They don't make Homo sapiens like they used to — and they don’t all come in one make and model:
Bones don’t lie. John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin at Madison likes evidence he can put his hands on, so he takes me on a tour of the university’s bone laboratory. There, the energetic 36-year-old anthropologist unlocks a glass case and begins arranging human skulls and other skeletal artifacts—some genuine fossils, others high-quality reproductions—on a counter according to their age. Gesturing toward these relics, which span the past 35,000 years, Hawks says, “You don’t have to look hard to see that teeth are getting smaller, skull size is shrinking, stature is getting smaller.”These overriding trends are similar in many parts of the world, but other changes, especially over the past 10,000 years, are distinct to specific ethnic groups. “These variations are well known to forensic anthropologists,” Hawks says as he points them out: In Europeans, the cheekbones slant backward, the eye sockets are shaped like aviator glasses, and the nose bridge is high. Asians have cheekbones facing more forward, very round orbits, and a very low nose bridge. Australians have thicker skulls and the biggest teeth, on average, of any population today. “It beats me how leading biologists could look at the fossil record and conclude that human evolution came to a standstill 50,000 years ago,” Hawks says.