A history of big-headedness
How humans got their brains
“HOW the human got his brain” is probably the most important “Just So” story that Rudyard Kipling never wrote. Kipling did not ignore people in his quirky take on evolution. Two of his tales describe the invention of the alphabet and the invention of letter-writing. But he took for granted the human brains behind these inventions, which are three times the size of those of humanity’s closest living relatives, the great apes, and are thus as characteristic of people as trunks are of elephants or humps are of camels.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “The history of big-headedness”
From the June 2nd 2018 edition
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