According to this study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the human brain was larger three thousand years ago and was the fault of the expansion of collective intelligence in human societies.
To know why the size of our brain decreased in the Pleistocene, Two scientists, a behavioral ecologist and an evolutionary neurobiologist, compared societies: human and ants. They looked for historical patterns in the evolution of the human brain, comparing their findings with ant societies.
Ants and humans, alike
Research showed that group-level cognition and division of labor can select for adaptive variation in brain size. Brains adapt to be more efficient by decreasing their size. If we are going to have to know everything, why do you want so much information.
According to him Dr. James Traniello, ants share with humans many factors of social life, such as group decision-making, the division of labor and the production of their own food, such as agriculture.
Collective intelligence
The team of researchers has proposed as a great conclusion that the decline in the human brain was due to increased confidence in collective intelligence, that is, the idea that a group of people is smarter than the smartest person in the group, the so-called “wisdom of the crowds,” added Traniello.
And it is that a sociability drives the size and structure of the brain. Throughout the evolution of hominids, encephalization has been dynamic. Although an almost fourfold increase in brain volume over the past 2 million years is a hallmark of human evolution, it remains largely unappreciated, but well documented, that both the absolute and relative size of the brain have decreased since the end of the Pleistocene.
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