In Rift Valley settings with a feedback loop, assortative mating for versatility predicts hominin brain enlargement in some detail

Abstract

Hominin procedures for fire-starting, sharpening rocks, and softening roots by pounding or chopping require sustained attention for hours; shade is sought in the brush fringe bordering a grassland. Clustering these more versatile adults, while others are away hunting and gathering, provides a setup for assortative mating. This can lengthen attention span, enhance versatility and, with it, brain size. The rate of enlargement is accelerated by a boom-and-bust cycle in their meat supply, predicting the observed initiation of enlargement at -2.3 myr in the Rift Valley once boom-prone grazers evolved from the mixed feeders. Several months after lightning created a burn scar back in the brush, the new grassland enables a population boom for those grazers that discover it. Several decades later as brush regrows, they are pushed back. Their hominin followers, wicked in from the grasslands shady fringe, boom together with the burn-scar grazers. They then follow their meat supply back to the main population. This creates an amplifying feedback loop, shifting Homo gene frequencies centrally. Brush fires are so frequent that the cosmic ray mutation rate becomes enlargements rate-limiter, consistent with 460 cm3/myr remaining constant during many climate shifts. The apparent tripling of enlargement rate in the last 0.2 myr vanished when the non-ancestors were omitted. Asian Homo erectus enlargement lags the ancestral trend line by 0.5 myr. Neanderthals lag somewhat less but have a late size spurt after the -70 kyr Homo sapiens Out of Africa, suggesting enlargement genes were acquired via interbreeding.