Article

Childhood First: Prolonged Development Before Big Brains in Human Evolution

2026-02-21

Abstract excerpt

<p>The prevailing account of human life-history evolution holds that selection for larger brains drove the prolongation of childhood: because neural tissue is metabolically costly, encephalization necessarily slowed developmental pace. Recent fossil evidence calls this causal sequence into question. Across multiple hominin lineages spanning over three million years (including Australopithecus afarensis, early Homo...

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Literature Corpus work: 03681b44-c07d-5ead-9a15-6592158f5377
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/58v9b_v1

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