Faces reveal accurate information about overhand throwing ability in men.
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Gallup, A.C., Windhager, S., Eldakar, O.T., 2026. Faces reveal accurate information about overhand throwing ability in men. Animal Behaviour 237, 123621.
Highlights
•Face-based inferences of overhand throwing ability are reliable and accurate.
•Skilled throwers have distinctive face shapes that may be driving these perceptions.
•Inferences of throwing are biased towards ancestral projectile weaponry.
•Perceptions of overhand throwing do not merely track assessments of strength.
•Selection may have operated on the capacity to infer throwing abilities of others.
The ability to throw projectiles overhand with power and accuracy evolved within the genus Homo, whereby selection favoured superior throwing skills by offering advantages in fighting and hunting. As a result, the capacity to quickly infer this trait in others could have also been adaptive for the purposes of assessing coalitional partners, rivals and potential mates. Here, we conducted three studies to examine inferences of overhand throwing from facial photographs. First, we found high inter-rater reliability for face-based inferences of overhand throwing using a diverse stimulus set and identified the facial shapes predictive of these perceptions using geometric morphometrics. Next, we demonstrated that face-based inferences of overhand throwing ability are accurate, predicting an analogue of ancestral projectile weaponry, the javelin, among male track and field athletes. Moreover, we found that javelin throwers have distinctive facial shapes, which may be driving these perceptions. Finally, we replicate these effects and demonstrate that face-based inferences of overhand throwing ability can be decoupled from perceptions of physical strength and formidability. These findings support the hypothesis that selection has operated on the capacity to quickly infer the throwing prowess of others, although further research is needed to test whether humans possess a dedicated perceptual module for overhand throwing ability.