Apparently primatologists theorised for years that monkeys and men etc developed large brains in order to fix things, prehistoric leaking taps, a misfiring Model T, that sort of thing. This gave a positive moral glow to our largest of all human brains. Through honest endeavour and a few million years we have hoisted our neurological engine to Bob the Builder status and can look down on baboons that haven’t even smashed a bone into the ground and watched it fly up in slow motion. It’s comforting to know that even a million years ago our species was fuelled by a protestant work ethic. All was well until the 80’s when two primatologists put forward another theory. They studied the brain sizes of different apes and found that it was closely related to the size of their typical social groupings, small group small brain, larger group larger brain. This correlation was so strong that given a group size they could accurately predict brain size. Now the inter relationships within a group increases as the group numbers increase. A+B+C= 3 relationships, A+B+C+D= 6, A+…+E= 24, and so on. By the time a group gets to 15 members the number of relationships is 105. They then found that all primates have a propensity for manipulation within these relationships and suggested that increased brain size, far from being a result of enhanced logic and problem solving, was due to having to cope with all the lying and cheating that went on within larger groups. This theory didn’t go down well at first. So where does that leave us humans? Are we advanced technologists or supreme manipulationists?
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