Today I Learned

Idk, I was assured that pigs had a chinny-chin-chin.

Have you seen humans without chins? That's why

TIL chins are only chins because they stick out. I had always considered the front of a lower jaw to be a "chin".

Of course we know why. So that evolution could result in the universe's most perfect being.

This is why it bothers me when artists add chins to animalistic characters. It looks so wrong. An example:

Like, shit. Cool character design but you gave the cat lady a chin. Cats don't have chins, why did you give her a chin?

If I am not mistaken, according to the grammatical scrolls, having a chin makes everyone .. chinese

If other animals don't have chins, they're using a weird definition of chin.

“If you're looking across all of the hominids, which is the family tree after the split with chimpanzees, there [are] not really that many traits that we can point to that we can say are exclusively human,” Duke University’s James Pampush tells Robert Siegel for NPR. “[T]hose animals all walked on two legs. The one thing that really sticks out is the chin.”

One of the most popular ideas is that our ancestors evolved chins to strengthen our lower jaws to withstand the stresses of chewing. But according to Pampush, the chin is in the wrong place to reinforce the jaw. As for helping us speak, he doubts that the tongue generates enough force to make this necessary. A third idea is that the chin could help people choose mates, but sexually selective features like this typically only develop in one gender, Pampush tells Siegel.

The spandrel hypothesis is as good a theory as any, but it too has its problems. It’s hard to find evidence to test if something is an evolutionary byproduct, especially if it doesn’t serve an obvious function. But if researchers one day do manage to figure out where the chin came from, it could put together another piece of the puzzle of what makes us different from our primate and Neanderthal cousins, Yong writes.

I figure walking upright made being hit from below more common, necessitating thicker bones to protect the very sensitive nerves of the jaw.

Some humans even have double

The "spandrel hypothesis" is the front runner explanation. Essentially we didn't evolve to have chins but rather evolved other things that are helpful, and the chin is a byproduct of that other evolution. Not harmful so it didn't get selected away, but not helpful.

All of the the three little pigs had a chinny chin chin

Would you mate with somebody who didn't have a chin? Chins are sexy.

Useful in fighting as it helps protect the lower jaw and teeth?

But then again, it could simply be a trait we have developed over the millennia, and there is no deeper meaning to it.

TIL LeafyIsHere isn't human after all...