Ancient History

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TIL The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago (slrpnk.net)

submitted 6 days ago by solo@slrpnk.net to c/ancienthistory@slrpnk.net

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More on this, here:

The mystery over why human brains have shrunk over time | BBC |18 May 2024
Human brains have shrunk: the questions are when and why | Front. Ecol. Evol., 22 June 2023

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[–] solo@piefed.social 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Maybe, we just don't know! One hypothesis for example claims the exact opposite, that we started living with more people so we could "outsource" some efforts to others.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 points 6 days ago

it's hard for me to imagine tribes & clans dramatically gaining size ~100Kyrs ago to the extent that it would make such a dramatic, species-wide difference in brain size.

I would tend to guess the reasons were multifactorial, at least. Possibly environmental changes and interbreeding (there were five other humans back then IIRC) were factors.