Las Vegas City Wire

Scientists with University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) have set out to disprove the widely believed myth that decreased brain size ushered in the modern world.

According to a news release provided by UNLV, as human beings were establishing the written word they were doing so with a brain that is equivalent to the size we have today.

“We were struck by the implications of a substantial reduction in modern human brain size at roughly 3,000 years ago, during an era of many important innovations and historical events — the appearance of Egypt's New Kingdom, the development of Chinese script, the Trojan War and the emergence of the Olmec civilization, among many others,” UNLV anthropologist Brian Villmoare said in the release. 

Last year, the scientists hit the news cycle when they said that the human brain actually decreased approximately 3,000 years ago when urban societies started being established that necessitated humans “to store information externally in social groups" and this "reduced our need to maintain large brains.”

The assumption was founded in a comparison to the evolutionary patterns of human fossils and ant colonies, according to the release. The research necessitated a deep dive into the common belief of current human brain size regarding evolutionary reduction.

“We re-examined the dataset from DeSilva et al. and found that human brain size has not changed in 30,000 years, and probably not in 300,000 years," Villmoare said. "In fact, based on this dataset, we can identify no reduction in brain size in modern humans over any time-period since the origins of our species.”