The Human Brain Has Been Shrinking—and No One Quite Knows Why

Muse on that headline a moment
And it may become amusing—
Well, of course no one quite knows why,
Given that their brains are shrinking.

Poor things, pushed for generations—
For roughly one hundred thousand
Generations—the direction
Of more impressive braininess,

To now be streamlining again.
The veteran forager,
The knowledgeable hunter honed
By decades of tool mastery,

The elder who can recite tales
Linking now to the dawn of time,
Even the scholar-professor,
Are no longer needed to cinch

The collective knowledge of all.
There are better storage organs
Brains only need to access well,
So selection shoves somewhere else.

And what will happen when the tools
Of global memorization
Need only to talk to themselves?
Who knows? Not the hare-brained humans

Who may, in demographic terms
Have benefitted from the shift,
No more carrying the burdens
Of having to think for themselves.