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Nature Is Weird  /  Biology

From bees to humans, nature has decided that the 'face' is the absolute best place to have a conversation.

Scientists discovered that having a face as a hub for social signals is a universal design rule across the animal kingdom, not just a human trait. Even though insects and mammals are unrelated, they both evolved to concentrate expressions and gaze in the same spot to simplify communication.

Original Paper

Why are embodied social signals concentrated towards the rostral region? — The rostrum concentration hypothesis

Satoh, Shun, Matsui, Hiroshi

EcoEvoRxiv  ·  10.32942/X2909T

Although frequently embodied, the relationship of animal social communication with body layout has rarely been investigated from a unified cognitive perspective. Across animal taxa, socially relevant signals, ranging from facial expressions and gaze to colouration and morphology, are strikingly concentrated towards the anterior region of the body. Here, we propose the Rostrum Concentration Hypothesis (RCH), a conceptual framework positing that social signals preferentially evolve and converge al