Doug wrote an answer to the question “What is the purpose of eyebrows?” in which he agrees with the consensus that their function is to keep moisture out of the eyes. OK, but maybe it should be mentioned that they play a key role in non-verbal communication. All facial expressions are accentuated and made visible from a greater distance thanks to our trusty eyebrows, something that was maybe more important to our Neanderthal ancestors when approaching an unfamiliar person. Nice? Nasty? Check out the eyebrows (or probably eyebrow in the case of Neanderthals).
P.S I know this was an article from 2000, but it’s the fault of that “Random Article” button.
Definitely not the case for my husband (a redhead). Scrunch up your gaze and you wouldn’t even know the eyebrows were there.
Come to think of it, am I misremembering or is the current theory that Neanderthals were Nordic/blondish in colouring?
Yes, I hadn’t thought of very light hair colouring. And can imagine that for certain people you just can’t notice the eyebrows. I did search on Google Images for “face” pictures with “ginger” as the search term, (I tried “redhead” but that just turns up pictures of girlz that I shouldn’t have on my screen at work…) and although there are some with hard-to-see eyebrows, most are darker shades of ginger and have quite noticeable eyebrows. I imagine that even if Neanderthals were blonde, they would unlikely be the extremely light blonde that makes eyebrows hard to make out.
I just remembered in the film “Spirit”, a children’s animated movie about horses, my sister pointed out that they had given the horses eyebrows. Although there is some narration, the animals do not speak, they just use facial expressions and “horse noises” to show their emotions. I image the animators added eyebrows (where in nature there are none) to accentuate the expressions and give a subtle, more human aspect to the horse.
So I still believe that eyebrows play a key roll in non-verbal communication and should have been mentioned in the original article, but I imagine your husband and other of today’s light-eyebrowed folk, may have given off unclear signals had they been around in the times of the Neanderthals.
IIRC blond hair is a fairly recent development, so it shouldn’t really be of any significance in this matter.
The contrasting brows themselves are not a big addition to conveying messages. When Pixar was developing Finding Nemo they were trying to convey emotions without anthropomorphizing the characters too much. One of the staffers recalled how expressive dogs’ faces are; some test shots were made and the conclusion was it’s all in the brows. So the main characters got eyebrows, albeit non-hairy ones.