How The Human Face Might Look In 100,000 Years

100,000 years:Human face will have large forehead and saucer like eyes

A typical man and woman  PHOTOS:COURTESY

-Adapted from Daily Mail

Just as the human face has evolved considerably since stone age times so it is expected to keep changing in the future.

Today the human brain is three times the size of our primate ancestors. As our brains grew so did our heads get bigger, our skulls expanded and our features became flatter.

Now with the advent of wearable technology, such as Google Glass, how will our heads and faces evolve in 20,000 years, 60,000 years and even 100,000 years from now?

According to Daily Mail, this was the question posed by artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm from MyVoucherCodes.co.uk when he quizzed Dr Alan Kwan, who holds a PhD in computational genomics from Washington University.

Based on their discussions Lamm has created a stunning series of images which display one possible evolution for the human race over the next 100,000 years.

Dr Kwan believes that key to our future evolution will be man ‘wresting control’ of the human form from natural evolution and adapting human biology to suit our needs.

As genetic engineering becomes the norm, ‘the fate of the human face will be increasingly determined by human tastes’ writes Dr Kwan, while fore heads will continue to expand as our brains continue to grow larger.

As man achieves total mastery over human morphological genetics, the human face will become heavily biased towards features that humans find fundamentally appealing: strong, regal lines, straight nose, intense eyes, and placement of facial features that adhere to the golden ratio and left/right perfect symmetry.

Dr Kwan believes eyes will grow 'unnervingly large' as the human race colonizes the solar system and people start living in the dimmer environments of colonies further away from the sun.

Eyes will also develop in other ways - that would seem startling from our viewpoint today - with new  features including eye-shine enhance low-light vision and even a sideways blink from re-constituted plica semilunaris to help protect our eyes from cosmic rays.

Skin will also become more pigmented to help alleviate the damage by harmful UV radiation outside of the earth’s protective ozone.

Dr Kwan also predicts that people will have thicker eyelids and a more pronounced superciliary arch (the smooth, frontal bone of the skull under the brow), to deal with the effects of low gravity.

World’s Tiniest Chameleons Found in Madagascar

 

Researchers have recently discovered four new chameleon species, which rank among the world’s tiniest reptiles. Adults of the smallest species are just over an inch from snout to tail.

The four new species belong to the genus Brookesia, also known as the leaf chameleons, which live in remote rainforests in northern Madagascar. The genus is already known to contain some very small species, with members typically resembling juvenile versions of larger species.

As small as these guys are, a super-tiny dwarf gecko found in the British Virgin Islands might be just a tad more wee.

Since the chameleons all look extremely similar, researchers used genetic analysis to determine that they belonged to separate species.

Brookesia species tend to live within a very small range. Half the members of this genus are found in only a single location and the smallest of the newly found species — Brookesia micra — lives only on a small island called Nosy Hara. Extreme miniaturization of this sort is common in island populations. Known as island dwarfism, it may occur due to limited resources and pressure to reproduce faster.

“The extreme miniaturization of these dwarf reptiles might be accompanied by numerous specializations of the body plan, and this constitutes a promising field for future research,” said herpetologist Frank Glaw, lead author of the study, in a press release. “But most urgent is to focus conservation efforts on these and other microendemic species in Madagascar which are heavily threatened by deforestation.