Human faces are distinctive because we have evolved to look unique. Those were the findings of a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Behavioral ecologist Michael Sheehan explains that they found there were more variations in facial traits than in the rest of the body.

"Traits tend to be correlated in size. So bigger animals have bigger traits, right? Tall people have long arms and long legs. But it’s not the case that tall people have large facial traits. Tall people don’t necessarily have big noses. So the face is doing something quite different not just from the rest of our body but sort of different from what other organismal traits do in general. This would be one way to create lots of different variation in the overall phenotype and make individuals more distinctive."

Sheehan says that the variation may have come from evolutionary pressures to make us easily recognizable.

"Recognition is a really important part of our social lives so therefore there may have been selection for individuals to be more recognizable and make recognition a little bit easier."