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Konkvistador comments on Brain shrinkage in humans over past ~20 000 years - what did we lose? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think humans aren't that special in this regard. There are plenty of other examples of domesticated species having smaller brains (Canis lupus familiaris for starters). And yes humans are animals and it would be pretty hard to argue that we aren't in fact domesticated. :)
If I had to guess I would say that our sense of smell and the part of the brain dedicated to making sense of that data may have decreased significantly precisely because of our domestication of dogs.
Going off some of the writing of anthropologist Peter Frost. I think a good case can be made that in this case:
This seems like a good candidate for brain shrinkage for various reasons. For starters it seems population densities where much higher 20 000 years ago than 200 000 years ago.
Then there is the whole matter of the invention of writing and the formation of hereditary classes preforming different functions.
What kind of information one may store back then, which would result in reproductive advantage? If you are storing more detailed map, you need better path-finding to take advantage of more detailed map; if you store more details of your life, you need to do more statistics to find useful correlations; etc. Extra information needs extra processing.
Today, memorizing declarative ready-to-use facts - prepared by other people - can be very useful - yet they still require a lot of processing so that real world events would bring them to attention. Perhaps less when you have ready-to-use facts and methods to solve the problems prepared for you by another person, who identifies what knowledge you may use. That person however has to be able to match the real world problem to the solution he was taught.