Humans can be distinguished from other monkeys in many ways, such as our general hairlessness, our upright bipedality, and of course our powerful brains. But it appears that our cognitive ability did not develop as early as previously thought, according to new research by an international team of researchers.
The team’s findings, published today in the journal Science based on five skulls of 1.8 million years from a site of about 10 hectares near the Georgian city of Dmanisi. The brain of this early arrival in Europe and Asia—Hominin species that evolved well before Homo sapiens–was already known to be small, but in the recent inspection, the researchers made endocasts of the old skulls. In fact, they have made topographic maps of the brain traps, which may reveal small differences in shape that provide insights into the development of different regions of the long-decomposed brains. The understanding of ancient brain structures helps to expand the origin of our species; whether we have looked at our modern morphology, or what path we have taken to get here.
“These structures are extremely interesting because they form the neural substrate for complex cognitive tasks, such as the making and use of tools, social cognition and, more importantly, the spoken language,” the authors Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer, both paleo-anthropologists at the study, said. the University of Zurich, in an email. “We do not know if this had hominin language in the modern sense, but the brain structures were there and probably developed along with language ability.”
The saga of human origin is obscured by a fragmentary fossil record, like an old book that has become so worn out over time that only a handful of sentences are used to guess the whole story. But we think, and our accuracy gets better with each newfound fossil and newly invented technology to analyze it. The skulls examined in the new article were excavated between 1991 and 2008 and are housed in the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi.
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Compare the Georgian Homo endocast to a taken awaym skulls of about the same age and younger than Africa and the Indonesian island of Java, the team found that the brains of the Georgian hominins look more like those of great apes than modern humans. This suggests that modern brain structures originated in the African continent at least 100,000 years later.
‘There should have been two early distributions of’ outside Africa ‘ Homo“The first was documented by the fossil evidence of the Dmanisi site in present-day Georgia,” the researchers said in an email. ‘This Homo populations had primitive brains. The second distribution is documented by the fossils of Java; these populations had modern brains. ”
Since the earliest fossil attributed to the genus Homo dating from almost 3 million years ago, the Georgian skulls mean that there were at least some of the earliest humans lacks the developed brains that we normally regard as defining our genus. According to the researchers, it was a moment of ‘realizing that the emperor has no clothes’, the clothes here be a reorganized brain.
The researchers were particularly interested in the frontal lobes of the Dmanisi individuals, a region of the brain that probably played an important role in the early human efforts to develop language and make tools. Both innovations were springboarding for early humans, who could do more than survive; at some point we started communicating with nuances, organizing as larger groups and creating tools that enabled us to hunt more effectively, live in greater comfort, and eventually become the most dominant species on the planet (for good or ten kwade).
‘It does not really change our understanding of Homo sapiens, but it certainly changes the way we look at the early evolution of the human brain, ”said Amélie Beaudet, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the recent study, in an e- pos said. Beaudet noted that despite knowledge of the primitive Australopithecine brain structure possess by the Lucy individual, amongst other things, and the more developed skull of recent people (dating to about half a million years ago), ‘we did not really know what happened in between. With this study, we have a better idea, even if there are still gaps. “
More fossils are always helping to better understand our evolutionary arc, but instead of new discoveries, new technologies tend to increase. The gap in our knowledge of human cognitive development is narrowing. We need to be thankful for our predecessors’ evolution, because now we have the brains to figure out how it all happened.