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Scientists: Ants reveal the reason for the shrinkage of the human brain

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Scientists believe that about 6 million years ago today, the size of the human brain nearly doubled 4 times after the ancestors of humans diverged into several genera from the original archaic human.

Scientists noted that many people do not know that man, in the period following the last ice age, had his brain shrink and was subjected to shrinkage, which is what scientists noticed in the discovered and very old fossils.
According to the article published in the scientific journal “Sciencealert”, the human brain today is smaller than the first humans who lived about 100,000 years ago, but the exact time period for this occurrence and the reason for its occurrence is still a mystery.

A team of anthropologists, behavioral ecologists and evolutionary neuroscientists worked together to uncover this mysterious vulnerability and try to find out its strange causes and its intriguing truth.
The relationship of an ant to a human being is much greater and deeper than you might expect

Researchers focused on studying one of the smallest creatures on the planet, the little ant. The team focused on the evolutionary history of the ant’s brain, which is about a million times smaller than the human brain.

Despite the great difference between an ant and a human, according to scientists, “you may be surprised to learn that the similarities between them are very much,” as humans and ants have developed things that are very similar to experts and researchers.

The scientists noted that humans and ants developed a very unique social life “incredibly”, as ants developed a very complex social life somewhat similar to those of humans in terms of interdependence, relatives and work, where work is distributed to specializations and unique areas in ant societies, Some species of ants even developed their own agriculture and crops like human farmers.
Collective intelligence played a big role in brain shrinkage

When the researchers analyzed models of brain size and structure in worker ants, they found evidence that the organ (the brain) had adapted to become more efficient in collective societies.

The authors of the new study published in “frontiersin” suggested that humans also developed their brain as a result of collective or collective intelligence, resulting from living and working in societies, where it is possible to share new knowledge with the rest of society.

According to scholars, with the beginnings of human societies, humans transferred their personal knowledge and experiences abroad, as these experiences were transferred from individuals to the group and from there to society as a whole.

The period when our brain shrinks is very close

Distributing the information among several people rather than storing it all with one person or with each person has, in theory, crossed that (intellectual fat) and freed the brain to become more efficient at fewer functions.
The authors point out that as a result of collective decision-making and an exceeding of individuals’ cognitive accuracy, “the volume of the human brain may have decreased due to the provision of metabolic needs”, as well as the emergence of language among humans, which also contributed to the increased energy efficiency of the human brain.

When the researchers analyzed about a thousand fossilized human skulls, they found that the decline in human brain size began late, occurring only about 3,000 years ago.

The scientists considered that these results mean that the shrinkage of our brains occurred in a parallel period to the expansion of collective intelligence in human society, which adds weight to the new hypothesis.

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