We once thought our brains were pretty telling , able to use more resources than other animals . Not any more , according to new inquiry .
Published in theJournal of Human Evolution , Doug Boyer and Arianna Harrington from Duke University in North Carolina found that proportional to 22 other specie , we ’re actually pretty normal .
It had been conceive our body devote a larger parcel of our daily calorie intake to our brains than other creature . Our brains make up just 2 percent of our soundbox weight , but they can consume more than 25 percent of our body ’s zip budget .
And that proves to be the case for some animals too . While our brain were found to use doubly as many calories as chimp , and three to five time more than squirrel , mouse , and lapin , we were n’t the only single with olympian nous . The researcher find that a penitentiary - tag treeshrew had a similar brain cost in terminal figure of calorie uptake to us . The ring - tailed lemur and even the Pigmy marmoset also devoted the same proportion of their body energy to their brains as we do .
" We do n’t have a uniquely expensive brain , " said Boyer , assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University , in astatement . " This challenges a major dogma in human evolution studies . "
To make their finding , the team looked at publish estimates of learning ability glucose intake and internal skull volume , an indicator of genius sizing , in seven species . They then used that data to prefigure the brain energy expenditure in another 15 species .
Energy jaunt to the brain via blood vessels , deliver lolly shout out glucose , so using this method acting allow them to see how athirst the animals ' wit were .
The big entailment here is that humanity were not responsible for the evolution of hungry brains . Instead , this appears to have occurred millions of old age before , when our primate branch of the mammal tree diagram burst from rodents and rabbits .
Boyer mark that this is n’t too surprising , because some animate being have bigger brain - to - eubstance mass ratio than world . But it does suggest that our learning ability may not be the energy powerhouses we retrieve – and even the world ’s smallest monkey , the pygmy marmoset , can give us a tally for our money .
