Brains reach modern size
Cranial capacity plateaus near 1,350 cubic centimetres in several lineages at once.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 200 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
By the later Middle Pleistocene, Neanderthals, Denisovans and early Homo sapiens all have brains within or above the modern human range, having increased in parallel across separate continents. The expansion then stops — brain size has not increased since, and modern human brains are on average slightly smaller than Neanderthal ones and than those of Late Pleistocene humans. Whatever changed afterwards was organisation and culture, not volume.