Humans have more time so have sharper skills

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

Longer childhoods and larger brains help finetune things.

Humans learn life skills after a cumulative sequence of steps in just the same way as other primates, according to a new study.

However, as we take longer to progress from child to adult, we develop a larger brain and have the time to learn and develop finer manual skills.

This finding, published in the journal Science Advances, challenges current notions of evolution, according to senior author Carel van Schaik from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and gives weight to a previous theory.

“There used to be this idea – linked to Ernst Haeckel – that most evolutionary change, say when a new species evolves, is produced by adding new steps at the end of a sequence of steps,” she says.

“[N]ow most people argue that evolution can often insert steps [or] features pretty much anywhere – the modularity principle – so you would see a mosaic pattern rather than a series of rigid sequences.

“It looks therefore like we here hit on a strong example of the old Haeckel principle, which tells us a lot about brain development.”

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