Humans can be distinguished from other apes in many ways, such as our general hair, our vertical bipedalism, and of course our powerful brain. But it turns out that our cognitive ability did not evolve as quickly as thought, according to new research from an international team of researchers.
The team’s conclusions, published today, in the journal Science, they are based on five 1.8-million-year-old skulls from a site of about 10 acres near the Georgian city of Dmanisi. The brain of these first arrivals Europe and Asia—Hominin species that evolved much earlier homo sapiens–they were already known to be small, but in the recent inspection, researchers made endocasts of the ancient skulls. Basically, they created topographic maps of brain cases, which can reveal small differences so that they provide information about the development of different regions of the decomposed brains over a long period of time. Understanding the ancient brain structures helps to concretize the genesis of our species; whether we have advanced to the speed of our modern morphology and what path we have taken to get here.
“These structures are extremely interesting, as they constitute the neural substrate for complex cognitive tasks, such as the manufacture and use of tools, social cognition, and, most importantly, spoken language,” said the authors of the study. study Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer, both paleoanthropologists at the University of Zurich, in an email. “We don’t know if these hominins had language in the modern sense, but the brain structures were there and probably co-evolved with the abilities of language.”
The saga of human origins is clouded by a fragmentary fossil record, like an old book so worn out over time that only a few handfuls of sentences are used to guess the whole story. But suppose so, and our accuracy improves with each newly found fossil and newly invented technology to analyze them. The skulls investigated in the new document were excavated between 1991 and 2008 and are in the National Museum of Georgia in Tbilisi.
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Comparing Georgian Man endocasts to some taken herem skulls about the same age and under Africa and the Indonesian island of Java, the team found that the brains of Georgian hominins looked more like those of great apes than modern humans. This suggests that modern brain structures emerged from Africa later than the first travelers off the continent for at least 100,000 years.
There should have been two “out-of-Africa” dispersions in the early days Man: The first is documented by fossil evidence from the Dmanisi site in present-day Georgia ”about 2 million years ago, researchers said in their email. “These Man the populations had a primitive brain. The second dispersal is documented by Java fossils; these populations had modern brains. “
From the first fossil attributed to the genus Man dating back almost 3 million years, Georgia’s skulls mean that at least some of the first humans they did not have the developed brains that we normally consider definedof our kind. Investigators said it was time to “realize that the emperor had no clothes.” the clothes here being a reorganized brain.
The researchers were especially interested in the frontal lobes of individuals in Dmanisi, a region of the brain that probably played a vital role in early human language development and tool-making efforts. Both innovations were springboards for the first humans, who were able to do more than survive; at some point, we began to communicate with nuances, to organize ourselves into larger groups, and to create tools that allowed us to hunt more effectively, live more comfortably, and finally become the most dominant species. of the planet (for better or for worse).
“It really doesn’t change our understanding of homo sapiens, but it definitely changes the way we see the initial evolution of the human brain, “said Amélie Beaudet, a paleoanthropologist at Cambridge University who was not affiliated with the recent study, in an email.eaudet pointed out that despite the knowledge of the primitive Australopithecine brain structure possessed for the individual Lucy, among others, and the most developed skull of recent humans (dating to about half a million years ago), we didn’t really know what happened in the middle. With this study we have a better idea, although there are still some gaps. “
More fossils always help to better understand our evolutionary arc, but instead of new findings, new technology tends to intensify. The gap in our knowledge about human cognitive development is narrowing. We should be grateful for the evolution of our predecessors, because we now have the brain to find out how it all happened.