Sizing up human brain evolution

McElreath, Richard

doi:10.1038/d41586-018-05197-8

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23 May 2018

Sizing up human brain evolution

An innovative computational analysis of factors that might have influenced human brain evolution suggests that ecological, rather than social, factors had a key role in the evolution of large, rapidly developing brains.

Richard McElreath⁰

Richard McElreath
1. Richard McElreath is in the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
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Most organisms are brainless but thriving. Brains are expensive to produce and maintain, and in the human lineage they have grown so large as to incur a substantial metabolic burden as the brain develops¹. A human brain stops growing by the age of ten, long before the body reaches physical maturity, and this costly and fast process of brain growth has been proposed to cause a delay in body growth¹. Brain growth is not given priority in this way in other apes, and the human pattern is puzzling because it keeps our bodies smaller, more vulnerable and less productive for longer. The answer to this riddle must lie in how the human brain helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce. In a paper in Nature, González-Forero and Gardner² investigate the role of different factors as possible drivers of our unusually large brains, and determine how well these factors might account for the pattern of changes in brain and body size that occur as humans develop.

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Nature 557, 496-497 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05197-8

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