I just heard about a skull found in Georgia which suggests that the humans that left Africa to go North had much smaller brains than has previously been thought (and were much more apelike). The suggestion has been made by some anthropologicts that intellect is not directly correlated to brain size but rather to the relationship between brain and body size. Anybody know anything about this?
Well, Asians tend to have smaller body frames, yet they tend to be more intelligent than the average. Take Georgia Tech in the US for example... That is place where whites are a minority to Asians Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! James Sibley
Little green men tends to be smaller aswell. And they must be smarter if they are visiting earth! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I read this somewhere actually. An elephants brain is quite bigger than a human's yet humans are far more intelligent. I think body-brain ratio-wise; humans have the biggest advantage.
I'd like to see some solid statistical evidence about the supposed superiority of the Asian intellect. Post links please
Hold on folks. I didn't mean to start some interracial competition. The question was about the relationship between brain size and intelligence in species in general principle, not whether smaller people are more intelligent than big ones. That would lead to trouble! The point was that the human beings who first migrated out of Africa have always been assumed to be more advanced (tool use, brain size, posture etc) than the recent finds suggests they were. This seems to be leading to a re-evaluation of the intelligence of our earlier ancestors and the idea that 'intelligence' may be a function of the relationship between brain size to body size, and not simply some objective measure of brain size. BTW Is there any measure of intelligence that is not completely anthropocentric?
The highest brain-size to body-mass ratio in the world goes to the african elephant nose fish. Sparrows beat humans, obviously that isn't the best indicator. I wouldn't be so sure people are that much smarter than elephants. I think raw size of brain is a better indicator than body/brain ratio but it is still very flawed. Many factors like folds and number of neurons etc etc etc come into play and there is still no definitive answer as to which species has the most powerful brain. I'm interested in this skull found in georgia:bugeye: Which georgia? You don't mean the us georgia right? Anyway, one skull does not a case make. I'm pretty sure homo-sapiens didn't leave africa until they were homo-sapiens and(obviously) once they were homo-sapiens their brains were as big as ours.
Canute it would seem that to gain a clear comparisson you would have to form a collective norm of an even bias intellectual competence test which is yet to be designed from what ive heard and or read about the differing ability in similar brain size seems to be soo exagerated in humans that we cant use humans as a group to evaluate the bias of the testers is accumulative to nurture and nature so until some face some rather personal concepts of self evaluation in relation to perception it seems we are ill equiped to self evaluate however if you then move to a concept of non domesticated animals im not sure you could maintain experimental sterillity for data collection e.g anthropromorphic perception of the self awarenes and related collective self aware reality as an interactive conseusness. just a thought groove on all Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It was Georgia USSR last year. I believe that the idea that it was homo-sapiens that left Africa is what the find calls into question.
Yeah, the “out-of-Africa-Theory” (just read an article about “Toumai”, found in now Chad). Now some scientist are checking whether it was possible that humanoids were actually already walking upright, BEFORE they moved to the savannas, this having implications on the theory that brain development was connected to upright walking. Back to your question: When I was at school we were taught that it is not the brain size that counts (and neither the relative size/mass), but the degree of “furrows”. I just read a book about thinking where they say that 98.5% of our genes are identical to today’s Chimps, including the brain. However, the main difference for the “upper sector” lies in the development of the neocortex. Here, you have a big increase from cavemen neocortex-size (Australopithecus: 300 ccm) to homo sapiens sapiens (1200-1300 ccm). Therefore you would have to inquire whether the neocortex (not the whole brain) of the newly-found skull had any signs of being significantly bigger than that of apes (or of being at least to the same degree developed as that of other humanoids). Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
if you went back 1 million years could you teach a seal or dog to balance a ball on its nose? where would be the relevent mesure you cant create a control group so the very notion of modernday scientific fact could not be considered anything greater than the current scientific facts surrounding little/big green/blue/red men/women Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! aye!
Sparkle - Yeah, I've heard the neo-cortex likened to a cancerous growth. This makes some sense, and would explain its astonishingly fast evolution.
Dr Lou Natic is there preserved complete brains from the era that people are considering to be the development/comparison stage? where is the example? maybe there are frozen bodys that date back millions of years that can validate this? has it been documented to prove the theory? groove on Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
There is an advantage to having larger brains, you have more neurons to use. However, it's mostly not how big your brain is, but how you use what you got. Elephants may have larger brains but they don't have the same brain organizations as humans. i.e. They don't have frontal lobe organizations that are needed for complex planning. Also there is something to say about the number of connections between neurons. Two brains could be the same size but if one has 10 times as many connections between it's neurons then that brain is most likely to be more intelligent.
