ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Human frontal lobes are not relatively large.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Fish Welfare in Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS): The Imperative for Environmental Enrichment (EE).Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- RRmorph-a new R package to map phenotypic evolutionary rates and patterns on 3D meshes.Communications biology · 2024Article
- A Comparison of Rapid Rule-Learning Strategies in Humans and Monkeys.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Variation and convergence in the morpho-functional properties of the mammalian neocortex.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2024Review
- Structural connectivity of the multiple demand network in humans and comparison to the macaque brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- A functional account of stimulation-based aerobic glycolysis and its role in interpreting BOLD signal intensity increases in neuroimaging experiments.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Representations and decodability of diverse cognitive functions are preserved across the human cortex, cerebellum, and subcortex.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Multilevel atlas comparisons reveal divergent evolution of the primate brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Cortical Morphology and White Matter Tractography of Three Phylogenetically Distant Primates: Evidence for a Simian Elaboration.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Evolution of prefrontal cortex.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- Diffusion MRI data, sulcal anatomy, and tractography for eight species from the Primate Brain Bank.Brain structure & function · 2021Article
- Evolution, Emotion, and Episodic Engagement.The American journal of psychiatry · 2021Review
- A Common Space Approach to Comparative Neuroscience.Annual review of neuroscience · 2021Article
- An agent-based model clarifies the importance of functional and developmental integration in shaping brain evolution.BMC biology · 2021Article
- The nonhuman primate neuroimaging and neuroanatomy project.NeuroImage · 2021Review
- Cutting across structural and transcriptomic scales translates time across the lifespan in humans and chimpanzees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Length of the Neurogenic Period-A Key Determinant for the Generation of Upper-Layer Neurons During Neocortex Development and Evolution.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2021Review
- Genetic Mechanisms Underlying Cortical Evolution in Mammals.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2021Review
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Abstract
One of the most pervasive assumptions about human brain evolution is that it involved relative enlargement of the frontal lobes. We show that this assumption is without foundation. Analysis of five independent data sets using correctly scaled measures and phylogenetic methods reveals that the size of human frontal lobes, and of specific frontal regions, is as expected relative to the size of other brain structures. Recent claims for relative enlargement of human frontal white matter volume, and for relative enlargement shared by all great apes, seem to be mistaken. Furthermore, using a recently developed method for detecting shifts in evolutionary rates, we find that the rate of change in relative frontal cortex volume along the phylogenetic branch leading to humans was unremarkable and that other branches showed significantly faster rates of change. Although absolute and proportional frontal region size increased rapidly in humans, this change was tightly correlated with corresponding size increases in other areas and whole brain size, and with decreases in frontal neuron densities. The search for the neural basis of human cognitive uniqueness should therefore focus less on the frontal lobes in isolation and more on distributed neural networks.
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