Geographical environments play a role not only in the sociocultural field, but also in our physical differences depending on climatic conditions. When we consider the obvious contrasts in the appearance of people, we can observe the effect of geography and thus climate changes.
A research paper in the journal Brain, Behavior and Evolution shows that there are adaptive increases and decreases in the size of the human brain to climate change. Shrinkage is observed in the brain, which develops adaptation according to climatic conditions.
Can skull size increase in parallel with excess intelligence? What does brain and skull size mean intellectually?
External factors such as the living conditions that people are exposed to and the environmental differences in the geographical regions they are in cause differentiation in terms of morphological features. Changes in homologous cells carried by humans included in the Homo sapiens species cause changes in different structural features such as skull and tooth anatomy.
The anatomical structure that causes us to think that people with a large head or a wide forehead have larger brains and therefore more intelligent may cause a general psychological connotation among people. You can take a look at the content we have created on this subject;
A lot of resources were used for the research. Fossils and climate calculations from thousands of years ago were compared for temporal consistency.
Stibel divided the fossils into groups according to their age, and conducted his analysis using four different fossil age ranges. The skull and brain volumes of the fossils were calculated in proportion to their body size. A total of 298 skull measurements were made. By comparing body and skull sizes, estimates of brain size were obtained from skull capacity measurements.
Four climate records were then compared, including temperature data from the Antarctic Ice Core European Project (EPICA) Dome C in Antarctica. In the study, which included examining 298 samples from the last 50,000 years, Jeff Morgan Stibel found that there was a significant decrease in average brain size during periods of hot climates.
The human brain shrinks as it is exposed to hot climates! The biggest factor in brain shrinkage is actually the climate changes we are exposed to.
Research paper published in 2022 by Jeff Morgan Stibel showed that when compared to four climate records, people exposed to colder climates had a larger brain size than people living in warmer climates than average.
In short, the brain’s size shrinks as the climate gets warmer, according to the research. Also Stibel; revealed that humidity and precipitation levels also affect brain development, albeit to a lesser degree than temperature.
There is talk of the possibility that global warming can make our brains smaller and smaller. We may face big problems in the future.
People experienced a significant decrease in average brain size of just over 10.7 percent, particularly during the Holocene warming period, which occurred about 17,000 years after the last glacial maximum, the study said. But changes in brain size tend to occur thousands of years after climate change, according to Stibel. It is therefore shown that multiple generations are required for the possibility of species-level adaptation. These results, revealed by Stibel, have also raised concerns about the potentially harmful effects of ongoing global warming on human cognition.
Stibel argues that even a small reduction in brain size among modern humans can have important physiological consequences that are not yet fully understood. And as it is known, Stibel states that besides indirect climate effects, non-climatic factors such as technology and culture also cause changes in brain size.
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