ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Metabolic constraint imposes tradeoff between body size and number of brain neurons in human evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 64 papers.
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Who cites it
64 citing papers in PubMed, 198 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Review
- Burn Selection: How Fire Injury Shaped Human Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Adaptations of the axon initial segment in fast-spiking interneurons of the human neocortex support low action potential thresholds.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Electromechanically induced membrane restructuring enables learning and memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Elucidating reaction dynamics in a model of human brain energy metabolism.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Food as Medicine: Curbing Type-2 Diabetes Prevalence Through Consumption of High Amylose Starchy Foods in Sub-Saharan Africa.Advanced pharmaceutical bulletin · 2025Review
- Cleaner wrasse failed in early testing stages of both visual and spatial working memory paradigms.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Lactate-induced metabolic signaling is the potential mechanism for reshaping the brain function - role of physical exercise.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2025Review
- Oxygen and the Spark of Human Brain Evolution: Complex Interactions of Metabolism and Cortical Expansion across Development and Evolution.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2024Article
- Econeurobiology and brain development in children: key factors affecting development, behavioral outcomes, and school interventions.Frontiers in public health · 2024Review
- Is obesity the next step in evolution through brain changes?Neuroscience applied · 2024Article
- Both Diet and Sociality Affect Primate Brain-Size Evolution.Systematic biology · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The Placental Function Beyond Pregnancy: Insights from Latin America.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2023Review
- The Burden of Carbohydrates in Health and Disease.Nutrients · 2022Review
- A Complex Systems Perspective on Neuroimaging Studies of Behavior and Its Disorders.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2022Review
- Brain power.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Early Pleistocene faunivorous hominins were not kleptoparasitic, and this impacted the evolution of human anatomy and socio-ecology.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Energy constraints on brain network formation.Scientific reports · 2021Article
4 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite a general trend for larger mammals to have larger brains, humans are the primates with the largest brain and number of neurons, but not the largest body mass. Why are great apes, the largest primates, not also those endowed with the largest brains? Recently, we showed that the energetic cost of the brain is a linear function of its numbers of neurons. Here we show that metabolic limitations that result from the number of hours available for feeding and the low caloric yield of raw foods impose a tradeoff between body size and number of brain neurons, which explains the small brain size of great apes compared with their large body size. This limitation was probably overcome in Homo erectus with the shift to a cooked diet. Absent the requirement to spend most available hours of the day feeding, the combination of newly freed time and a large number of brain neurons affordable on a cooked diet may thus have been a major positive driving force to the rapid increased in brain size in human evolution.
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