No, the humanbrain did not shrink 3,000 years ago: research unlvnews frontiersin
Not so fast, said UNLV anthropologist Brian Villmoare and Liverpool John Moores University scientist Mark Grabowski., the UNLV-led team analyzed the"We were struck by the implications of a substantial reduction in modern human brain size at roughly 3,000 years ago, during an era of many important innovations and—the appearance of Egypt's New Kingdom, the development of Chinese script, the Trojan War, and the emergence of the Olmec civilization, among many others," Villmoare said.
"We 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," Villmoare said."In fact, based on this dataset, we can identify no reduction in brain size inThe UNLV research team questioned several of the hypotheses that DeSilva et.
The UNLV team says the rise of agriculture and complex societies occurred at different times around the globe—meaning there should be variation in timing of skull changes seen in different populations. However, DeSilva's dataset sampled only 23 crania from the timeframe critical to the brain shrinkage hypothesis and lumped together specimens from locations including England, China, Mali, and Algeria.
The dataset is heavily skewed because more than half of the 987 skulls examined represent only the last 100 years of a 9.8-million-year span of time—and therefore don't give scientists a good idea of how much cranial size has changed over time.size need to be reassessed if human brains haven't actually changed in size since the arrival of our species.More information:
Brian Villmoare et al, Did the transition to complex societies in the Holocene drive a reduction in brain size? A reassessment of the DeSilva et al. hypothesis,
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