The burst through study has claimed that human being is getting dumber day by day. The finding of a new US study suggests that human brain has been shrinking since last twenty-thousand years and the shrinkage is consequential in dumber generation of human being.
The human race is getting dumber because the brain size is getting smaller. According to an anthropologist John Hawks from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, shrinking of the brain was not a sign of turning down of human intellect, while rebutting the claims made by the study that smaller brain resulted in dumber human being.
Several paleontologists tone with Hawks conviction that smaller brains have not affected the human efficacy. Over the last twenty-thousand years, the average volume of male’s brain has reduced from fifteen hundred cubic centimeters to thirteen-hundred and fifty cubic centimeters. The volume of female brain has also shrunk by about the same proportion, explained Kathleen McAuliffe in Discover magazine.
The excessive shrinking of the brain is associated with schizophrenia. People who later develop schizophrenia suffered hastened shrinkage of the brain p to they get unwell, reported a study by team from the Edinburg University. People in the age group of sixteen to twenty-five were at higher risk of being diagnosed with the condition.
One of the hypothesize on brain shrinkage is that, the big heads were essential to subsist Upper Paleolithic life which occupied cold and outside activities. Other theory stated that the skull developed to tackle a chewy diet of reindeer, foxes, horses and rabbits. As food has become easier to eat so the heads halted growing.
According to researchers David Geary and Drew Bailey from the University of Missouri, during the evolution period the cranium size altered with the course of time from two million years to last ten thousand years. They observed that as gradually more societies appeared, the brain grew smaller as people did not have to be as smart to survive.
The brain scans could help to identify shrinkage of the brain in those who are more likely to developing schizophrenia. Moreover, scans could also help doctors in early diagnosis and treatment of the condition.