Magnetic Reversals
and
Evolutionary Leaps

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Did an ice age boost human brain size?
Or a magnetic reversal?

29 Jul 09 - "Why did we humans evolve such big brains, making us the unrivalled rulers of the world?" asks this article in New Scientist.

"Some 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors' brains expanded from a mere 600 cubic centimetres to about a litre. Two new studies suggest it is no fluke that this brain boom coincided with the onset of an ice age."

Biologists David Schwartzman and George Middendorf of Howard University hypothesize that our modern brain could not have evolved until the Quaternary ice age started, about 2.5 million years ago, because such a large brain would have generated heat faster than it could dissipate it in the warmer climate of earlier times. 

If keeping cool is a problem now, says climate researcher Alex Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, it would have been too challenging 2 or 3 million years ago when temperatures were a few degrees warmer than today.

          I don't think the change to a larger brain had anything to
          do with the ice age.

          If magnetic reversals trigger ice ages (as I claim in "Not
          by Fire but by Ice"), and if the Quaternary ice age started
          in sync with a magnetic reversal (as I show in "Not by Fire
          but by Ice"), then it seems logical that the radioactivity
          dumped onto our planet during the reversal would have
          caused mutations. Those mutations would explain the
          sudden appearance of our bigger brains.

          By the way. Did you notice that it was a few degrees
          warmer back then than it is today? I wonder who caused
          that "global warming"?

See entire article by Bob Holmes
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327194.000-
did-an-ice-age-boost-human-brain-size.html
Thanks to Winona Campbell for this link 

I Just could not put it
down - I received the
books last night. I started
with Magnetic Reversals
and Evolutionary Leaps. 
I just could not put it down.

I will need to read it many
times before I can even
begin to digest the depth
of knowledge it contains.
See Fantastic reviews 

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Magnetic reversals  -  far more important than we realize