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Modern human babies are essentially learning machines. After birth, their brains grow in leaps and bounds, allowing infants to lay the groundwork for future social and cognitive achievement. But it wasn’t that way for Neandertals. At least in terms of the shape of their brains, Neandertal newborns pretty much coasted into adulthood.
Scientists have shown that Neandertal brains are about the same size as ours. Yet our Paleolithic brethren are not known for having been great scholars. To probe this cognitive conundrum, researchers took CT scans of 11 Neandertal brains, including one newborn. And they compared these images to those of modern humans.
They found that baby braincases are similar in size and shape, regardless of their parentage. All are elongated, most likely to smooth passage through the birth canal. But modern human baby brains grow more globular in the first year of life, changes that reflect a massive wave of neural development. That phase change is absent in Neandertals, whose brains retain that extended newborn shape throughout their lives. The results appear in the journal Current Biology. [Philipp Gunz et al., "Brain development after birth differs between Neanderthals and modern humans"]
It’s not clear whether our well-rounded brains made us the pointy-headed intellectuals we are today. But they do make us look smart in a cap and gown.
—Karen Hopkin
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
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6 Comments
Add CommentWhat did they use for controls? Brains of Tea Partiers?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe research report cited and linked was based on reconstructed braincase scans of two young Neanderthals, hardly a sampling representative of a human species.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe researchers suggest that a modern human specific process of brain 'globularization' is critical to the development of neuronal circuits producing our cognitive abilities. From this is must be inferred that Neanderthals could not have had cognitive abilities that were comparable to modern humans.
I'd find this argument a bit more convincing if the researchers had shown that specific structural regions of the brains of Neanderthals and modern humans were distinguishable.
As it is, in my opinion these researchers have failed to achieve their apparent objective of demonstrating that Neanderthals weren't as intelligent as they are.
I expect head shape doesn't make that much difference. The wiring of babies' brains is incredibly flexible. The nobility of one of the Central American empires (I forget which one) used to wrap their heads from infancy to create what might be called a Neanderthal shape. Myself, I've got a head that's both elongated and globular, so what would that make me (other than very frustrated when shopping for hats)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyway, as for the "not great scholars" perception, the difference in lifestyle between Americans and bushmen is far greater than the difference in lifestyle between Neanderthals and their contemporary humans. Technological backwardness doesn't indicate a lack of innate ability.
Is there a correlation between brain shape and length and size of nasal tract in modern humans?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNeamderthals had bigger noses than humans. If their senses were integrated more with a sense of smell corresponding to their bigger noses - is this something that modern human babies lose with age whereas it might be maintained in Neanderthals and used for tracking, hunting and social bonding (i.e. a more animalistic tendency)rather than speech.
A spherical brain might shorten the synesthetic connectivity required for speech and reduce heat loss in the ice ages in which modern humans apparently demonstrated artistic and protolinguistic abilities.
So requiring complex and rapid blood flow in diffuse regions of the brain in a very cold climate.
The nose of Neanderthals preventing heat loss from their brain and a retention of olfactory abilities in their colder northern habitat.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeter Reynolds
This ties in with the recent discovery (from teeth growth patterns) that Neanderthals reach adulthood in only 8 years, while humans take twice as long. It is actually humans and not Neanderthals that exhibit peculiar brain development. It takes humans 12 years to become adolescents, 16 years to become young adults, and 20 years before they can make full use of their brains. Why should it take that long? The Neanderthal development pattern would seem to make more sense especially since life expectancy then would have been about 40 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suspect that it is something to do with learning of abstract concepts and language in particular. The human brain is being wired up to handle language and abstract concepts during childhood development, and I suspect this is why human development takes so long. It has been shown from studies of feral children that if children are deprived of language input between the ages of 2 to 6 years of age, they are subsequently limited in their ability to learn complex language(this is similar to children who are born blind at birth and have their eyesight restored, but cannot see properly because the part of the brain processing visual images hasn't has the correct neural connections made, but involves language processing capability). After six years other similar learning processes seem to be wired in, culminating in the ability of humans to use their full mental capabilities only at 20 years of age. This is what explains children's remarkable capacity for learning languages, which adults cannot match.
I suspect this is a key difference between Neanderthals and humans - the ability of the human brain to accommodate learning of complex abstract concepts in a way that is hard wired into human brains. It may well be that Dolphins and Neanderthals both are as intelligent as us - both have slightly larger brains than our own. However it may be our brains' ability in hardwire complex abstract concepts and associations into it's structure in the same way as is done for visual processing, that gives us the ability to build on what others before us have done, and give us a kind of collaborative super-intelligence that led to the complex symbolic concepts in language, music, culture, art, mathematics, science, law etc. that defines humans. That is the reason we have gone from living in a primitive hunter gather lifestyle, to landing on the moon, to sending the first object to leave our solar system, in a mere 70,000 years.