Humans Alone See Brains Shrink With Age, Researchers Find

ut in the first direct comparison of humans to chimpanzees, a brain-scanning team led by George Washington University anthropologist Chet Sherwood found that chimpanzees don't experience such brain loss. From that, researchers concluded that only people are afflicted by this oddity of longevity. "We are very weird animals," said Emory University anthropologist Todd Preuss at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, who wasn't involved in the study. "Among neuroscientists, the assumption has been that species are all the same, but this shows there is something really unusual about the late-life biology of the human species."