Forget grunts, our ancestors talked using their eyebrows

EYEBROWS gave our primitive ancestors the ability to communicate before the species developed the ability to speak, a study suggests.

Expressing emotion with our eyebrows helped prehistoric humans develop the social groups needed to survive the last ice age, it found.

Researcher Dr Penny Spikins said: ‘While our sister species the Neanderthals were dying out, we were rapidly colonising the globe and surviving in extreme environments.

‘Eyebrows are the missing part of the puzzle of how modern humans managed to get on so much better ... than other now-extinct hominins.’ In the University of York study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers studied the skull of a Homo heidelbergensis, a precursor to modern humans that lived up to 600,000 years ago.

Though previous research suggested the brow ridge developed to protect the skull when chewing, this study concluded it was more likely to enable communication.