"Q: “Why did anyone do this study?” And this recent study is a great example of that. The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at ape and human skulls to see if ancient human infants were as helpless as today’s human infants—all in an effort to discover when our larger brains supposedly evolved—and, well, I don’t think you’ll be shocked by the study findings!
Here’s how they describe the “need” for this study in the abstract of the paper:
"Unlike other catarrhine primates, modern humans deliver a helpless newborn who requires prolonged extensive care. Such helpless infancy is associated with fetus-like, rapid postnatal brain growth, which is essential to produce the large human brain. In the debate about its evolution, a key question has been whether it emerged in Homo erectus, whose brain sizes were approximately 20–40% smaller than Homo sapiens."
To test this, the authors examined 1,504 “cranial specimens,” including nearly 1,000 from great apes and over 500 from modern
The researchers assume that if a skull shows this deformity, it must be because the infant was helpless, like today’s infants. They then looked at cranial fossils from archaic humans, Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis (the so-called “Hobbits”), and found that two of the H. erectus specimens and one of the H. floresiensis specimens exhibited this deformational plagiocephaly. The researchers’ conclusion?
"These support a deep evolutionary origin of hominin helpless infancy, and imply both elaborate parental childcare and cooperative social behaviors that could likely have accompanied it."
In other words, humans had babies that looked and acted like human babies! What a shock!"
AIG
