Sentences with phrase «brain expansion»

Once we got smart enough to develop tools and find a richer diet, a positive feedback effect may have kicked in, leading to further brain expansion.

Taken together, this suggests that small steps in brain expansion in Africa may have been driven by regional aridity.

Jianzhi Zhang of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, hypothesized that ASPM might have played a key role in human brain expansion.

More important, early divergence would mean that a significant part of brain expansion in Neanderthals took place completely separately from that in our own lineage.

As significant hominin brain expansion occurred at ∼ 1.8 Ma coeval with occurrence of massive ephemeral deep - water lakes, while subsequent expansions are associated with extreme dry periods.

But other genes were probably also involved, because hominid brain expansion took place in multiple stages over 2 million years, says Ajit Varki, a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Diego.

«Considered in total, this study provides important early archaeological evidence for meat eating, hunting and scavenging behaviors - cornerstone adaptations that likely facilitated brain expansion in human evolution, movement of hominins out of Africa and into Eurasia, as well as important shifts in our social behavior, anatomy and physiology,» Ferraro said.

Of particular interest, the second duplication that gave rise to SRGAP2C arose 2.4 mya which corresponds approximately to the time during evolution where the Australopithecus and Homo lineages diverged and in the fossil record corresponds to the beginning of brain expansion characterizing the Homo lineage (Dennis et al., 2012).

Moreover, they found that evolved brain expansion in the marine mammals predicts the breadth of social and cultural behaviors, as well as ecological factors, such as the diversity of their prey types and latitudinal range.

«We have shown that lncND might be an important player in human brain expansion, which is exciting in itself,» Rani said.

In the last few years, researchers have found a handful of genes they suspect play a role in the rapid brain expansion that fostered human evolution [ScienceNOW 16 December, 2003].

The relationship between the local environment and hominin brain expansion is less clear.

New evidence suggests that the ASPM gene may have contributed to brain expansion in hominids.

Scientists first proposed a relation between social living and brain expansion, or encephalization, nearly three decades ago, when they observed that primate species with larger brains typically lived in bigger groups.

One approach to finding the genes involved in brain expansion has been to investigate the causes of primary microcephaly, a condition in which babies are born with a brain one - third of the normal size, with the cortex particularly undersized.

Experts say this is strong evidence that ASPM could have contributed to human brain expansion.

According to Kosik, this work not only identifies a very critical gene for human brain development but also offers a clue about a component that likely contributed to brain expansion in humans.

This may have stymied our brain expansion for 160,000 years, but I would submit that this evolutionary limitation has already been conquered.

Citation: Shultz S, Maslin M (2013) Early Human Speciation, Brain Expansion and Dispersal Influenced by African Climate Pulses.

Researchers have wondered why encephalization — brain expansion — evolved in some animals but not others.