Nose Shape Linked To A Person's Ancestral Climate, Says Study

The shape of a person’s nose is determined by the climate of the place his or her ancestors originally came from. This is because noses are particularly designed to heat the air that it inhales to prevent damage or illness to the airways and lungs, according to a PLOS Genetics study Thursday. Therefore, someone with a narrow nose will be able to trace back his or her ancestral roots to a cold part of the world, while someone with a wider one will likely find that his or her ancestral climate came from somewhere warmer.

Physical traits that are directly exposed to weather conditions experience natural selection and evolve faster, the study’s author Dr. Arslan Zaidi told the New York Times Thursday.

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“This is one of the reasons why we looked at nose shape,” Dr. Zaidi said. Learning why the shapes of people's noses evolved help scientists get a better understanding of potential health risks and diseases, he said.

The new study backed up a popular theory made by British anthropologist Arthur Thompson in the 1800’s known as the Thompson’s Nose Rule, which suggested that natural selection favored noses that were better at heating and moisturizing air in cold and dry local climates, the New York Post reported Friday.

Researchers at Penn State University came to the conclusion after they measured the nose height, nose length, protrusion and nostril width of volunteers and compared those results with the environments their ancestors came from. Zaidi said the researchers surveyed 476 participants from West Africa, East Asia, Northern Europe, and South Asia to “maximize the distance across the populations.” They found that the correlation between nostril width and their ancestral climates was strongest among the Northern Europeans.

The study found that nostril width was not as indicative of someone's ancestral climate as skin pigmentation is. People with lighter skin, for example, have a greater risk of getting a sunburn or skin cancer if they lived close to the equator, while someone darker is more likely to have a vitamin-D deficiency if he or she lives far from it.

Less than 15 percent of genetic variation can be seen between people from different continents, Zaidi said.

“People are more similar than they are different. What this research does is offer people a view of why we’re different,” he said. “There’s an evolutionary history to it that, I think, kind of demystifies the concept of race.”