TY - JOUR
T1 - Reconstructing the Neanderthal brain using computational anatomy
AU - Kochiyama, Takanori
AU - Ogihara, Naomichi
AU - Tanabe, Hiroki C.
AU - Kondo, Osamu
AU - Amano, Hideki
AU - Hasegawa, Kunihiro
AU - Suzuki, Hiromasa
AU - Ponce De León, Marcia S.
AU - Zollikofer, Christoph P.E.
AU - Bastir, Markus
AU - Stringer, Chris
AU - Sadato, Norihiro
AU - Akazawa, Takeru
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Y. Rak and I. Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University for allowing the use of CT scan data of Amud 1 and Qafzeh 9; P. Mennecier and A. Froment of Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle for La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1, La Ferrassie 1 and Cro-Magnon 1; D. Lieberman, O. Herschensohn and M. Morgan of Harvard University for Skhul 5. CT scan data of Mladeč 1 were obtained from the digital archive of fossil hominoids, the University of Vienna. MRI data were provided by the Information eXtraction from Images (IXI) project and by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University. The chimpanzee and bonobo MRI data were provided by the National Chimpanzee Brain Resource (supported by NINDS grant NS092988). This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas “Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans: Testing Evolutionary Models of Learning” from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to T.A. (#22101001), N.O. (#22101006), and H.C.T. (#22101007) respectively, and by Swiss NSF grant 31003A_135470 to C.P.E.Z., CGL-2015-63648-P MINECO, Spain to M.B., and The Calleva Foundation and the Human Origins Research Fund to C.S.
PY - 2018/12/1
Y1 - 2018/12/1
N2 - The present study attempted to reconstruct 3D brain shape of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens based on computational neuroanatomy. We found that early Homo sapiens had relatively larger cerebellar hemispheres but a smaller occipital region in the cerebrum than Neanderthals long before the time that Neanderthals disappeared. Further, using behavioural and structural imaging data of living humans, the abilities such as cognitive flexibility, attention, the language processing, episodic and working memory capacity were positively correlated with size-adjusted cerebellar volume. As the cerebellar hemispheres are structured as a large array of uniform neural modules, a larger cerebellum may possess a larger capacity for cognitive information processing. Such a neuroanatomical difference in the cerebellum may have caused important differences in cognitive and social abilities between the two species and might have contributed to the replacement of Neanderthals by early Homo sapiens.
AB - The present study attempted to reconstruct 3D brain shape of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens based on computational neuroanatomy. We found that early Homo sapiens had relatively larger cerebellar hemispheres but a smaller occipital region in the cerebrum than Neanderthals long before the time that Neanderthals disappeared. Further, using behavioural and structural imaging data of living humans, the abilities such as cognitive flexibility, attention, the language processing, episodic and working memory capacity were positively correlated with size-adjusted cerebellar volume. As the cerebellar hemispheres are structured as a large array of uniform neural modules, a larger cerebellum may possess a larger capacity for cognitive information processing. Such a neuroanatomical difference in the cerebellum may have caused important differences in cognitive and social abilities between the two species and might have contributed to the replacement of Neanderthals by early Homo sapiens.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41598-018-24331-0
DO - 10.1038/s41598-018-24331-0
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85045985769
VL - 8
JO - Scientific Reports
JF - Scientific Reports
SN - 2045-2322
IS - 1
M1 - 6296
ER -