14.06.09 - One-two punch for evolution

There's a new theory this week claiming that men's faces evolved to take punches. It comes from researchers at the University of Utah and goes against a previous theory that craniofacial evolution was driven by a diet of nuts, seeds and vegetables.

The Utah team think that extra-thick bones and muscles in the jaw and brow helped to protect our ancestor's faces when they got into punch ups, presumably while fighting over women.

But although it's a neat story, and a different way of looking at the evolution of skulls, there are some problems with the idea, as Kat Arney found out from Julie Lawrence from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge, who's also working on our ancestor's skulls...