researchers from the United States showed that the reduction of the human brain occurred in parallel with the development of the collective mind. The article of scientists is published in the Frontiers magazine in Ecology and Evolution.
In the Pleistocene, the size of the human brain slightly decreased. However, when exactly and why it happened, it is still unknown. Researchers from the University of Boston and Dartmouth College decided to analyze the patterns of the evolution of the human brain and compare them with those in ants. To begin with, with the help of the analysis of points, the change was analyzed by 985 fossil and modern human skulls. It turned out that the decrease in our brain occurred about three thousand years ago – which is less than previous estimates.
“According to our hypothesis, for ants, you can create various models that will allow you to explain the increase or decrease in the volume of the brain depending on social life,” explains one of the authors of the work, Professor of the University of Boston James Traniello. In ants, as in humans, such features of social life are developed as group decision-making, labor separation and food production. Researchers analyzed computer models that describe the brain of brain workers of ants of several treasures – in particular, black garden ants, Muravyev-leafores and ants-tailors.
It turned out that the group’s knowledge and division of labor affect the change in the brain sizes. In social groups with common knowledge and specialization of labor, the brains of their participants are adapted to maximize efficiency – including by reducing in volume. “We assume that this reduction was associated with an increase in dependence on the collective mind,” says Traniello. Exchange knowledge required less energy to store information by each individual person, which contributed to the decrease in brain volumes.