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Why human brains were bigger 3,000 years ago

bbc.com

Why human brains were bigger 3,000 years ago

Our modern civilisation may be the most advanced to ever exist on Earth, but around 100 generations ago, our ancestors had brains that were larger than our own. Y Your ancestors had bigger brains than you. Several thousand years ago, humans reached a milestone in their history – the first known complex civilisations began to emerge. The people walking around and meeting in the world's earliest cities would have been familiar in many ways to modern urbanites today. But since then, human brains have actually shrunk slightly. The lost volume, on average, would be roughly equivalent to that of four ping pong balls, says Jeremy DeSilva, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College in the US. And according to an analysis of cranial fossils, which he and colleagues published last year, the shrinkage started just 3,000 years ago. "This is much more recent than we anticipated," says DeSilva. "We were expecting something closer to 30,000 years ago."
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