Tech News: People From Northern Parts Of The World Have Bigger Brains

Brains

LONDON - PEOPLE from northern parts of the world have evolved bigger brains and larger eyes to help them to cope with long, dark winters and dim skies, scientists said on Wednesday.

Researchers from Oxford University studied the eye sockets and brain capacity of 55 human skulls from 12 different populations across the world and found that the further human populations live from the equator, the bigger their brains.

It's not because they are smarter, however, but because they need bigger vision areas in the brain to cope with the low light levels at high latitudes, the scientists said in a report of their findings in the journal Biology Letters.

'As you move away from the equator, there's less and less light available, so humans have had to evolve bigger and bigger eyes,' said Eiluned Pearce from Oxford's School of Anthropology, who led the study. 'Their brains also need to be bigger to deal with the extra visual input.

'Having bigger brains doesn't mean that higher latitude humans are smarter, it just means they need bigger brains to be able to see well where they live.'

The skulls used in the study dated back to the 1800s and included samples from indigenous populations of England, Australia, Canary Islands, China, France, India, Kenya, Micronesia, Scandinavia, Somalia, Uganda and the United States. -- REUTERS