The most striking feature of humans is the size of our brains: bigger, in comparison to body weight, than any other animal. Strikingly bigger. A detailed story of what makes us human must be extraordinarily complicated, but it’s clear that big, powerful brains were the main invention that made it all possible. So we now have two obvious questions to think about: ‘Why did we evolve big brains?’ and ‘How did we evolve big brains?’

