Humans can be distinguished from other monkeys in many ways, such as our general lack of hair, our straight bipedalism, and, of course, our strong brains. But it seems that our cognitive ability did not evolve as early as previously thought, according to new research conducted by an international team of researchers.
Team discoveries, published today, in the journal Science, it is based on five 1.8-million-year-old skulls from a site of about 10 acres near the city of Dmanisi in Georgia. The brain of these early arrivals in Europe and Asia“Hominin species that evolved long before.” homo sapiens–they were already known be small, but in the recent inspection, researchers made endocasts of ancient skulls. Basically, they have created topographic maps of brain cases, which can reveal tiny differences in shape, which provide information about the development of different regions of much decomposed brains. Understanding ancient brain structures helps to concretize the genesis of our species; whether we headed for the sprints or headed for our modern morphology and what path we took to get here.
“These structures are extremely interesting because they are the neural substrate for complex cognitive tasks, such as the manufacture and use of tools, social knowledge and, most importantly, spoken language,” said study authors Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer, both paleoanthropologists at the University of Zurich in an e-mail. “We don’t know if these hominins had language in the modern sense, but the brain structures were there and probably co-evolved with language abilities.”
The saga of human origins is overshadowed by a fragmentary fossil record, like an old book so worn by time that only a handful of sentences are used to guess the whole story. But we assume that we do, and our accuracy improves with each newly discovered fossil and newly invented technology to analyze them. The skulls investigated in the new work were excavated between 1991 and 2008 and are housed at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi.
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Comparing Georgian fag endocasts in some taken from herem skulls of about the same age and smaller from Africa and The Indonesian island of Java, the team found that the brains of Georgian hominins looked more like monkeys than modern humans. This suggests that modern brain structures emerged from Africa later than the continent’s first wanderers, at least 100,000 years ago.
“There must have been two early dispersals ‘outside Africa.’ fag“The first is documented by fossil evidence on today’s Dmanisi site in Georgia” about 2 million years ago, the researchers said in an email. “These fag populations had primitive brains. The second dispersal is documented by Java fossils; these populations had modern brains. ”
From the first fossil attributed to the genus fag dating back almost 3 million years, Georgian skulls mean that at least some of the first humans we lacked the developed brains that we normally think of as definedof our kind. Researchers say it was a time of “realizing that the emperor had no clothes” the clothes here being a reorganized brain.
Researchers were particularly interested in the frontal lobes of Dmanisi individuals, a region of the brain that probably played a vital role in early human language development and instrument making. Both innovations were a springboard for the first humans, who managed to do more than survive; At one point, we began to communicate with nuances, to organize ourselves into larger groups, and we created tools that allowed us to hunt more efficiently, to live in greater comfort, and eventually to become the most dominant species on the planet (for better or worse).
“It simply came to our notice then homo sapiens“But it certainly changes the way we look at the early evolution of the human brain,” said Amélie Beaudet, a paleoanthropologist at Cambridge University who was not affiliated with the recent study, in an email. Beaudet remarked that, in spite of the knowledge of the primitive Australopithecin brain structure possessed by the individual Lucy, among others, and the more developed skull of recent people (dating back about half a million years ago), “I didn’t really know what happened between them. With this study we have a better idea, even if there are still some gaps. ”
More fossils always help to better understand our evolutionary arc, but instead of new discoveries, new technology tends to intensify. The gap in our knowledge of human cognitive development is narrowing. We should be grateful for the evolution of our predecessors, because now we have the brain to figure out how it all happened.