Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 12, 2025

Quantifying Abdominal Pigmentation in Drosophila melanogaster
Published on: June 1, 2017
Sexually dimorphic traits are associated with subsistence strategy in African faces from the Sahel/Savannah belt
Karel Kleisner1, Šimon Pokorný1, Viktor Černý2,3
1Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
Objectives:
Previous research revealed that in some African populations, food-production strategies are associated with facial shape. Nomadic pastoralists living in the African Sahel/Savannah belt have a different facial morphology than their sedentary neighbors. We investigated whether the lifestyle associated with a subsistence pattern has an impact on sexual dimorphism in the facial structure.
Methods:
We employed several methods from geometric morphometrics and demonstrated such effect in four ethnically distinct populations that share the same geographic space.
Results:
We show that the facial traits which correlate with a subsistence strategy are systematically associated with levels of facial sex-typicality. In particular, we found that faces with more pronounced pastoralist features have on average more masculine facial traits and that this effect is more pronounced in men than in women.
Conclusions:
In general, though, the magnitude of overall facial dimorphism does not differ between pastoralists and farmers. Pastoralists (in contrast to farmers) tend to have a more masculine facial morphology but facial differences between the sexes are in both groups the same.
Related Concept Videos
X-linked Traits
Frequency-dependent Selection
Types of Selection
Multiple Allele Traits
Mate Choice
Relationship Formation

