusion, the scientific term for crooked teeth.

In the 1960s, a group of anthropologists studied a hunter-gatherer tribe in Brazil known as the Xavante.

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