Some of us actually love the winter season. The cold breeze, the beautiful white snow and the feel of Christmas coming in sure makes it a lot nice to live in a place like ours. But there is actually an effect about the winter or at least those that live in high altitudes that we don’t know about. Humans who living in these areas have been found to have bigger eyes and brains to cope with poor light whenever winter seasons comes or when they are having cloudy days. This was recently found out by UK scientists from the Oxford University team. But this didn’t make people a lot smarter just because of the size of their brain being larger.
Vision processing areas fill up the extra capacity and making these areas larger. They were written in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters journal to be able to explain this phenomenon. scientist measured eye sockets and brain volumes of about 55 skulls to be able to explain this and they went over 12 populations across Earth specifically those with high altitudes.
The lead author who is Eiluned Pearce said in BBC news that they have found a relationship between absolute latitude and both eye socket size and cranial capacity. The skulls that they have used are from the 1800s that were kept in the museums in Oxford and Cambridge. The team was from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology. They were from indigenous people that came from Scandinavia to Australia, Micronesia and North America.
The largest brain cavities are from Scandinavia and the smallest were from Micronesia. Depending on where they are found on the Globe depicts the amount of light hitting their area and thus resulting to their enlargements in different levels.
They are also suggesting that there is a strong possibility of the larger eye sockets had extra fat around the eyeballs to insulate them from freezing temperatures.
There are a lot more cool facts that we don’t know of and continues research can help us know more of our past and present to help us understand our very existence.