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Our ancestors left Africa both with and without modern brains - Ars Technica
Apr 09, 2021 1 min, 19 secs
They have found that some earlier brain species persisted well into the history of our genus Homo, but that didn't stop those ancestors from migrating out of Africa.

How do you figure out what a brain once looked like.

More recent ancestors, like Homo erectus, had an arrangement that looked much more like what we have today.

This led to the assumption that the modern arrangement evolved at the same time as our genus Homo appeared.

These are generally classified as members of Homo erectus, but they retain enough features of earlier species that this label remains controversial.

The results are pretty clear: all five Dmanisi skulls show the earlier pattern of brain structure.

It clearly means that the present-day brain structure did not originate with the genus Homo but only evolved after we'd been around for nearly a million years.

In addition, the Dmanisi skeletons were found with a variety of stone tools, so we can infer that the modern brain structure wasn't a prerequisite for their development.

Finally, it also shows that our ancestors didn't need the present-day brain structure in order to spread far beyond their point of origin in Africa.

In fact, it suggests that the relationship between our brains and migrations is extremely complicated because previous data, when incorporated into this analysis, indicates that the modern arrangement of the brain was in place by 1.5 million years ago—and appeared almost contemporaneously from Africa to Southeast Asia.

But there's no clear correlation between what was going on with the face and jaw and what was happening with the brain structure.

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