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 1 week 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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[–] 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.