Previous research had shown that the human brain shrank thousands of years ago. A study published last year concluded that the brains of people who started building modern cities 3,000 years ago shrank. It was stated that this may have occurred because our ancestors’ ability to store information externally in social societies reduced the need for large brains.
The authors of a new study published last week in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution rejected this hypothesis and shared their thoughts on this increasingly popular situation in the scientific world.
Researchers think the human brain hasn’t changed much in the last 30,000 years.
Scientists from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNVL) in the USA, analyzed the data used in the research conducted last year and rejected the findings. The team used these expressions by stating that many innovations and historical events such as the development of Chinese writing and the emergence of the new kingdom of Egypt took place in the specified period.
Brian Villamore, one of the researchers, said: “We re-examined the dataset from last year’s study and found that the human brain has not changed in the last 30,000 years. Based on these data, we cannot detect a reduction in modern human brain size at any time since the beginning of our species.” Villamore also noted that they think the human brain may not have undergone a change in the last 300,000 years.
The UNVL team found that more than half of the 987 skulls examined represent only the last 100 years of a 9.8 million-year time span; therefore, it says that it does not provide enough information about the size change. In addition, the team says that the rise of agriculture and complex societies occurred at different times around the world, and that variation in the timing of skull changes is required. The researchers add that last year’s data only sampled 23 skulls from the time period critical to the hypothesis.
There has been a lot of research on the shrinkage of the human brain since the emergence of our species. However, experts think these hypotheses should be re-evaluated if there really hasn’t been a change in size.
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