Confirmed: Northerners have bigger brains

Brains are larger in those who live farther from the equator — in order to help them see better, researchers now suspect…

Dunbar and his Oxford colleague Eiluned Pearce measured the size of eye sockets and brains in 55 people from 12 different areas of varying latitude across the globe, from Scandinavia to Kenya to Australia. They determined that eyeball size increased with latitude just as brain size did, findings that are detailed online July 27 in the journal Biology Letters.

The biggest brains belonged to populations who lived in Scandinavia, while the smallest brains were those of Micronesians, the researchers found.