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The Evolution of Human Brain Development

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Abstract

The human brain is a large and complex organ, setting us apart from other primates. It allows us to exhibit highly sophisticated cognitive and behavioral abilities. Therefore, our brain’s size and morphology are defining features of our species and our fossil ancestors and relatives. Endocasts, i.e., internal casts of the bony braincase, provide evidence about brain size and morphology in fossils. Based on endocasts, we know that our ancestors’ brains increased overall in size and underwent several reorganizational changes. However, it is difficult to relate evolutionary changes of size and shape of endocasts to evolutionary changes of cognition and behavior. We argue here that an understanding of the tempo and mode of brain development can help to interpret the evolution of our brain and the associated cognitive and behavioral changes. To do so, we review structural brain development, cognitive development, and ontogenetic changes of endocranial size and shape in living individuals on the one hand, and ontogenetic patterns (size increase and shape change) in fossil hominins and their evolutionary change on the other hand. Tightly integrating our knowledge on these different levels will be the key of future work on the evolution of human brain development.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Philipp Mitteroecker and Philipp Gunz who organized the wonderful workshop “Human EvoDevo: The Role of Development in Human Evolution” at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg, Austria, and who invited us to contribute this paper. Thanks to Alyson Reid, Carolyn Rowney and Philipp Gunz for comments and discussion. Comments by Benedikt Hallgrimsson, Alexandra de Sousa and one anonymous reviewer helped to substantially improve this manuscript. This work was supported by EU FP6 Marie Curie Actions grant MRTN-CT-2005-019564 ‘EVAN’ and by the Max Planck Society.

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    Simon Neubauer & Jean-Jacques Hublin

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Neubauer, S., Hublin, JJ. The Evolution of Human Brain Development. Evol Biol 39, 568–586 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11692-011-9156-1

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