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Why are the faces of primates (and people!) so dramatically different from one another?

Biologists working as "evolutionary detectives" studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America in search of some answers, and discovered that faces they studied evolved over at least 24 million years.

Science Daily quotes evolutionary biologist Michael Alfaro as saying, "If you look at New World primates, you’re immediately struck by the rich diversity of faces. You see bright red faces, moustaches, hair tufts and much more. There are unanswered questions about how faces evolve and what factors explain the evolution of facial features. We’re very visually oriented, and we get a lot of information from the face." read more

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Humans are here thanks to electricity. Evolutionary biologists have discovered that just about every vertebrate on Earth–including us–descended from an ancient ancestor with the ability to detect electrical fields in water.

500 million years ago, two types of fish diverged. One of them were able to use a mild electrical field in order to detect nearby predators, and those are the ones who survived and evolved–and eventually led to us.
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During the football playoffs, we began to wonder how humans, unlike any other species on Earth, learned to throw long distances. New research suggests that this unique evolutionary trait is entangled with language development in a way critical to our very existence. In fact, throwing made us human.
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