The Shocking Decline in Human Cranial Capacity over the past 12,000 years of the descending Yuga Cycle

 

Note: This article is extracted from my book, "Yuga Shift" and was first published on MU (https://mysteriousuniverse.org)

One of the stories that most of us have grown up hearing is that the human species is continuously evolving to higher levels of intellect, by a gradual process of evolution by natural selection. It has been literally drilled into us that the modern human species i.e. Homo sapiens, has evolved over millions of years from ape-like ancestors. 

The fundamental physical factor that drove the process of evolution was the increase in brain volume or cranial capacity, which, over time, led to a slew of innovations such as fire, tools, weapons, clothes, boats, shelter, burials, rock art, music, language etc. The cranial capacity is regarded as the most important indicator of IQ, since many studies using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the brain in individuals who were tested for IQ, found significant correlations between the size of cerebral structures and measures of intelligence. 

Now, if this story were true, then even in the modern day we should have found that our cranial capacities are gradually increasing over time. Instead, a number of studies have revealed the exact opposite! The human brain has been consistently shrinking in volume over the past 12,000-odd years, since the end of the last Ice Age. We are dumber today than any time before in the Holocene era!

In one of the early studies titled, “Decrease of Human Skull Size in the Holocene”, published in the Human Biology journal in 1988, scientists computed cranial capacity (CC) for nearly 9500 male crania and 3300 female crania, originating from Europe and North Africa. The study found,

“Among male samples the peak CC (cranial capacity) occurred in the Mesolithic (1593 cc), the lowest value falls in modern times (1436 cc); in females sample timing is the same: Mesolithic maximum of 1502 cc and modern minimum of 1241 cc. For both males and females the decrease through time is smooth, statistically significant and inversely exponential. A decrease of 157 cc (9.9 % of the larger value) in males and of 261 cc (17.4 %) in females is a considerable one, of the order of magnitude comparable to the difference between averages for H. Erectus and H. Sapiens.”[1]

Separate studies conducted on large samples from Europe, the Near East, Africa, Japan and Australia have confirmed this general trend. Human cranial capacity has decreased by approx. 10% of its average value (i.e. 100-150 cc) since the Late Pleistocene until the early 20th century.[2]

If evolution by natural selection is consistently making us smarter then why did we lose such a large chunk of brain volume at a time when, supposedly, for the first time, humans transitioned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled, agricultural communities that allowed the first great civilizations of the world to flourish?

One of the first recognizable members of the genus Homo is called Homo erectus (meaning “upright man”), whose earliest appearance in the fossil records occurred around 2 million years ago. Homo erectus are thought to have been the earliest human ancestors capable of using fires, hunting and gathering in coordinated groups, caring for injured or sick group members, seafaring, and possibly art-making. The difference between the average cranial volume of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens is roughly the same as the amount of cranial volume that has been lost in the past 12,000 years in the Holocene period. 

Allow that to sink in. In just 12,000 years, we have lost the same amount of intelligence that, purportedly, took nearly 2 million years to develop! How does that happen? And why has the cranial volume been declining at a time when the most significant advancements in human civilization supposedly took place?

Clearly, something is amiss here. The data does not lie. Certain unfounded assumptions appears to have been made about human evolution and the origins of civilization that does not accord with the precipitous decline in human cranial capacity during the Holocene period. One of the thoughts that struck my mind when I came across this stunning data is, how do evolutionists and anthropologists explain it? 

I had a hard time finding a well-written paper or article on this topic, until I came across this piece in the Discover Magazine titled, “If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?”[3], in which, science writer Kathleen McAuliffe, tell us that she was utterly dismayed when anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin told her that, over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cc to 1350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. “This happened in China, Europe, Africa - everywhere we look,” Hawks informed her.

When Kathleen contacted other experts to find out if they knew about the shrinking human brain, she came to a startling realization. It was a closely guarded secret. “Only a tight-knit circle of paleontologists seem to be in on the secret, and even they seem a bit muddled about the matter,” she wrote to her utter surprise. 

One of the experts she consulted was Christopher Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Stringer told her something quite stunning: “Scientists haven’t given the matter the attention it deserves. Many ignore it or consider it an insignificant detail”. I could hardly believe this. This absolutely jaw-dropping piece of scientific data, which turns the Darwinian theory of gradual evolution by natural selection on its head, is treated by some scientists as an “insignificant detail”. What really is significant then? How the Homo erectus learnt to pick his nose?

Besides, why is there so much secrecy around this information? Why is it that only a “tight-knit circle of paleontologists” know about this, and everyone else seems to be in the dark? Isn’t it the duty of scientists, academia and the media to widely disseminate this kind of shocking information and invite debates and discussions over it? 

The truth is that, and many have written about it, scientists and academics do not earn any brownie points by ruffling the calm surface of “Lake Consensus”, as John Anthony West put it. There is a strong tendency to adhere to the status quo, and very often, errant academics who do not toe the official line, are put in their place by being denied grants, positions and other academic privileges. As a result, even if grave anomalies are observed in a theory that has achieved consensus, they are ignored or quietly filed away from the public eye. This kind of knowledge filtering goes on continuously, and what we know as the truth is simply a “consensus”, and nothing more.

Kathleen went on to write that, some scientists have tried to explain why our brains are shrinking, but their explanations are vague, muddled and inconsistent. According to Christopher Stringer, the reduction in cranial volume may be due to the decline in human stature since the Holocene period, since a larger brain is required to control a bigger body mass. However, John Hawks has contested this, claiming that the brain has shrunk much faster than the body. “For a brain as small as that found in the average European male today, the body would have to shrink to the size of a pygmy”, Hawks said. 

Besides, the scientific data indicates that human height declined till the end of the Bronze Age, after which it has been steadily increasing. But, brain volume has continued to decline till the modern period. This means there cannot be any cause-effect relationship between body size and brain size. 

Cognitive scientist David Geary of the University of Missouri believes that people actually became dumber in the Holocene period. According to him, as population density increased and complex societies emerged, people did not have to be as smart to survive; they could get by with the help of others. This created the selection pressure for the brain to become smaller. 

However, historical facts do not support his contention. It is only around c. 5000 BCE in the Eastern Mediterranean that we see a jump in population densities, followed by the emergence of complex Bronze Age societies. In many other parts of the world, complex societies arose even later than that. By that time, there had already been a substantial reduction in cranial volume. What this implies is that, only after humans became substantially stupid they began to form large, complex societies, and, as a result, some people were able to get by without possessing any specific skill or sufficient gray matter.

John Hawks put a different twist to the situation. He believes that humans may be getting smarter due to a re-wiring of the brain. The brain is an energy guzzler; it consumes nearly 20 percent of our calorie intake. A bigger brain uses up more energy. So, optimally, we need a brain that packs the most intelligence for the least energy. Hawks believes that, over the past 10,000 years, due to a series of advantageous brain-related mutations, the neural connections of the brain may have become streamlined and the molecular activity at the synapses improved, thereby making us more intelligent than our Paleolithic ancestors, even though we have smaller brains.

So, what Hawks is essentially saying is that, after moving in the wrong direction for nearly 2 million years, turning itself into an energy-guzzling SUV, the brain went through a sudden awakening at the end of the last Ice Age and decided to change course and transform itself into a Tesla. Hawks himself admits that such a course correction would require a large number of very rare, beneficial mutations, the chances of which are extremely slim. 

The fact is that, random new mutations are more likely to reduce than to raise intelligence. A course correction for the human brain after 2 million years of evolution in the wrong direction, due to the sudden appearance of extremely rare beneficial mutations, is wishful thinking at best. 

Besides, there is no tangible evidence that the neural connections in the brain suddenly became more efficient after the onset of the Holocene Period. Nor is it likely that any such evidence will ever be found, since brain tissue is not preserved for such long periods of time. If they were, we might have found that even the neural connections have degraded!

The truth is very simple. Our declining cranial capacity indicates that we have been getting dumber over the course of the past 12,000 years. Our memories have declined substantially compared to our ancestors who could remember massive volumes of data, and transmit them orally to the next generation. Our powers of judgment and discrimination have declined because of which we cannot distinguish between the truth and lies, or discern what truly serves our welfare as opposed to what takes us down the path of misery. Our ethics and morality have nosedived, along with all the subtle abilities of the brain that we possessed in the bygone ages such as intuition, telepathy, clairvoyance etc. 

Unfortunately, most people have been brought up to believe otherwise. They think that we are the smartest generation of people that ever lived, since that is the idea that is pushed down their throat from an early age. The problem is, once people have been indoctrinated with a specific belief or ideology, no amount of evidence is enough to overturn that. The hardest things to get rid of are deeply held biases, and scientists are no exceptions to this.

Although the decline in cranial capacity during the Holocene period is at odds with Darwinian evolution, it is perfectly aligned with the doctrine of the Yuga Cycle or Great Year. The last 12,000 years comprise the descending arc of the Yuga Cycle, when human consciousness, memory and intelligence are supposed be in a state of continuous degradation. In the Mahabharata, the sage Markandeya told Yudhisthira, “Know, O Yudhisthira, that the period of life, the energy, intellect and the physical strength of men decrease in every Yuga!”[4] These statements, which have been generally regarded as fanciful notions, are amply borne out by the scientific data collected over the past few decades.

Figure 1: The 25,800-year Yuga Cycle, including the 1200-year periods of Kataklysmos and Ekpyrosis. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra.

Since we are now approaching the end of the Kali Yuga, the shrinking of the human brain has already started tapering off in some populations. We can expect that, once we come out of the Kali Yuga, our cranial capacity will again start increasing gradually and attain their peak value in the next Golden Age or Satya Yuga, after another 12,000 years evolution along the ascending arc of the Yuga Cycle. 

So, what does all of this mean for human evolution? It means that the sinusoidal fluctuation in cranial volume, height and lifespan has been going on for millions of years, ever since man first appeared on the earth. Over a period of roughly 25,800 years, cranial volume goes up and down with a 10% - 15% fluctuation in its value. 

Contrary to oft-repeated claims, there has not been a gradual increase in cranial volume over the past 2 million years. That is an assumption and not a fact. We have found less than 200 pre-Holocene hominin skulls. 200 skulls in a span of 2 million years! How can such a scanty collection of pre-Holocene crania reveal the pattern of human evolution? A regression line was fitted through these data points assuming that cranial volume must have increased linearly. That is an unacceptable assumption. Literally any kind of curve can be drawn through a scatter of 200 data points over a 2 million year time period. There are hundreds of thousands of years in the graph without a single data point! 

On the other hand, tens of thousands of Holocene crania have been found, and that data indicates that cranial volume has been decreasing over the past 12,000 years and gradually flattening out. Surely, the true nature of the cranial capacity curve will be revealed where the data density is the highest!

The only sensible conclusion to be drawn from this is that human cranial capacity fluctuates in a sinusoidal manner over a 25,800 year cycle. My proposition is that all the available Homo sapiens cranial specimens can be plotted on this sinusoidal curve. Since I do not have access to a well-dated set of human skulls I cannot test it out myself. But, there is a well-known set of cranial specimens belonging to the Cro-Magnon, which supports this argument.

The Cro-Magnon were one of the earliest examples of modern Homo sapiens in Western Europe. Cro-Magnon were taller than modern humans, had more robust bones, with a cranial capacity of around 1600 cc, which is comparable to the peak cranial capacity of the Mesolithic period.[5] Their fossils have been found between 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, which straddles the peak of an earlier Golden Age at around 38,676 BP (Before Present) or 36,676 BCE.

Figure 2: The cranial volume fluctuates over a 25,800-year Yuga Cycle. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra.

This can be easily calculated from the Yuga Cycle timeline. The peak of the last Golden Age was reached around 10,876 BCE, and we need to add 25,800 years to get the previous peak i.e. 36,676 BCE. This means that the Cro-Magnons lived in an earlier Golden Age and some part of the descending Yuga Cycle. This is why, their morphology and cranial capacities are larger than that of modern humans and comparable to the peak cranial capacities of the Mesolithic period i.e. the most recent Golden Age.

Figure 3: Skull and lower jaw of Cro-Magnon, exhibited at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Credit: Thilo Parg, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Figure 4: Forensic facial reconstruction of a Cro-Magnon man, using a cast of skull. Credit: Cicero Moraes, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What this means is that, over the past 2 million years, since the first hominin fossils began to appear, our cranial volume has been oscillating over a 25,800-year cycle, without a net increase or decrease in any direction. This is true not only for Homo sapiens crania, but is likely to be equally applicable to all the extinct members of the human family, including the Neanderthals and Homo erectus. 

Figure 5: Comparison of Modern Human and Neanderthal skulls from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The Neanderthal skull is the one on the right. Credit: hairymuseummatt CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

For instance, the Neanderthals had a bigger skull than modern humans with an average cranial capacity of around 1500 cc, which is comparable to the cranial volume of humans who lived at the end of the last Ice Age. However, even Neanderthal skull capacities vary between 1300 to 1600 cc, and it is quite possible that this variation occurs in tandem with the 25,800-year precession cycle. No-one has tested for this till now, but if we plot out the available Neanderthal skulls on this curve, we may be taken by surprise.

However, cranial specimens need to be be accurately dated before plotting on the 25,800-year sinusoidal curve, because even a small percentage error in dating can make things go haywire. The difference between the peaks and troughs of the curve is only 12,900 years, which is very small in geological terms. Ideally, the hominin cranial specimens which have been discovered in the past 100,000 to 200,000 years should be used for plotting on this curve, so that the error in dating is not very significant.

In case you are wondering what could be responsible for the decline in our cranial capacity during the Holocene period, certain studies indicate that genetics is the main driving factor. Over the past 12,000 years, we have been acquiring harmful gene mutations, and passing them on to our children, leading to the gradual degeneration of the human race. In a couple of papers published in the journal Trends in Genetics (2012), Professor Gerald Crabtree of the Stanford University showed that, as a species, we are gradually declining in average intellect because we are accumulating mutations that deleteriously affect brain development or function.[6]

Professor John Sanford of the Cornell University firmly believes that the human race is devolving, and that there is no evidence of human evolution being directed by the forces of natural selection. In the book Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome (2008), he argued that the minimal rate of human mutation is estimated to be 100 new mutations per generation. While most mutations do not have any effect, some of them are deleterious. This causes a genetic degradation that leads to the gradual extinction of a species through time. In an interview with Jim Cantelon, he explained the new findings in the field of genetics:

“It’s kind of a trade secret amongst population geneticists - any really well-informed population geneticist understands that man is degenerating…what’s happening is that, every gene in every chromosome of every cell in my body is mutating, and so that guarantees my aging and my death. But the problem is that - these mutations that are accumulating in my body - some of them are transmitted to my children. I take all the mutations that I inherited from my ancestors – tens of thousands of deleterious mutations in my body – and I add my own contribution to that – about a 100 new mutations at least – and pass it on to the next generation…It means we are a perishing people living in a dying world…there is no circle of life where things just continue staying the same, and it’s not an upward spiral of evolution where things keep getting better and better, it is a downward spiral. ”[7]

A downward spiral indeed! In other words, the descending arc of the Yuga Cycle or Great Year in which human intellect gradually declines. The wisdom of the ancients is now being validated by different scientific disciplines. But why is there so much secrecy? 

John Sanford said that the degeneration of man is a “trade secret amongst population geneticists”, while Kathleen McAuliffe had noted that the phenomenon of the shrinking human brain is a secret known to “only a tight-knit circle of paleontologists.” Why is this knowledge being concealed from the people at large? Why not just come out and say, “Its confirmed guys. We are idiots, and we are getting dumber, and that’s why we are messing up the world.” Is that too much to ask? 

I believe that John Sanford’s statement that we are “a perishing people in a dying world” is a bit too pessimistic, for it seems to imply that there is no hope for the world. That is not exactly true. Had the deterioration of the human brain been going on ceaselessly for the past 2 million years, then we would have transformed into chimps by now. Or become extinct. But we didn’t, right? This means that the process of degeneration is not unidirectional, but reverses itself at periodic intervals. Humanity is not headed towards extinction, but towards transformation. 

At some point after the completion of the Kali Yuga, the harmful genetic mutations will get replaced by beneficial genetic mutations, which will then keep on accumulating and drive the upward spiral of evolution till the next Golden Age. This is how the Cycle of the Ages operate, and it is a shame that this essential wisdom has been discarded by the modern civilization. But, then, this is exactly what happens in the Kali Yuga, the age of ignorance and darkness, when, in spite of having so many advanced technologies, humanity remains completely oblivious of its origins and purpose.

One might naturally wonder what could be causing the harmful and beneficial genetic mutations to fluctuate over a 25,800-year cycle. Could the radiation from some powerful cosmic source be driving this phenomenon? The answer is yes, and I have explored this idea in my book Yuga Shift, and I shall write about it in future articles.

References

[1] Maciej Henneberg, “Decrease of Human Skull Size in the Holocene”, Human Biology, June 1988, Vol.60, No.3, pp. 395-405, https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol/vol60/iss3/5/
[2] Christopher B. Ruff et al, “Body mass and encephalization in Pleistocene Homo”, Nature, 1997, Vol.387, pp. 173 - 176.
[3] Kathleen McAuliffe, “If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?” Discover Magazine, 20 January 2011, https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/if-modern-humans-are-so-smart-why-are-our-brains-shrinking
[4] Mahabharata 3.189, https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m03/m03189.htm
[5] “Cro-Magnon”, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cro-Magnon
[6] Gerald R. Crabtree, “Our fragile intellect. Part I” and “Our fragile intellect. Part II”, published in Trends in Genetics. Taken from Kevin J. Mitchell, “Genetic entropy and the human intellect”, Trends in Genetics, 2013, Vol.29, No.2, pp. 59-60.
[7] Dr. John Sanford, author of “Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome”, in an interview with Jim Cantelon, on the YouTube channel 100huntley, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8KbM-xkfVk