Why did language evolve?
Language is important to us modern humans so asking why it evolved seems like a silly question. After all, surely we can think of numerous benefits of language that drove […]
Category Archives: Evolution of the brain
Monkeys and mirrors: are monkeys self-aware?
Being able to recognise yourself in the mirror is a sign you’re self-aware, which is a key step on the road towards theory of mind and other complex thought processes. It has long been thought that monkeys cannot recognise themselves in the mirror, or can they?
How smart were our fire-taming ancestors?
The discovery of fire was a key moment in the human prehistory. With fire our ancestors would’ve been able to cook food, making digestion more efficient. The benefits of this […]
Why Our Brains Are Big
This post first appeared at The Advance Apes on 1/31/13 One of the most important traits we’ve developed over the course of human evolution is our exceptionally large brains. Brain […]
Competition makes apes take greater risks
A “farmer curve” is a graph which charts the chance of an event occurring against how bad that event will be, in effect calculating how risky a particular situation is. […]
Neanderthal technology and intelligence
For many years people have been attempting to identify differences between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis in an effort to understand why one species survived yet the other did not. […]
Earth’s orbit and human evolution
A while ago I wrote “the children of climate change,” a post discussing research about how climate variability may have caused the evolution of Homo sapiens’ large brain. The crux […]
Wernicke’s and Broca’s area in chimps – Supplementary Sunday
This weeks top rated post is “humans have giant chimp brains” with a grand total of 3 up-votes, making it the 3rd most popular post of all time. As such […]
Humans have giant chimp brains
Humans specialise in being smart. It wasn’t our sharp teeth that allowed us to rise to dominance chain but our brains. It provides us with the intelligence needed to build […]
We know nothing about the evolution of handedness
Jim Thomeson – who gets a brofist for being one of the most frequent commenter here – asks I wonder about handedness. i am right handed, and my right hand […]
