Skull from Black Death.
An unusual study of old skulls has revealed that human heads have gotten significantly bigger than they were just a few centuries ago.
Led by orthodontist Peter Rock of the University of Birmingham, U.K., researchers measured 30 skulls from male and female victims of London's Black Death epidemic of 1348-'49 and 54 male skulls brought up from a warship, the Mary Rose, which sank in England's Portsmouth harbor in 1545. The team compared the old skulls with x-rays from 31 modern young adults of both sexes. The height of the modern group's cranial vaults exceeded that of both historic samples by about 15%, the team reported last month in the British Dental Journal. Although it is well known that body size has increased over the centuries as diets have improved, Rock says he found hints that brain size might have increased independently: Faces have become less prominent in relation to foreheads over the centuries, he says, and the part of the skull that holds the brain's frontal lobes--the part associated with intelligence--was proportionally larger in modern skulls.
"I think it's a very exciting study because they have two very interesting samples from the past," says primatologist Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago. But the significance of the brain change can't be determined, especially because there are no bones available to reveal the relationship to body size.
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
