Hi Jack. Good points! I didn't mean to suggest that brain size was 'overly' allocated for hands/etc, since you are absolutely correct that it would have evolved differently. I also stand corrected that it's a hypothesis and not a theory :) And a bit superficial I realize :) Although I could be a little finnicky and say that since we are dealing with visual arts here, we are by definition dealing with the superficial :) The blind angle is a very interesting one I hadn't considered. I did work with a blind programmer many years back when I was working up in the far, Canadian North (basically equivalent to Alaska) He used to delight in our weekly power outages since he was perfectly comfortable in the dark, and he'd just wander around scarring the jeepers out of the rest of us stumbling around :) I never did ask him how much of his brain he used for facial recognition. Obviously he wouldn't need the visual processing facilities, but perhaps they use some of it for the touch/feel type of recognition. The whole neural processing area and how your brain is laid out in discreet areas to handle specific body part is quite fascinating. More fascinating is how the visual neural encoding is laid out in 3D layers. Then there is the whole memory thing, and how it encodes and cross references things in order to bring back entire scenes including visual as well as sounds and smells. I'm WAY out of my league there, and not certain it has any relevance to a particular art style. It would be interesting to see a nerve density drawing or illustration, just to see where the most heavily populated areas were. Likely the hands and face are fairly dense with nerves endings, although I'm not to sure if that would be true of the feet. I never realized the over sized proportions was a relatively new issue. Especially the caricature angle. I suppose I've always been subjected to it so considered it 'normal'. Mad magazine has been around since I was a little kid, and a significant proportion of newspaper cartoons and comix have always had at least a bit of this. It's a fascinating topic though, and I appreciate the comments. I certainly didn't mean to portray my 'hypothesis' as anything but a wild idea :) Maybe true, maybe not, but it's kind of an interesting idea to consider.