No, Human Brain Did Not Shrink 3,000 Years Ago
Published:31 Aug.2022 Source:University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Last year, a group of scientists made headlines when they concluded that the human brain shrank during the transition to modern urban societies about 3,000 years ago because, they said, our ancestors’ ability to store information externally in social groups decreased our need to maintain large brains. Their hypothesis, which explored decades-old ideas on the evolutionary reduction of modern human brain size, was based on a comparison to evolutionary patterns seen in ant colonies.
In a new paper published last week in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the UNLV-led team analyzed the dataset that the research group from last year’s study used and dismissed their findings. They re-examined the dataset from DeSilva et al. and found that human brain size has not changed in 30,000 years, and probably not in 300,000 years. And the research group said that, in fact, based on this dataset, they can identify no reduction in brain size in modern humans over any time-period since the origins of our species.