This paper reports on efforts to understand how the primate brain evolved; the research tested which regions of the cortex underwent the most profound evolutionary change throughout the evolution of the group, whether those regions’ evolution differed from that of other mammals, and whether the human brain is exceptional in those regards; the paper also describes the authors’ development of a method, rate.map, which allows the charting of evolutionary rates of shape-change directly on the original endocast 3D meshes or even to magnetic resonance image reproductions of the brain, and to associate the rates to individual landmarks.
Although intense research effort is seeking to address which brain areas fire and connect to each other to produce complex behaviors in a few living primates, little is known about their evolution, and which brain areas or facets of cognition were favored by natural selection. By developing statistical tools to study the evolution of the brain cortex at the fine scale, the authors found that rapid cortical expansion in the prefrontal region took place early on during the evolution of primates. In anthropoids, fast-expanding cortical areas extended to the posterior parietal cortex. In Homo, further expansion affected the medial temporal lobe and the posteroinferior region of the parietal lobe. Collectively, the fast-expanding cortical areas in anthropoids are known to form a brain network producing mind reading abilities and other higher-order cognitive functions. These results indicate that pursuing complex cognition drove the evolution of Primate brains. (Published Abstract Provided)
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