Dr. James Traniello, in collaboration with anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva, recently published their article, “When and why did human brains decrease in size? A new change-point analysis and insights from brain evolution in ants” in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. This article has been recognized by over 50 media platforms including BBC, MSN, Newsweek, and AAAS EurekAlert. Topping over 33,000 views and 2,477 tweets, this paper is one of the highest-scoring outputs from Altmetric which ranks the article in the 99th percentile.
Dr. Traniello summarized the paper with the following: “We found that human brains decreased in size 3000 years ago, which is surprisingly recent. Brain size reduction did not result simply from a decrease in body size, dietary shift following the origin of agriculture, or self-domestication. Our analysis suggests the recent decrease in brain size may have resulted from the benefits of a culture of information-sharing and the advantages of group-level decision-making. We hypothesize the decrease in human brain size was due to increased reliance on collective intelligence.”
Congratulations to Dr. Traniello, Dr. DeSilva and their collaborators on this achievement. You can read the article here.