Flexible Skulls
About this video
Evolving out of a tight squeeze?
In order to squeeze through the mother's narrow birth canal, human infants are born with skulls that are highly flexible. This flexibility also allows the brain to grow rapidly during early development.
A recent analysis of an ancient hominid skull suggests that this flexibility may have evolved much earlier than we had once suspected and that it may have been the key to developing larger brains.
But how far back is this adaptation seen in our evolutionary lineage? And how might bipedalism have paved the way for flexible skulls?
