Smithsonian iPhone app makes it possible for you to morph into a Neaderthal

There truly is, apparently, an iPhone app for everything. Including this new one from the Smithsonian Institution that lets you see what your Neaderthal ancestors may have looked like.

The Christian Science Monitor has the ugly details of the Me-anderthal app:

First you upload a portrait of your face and line up the image with markers for the eyes, nose and mouth. Next, you choose which human species you’d like to become, including: Homo floresiensis who lived between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago; Homo neanderthalensis who lived 200,000 to 28,000 years ago; and Homo heidelbergensis who lived 700,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Expect your nose to inch up in size in the resulting MEanderthal image.
“Neandertal faces tend to have much bigger noses,” said Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Human Origins Program. “Big noses were good for humidifying and warming glacial, ice age air.”

It’s so easy a caveman could do it, so we ran a random photo through the Me-aderthal iPhone app just to see what would happen.

Good lord, those neanderthals were ugly.

Source: Science