Mother’s love responsible for bigger brains in humans

LONDON - Humans and primates have their mothers to thank for their bigger brains.

Monkeys have large brains because of mothering after birth, a new research has found.

Earlier, scientists had ascribed a large brain to fast metabolism. But kangaroos and possums, marsupials, who develop in a pouch instead of a womb, have relative brain sizes just as big as those of other mammals despite slower metabolic rates, reports the Daily Mail.

Researchers found that brain size in both marsupials and placental mammals are linked with the length of maternal care, says the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Marsupial brains grow slowly after birth in the mother’s pouch while placental mammal brains grow rapidly in the womb.

Primates like humans and chimps spend a long time in the womb and a long time being cared by their mothers after birth, which could explain their unusually large brains.

Anjali Goswami, study co-author from University College London, said: “For a long time, our interest in our own large brains has focused the field on placental characteristics, such as high basal metabolic rate, and made us overlook the role of maternal care after birth on the evolution of big brains.”

“However, if we take primates out of the equation we discover that marsupials, despite having much lower metabolic rates, have similarly sized brains or sometimes even bigger brains than their placental mammal counterparts.

“So clearly, evolving big brains isn’t just about having a high metabolism. Instead, it seems that maternal care is the most consistent factor driving the development of big brains across all mammals,” she added.