The Storm Episode One

Two million years ago, the evolution of the brain took man out of the animal world by endowing an unremarkable branch of the Tree of Life with fantastic capabilities for processing and exchanging information. Subsequent generations call it the human intellect.

A short time later, mankind left its cradle, Africa, and established itself on every continent except Antarctica. Fragile in body, but with the gift of a highly developed intellect, the members of this race easily forced out the apex predators and took their place, in spite of their powerful claws and huge tusks.

Having won first place in the food chain in most of the occupied ecological niches, this life form declared itself the crowning glory of creation, assuming the whole route travelled by evolution on the planet had stopped when its own race had been born. However, evolution never for a minute stopped affecting all of life, including man.

Thirty thousand years ago, the weight of the human brain achieved its historical maximum. Since then it has steadily become smaller, and by the end of the second millennium A.D., the total loss of cerebral material was 300 grams. In the 21st century, this reduction suddenly approached crisis point...