Brooklyn College professor helps answer: When did extinct mammals develop intelligence?
When associate professor of anthropology and renowned paleontologist Stephen Chester was part of a collaborative, groundbreaking study in 2019 that used rare fossils from the Denver Basin in Colorado Springs to demonstrate how mammal body size increased after the major extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, he didn’t realize there would be such a heady follow-up.
While that study — published in Science magazine in October 2019 — illustrated how that time interval allowed for mammals, and later humans, to grow into dominant species physically, it didn’t address when our extinct relatives began to separate themselves intellectually. Until now.
While it seems obvious to understand conceptually that humans have the largest brains among animals, if you were to compare the absolute size of a human brain to that of an elephant, the elephant easily wins the contest.