Today I Learned (TIL)

9170 readers

1 users here now

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?

/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.

Share your knowledge and experience!

Rules

Information must be true
Follow site rules
No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
Posts must be about something you learned

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

Kokomheart@lemmy.ca

JCSpark@lemmy.ca

TIL The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago (piefed.social)

submitted 1 week ago by solo@piefed.social to c/til@lemmy.ca

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

More on this, here:

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Allow me to read the article for you:

As smaller and better organised brains were able to perform more complex computations, metabolically expensive larger brains simply became unnecessary

Tattersall believes that the catalyst that caused this change in thinking style was the spontaneous invention of language. This led to the neural pathways of the brain being reorganised in a more metabolically efficient way, allowing humans to get more "bang for their buck".

In other words, as smaller and better organised brains were able to perform more complex computations, metabolically expensive larger brains simply became unnecessary.

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tattersall believes

This is just an educated guess. No one really knows why it happened. All we have is a handful of fossilized skulls to base this on.

While I'll take their educated guess over my own musings, that doesn't mean they're absolutely correct. No one knows for certain.

[–] Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 days ago

Oh, so you've heard of this thing called "science" before?

We can get some idea of what their brains looked like based upon imprints left on the inside of the skull. We can get an idea of relative intelligence based on artifacts, like tools and art. If you know that cranial volume dropped, but you can see imprints indicating more folds, and you can see cave art indicating more sophisticated culture, and more advanced tools, then you know with reasonable certainly that you're looking at a more intelligent creature despite the smaller brain.