ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how a comparative, evolutionary approach can yield insight and perhaps alternative thoughts about the age-old question, "Why do we (humans) look the way we do?" It considers three subsidiary questions: What do we look like now? What did we look like in the past? and What can the examination of extant and fossil primates tell us about the way we look? The chapter presents a comparative examination of skulls from modern humans and two Great Apes, chimpanzees and gorillas, generating a list of attributes distinctive to human craniofacial anatomy. It reviews the fossil record, concentrating on the past 4 million years or so. The chapter discusses the convention of subdividing the skull into the neurocranium and the viscerocranium, then further parceling these two basic units into the individual structural-functional components which comprise them. Many of the findings and interpretations offered are original, based on collective personal experience over several decades of studying craniofacial anatomy.
