According to the BBC, a new study has found that northern peoples have bigger eyes - and bigger brains.
Actually, the paper in question talked about eyes but didn't make much of the brain finding, which is confined to the Supplement. Nonetheless, they did find an effect on brain size too. Peoples living further from the equator have larger eye sockets and also larger total cranial capacity (brain volume), apparantly. The authors include Robin Dunbar of "Dunbar's Number" fame.
Their idea is that humans evolved larger eyes because further from the equator, there's on average less light, so you need bigger eyes to collect more light and see well.
They looked at 19th century skulls stored in museum collections, and measured the size of the eye sockets (orbits). They did this by filling them with a bunch of little glass balls and counting how many balls fit. They had a ...
