New York, Aug 7 : As was speculated earlier the 12th century BCE, a period when humans were constructing huge empires and experimenting with new types of written language did not coincide with the evolution of a reduction in the size of their brains, says an array of researchers who have disproved the most popular theory within the scientific community. In the past year, a group of scientists was in the news after they determined that our brain slowed down in the transition to modern urban society around three thousand years ago because the ancestral ancestors’ capacity to organize data externally in social groups reduced our need for maintaining large brains.
Their research, which looked at long-standing theories about the evolutionary reduction of the human brain’s size was founded on a comparison with the evolutionary patterns observed in colonies of ants.
But not so quick, according to the team from the University of Nevada-Los Angeles.
“We were amazed by the significance of an enormous reduction in the size of the modern human brain at around 3000 years ago, in an period of numerous significant innovations as well as historical events such as including the debut of Egypt’s New Kingdom as well as the evolution of Chinese script and the Trojan War, and the appearance of the Olmec civilization, among other things,” said anthropologist Brian Villmoare from the University of Virginia.
In a new study released in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution They re-examined the previous data and found that the human brain size hasn’t changed in 30 years, and likely not in 300,000 years.
“In fact using this data we have found no decrease in the size of the brain in modern humans at any time since the beginning of our species.” Villmoare said.
The team has questioned a variety of the theories that were previously were derived from a collection of approximately 1,000 fossils of early human beings as well as museum specimens.
They also noted that the rise of complex societies and agriculture were observed at different times across the globe.
This means that there is a variance in the timing of skull changes that are observed in different populations.
However, the prior study only included 23 crania in the timeframe that is crucial to the theory of shrinkage in brains and mixed specimens from different places like England, China, Mali and Algeria.
The previous data is highly distorted because the majority of the skulls that were examined are only representative of the last 100 years of the 9.8-million-year period of time.And do not give scientists a clear idea of the extent to which the size of the skull is changing over years, Villmoare said.
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