Why have relatively large brains only occurred in man?

This is an unknown. Many scientists have looked into brain size, relative to the animal, to try and figure out why our brains got so large relative to our bodies.

For a long time it was assumed that there was a relation to being a biped and that walking on two legs encouraged those with a larger brain to do well in the environment. However this seems to have been blown out of the water with instances of bipedality in the fossil record going back at least 6 million years, yet no co-relative increase in brain size is seen for millions of years, with creatures such as austrolopithecus never increasing brain size demonstrably from what we can tell.

It may have to be conceded that it is just a fluke that brain size increased in us as it did, and that if events were re-run this would not happen - so the answer is it is a mystery.

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