London, March 16: Human brains are shrinking, suggests a team of French scientists, who claim to have produced one of the best replicas yet of a 28,000-year-old human cranium.
According to the scientists, the replica of the skull created from the remains found in France is 20 per cent bigger than that of the present human.
The skull, named Cro Magnon 1 after the caves in the Dordogne where it was found, has been kept in the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris since it was discovered among five ancient skeletons in 1868, the reported.
It is thought to have been of a well-built, elderly man about 6ft tall. Its end cast was made by scanning its interior at the Quinze-Vingts Hospital in Paris to obtain a picture of the impression left by the brain on the neurocranium.
Antoine Balzeau, of the French Museum of Natural History, transformed this into a 3D image that was in turn made into a mold by a specialist software prototyping firm.
“It’s one of the most beautiful endocasts ever,” Balzeau told The Times.
An initial assessment of Cro Magnon 1’s skull confirmed the belief that brains had grown ‘slightly smaller over tens of thousands of years’, reversing an earlier trend towards bigger brains, he said.
However, the cerebellum a brain structure linked to language and concentration appears to take up a larger proportion of the head now, suggesting that some parts of the brain are more ‘compressible’ than others, he said.
—-PTI