BRAIN SIZE AND LIFE SPAN

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 99, Issue 15, 10221-10226, July 23, 2002
Anthropology / Economic Sciences
The emergence of humans: The coevolution of intelligence and longevity with intergenerational transfers
Hillard S. Kaplan and Arthur J. Robson

Two striking differences between humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, are the size of our brains (larger by a factor of three or four) and our life span (longer by a factor of about two). Our thesis is that these two distinctive features of humans are products of coevolutionary selection....