The finding shows that this population of cells in the human brain is more similar to that of a macaque
than a chimp brain.
Besides the obvious size difference — the human brain is about three times larger
than the chimp brain — little has been known about how the human brain and the rest of the nervous system changed in our lineage over evolutionary time.
Not exact matches
The frontal
brain grooves on a H. naledi endocast, like those in modern humans, lie farther back
than the grooves seen in the
chimp MRI scan, Hurst contends.
When they measured the concentrations in the same area in
chimp brains, the team found that the differences between
chimps and normal humans were much greater for those nine
than for the 12 metabolites not implicated in schizophrenia, suggesting that energy pathways implicated in schizophrenia were also altered by human evolution, the team reports this week in Genome Biology.
New work on primates bolsters the idea that diet — rather
than social complexity — was key to evolution of our big
brains, says
chimp expert Richard Wrangham
A multitude of factors help makes the human
brain superior to the
chimps», but new research indicates that looser genetic control of
brain development in humans allows us to learn and adapt to our environment with more flexibility
than our primate cousins.
As a result, the embryos carrying human HARE5 have
brains that are 12 % larger
than the
brains of mice carrying the
chimp version of the enhancer.
The blue stains in these developing mice embryos show that the human DNA inserted into the rodents turns on sooner and is more widespread (right)
than the
chimp version of the same DNA, promoting a bigger
brain.
They also have
brains that are 20 percent smaller
than those of
chimps.»
But in the
brain, the team detected much more gene expression in humans
than in
chimps, whereas gene expression in the
brains of
chimps and the other primates was about the same.
Regulator genes help determine how other genes will express themselves, and the researchers suspected that some of these regulators might be making
brain development more active in human embryos
than in
chimps.
(In the sense that a
chimp - sized
brain couldn't possibly manage all those augmented functions like syntax, not any more
than you could run Windows programs on a 1950 desk calculator.)