![]() ![]() Cooking increases the amount of energy that can be extracted from food. Which meal do you think contains more protein and calories: raw carrots and celery or a steak and baked potato?Ĭooking food may also have been important in brain size increases. Meat is rich with calories and protein, which makes it a perfect food for fueling brains. Scientists believe that meat played a major role in the evolution of our brain size. So for our ancestors to develop bigger brains, they needed more high-energy foods. ![]() How did our brains get bigger?īrain growth and upkeep is expensive, as it requires large amounts of high-energy food. Neanderthals are associated with complex stone tools, and they were excellent hunters. One late Homo species, the Neanderthal, grew brains that even exceeded modern human brain size. This also coincided with the greatest increases in brain size, and brains eventually reached the size they are in modern humans. The greatest variation in climate in all of human history occurred during this time. The trend of climatic instability continued from 800,000 to 200,000 years ago. Such tools would have made killing and butchering animals easier. Early Homo also had more complex stone tools. This may have allowed early Homo to travel and run for long distances, perhaps even running their prey to exhaustion. The bodies of early Homo were also more human-like than those of early hominins. For example, bigger brains may have allowed Homo to be a more strategic hunter or scavenger. Bigger brains allowed early Homo species to survive in variable environments. This variability in climate coincided with brain size increases in early Homo. Having a large brain allows animals to think their way through these unpredictable conditions.Ībout two million years ago, the climate began to be more variable than it had been before that. It may take more time and effort to find them. When climate is unpredictable, food and water are more difficult to find. The logic is that living in a variable climate makes life unpredictable. Scientists believe that there is a link between brain size and how variable the climate is. Blustery days and bigger brainsĪs our closest ancestors evolved, brain size began to increase substantially in members of our own genus, Homo. Despite their small brains, some of them may have used simple stone tools to butcher scavenged animals. These early hominins resembled humans only in the fact that they were bipedal. In fact, one of the early hominins, Ardipithecus ramidus, had a brain that was even smaller than a chimpanzee brain. Brain size, on the other hand, didn't change much for the first few million years of human evolution. The bodies of hominins are different from chimpanzees because hominins walked on two legs. Any species that evolved after this last common ancestor, but were more related to humans than to chimps, are known as hominins. The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived about six to eight million years ago. We learned that big brains, the ability to make stone tools, and the ability to walk on two legs each evolved separately. But when scientists found more fossils, we learned something very important about our evolution. People used to think that these features all appeared at the same time. Large brains, complex tools, and bipedalism are some of these features. Scientists look for human features in fossils to identify our ancestors. But aside from these features, not much makes human babies very different from young chimpanzees. When studying humans, the things that set us apart form other species can be very important. As we grow up, our brains get much bigger, and we learn how to talk and walk on two legs. When we are born, we have big heads and barely any body hair. ![]()
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