University Honors

Over the last 2 million years, the human brain has undergone an extraordinaryevolutionary journey, expanding in size to nearly thrice that of our ancient ancestors, Homohabilis. This remarkable growth far surpasses the evolutionary changes seen in other primates,indicating a unique path of human development. Scientists have suggested a wide range offactors to explain the dramatic increase in brain size, including environmental, dietary, social,and climatic influences. This paper uses environmental data joined with hominid fossil data tocreate a prediction model using linear regression. Four different models are created, with themost significant model showing that environment variables along with time explain 21 percent ofthe variance found in cranial capacity over the past 7 million years.