It was two hours before the submission deadline and I still hadn't finished my news article. I sat at the desk, but suddenly, the typewriter didn't work. No matter how hard I tapped the keys, the levers wouldn't move to strike the paper. I started to realize that I would not be able to finish the article on time. Desperately, I rested the typewriter on my lap and started hitting each key with as much force as I could manage. Nothing happened. Thinking something might have happened inside of it, I opened the cover, lifted up the keys, and found the problem ― a paper clip. The keys had no room to move. After picking it out, I pressed and pulled some parts. The keys moved smoothly again. I breathed deeply and smiled. Now I knew that I could finish my article on time.

Wilbur Smith was a South African novelist specialising in historical fiction. Smith wanted to become a journalist, writing about social conditions in South Africa, but his father was never supportive of his writing and forced him to get a real job. Smith studied further and became a tax accountant, but he finally turned back to his love of writing. He wrote his first novel, The Gods First Make Mad, and had received 20 rejections by 1962. In 1964, Smith published another novel, When the Lion Feeds, and it went on to be successful, selling around the world. A famous actor and film producer bought the film rights for When the Lion Feeds, although no movie resulted. By the time of his death in 2021 he had published 49 novels, selling more than 140 million copies worldwide.

The human brain, it turns out, has shrunk in mass by about 10 percent since it peaked in size 15,000-30,000 years ago. One possible reason is that many thousands of years ago humans lived in a world of dangerous predators where they had to have their wits about them at all times to avoid being killed. Today, we have effectively domesticated ourselves and many of the tasks of survival―from avoiding immediate death to building shelters to obtaining food―have been outsourced to the wider society. We are smaller than our ancestors too, and it is a characteristic of domestic animals that they are generally smaller than their wild cousins. None of this may mean we are dumber―brain size is not necessarily an indicator of human intelligence―but it may mean that our brains today are wired up differently, and perhaps more efficiently, than those of our ancestors.