Our Bigger Brains Came With a Downside: Faster Aging

A study comparing chimpanzee and human brains suggests that the regions that grew the most during human evolution are the most susceptible to aging.

The human brain, more than any other attribute, sets our species apart. Over the past seven million years or so, it has grown in size and complexity, enabling us to use language, make plans for the future and coordinate with one another at a scale never seen before in the history of life.

But our brains came with a downside, according to a study published on Wednesday. The regions that expanded the most in human evolution became exquisitely vulnerable to the ravages of old age.

“There’s no free lunch,” said Sam Vickery, a neuroscientist at the Jülich Research Center in Germany and an author of the study.

The 86 billion neurons in the human brain cluster into hundreds of distinct regions. For centuries, researchers could recognize a few regions, like the brainstem, by hallmarks such as the clustering of neurons. But these big regions turned out to be divided into smaller ones, many of which were revealed only with the help of powerful scanners.

As the structure of the human brain came into focus, evolutionary biologists became curious about how the regions evolved from our primate ancestors. (Chimpanzees are not our direct ancestors, but both species descended from a common ancestor about seven million years ago.)

The human brain is three times as large as that of chimpanzees. But that doesn’t mean all of our brain regions expanded at the same pace, like a map drawn on an inflating balloon. Some regions expanded only a little, while others grew a lot.