Sentences with phrase «increase in brain size»

«The reason we have more neurons than any other animal alive is that cooking allowed this qualitative change — this step increase in brain size,» she says.

He showed that after the slow and gradual increases in brain size in the previous hominid groups over the previous three million years, there was a very sudden increase at the dawn of Homo Sapiens, by a factor of two relative to body weight.

Aiello and Wheeler noted that this dramatic increase in brain size would seem to have required a dramatic increase in metabolism — the same way that adding an air - conditioning system to a house would increase the electricity bill.

William H. Calvin's marvelous A Brain for All Seasons argues that such cycles of cool, crash, and burn powered the pump for the enormous increase in brain size and complexity in human beings.

«This new timeline has significant implications in helping us to understand this period of human evolution — cooked food provides greater energy, and cooking may be linked to the rapid increases in brain size that occurred from 800,000 years ago onwards.

«The unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body,» Jerry Adler of Smithsonian magazine wrote last year.

He hinted that gestural theory could clear up another mystery about this period as well: why the stone tools of these early hominids show little evolution for almost two million years, despite increases in brain size.

Subsequent incremental increases in brain size are associated with dry periods with few if any lakes.

Not only was there a dramatic increase in brain size, but also in life history (shortened inter-birth intervals, delayed development), body size, shoulder morphology allowing throwing of projectiles [45], ecological flexibility [46] and social behaviour [47].

William H. Calvin's marvelous A Brain for All Seasons argues that such cycles of cool, crash, and burn powered the pump for the enormous increase in brain size and complexity in human beings.

Only an increase in brain size could make throwing — especially over long distances — accurate, he says.

Wcislo and his colleagues conclude that the pressures of a social life, and particularly of having to maintain dominance over a subordinate, is what is driving the increase in brain size in these insects.

This suggested that the gut - shrinking phenomenon within the primate groups was probably too subtle to explain our increase in brain size completely.