ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Hominin brain size increase has emerged from within-species encephalization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Bipedalism and brain expansion explain human handedness.PLoS biology · 2026Pooled it
- Proportional limb strengths signal an adaptive shift in arboreality in early human evolution.Science advances · 2026Article
- Human cerebral arterial morphogenesis explored by 3D microscopic imaging of cleared embryos: Bridging the gap between embryonic and adult anatomy.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Competing models of hominin body size evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Macroevolutionary brain scaling is a microevolutionary metaphenomenon.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Human dexterity and brains evolved hand in hand.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Phylogenetically informed predictions outperform predictive equations in real and simulated data.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Why did the human brain size evolve? A way forward.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Proximate mechanisms underlying the coevolution of diet quality and relative brain size in primates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Evolution of cellular architecture and function of the hippocampus: insights from the artificial selection experiment.Biology letters · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The fact that rapid brain size increase was clearly a key aspect of human evolution has prompted many studies focusing on this phenomenon, and many suggestions as to the underlying evolutionary patterns and processes. No study to date has however separated out the contributions of change through time within vs. between hominin species while simultaneously incorporating effects of body size. Using a phylogenetic approach never applied before to paleoanthropological data, we show that relative brain size increase across ~7 My of hominin evolution arose from increases within individual species which account for an observed overall increase in relative brain size. Variation among species in brain size after accounting for this effect is associated with body mass differences but not time. In addition, our analysis also reveals that the within-species trend escalated in more recent lineages, implying an overall pattern of accelerating relative brain size increase through time.
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