Brain

Groundbreaking research examining 7,000-year-old mummies from Chile's Atacama Desert has revealed that prehistoric hunter-gatherers possessed significantly smaller brain volumes than modern populations, suggesting centuries of nutritional hardship in one of Earth's most unforgiving environments. The study, recently published in Scientific Reports, analyzed 68 ancient skulls from the remarkable Chinchorro culture and found their average intracranial volume measured 12 percent less than contemporary Chileans. This discovery sheds new light on how extreme environmental conditions shaped human development in prehistoric South America. The Chinchorro people inhabited the coast of the Atacama Desert between 7,500 and 3,500 years ago, creating the world's oldest known artificially mummified remains - predating Egyptian mummification by millennia. Using advanced CT scanning technology, researchers from Chilean and international