“The brain, this energy-consuming organ that has shaped the human species”

If we owe our incredible evolutionary success to our brain, it has imposed many constraints on us, paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin tells us in his new work, The Tyranny of the Brain (Robert Laffont). The professor at the Collège de France has chosen to tell the story of our ancestors through the prism of the development of this extraordinary organ which seems to make us unique.

LE FIGARO. – You tell the story ofA wise man and our ancestors not by telling a great epic, but by focusing on an organ: the brain. For what?

Jean-Jacques HUBLIN.– More than any other, it is this organ that makes us a species apart. Thanks to it, humanity has engaged in an increasingly profound modification of its environment, by constructing an ecological niche adapted to its needs. In this process, the constraints imposed by our brain played a primordial role. For at least 3 million years, human ancestors have developed…