Good news for would-be bar fighters: Your face was made for taking punishment, or at least that’s the conclusion arrived at by researchers from the University of Utah. Earlier, long-held conceptions determined that the human head and face evolved based on the need to chew things, but apparently not: As our hands evolved to form brutally effective fists, our head evolved in turn to weather blows from them.

“The australopiths were characterized by a suite of traits that may have improved fighting ability, including hand proportions that allow formation of a fist; effectively turning the delicate musculoskeletal system of the hand into a club effective for striking,” said University of Utah biologist David Carrier, lead author of the study. “If indeed the evolution of our hand proportions were associated with selection for fighting behavior you might expect the primary target, the face, to have undergone evolution to better protect it from injury when punched.”

It’s not all that surprising, if you think about it – if you’ve ever had the pleasure of nailing someone with a haymaker, you’re well aware of just how tough the human skull is. By comparison, it makes the human hand look like a piece of fine china. What’s more, Carrier and his team found that there’s a pronounced difference between males and females, which alludes to the notion that because males do most of the fighting, their skulls evolved to handle it.

“When modern humans fight hand-to-hand the face is usually the primary target. What we found was that the bones that suffer the highest rates of fracture in fights are the same parts of the skull that exhibited the greatest increase in robusticity during the evolution of basal hominins. These bones are also the parts of the skull that show the greatest difference between males and females in both australopiths and humans. In other words, male and female faces are different because the parts of the skull that break in fights are bigger in males,” said Carrier.

Like it or not, violence is a bigger part of our history than we may like to admit. Be glad you have a skull designed to defend against it.