Hooked, Pointy or Snubbed? How Your Nose Got Its Shape

Now, new research has uncovered four genes that govern some of the variation in the human olfactory organ. "Finding out the role each gene plays helps us to piece together the evolutionary path from Neanderthal to modern humans," study co-author Kaustubh Adhikari, a cell and developmental biologist at University College London, said in a statement. Although many people think of nose shape as a purely aesthetic feature, researchers suspect that different nose shapes evolved in different environme