This is so neat:

“Stephen Juan, an anthropologist from the University of Sydney answers Lee Staniforth of Manchester, UK question, “Do humans have a compass in their nose?” He writes about some scientists at California Institute of Technology discovered that humans possess a tiny, shiny crystal of magnetite in the ethmoid bone (pink bone to the image on your right), located between your eyes, just behind the nose…”

Before you go spewing this out as a new fact of science, do note that the original research has yet to be sourced… But it does make sense. Humans migrate a hell of a lot more the your typical primate.

My wildly speculative theory is that one of the reasons why homo sapiens migrated so wide and so far is partly because we lost the ability to actually use our built-in compass. A typical migration pattern follows seasons and/or food. If some of our ancestors were born without the innate ability to navigate properly, it would explain why we moved all over the place without regard to the “comfort level” of the areas we settled in. If a tribe of “odd wanderers” trounced off into a hard-to-live area, you’d expect only the cleverest of the “navigationally-challenged” to survive.

Alternatively, it could be even simpler: Being born without a working compass, you must use your brain (as opposed to just your head =) to navigate. It could just be that the reason why our magnetite compasses don’t work is because our frontal lobes grew too big and encroached on that function.

Regardless of the how and why, this discovery explains why men refuse to ask for directions and women rely on landmarks to navigate: Men could have an instinct for self-navigation that doesn’t work (anymore) and women, also lacking a compass and being constantly dragged to all ends of the earth by their navigationally-challenged men, had to rely on their memories.