Why Our Brains are Smaller Now

Archeologists have found evidence from 20,000 to 30,000-year-old human skulls that both human height and brain size are shrinking. The cause of this? Farming. This shrinkage started about 10,000 years ago, when humans moved from the hunter-gatherer life to agriculture.

In PhysOrg.com, Deborah Braconnier writes, "While the change to agriculture would have provided a plentiful crop of food, the limiting factor of farming may have created vitamin and mineral deficiencies and resulted in a stunted growth. Early Chinese farmers ate cereals such as rice which lacks the B vitamin niacin which is essential for growth."

But while agriculture may account for our smaller body size, it doesn’t explain our smaller brain size. Researcher Marta Lahr Lahr thinks this may be a result of the energy required to maintain a larger brain, since the human brain uses one fourth of the body’s energy. But a smaller brain doesn’t mean that modern humans are less intelligent than we were in the past, because our brains have evolved to work more efficiently on less energy.

Climate change means we’re going to have to find new places to farm in the future. The southeastern US might be uniquely equipped with the right combination of natural resources to meet the nation’s growing demand for farm products. Researcher Richard McNider says, "The Southeast may be in a sweet spot. We are one of the few places in the country with both the water and the land that will be needed to substantially increase farm production. That could become very important in the near future, as California and other western states continue to struggle with escalating water shortages. Southern New Mexico, for instance, recently set an all-time record for consecutive days without rain."

New growing regions include Alabama, Mississippi, North Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. McNider says, "If the forecasts for climate change are accurate, the dry western states will get drier and the wet states will get wetter. Whether we have climate change or not, the western region is very likely to return to the ‘normal’ climate of the previous 500 years, which is much drier than the climate of the past 100 years. Now is the time to start thinking about how we deal with these issues, instead of waiting for the crisis that we can see coming at us."

When Whitley Strieber met the Master of the Key in 1998, MOTKE warned him about the big changes in the climate that were to come (and are here now). These changes include either drought or floods (or BOTH), and these will make it harder to grow food. Find out WHAT ELSE the Master had to say: "The Key" is in bookstores NOW!