He’s got a head start
“When I look in the mirror, I think I look like a Marx brother,” joked Daniel Lieberman. But, he insists, beneath our daily quibbles with how our faces look, our heads are wonderlands that we often take for granted. After all, their design was millions of years in the making. In Lieberman’s new book, “The Evolution of the Human Head,” he discusses how complex parts of the body can and do evolve, and he traces the head’s perpetual slow makeover as it unfolded in the hominin fossil record. “The human head is remarkably different than any other mammal’s,” Lieberman told a capacity crowd at the Harvard Museum of Natural History last month. “We have wide, round heads, vertical foreheads, prominent eyebrows … We’re the only primate without a snout, and we alone have an external nose.” And we’re also the only species with a chin, he said. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary...