--- title: The Chin: Why You Have One description: It's useless, but it's there all the same canonical: https://time.com/3823115/chins-why-we-have-them/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-04-15T20:31:45.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:59:23.527Z article:section: Science og:title: Here's Why You Have a Chin og:description: Hint: You could do perfectly well without it og:url: https://time.com/3823115/chins-why-we-have-them/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt63f426dd019977d9/6987eb4935ba6f002ac0ae41/chin.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 5223 og:image:height: 2938 og:image:alt: Gorgeous—and pretty much useless og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Here's Why You Have a Chin twitter:description: Hint: You could do perfectly well without it twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt63f426dd019977d9/6987eb4935ba6f002ac0ae41/chin.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Here's Why You Have a Chin > Sponsored content. 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Future Proof is TIME's weekly climate and energy newsletter, written by senior correspondent Justin Worland. It connects the energy transition to the decisions reshaping business, technology, policy and markets. #### Where can I follow the energy transition as a business story? Future Proof covers climate and energy as an economic and business story rather than only an environmental one. It publishes every Friday and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes Future Proof? Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at TIME and an award-winning climate journalist, writes Future Proof. #### Is Future Proof free? Yes. Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: Waking the Dead: Bringing Extinct Species Back to Life [Watch (HLS stream): Waking the Dead: Bringing Extinct Species Back to Life](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/7mURxfr4.m3u8) (4:03)  _Published 2014-03-12. Conservationists and scientists have a saying, "extinction is forever." But soon biologists will clone long-gone animals in the hope to redefine that axiom to "DE-extinction is forever."_  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Apr 15, 2015 8:31 PM UTC  Gorgeous—and pretty much useless Gorgeous—and pretty much useless Chev Wilkinson; Getty Images  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Apr 15, 2015 8:31 PM UTC Nature is nothing if not parsimonious, especially when it comes to the human body. There’s a reason we don’t have webbed feet or nut-cracking beaks like other species, and that’s because we don’t need them. The system isn’t perfect, of course. If you ever wind up having painful abdominal surgery, odds are pretty fair that it will be your good-for-nothing appendix that’s to blame. And wisdom teeth seem a lot less wise when you consider how often they fall down on the job and need to get yanked. As it turns out, the same why-bother pointlessness is true of what you might consider one of your loveliest features: your chin. Researchers have long wondered what the adaptive purpose of the chin could possibly be. Sexual selection seems like an obvious answer, since an attractive chin increases your chances of mating. But a feature needs a function before it can appear in the first place. Only then can it be assigned some aesthetic value. The other, better answer is all about chewing. The jaw exerts enormous forces when it bites and chews—up to 70 lbs. per sq. in. (32 kg per 6.5 sq. cm) for the molars. Conscious clenching increases the figure, and people who grind their teeth in their sleep may exceed the average force 10-fold. What’s more, the jaw moves in more than just one axis, both chewing up and down and grinding side to side. That, so the thinking went, might increase bone mass in the same way physical exercise builds muscle mass. And bone mass, in turn, may produce the chin. The problem with the theory, however, is that it doesn’t account for Neanderthals and other primates—including the great apes—which lack prominent chins but in many cases have far more powerful bites than we do. To answer the riddle, Nathan Holton, a post-doctoral researcher who specializes in craniofacial structure in the University of Iowa school of orthodontics, selected 37 of the many subjects whose facial measurements have been taken regularly from age 3 to young adulthood, as past of the longstanding Iowa Facial Growth Study (yes, there is such a thing). With the help of basic physics, it’s possible to determine how much force any one jaw exerts without the subjects’ ever having to be tested directly with a bite gauge. Measuring the geometry of what orthodontic researchers call the mandibular symphysis and what everyone else just calls the chin region, and comparing that to what is known as the bending moment arm—or the distance between where a force is initially applied (in this case the muscles in the jaw) and where that force is eventually felt (the chin)—yields a pretty good measure of force exerted. “Think about removing the lug nuts from a wheel on your car,” Holton wrote in an e-mail to TIME. “The longer the wrench, the easier it is because the longer wrench increases the moment arm, allowing you to create more force.” And more force, in this case, should mean more bone mass in the chin—but that’s not what the results of the new research showed. Not only did the two turn out to be unrelated in the 37 subjects studied, but Holton and his colleagues even found that as the face matures, the chin is less adept at resisting mechanical forces, which is the whole reason it was assumed to grow more pronounced in the first place. So why did we grow chins at all? The answer is, we didn’t. Holton and his collaborator, University of Iowa anthropologist Robert Franciscus, instead suspect that the face shrank away from behind the chin as primitive and pre-humans became modern humans, making it appear larger relative to everything else. The reason, as with so many things in the human species, has to do with male behavior—specifically violent male behavior. As humans migrated from Africa 20,000 years ago and settled down into societies, males had to become less competitive and more cooperative—giving an advantage to those with lower testosterone levels. And reduced testosterone softens and shrinks the craniofacial structure. “What we are arguing is that modern humans had an advantage at some point to have a well-connected social network,” Franciscus said in a statement accompanying the study. “And for that to happen, males had to tolerate each other. There had to be more curiosity and inquisitiveness than aggression, and the evidence of that lies in facial architecture.” It wasn’t until we had our chins that we set about assigning value to them—strong ones, weak ones, angular, round, cleft or dimpled, depending on your tastes. Those tastes—and the mating choices that arise from them—ensure that the chin will stay. It might be biomechanically useless, but you’d look awfully silly without one. _Read next:_ [_Can Plastic Surgery Make You More Likeable? A Close Look at a New Study_](http://time.com/3814422/plastic-surgery-likeable/?iid=time%5Freadnext) [_Listen to the most important stories of the day._](http://time.com/newsletter/the-brief/autoplay/?xid=spl-fullbrief-article) ## Transcript [ SOUND ] [ MUSIC ] My name is Stuart Brand and I was trained as an ecologist. Conservation is about to take a turn because the technology was gonna allow us to use the DNA that's in the museum specimens and fossils to bring back extinct species [ MUSIC ] The passenger pigeon was around for 6 million years. And people remembered how amazing it was that these animals darkened the sky for hours at a time. There's these stories about these giant flocks blocking out the sun. And their wings sounding louder than thunder. We developed the techniques to hunt and net these birds and basically killed them all. And then it was really gone. When I was growing up, my mother said when the last one died in 1914 it broke America's heart. It was one of the prideful things that America had to show the world, and it was gone. This book. This is essentially the bible of passenger pigeon. I am currently the lead researcher for the deextinction project to bring the extinct passenger pigeon back to life. When I say, oh, we'll bring back a passenger pigeon, everyone goes, oh, my god, that's like Jurassic Park. And no, no, it's not. Not at all. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before. Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. I don't think a pigeon is going to, you know, pluck lawyers off of toilets. No. [ SOUND ]. Aah! [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So how we're actually going to go about deextinction. Every organism has a unique code in their genes. This one would be good I think. So these are actual DNA codes. From a chunk of a passenger pigeon foot. Now, if you can get DNA, then we can actually make it into a living cell. We're going to sequence its whole genome. We're gonna build from scratch the code that is a passenger pigeon, one gene at a time. Compare it to its closest relative. [ MUSIC ] Then we're gonna introduce DNA into the living cell of a band- tailed pigeon. And when you introduce an extinct animal's egg cell into a new mother, then you've changed the game. [ MUSIC ] Which has been done. The extinct Iranian Ibex was successfully cloned. That was the first deextinction. In this particular case, the animal only lived about ten minutes, but it was a proof of concept, and with further efforts, we hope, followed by everything from the passenger pigeon to the Tasmanian tiger. It's one of the most famous human- caused extinctions in the world. Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger, died in 1936. It was our direct activity that caused that extinction. For me, biotech is the future of conservation because our meddling is not unnatural. It is what species do. One of the things that gotten used to is the horrifying realization that extinction is forever. 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