London: 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 Daily
Mail 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
