Skull casts from human evolution. Left to right: Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. (Photo Credit: Roger Seymour)

Researchers have long attributed the evolution of human intelligence to the size of the brain. It turns out that while a larger skull certainly helped, it was the extra blood sucked in by the brain that transformed humans into one of Earth’s smartest species. The surprising revelation that overturns the previous, long-standing theory, comes from a team of scientists at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and the University of Adelaide in Australia.