Editor, CNBC Indonesia
Tech
Monday, 03/07/2023 20:10 WIB
Photo: Illustration (Photo by David Garrison from Pexel)
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – A study shows a link between past climate change and a shrunken human brain. According to researchers, the human brain is getting smaller to adapt to the “apocalypse” of climate change.
Research by Jeff Morgan Stibel, a cognitive scientist from the Natural History Museum, aims to understand how humans develop and adapt amid the pressures of environmental change. He analyzed the history of climate and human fossils in the last 50,000 years.
“Global warming trends make it very important to understand the impact of climate change, on brain size and human behavior,” said Stibel in his research report, quoted from Science Alert on Monday (3/7/2023).
Stibel examined the brain sizes of 298 samples from the genus Homo, which have changed in the last 50,000 years. Then, he compared the brain size to global temperature, humidity and precipitation.
As a result, the human brain gets smaller when the Earth’s climate gets warmer.
“We know that brains in all species have gotten bigger in the last million years, but we know very little about evolutionary trends at the macro level,” said Stibel.
He took skull size data from several sources, which in total consisted of 373 measurements of 298 human bones spread over 50,000 years of age. In his research, he also considered body size adjusted for geographic region and gender to estimate brain size.
The brain size data were then compared with four climate histories including temperature data from the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) Dome C, which stores surface temperature data up to 800,000 years ago.
In the last 50,000 years, there have been several important events, such as the Last Glacial Maximum, which caused the Earth’s average temperature to drop sharply until the end of the Pleistocene. When Earth entered the Holocene era, temperatures continued to rise steadily to this day.
The data shows that the human brain is larger when Earth’s temperature is colder than when it is warmer in the every 100 year and every 10,000 year period groupings.
Stibel’s analysis describes the pattern of changes in brain size in creatures within the genus Homo and its correlation with changes in temperature. The human brain has shrunk in size so that it is only about 10.7 percent of the brain it was at the start of the Holecene era.
“Changes in brain size continued for thousands of years after climate change and were most pronounced after the late glacial maximum, roughly 17,000 years,” said Stibel.
The pattern of evolution in the human brain occurred in a relatively short time, namely 5,000 to 17,000 years. These findings indicate that global warming which is currently occurring can have a negative impact on human ability to think (cognition).
“Just the slightest bit the human brain shrinks, the impact on human psychology can be significant in ways that have never been understood before,” said Stibel.
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2023-07-03 13:10:00
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