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Replica of big skull from 28,000 years ago suggests human brains have started to shrink
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 2:40 PM on 14th March 2010
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Our brains are shrinking, according to scientists who have recreated a 28,000-year-old skull from remains found in France.
The French team, which claims to have produced one of the best replicas yet of an early modern human’s cranium, says it is up to 20 per cent bigger than ours.
No one is suggesting this means our ancestors were more intelligent as studies have found there is only a minor link between brain size and IQ.

Old big head: A 3D image replica of the skull shows it was 20% larger than ours
Instead, it is believed the skull, called Cro Magnon 1 after the caves in the Dordogne where it found, suggests our brains are becoming more efficient like shrinking computers.
But the project could shed light on a human evolutionary question that has divided and bemused the specialists: if our heads have started to shrivel, why is this happening?
Cro Magnon 1 has been kept in the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris since it was discovered among five ancient skeletons in 1868.
It is thought to have been a well-built, elderly man about 6ft tall.
Already known to scientists worldwide, Cro Magnon 1 will become even more famous next week when a mold of his skull will be shown at the American National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
The endocast was made by scanning the interior of the skull at the Quinze-Vingts Hospital in Paris to obtain a picture of the impression left by the brain on the neurocranium.
Antoine Balzeau, of the French Museum of Natural History, transformed this into a 3D image that was in turn made into a mold by a specialist software prototyping firm.
‘It’s one of the most beautiful endocasts ever,’ Mr Balzeau told The Times.
He said that an initial assessment of Cro Magnon 1’s skull confirmed the belief that brains had grown ‘slightly smaller over tens of thousands of years’, reversing an earlier trend towards bigger brains.

However, he said that the cerebellum — a brain structure linked to language and concentration — appears to take up a larger proportion of the head now than in the time of Cro Magnon 1.
This suggests that some parts of the brain are more ‘compressible’ than others, he said.
Several theories have been advanced to explain the mystery of the shrinking brain. One is that big heads were necessary to survive Upper Paleolithic life, which involved cold, outdoor activities.
A second theory is that skulls developed to cope with a chewy diet of rabbits, reindeer, foxes and horses.
As our food has become easier to eat, so our heads have stopped growing, according to supporters of this theory.
Other experts say that with high infant mortality, only the toughest survived — and the toughest tended to have big heads.


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They were probley alot more intelligent than us in those days!

Scientists found out that we use only a few percent of our brain, so it can shrink a lot more before we notice.
But then again scientists are also human, also using only a few percent of their brain, so are they right?

Can you show me a peer-reviewed, legitimate scientific study supporting that?
PET and MRI scans show that while some tasks only use small portions of our brain at a time, complex tasks use much more, and that we use all portions of our brain.

That might not be entierly correct their are some real explaination's of larger mamals and fish duing the early years of man

Ya it can shrink alot more before some of us will start to notice lol

The brain is like a sports car, we're driving it at 20 % of its capacity.
Because of this 80 % of our dna was declared junk.
When you learn something like speed reading, or get rid of limiting patterns, you start thinking in a parallel way, start using your right brain.

Elements of our DNA that do not directly code for proteins still have a purpose.

So if you are suggesting that we are only using a minimum of our brain, could one then physically remove that 80% of our brains, and still function normally?

Neanderthal brains were about twice the size of modern man, though they never had any cause to use such a large brain capacity according to the standarts expected by us, they had no art or tools no civilisation that we know of and didnt farm. the general concensus is that they were nomadic huntergatherers, so why have such big brains? perhaps they had other mental abilities that rendered "civilisation" redundant, who knows perhaps we are becoming more retarded compared to our ancesters!

Who left behind all the giant ancient structures, wern't they built by humans during this period?
I don't trust mainstream science