Talk:Brow ridge

I edited the section which read "The closest living relatives of man, the Great Apes, have very pronounced supraorbital ridges. The evolution of man therefore is thought to have included a gradual reduction of the ridges. The size of the ridges is typically used as a rough indicator of date and therefore of stage of evolution." because it was uncited and untrue. Evolutionary theory says nothing about development in "stages," and the supraorbital tori of hominids have been found to "grow" and "shrink" over time without any clear progression.

Gender Differences?
A commonly held belief is that males tend to have more prominent supraorbital ridges than females. Is there any evidence in the literature to support this? --Guy Macon (talk) 18:50, 21 November 2011 (UTC)


 * There is. Though I should tell you that in human osteology, one looks for the differences in sex, not gender. Gender is a cultural construction, the role one identifies with in society as masculine, feminine, or something else. Sex is the anatomically observable condition. In forensic anthropology, determining both sex and gender may be important. But to answer your question, see: Buikstra, Jane E. and Douglas Ubelaker, eds. Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains: Proceedings of a Seminar at the Field Museum of Natural History. Arkansas Archaeological Survey Press, Fayetteville, (1994). Boneyard90 (talk) 16:32, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Article name
Per Wikipedia's article naming convention, articles should be located at their most common English name. "Brow ridge" is much more commonly used than "Supraorbital ridge", so this article should be moved to "Brow ridge". Rreagan007 (talk) 20:49, 31 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Are there any anthropological or anatomical sources that say those two terms refer to two different features? Or two homologous features? Or two variants of the same feature? Are you absolutely sure they are identical and/or synonymous?  Boneyard90 (talk) 22:57, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Pictures
Not happy with where the pictures point the reader - two pictures of aboriginals and then pictures of gorilla and chimpanzee. It suggests a stronger link than there may be.


 * Don't really see the problem. Humans and the other great apes are closely related. "Strong links" among the three species have already been established. Boneyard90 (talk) 15:44, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the first comment, it suggests that aboriginals have more in common with apes than other humans do, and that almost never has a positive connotation. Maybe not racist, but severely racialist.Ropo153 (talk) 04:50, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

The arrangement of the pictures of Australian Aborigines along with great apes and a chimpanzee on this page are at the very least in poor taste. There are great examples of central Europeans with significant brow ridges yet they are not included. Surely there has been some more recent work done on this subject in the last 40 years. Anyone? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dnbenso (talk • contribs) 12:25, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I removed the images of the Australian Aborigines and replaced with a labeled skull, and removed one of the great ape images to make the article less "tasteless" and "racialist" (two opinions I agreed with). Drdemartino (talk) 15:48, 25 August 2013 (UTC)


 * There is no such thing as "race", therefore one photo of a human is as good as any other photo of a human that demonstrates the featured trait (in this case, the browridges). -Boneyard90 (talk) 17:46, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Some photos are more illustrative of the ridge in question then others. Those images of Australians from the early 1900s did not clearly show the pronounced supraorbital ridge, so I uploaded one that does. And just because race is a social, not physiological, construct, it does not mean that an article won't come across as racist by displaying certain images in proximity to one another. Drdemartino (talk) 21:11, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I enjoy the subtle pairing of a rugby player and a gorilla.86.63.168.150 (talk) 21:51, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Vague/undefined references
There are lots of parenthetical references that are just author/year (and occasionally pagenumber) that do not correspond to any of the "References" (or even "Further reading") entries. Can someone familiar with this topic help find these works and provide full references to them? (posted on behalf of a questioner at Reference desk/Science) DMacks (talk) 21:41, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Human variation - hard data on male caucasoids NOT coming first?
"Caucasoids" (male) are said to have the second largest brow ridges, following "australoids", but from any criteria, particularly bone thickness, it seems that male caucasoids have larger brow ridges than australoids. This paper doesn't address directly that, but it incidentally illustrates it:

"VARIATION IN CRANIAL BASE FLEXION AND CRANIOFACIAL MORPHOLOGY IN MODERN HUMANS" by E. K. Simpson

https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/37790/8/02whole.pdf

Pages 205 and 206, diagrams built from averaging several skulls ([white] "Americans" are caucasoids). The average male caucasoid brow ridge is clearly the thicker, and male australoids may even be third after male Polynesians. Even if protuberance is the parameter, male caucasoids still come first (or second to Polynesians), as the forehead angle itself is somewhat lower (but Polynesians have it even lower).

Perhaps the impression that australoids come first comes from a combination of eye sockets a little bit deeper below the cranial vault (making the brow ridge seem to protrude more than it really does), darker skin, perhaps even soft tissue on the forehead itself, and finally, a biased attention to exceptionally robust specimens taken almost as "holotypes" (perhaps "specimen", singular; it seems that 99% of the time you'll see exactly the same australoid skull, if you're not actively looking for a larger sample or lucky enough to stumble in a rare instance of a different specimen), often even contrasted with more gracile caucasoids. Not a proper anatomical assessment, but just a rough impression. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 177.139.2.117 (talk) 20:51, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 8 September 2018

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: moved. (page mover nac) The editor  whose username is Z0  16:50, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Supraorbital ridge → Brow ridge – Per WP:COMMONNAME. Rreagan007 (talk) 03:54, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Oppose for moment - does not appear to be commonname per n-gram at least; would be happy to reconsider if further evidence is presented. --Tom (LT) (talk) 11:11, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
 * "Brow ridge" (and "browridge") get 107,000 Google search results, while "supraorbital ridge" only gets 47,000. Encyclopedia Britannica lists their article at "Browridge". Dictionary.com has "browridge or brow ridge" as the main entry with "supraorbital ridge" being a redirect to the former. Rreagan007 (talk) 17:29, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Enough to convince me. New term definitely more understandable by the lay person. Support --Tom (LT) (talk) 22:48, 8 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Support per nom and discussion. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:22, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Support Definitely is the common name.ZXCVBNM (TALK) 23:28, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Support. Common name. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:04, 12 September 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Function
Hi there. Can anyone clean up the function subsection on the page? It doesn't list any sources for its content. I would like to learn more about the brow ridge and what purpose it serves, but Google isn't returning many results, and the lack of citations on our function subsection leads me to take it with a grain of salt. Soldier198 (talk) 03:12, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

Merge supraorbital foramen over here
Have editors given a good reason for why the very small supraorbital foramen article exists and is not housed here at the brow ridge page instead? I think supraorbital foramen should be merged into this page. GBFEE (talk) 19:48, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

I'll get on with merging after finishing work on sex differences in human physiology. I have a schedule for things I'll be doing on Wikipedia. It's much easier to cover brow ridge and supraorbital foramen on a single page so that I'm not going back and forth between pages to add information. Since supraorbital foramen is a very small article, I don't think the merge will disturb anything. GBFEE (talk) 20:06, 15 November 2021 (UTC)