The size of the human brain has not changed “since the origins of our species,” scientists have said.
Academics from the University of Nevada and Liverpool John Moores University have slammed previous research findings that claim the size of the human brain has shrunk over time.
According to prior studies, the human brain has reduced in size over the last 3,000 years due to big societal changes and historical events, such as the Trojan War.
However, a team of researchers have discredited this finding after re-examining datasets from thousands of years ago.
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First author Brian Villmoare said: “We were struck by the implications of a substantial reduction in modern human brain size at roughly 3,000 years ago, during an era of many important innovations and historical events – such as the appearance of Egypt’s New Kingdom, the development of Chinese script, the Trojan War, and the emergence of the Olmec civilization, among many others.
“We re-examined the dataset from DeSilva et al. and found that human brain size has not changed in 30,000 years, and probably not in 300,000 years.”
He added: “In fact, based on this dataset, we can identify no reduction in brain size in modern humans over any time-period since the origins of our species.”
They found that the data is severely limited because the majority of the skulls only represented the previous 100 years of a 9.8-million-year span of time – not giving the researchers the true evolution of the human brain size.
The full set of results can now be accessed in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
