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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

First thing that came to my mind is that chins might be better as attachment for facial muscles giving more expressive or efficient face expressions or talking.

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My first thought was that a chin may take a punch better...

But protruding chins don't really take punches that well, do they? The prototypical knockout punch is one that suddenly knocks the chin to the side, rotating the skull more quickly than the brain, bruising the brain both when the skull makes contact and when the brain passes the skull and makes contact on the other side.

Quite the opposite. A punch on the chin will knock you out easily.

Not to argue, but is being knocked out bad? It seems like a common occurrence to a fight is go to unconscious. Some people have strong chins. Would they do better in a no rules fight historically, if they didn't go down?

Getting knocked out in an athletic competition is one thing. Getting knocked out when a neighboring tribe is attempting to kill all your men and old folks, enslave everyone else, and steal everything of value, would probably have been something else.

If you're unconscious, you're not a threat any more.

Live to fight another day.

Inter-tribal resource wars might be fought by primitives, but they're not fought by idiots. Nor are they fought by chivalrous knights. The throats of unconscious warriors will be cut. Even if a throat was missed in all the chaos, what is the evolutionary advantage to a male of living on after all fertile females have been abducted?

Punching is the reason we have flat faces. They turned up around the same time we learned how to make fists. There was a research about that recently.

This article claims that chins handle stress worse not better (although I'm not sure if they meant stress associated with chewing or getting hit).

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