Jump directly to main navigation Jump directly to content Jump to sub navigation

How could we evolve such a huge brain?

Specialised foraging skills could have made the essential difference

A new study investigated the foraging behaviour of children in a present-day forager society. Already from an early age, there was a gender-specific development of foraging skills. These new findings, combined with the high level of food sharing in forager societies, support the embodied capital theory, offering an explanation for the substantially larger brains in humans. Foraging skills could have provided humans with a more stable energy and nutrient supply, which may ultimately have enabled large resource investments into the brain. The research was led by the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

boy_climbing_with_gear_byJanmaat.jpg
© Karline Janmaat