why ancient animals were bigger but humans weren’t
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In the grand scheme of things, humans haven’t been around long enough. We’ve been around only a million years, maybe three to four million if you count all the hominids and australopiths. The giant insects were buzzing around 300 million years ago; the giant dinosaurs were around 65 million years ago, etc. If you compared a horse to a horse a million years ago, it probably hasn’t changed much, either.
However, you’re looking at the wrong thing — in the last few million years, we HAVE grown an awful lot. Not our bodies, but our brains. The chimpanzee has the biggest cortex of any non-human brain, and their brains are 300cc; as our evolution diverged from theirs 6 to 7 million years ago, our brains have grown in size to 1400/1500cc, around 5x as big.
Brainwise, humans are enormous.
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