The team analyzed a data set used by a research team from
“We were struck by the consequences of a significantthe decline in the brain size of a modern person about 3,000 years ago, during the era of many important innovations and historical events - the emergence of the New Kingdom in Egypt, the development of Chinese writing, the Trojan War, the emergence of the Olmec civilization, and much more, Vilmore said. — We re-examined the data set from DeSilva et al. and found that the size of the human brain has not changed in 30,000 years and probably not even in 300,000 years.”
The study examined nearly 1,000 early human remains and museum specimens. Scientists made several key conclusions at once:
Rise of agriculture and complex societiesoccurred at different times around the world, meaning that there must be different timing of skull change seen in different populations. However, in the DeSilva et al. only 23 skulls were selected from time frames critical to the brain shrinkage hypothesis, and samples from locations such as England, China, Mali, and Algeria were pooled.
The dataset is highly skewed because morehalf of the 987 skulls examined represent only the last 100 years of a 9.8 million time span and therefore do not give scientists a good idea of how much skull size has changed over time. .
The multiple hypotheses about the reasons for the decline in modern human brain size need to be reassessed if the human brain has not really changed in size since the appearance of our species.
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