SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Nut-Size Ancient Skull Explains Our Brains' Bigness?

from National Geographic News

By scanning a 54-million-year-old skull roughly the size of a walnut, scientists have created the first virtual 3-D model of an early primate brain, a new study says.

Surprisingly, the model suggests that primates (such as lemurs, monkeys, apes, and humans, among others) might have evolved larger brains as a result of the need to move quickly from tree to tree—not, as commonly assumed, to hunt for fruit or navigate within a single tree.

The 1.5-inch-long skull belongs to the long-gone Ignacius graybullianus—described as a cousin of our earliest ancestors—which arose less than ten million years after the dinosaurs vanished.