{"id":17595,"date":"2022-08-20T02:36:04","date_gmt":"2022-08-20T02:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/?p=17595"},"modified":"2022-08-20T02:36:05","modified_gmt":"2022-08-20T02:36:05","slug":"study-finds-human-brains-did-not-shrink-3000-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/?p=17595&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Study finds human brains did not shrink 3,000 years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong><em>Mishaal Arshad C.M Underground News<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Largely accepted concept is that size of human brain changed 3,000 years ago.<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>It is posited that group thinking caused brain to shrink.<\/strong><\/li><li><strong>New paper refutes concept, says&nbsp;human brain remained &#8220;remarkably stable over last 300,00 years&#8221;.<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-cnvs-separator-id-1660962875585\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Refuting a common and largely accepted concept, a new paper published in&nbsp;<em>Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution<\/em>&nbsp;argues that the size of the human brain did not change 3,000 years ago&nbsp;\u2014 or ever, for that matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anthropologist Brian Villmoare from the University of Nevada and scientist Mark Grabowski of Liverpool John Moores University have responded to a paper by&nbsp;Jerome DeSilva of Dartmouth College and colleagues in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The 2021 paper suggested that in the Iron Age, the human brain lost up to 150 cubic centimetres of its volume, which is nearly the size of a lemon.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">DeSilva&#8217;s team posited that &#8220;self-domestication&#8221; and more group thinking than individual thinking caused the brain to shrink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While DeSilva&#8217;s study analysed 10 million years of evolution including apes, Villmaore said that it was useless and pointless to compare sapiens&#8217; brains to any other species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One reason was the lack of sufficient fossils of other human species. The author explained that we have been entirely different species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Villmaore told&nbsp;<em>Haaretz<\/em>&nbsp;they doubted the statistical treatment of data in DeSilva&#8217;s paper. Therefore, the no shrinkage study used the same data as they found it &#8220;the most complete&#8221;.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">However, their&nbsp;statistical methodology was different and so were their conclusions, eventually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe point was that we need to toss all this stuff about human devolution out,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is just not true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Their study concluded that the size of the human brain had remained &#8220;remarkably stable over the last 300,00 years&#8221; and that shifting to agriculture and community did not affect brain size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Responding to DeSilva comparing ants and human societies saying that collective intelligence reduced size in both the clades, the no shrinkage paper pointed out differences between the two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Villmaore said that humans were a competitive species, unlike ants who are mostly just slaves. Vertebrae, he said, make alliances, are aggressive, social and have larger brains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He said that we could compare elephants and rhinos as the former live in herds while the latter does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe elephant brain is six times bigger than that of the rhino,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He also pointed out another flaw. He said that DeSilva said that the shrinking occurred globally while tying it with the agricultural revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">However, this revolution would have taken place at different times in different parts of the planet. This does not explain all human brains shrinking in the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mishaal Arshad C.M Underground News Largely accepted concept is that size of human brain changed 3,000 years ago.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_appearance_grid":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,76,71,101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","category-important-news","category-latest-news","category-science-and-technology","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17597,"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595\/revisions\/17597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/undergroundnews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}