Humans may be gradually losing intelligence, according to a new
study. The study, published today in the journal Trends in
Genetics, argues that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to
be smart once we started living in dense agricultural
settlements several thousand years ago. The development of our
intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of
intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal,
dispersed groups of peoples living before our ancestors emerged
from Africa, said study author Gerald Crabtree, a researcher at
Stanford University, in a statement. Since then it’s all been
downhill, Crabtree contends. The theory isn’t without critics,
with one scientist contacted by LiveScience suggesting that
rather than losing our smarts, humans have just diversified them
with various types of intelligence today. Early humans lived or
died by their spatial abilities, such as quickly making a
shelter or spearing a saber-toothed tiger. Nowadays, though
almost everyone has the spatial abilit