[catlifeonmars]

From the first article:

> Humans owe their big brains and sophisticated culture to a single genetic mutation that weakened our jaw muscles about 2.4 million years ago, a new study suggests.

_A new study suggests_

I don’t think you can treat these claims as categorically true. It’s plausible and probably warrants further study, like most things in biology.

Edit: I could not read the second article you linked as it was behind a paywall, but I found the full text of the original paper[1]. The paper appears to make a much weaker claim: that a weakening of jaw muscles in humans coincided with acceleration in brain size. This is certainly intriguing, but correlation does not imply causation.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4035273/

[mattigames]

So we are to believe evolutionary paths are free? A stronger homosapiens could have done much more in their lifetime than an equal specimen with the same brain matter but less muscles, even with all the niceties of common era I very frequently find myself in scenarios where being stronger would have helped, I had to move to a building without an elevator and had to carry the freezer, the washing machine and other stuff to the fifth floor, having more muscles certainly would have helped, more recently I found a screw I couldn't unscrew just because I lacked enough force (not because it was a stripped screw), just imagine the amount of scenarios I would find myself if we didn't had all this technology and kitchen appliances that we have this days? You think our manual farming ancestors didn't need all the extra help they could get? To me it's almost preposterous to suggest we gave up our muscles just because we didn't use them because we lacked reasons to use them.

[catlifeonmars]

> So we are to believe evolutionary paths are free?

Huh? Where did I say that?

I was just pointing out you presented two claims as facts and the sources do not support your claims. Maybe there are other sources that do, but the two studies you cited make much weaker claims.

The news article titles misrepresent the findings in the typical way that news articles sensationalize and misrepresent science etc etc.