Face-to-Face: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form

Excerpted from
Adam's Navel; A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
By Michael Sims

Our bestial hair surrounds a lace that is equally animalian. Like other creatures' faces, ours is a busy area crowded with sophisticated information-gathering devices. There are twin instruments for the detection of visible electromagnetic radiation, two likewise paired for gathering sound waves, one (with two apertures) for analyzing particles floating in the air, and one for testing edibility and beginning the digestion of foodstuffs. The latter even doubles as the primary tool of communication in our species.

These high-tech instruments are not unique in themselves; they are merely our variation on the usual animal body plan that builds sensors just outside the command center. Yet our clan-Homo sapiens and our close kin among the higher primates-exhibits an interesting variation on the theme. As Desmond Morris observed, human beings have shed most of the hair that swaddles us in armor and metaphor. We are almost naked. But we are not the only species that has lost most of its facial hair. In the majority of higher primates, the hair gathers around the face much in the manner of our own-coming in varying degrees down the brow, around the ears, down alongside the cheeks, forming beards. The vervet of East Africa has proper whitish-gray sideburns on its black shrunken-head face. One of Jane Goodall's chimps at Gombe was so bewhiskered that she named him David Graybeard. Elderly orangutans tend to look like bearded sages, complete with the fat-Buddha posture. A step further down the phylogenetic scale, to such splendidly named Dr. Seuss primates as the slow loris and the golden potto and the aye-aye, brings us back among typically mammalian faces, fully as hairy as the rest of their body. Only among our nearer cousins do we see these friendly naked faces.

The adaptive virtue of a hairless face appears to be that it enables the cluster of information-gathering tools to also better serve as a broadcasting station-for broadcasting expressions, that is. This adaptation makes excellent evolutionary sense. As the animals with the most intricate (and most disturbingly humanlike) social hierarchies, apes use subtleties of facial expression to convey subtleties of emotion. The higher primates are social and frequently violent omnivores. We need to be able to discern more about the intentions of our fellow tribe members than would, say, solitary herbivores. We watch each other's faces to learn which individuals to trust, which to fear, when to be alarmed, whether the other individual needs comfort or support, even to answer questions of identity-all the vast spectrum of social cues that glue together a busy primate society from moment to moment.

The comparatively hairless faces of primates account for the reasonably convincing ape masks in the original Planet of the Apes movies and the considerably more realistic efforts in Tim Burton's 2001 remake. Contrast the nuanced performances of the heroic chimpanzees in those films (performances at least as subtle as Charlton Heston's acting) with the two or three expressions available to the hairy-faced Chewbacca in Star Wars. The variety of movements visible on the naked face is demonstrated by the subtle motions studied by practitioners of one kind of Indian dance. There are supposedly thirty-six ways of moving the eyes and nine for just the eyelids, thirteen gestures involving tilting the head, and nine for the neck. There are six different ways of moving the cheeks, lower lip, and nose; with seven gestures the chin is even more versatile. There is a lot going on in the primate face, especially in Homo sapiens' and we spend a lot of time looking at it. "You can never get tired of the human face," insists American film director Sam Mendes. "The best effect in any good film is the close-up."

Most of us are impressed with the differences between our faces as children and our faces as adults, but we would be shocked to observe the way that our faces changed before we were born. Because it encases the brain and is the headquarters for the major senses, the head is the first area of the embryo to differentiate. By birth it is more completely developed than the rest of the body, which is why development moves down the body from the head to the feet. From the moment that the spermatozoan and ovum join forces, the activity in the womb gains momentum. By the end of the first month after conception, although the embryo has nothing resembling a face, the front of the head has begun to move in that direction. What will in time become the nasal passages have appeared as two indentations high on the proto-blob that resembles the first rough blocking of a sculpture. Within another week or so, imaginative observers can perceive a face coalescing. Something resembling a flattened cartoon nose has migrated to the center of the area below the midline of what will be the face. Far away on each side of it, almost on the side of the head, are the undeveloped eyes.

Soon there is no question that this mass of cells is mysteriously shaping itself into a face. By eight weeks after conception, the creature looks almost like a human being. The nose is more nose-like; the eerie future eyes have converged toward it and even have eyelids; and there is not only a mouth but a mouth with distinct lower and upper lips. The ears are low on the head beside and even below the mouth, but the cheeks have appeared where they need to be. Curiously, at this stage the still top-heavy face, with its rounded forehead and skull, resembles the flat-featured stone heads of the monumental Olmec sculptures of Mesoamerica-minus the ornamental headgear. (One anthropologist suggests that these sculptures may represent fetal Homo sapiens.) By five months after conception, there is unquestionably a baby human being in the works. The mouth is smallish, the eyebrows barely developed, the ears still tiny, but the face has achieved essentially the composition and proportions it will have at birth. Evolving through a whole spectrum of artistic parallels, it now looks like Charles Schulz's round-headed characters in the early days of Peanuts.

When the baby emerges, the head, besides being misshapen by its traumatic squeeze through the narrow birth canal, is entirely out of proportion to the rest of the body. The eyes, already two-thirds of the size they will attain, seem huge. Prior to puberty, the most dramatic change between newborn and adult human beings is the rest of the face's growing into proportion with the prematurely large eyes.