Chins

Chins
Andre Willers
2 May 2008

Why is a protruding chin in humans associated with strength ?

“A strong jaw” has led to the concommittant “Weak jaw” . There is a spillover into myth , then into character .

The Hero always has a strong jaw . (See idealized images of the comics industry) .
But the Villain usually also has a strong jaw if he is a strong Villain .

Utterly despicable archtypes have evolved into chinless wonders .

Sexual selection by human females take the shortcut of Myth to make decisions .

This has been the source of real misery to males of sterling qualities who had the misfortune to be born with “weak” chins .
Especially since the start of the Disney era , when images of this type became a yardstick . (Not to speak about soapies . Ever seen a weak-chinned soapie hero?)

How did this arise ?

There is a sound evolutionary reason .

Pre-homonins had protruding jaws and females had small breasts .
(The human female milk gland is still the same size as that of chimps . The rest of the breast is fat and sinew scaffolding) . The protruding jaws (a general mammalian characteristic) prevented suffocation of the infant while suckling while clutching the infant during fleeing .

We have to take a step back to recapitulate the development of the large female human breast (a process described in more detail in previous posts)

The main evolutionary driver was speech . The ability to speak rapidly and clearly was so important to an individual’s survival (especially females:gossip) that selection pressure drove the shortening of the tongue . This drove the flattening of the protruding jaws . But this led to the choking of infants when the mother had to clutch the baby to her while fleeing . On a flat breast , the nostrils was blocked .

This was a choke point .

The evolutionary answer was to make the bosom conical and move the nipple to the point . Hence the conic form of the woman’s bosom , with the nipple at the point where there is maximum clearance for the baby’s nostrils ( Human babies can drink and breathe at the same time , a rather essential point) .

This conical breast was so essential that it got hardwired into the male sexual selection criteria .


But there was a teensy , weensy problem .
All mammals have a supply-on-demand mechanism while suckling , involving pressure on the breast/udder . Note how calves pump the udder . Milk machines pulsate , but do not maintain a more efficient steady sucking .

Note how the sucking effort in humans shoves the lower jaw forward . ( Suck your thumb and feel it) . In babies the lower jaw is even looser . The rhythm is also a recognition signal . Every baby will have a different pumping frequency .
This is a reflex mechanism older than homonins .

On a flat breast , a prognatious jaw is no problem . But on a conical breast , if the nostrils are clear , so is the lower jaw . Babies with an extra bony protrusion on the lower jaw had an advantage of better feeding on demand , which translated into higher survival rates and stronger adults .

Another adaptation was that the female nipple shifted a bit from the conical tip to slightly above and towards the torso , enabling easier contact between the baby’s lower jaw and the breast .

Another adaptation has to do with breast sagging after births . This chin selection effect described above gradually disappears as the baby has to pressed upwards into the nipple , coming into close contact with the breast .

This means that the chin development in the baby is also dependant on how successful its “pump-demand” is . If it is somewhat successful , but not sufficient for nutritional needs , the chin grows . Else the body does not waste essential bone-building nutrients. (This sounds like an epi-genetic response.)

Bottle feeding .
This has not been around long enough to have significant genetic impact .
But , it would have an epi-genetic impact .
Lack of response to pump-demand will lead the body to conclude that it is a waste of resources to build a chin . This will carry through at least three generations .

But you can design a bottle lets through more milk on pump-demand .
It would be an interesting experiment .

Even more interesting on adults .
Will stem cells mobilize to grow extra chin if we drink milk or coke from such bottles? The mind boggles .

The sad thing is , such a bottle will probably be commercially successful , first as a fad , then as niche market , even as therapeutic tool .

I have not touched on the psychological effects .
Response to pump-demand tells the body’s neural-networks and genetic systems in the most immediate possible terms that “mommy cares for you” .
Look at all the water bottles everybody these days are using . What do they remind you of ? All it needs is a little pressure valve at the bottom .

The effects of such a tool on the weaning process really needs some work .

Co-nutrients .
Notable chins are Roman , Dutch , Norse .
The common elements are cheese and fish products . Cheese for calcium and fish for vitD .

Bantu and Africans : cows for calcium and sunshine for vitD .

Note the small chins of steppe-dwellers (Slavs , Mongols , Easterners, etc)
This should disappear as calcium and vitD sources improve and if everybody survives long enough .

Steppe dwellers are especially interesting .
Horse milk is the closest mammalian milk to human milk , even down to many immunity markers .
See http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Infinite Probes 2 : The smell of horses” for a further discussion .
Bottle feeding might go back much further than we suppose . If we postulate a matriarchal episode and a male revolt , the males would have had to raid settlements on the steppe-borders and abduct male babies before maternal bonds were solidified and the Matriarchy pursued . A mother’s milk substitute would have been essential and there would have been extremely heavy selection on mares to produce it (ie culling like with border collies) . The horse genome is nearly as plastic as the dog and more than the human genome . This approach would have brought the two closer rapidly as far as milk is concerned , with most of the culling adaptation being done to the horses .

Even so , calcium usage would be minimized . I wonder if in some area of Asia some dinosaur genes for lightweight bones are being expressed .

Dinosaurs.
Mammals diverged well after the feather-hair split . Indeed , some wonder whether this was the defining split . The crucial bit is in the lungs . Hairs were older (from bacterial cilia) . They were (and still are in mammals) used to move things out of the lungs . But feathers are split hairs .

In the lungs , this is not just an internal hairdressing problem .

Initially a bad mutation .
One solution was to dispense with hairs and go to the more efficient “bird-lung” route.

This involved a gene doubling , a well established evolutionary route : two lungs instead of one . This propensity probably occurred in the same organisms as the doubling of hairs- ie feathering . The same mechanism would have made it more probable by orders of magnitude that the bird-lung and feathers evolved simultaneously .

The two then had a party of positive feedback reinforcing , culminating in a new order, the dinosaurs .

The dinosaur lung(bird lung) is superior to the old model . The double lung evolved into a bellows in part one , and an oxygen exchange mechanism in part two . The dinosaur could breathe both on inhalation and exhalation . The rate of oxygenation and waste disposal depended on the relative sizes of the two bellows .

This enabled higher rates of oxidation (ie greater strength) .
This enabled greater sizes , but led to momentum (ie speed) problems . This led to lightweight bones .
Bones are just clumped-together hairs with a calcium filling . Combining the strength of a silicon-calcium lattice . A lot of the filling can be dispensed with : hence feathering .
This led to even larger sizes . Our fossil record show bones that had enough calcium to last . But we know that organic-type materials like Kevlar are possible , and has been produced (albeit in small quantities) through genetic engineering . We have a strong suspicion that this arms-race could have led to super-dinosaurs larger than any seen before , but who left traces that could only be found by looking for specific breakdown products of these exotic materials .

Of course , these materials would take a lot of energy to produce . There would be bugs to eat them like candy . Hence the lack of fossils . There is a danger that some of them have sporulated and would reactivate in the presence of their food : Kevlar ,etc . (A spore of this nature would easily survive 60 my . ) You have been warned .

Imagine a horde of Kevlar-armoured tyrannosaurs a hundred feet high . If the exotic material involved iridium as a trace element , the KT boundary can be explained this way , though Occam would have frowned .

Mongolians.
While such speculation is interesting , we are still faced with the problem of explaining the Mongolian pony . Not only does it produce nearly human milk , it has anomalous strength and endurance . Read very efficient lungs .
So has the Mongolian .
This is understandable if both went an extremely rigorous selection process simultaneously .

For the horses this involved inbreeding and ferocious culling . The culling was primarily on human-compatible milk , but also on strength and endurance . The two combine in the lungs . Activation of some genes going back to the dinosaur-mammal split is postulated . Note the feathering on the pony hair . The finest felt is from pony hair .
These activation markers were transmitted via the milk and bypassed the immune system because of the milk-similarities and immune-suppressants in the milk .


Immune suppressants .
I have not mentioned the immune suppressants . Mongolian horse milk is heavy in immune suppressants , which is why they have the lowest HIV rate in the world . I suspect that ordinary horse-milk also has this property , but to a lesser degree .

Cold resistance
A nice little side-effect of this for a Mongolian is extreme resistance to cold . The higher breathing rate enables them to ratchet up their metabolic rate . They don’t shiver , but breathe faster . (This should be measurable) . Of course , this makes them obligate hunters .They are ones who fled from carbohydrate bondage to fat bondage .

Well , there is only one way to settle this . Examine a Mongolian pony and a Mongolians’ bones , lungs and hair for evidence of feathering .

I have no idea what form the lung-adaptation would take , but I suspect an alveoli-to-alveoli connection close to the rib- and abdominal diaphragma . Not as efficient as the bird-lung , but better than mammalian .

The bone-structure should be more telling . Fine detail should show some feathering . They should be just as strong or stronger than normal bone , but much lighter .
Try drawing a Mongolian bow , and you will see what I mean .

We would also expect the presence of retroviruses in large eco-presence . Bubonic plague’s home is the marmoset of the Mongolian steppes . A little evolutionary shit-stirrer if there ever was one .

The only other examples I can think of where there was severe selection over centuries for strength and where horses were involved (ie a weight limitation) are the Samurai of Japan and the Knight-nobility in Europe . But whether they drank horse-milk I do not know . Ninja in Japan and China might have followed , with infusions of Mongolian blood .

Reputedly , the markers for Genghis Khan’s genes have been found in about a third if the Eurasian population .

If the above argument is correct , then we can expect extreme strength and endurance individuals as outliers . Not just freaks . Performances that would have been simply impossible for the MkI ,II, III humans .

I draw your attention to the Turkish super-weight lifter . The euro athlete that can run all day for days on end (great lungs!) .
Wolf Messier is a good example . Lung and blood function at that level is simply not possible without some major reworking of human physiology . Not the Andeans or the Sherpas could manage it . Yet many others have now done it . The genes have spread .

What does this mean?
Gene material developed over the last 200 million years is slowly leaking back into the mammalian gene-pool .

The Mongolians were and are well on the way to becoming a separate species . Some interbreeding is still possible because of the Toba fiasco . But the human and crop monocultures will favour the survival of diverse genetic groups .

If diverse enough groups do not exist , genetic engineering will probably create them
And at the forefront , of all people , will be sportsmen . The expression of performance enhancing genes is already taking place , but as usual the humans have little understanding of what they are doing . A lot of this involves reactivating old genes and trying to fit them into a survivable context . Exactly what the nomads did . And we got the Mongols for their pains .

Can this happen again ?
The Mongols were Supermen in our definition , and their ponies were even more super .
Does this sound familiar ?
Nazism . The ubermensch . Nietsche’s sister . The Ultima Thule group . Madame Blavatsky . Does 40 recent million deaths convince you that this is not a mirage?
400 million with the Mongols?

A little history lesson is in order .
About 4 000 years ago , at the time of the collapse of the late bronze Age Civilization and major climate changes , there was a ferocious civil war in India . The Matriarchy Mythos would include them , but is not essential . The details are described in the Mahabharata . In our terms , it was something like the Second World War , with the horsemen barbarians (Indo Europeans in our terms) coming as a relief . The survivors took even being conquered and a caste system as being preferable .

The survivors of the rulers fled to Tibet and established a series of what we would call fascist monastery fortresses , exploiting the locals .

A series of extermination wars followed , as the survivors fought amongst each other . The ferocity of this can be gauged by the fact that I saw a video of an open pit where the losing notables had been thrown (BBC) : they still had their original silk clothes . Nobody knew how long they had been there . The whole area around had been completely depopulated . The corpses had all their jewelry and finery intact after at least a thousand years . No looting . Nobody was allowed to disturb them . It was like seeing the pits at Auschwitch , preserved in an aspic of fear as an object lesson .Fear was the general impression . Typical of meme-warfare .

The survivors settled in like ticks on hound-dog . Meddling with their neighbours’ business . They had some expertise in meme-structures , and a view of reality where reincarnation absolves them from all moral responsibility . (That was what the final war was about) .

The question is whether reality absolves them from moral responsibility .

I hereby give notice that God has noticed them , and will have a final refutation .

As far as I am concerned , the Chinese are treating this bunch of shit-stirrers far too lightly .

There might be some merit in arguing stochastic resonance in bringing out hidden values in civilizations . But their interference in all Civilizations , especially the Grey and Ultima Thule groups denotes a selfish bias . Not to mention the Moslems and Mongols , or the burning of the fleets in 1427 . And that is only recent history where improbable events can be traced .

Random shit stirring can be tolerated .
Self-serving cannot .

The Indians kicked this bunch of bums out 4 000 years ago as being intolerable . These ne-culturny lot still have not learned anything .

They are not civilized and will not pass a rite of human passage .
They do not cry for the numberless dead .

I designate them Prey in the name of God . And may God have mercy on their souls .

Andre Willers