ELI5-Why do we have such a wide variety of facial structure unlike other animals?
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Animals also have a wide variety of facial and body structures.
For examples there are so many different looking snakes or cats or dogs or whatever animal you want.
If you take a single breed like German Shepherds or pitbulls for example, they will all look similar to you just like asians or africans will look similar to you (no racism, just to explain my point)
Humans are just a lot better adapted to recognizing subtle differences in the facial structures of other humans, vs. those in other species.
Other animals have just as varied if not more so faces. Our brains literally have an area designed to recognize human faces that doesn’t extend to animal faces.
We have parts of our brains that exist to recognize faces. Sheep have parts of their brains that exists to recognize other sheep- a sheep can tell apart the faces of 1000 other sheep that look completely identical to you. That’s one part of the issue
Another is that humans spread apart farther and wider (and over a longer period of time) than most other species of animals. Some of us have ancestors that were Neanderthals, some of us have ancestors that were Denisovians, both different offshoots of humanity that separated a long time prior. Some of us have ancestors that were wholly from the African continent without any of that mixing (Africa itself, as the ancestral home of our species, has a huge amount of diversity). Migrations, subspecies splitting and remerging, and adaptations to a wide variety of climate and latitude leads to a very large diversity among humans.
No other animal really spread around the globe the same way we did, we did it fast enough we’re all one species but slow enough that there evolved a lot of diversity and features suitable to different climates
So a lot of broad features among many different tribes of human, as well as extremely visually-oriented and intelligent that makes us better at seeing subtle differences between individuals
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