Last year, an article published to Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution made headlines across the world after it claimed human brains shrank in size approximately 3,000 years ago. This, according to the authors, may have driven by the externalization of knowledge in human societies, thus needing less energy to store a lot of information as individuals. As a result, we developed smaller brains.

However, in a recent article, also published to Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, another team of researchers challenged this notion, questioning several of the original paper’s key hypotheses.

Speaking to his university, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, anthropologist Brian Vilmoare said that “human brain size has not changed in 30,000 years, and probably not in 300,000 years”. In fact, he added, “based on this dataset, we can identify no reduction in brain size in modern humans over any time-period since the origins of our species”.

Along with his co-author Mark Grabowski of Liverpool’s John Moores University, Vilmoare claimed the dataset used by the authors of the initial research was heavily skewed because more than half of the 987 skulls examined represent only the last 100 years of a 9.8m-year span of time.1

The scientific debate continues.

You can read more here.

References

  1. Villmoare, B. (2022). Did the transition to complex societies in the Holocene drive a reduction in brain size? A reassessment of the DeSilva et al. (2021) hypothesis. Frontiers. Retrieved October 23, 2022, from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.963568/full

Disclaimers

  • The material in these reviews is from various public open access sources, meant for educational and informational purposes only
  • Any personal opinions expressed are those of only the author(s) and are not intended to represent the position of any organization(s)
  • No official support by any organization(s) has been provided or should be inferred