Global Warming makes you dumber: study

by Kaitlin | March 26, 2007 at 01:32 pm

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A study about to be released by the University of Albany draws a scientific link between human evolution and climate change. Specifically, the study finds that as early humans migrated to colder climates, their brain grew larger.

The obvious leap, then, is that if our planet is now growing warmer as a result of global climate change, our brains must be growing smaller. Hey, at least we'll be too stupid to care.

In addition to the impact of global cooling, "By paying close attention to the geographic origin of each of the fossilized skulls," said Gallup, "it became clear that seasonal variation in climate may also have been an important selective force behind the evolution of human cranial capacity. Specifically, we found that as the distance from the equator increased, north or south, so did brain size."

The authors suggest that a key environmental trigger to the evolution of larger brains was the need to devise ways to keep warm and manage the fluctuations in food availability that resulted from cold weather.