Nov 19, 2013 11:46 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

As it turns out, primates were the first to develop social networking, but it had nothing to do with the Internet and a gave a new meaning to "interfacing."

According to a press release, scientists at UCLA have been studying the evolution of primates' faces for more than a year now. They have discovered that the more sociable ones have complex facial patterns and more complex colors.

Various primates have very unique faces and they come in many different colors. Last yea, the UCLA biologists reported a study on 129 species of South and Central American primates. The new research suggests the faces of Old World primates from Africa and Asia have been evolving for more than 25 million years.

"Humans are crazy for Facebook, but our research suggests that primates have been relying on the face to tell friends from competitors for the last 50 million years and that social pressures have guided the evolution of the enormous diversity of faces we see across the group today," study senior author Michael Alfaro, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science, said in the release.

The primates' means of social networking involves identification of each others' faces and those species that lived closer together in smaller spaces often had more complex colors and patterns. This likely helped the primates differentiate between species.

"Faces are really important to how monkeys and apes can tell one another apart," Alfaro said. "We think the color patterns have to do both with the importance of telling individuals of your own species apart from closely related species and for social communication among members of the same species."

Sharlene Santana, the lead author of the study published Nov. 11 in the journal Nature Communications, used photographs for primates' faces and developed a method to measure complexity.

 "She divided each face into several regions; classified the color of each part of the face, including the hair and skin; and assigned a score based on the total number of different colors across the facial regions," according to the press release. "This numerical score is called the 'facial complexity' score. The life scientists then studied how the complexity scores of primate faces were related to primates' social systems."

Santana is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington, but conducted the study as a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department, as well as the school's Institute for Society and Genetics.

"We expected to find similar trends across all primate radiations -- that is, that the faces of highly social species would have more complex patterning," said Santana. "We were surprised by the results in our original study on neotropical (Central and South American) primates."

See Now: Covert Team Inside Newsweek Revealed as Key Players in False Human Trafficking Lawsuit