ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Relaxed genetic control of cortical organization in human brains compared with chimpanzees.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Training-Induced Neural Plasticity in Youth: A Systematic Review of Structural and Functional MRI Studies.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Pooled it
- Morphological and anatomical variations in subcortical anatomy between humans and chimpanzees associated with heritability patterns related to human behavioral traits.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Heritability of gray matter volume and asymmetry in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and their association to cognitive abilities and tool use.Brain structure & function · 2025Article
- The cost of language: functionally over-dominant language circuits in the human brain may limit cognitive abilities and non-verbal executive functions.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Review
- Review
- Glutamate-specific gene linked to human brain evolution enhances synaptic plasticity and cognitive processes.iScience · 2024Article
- The evolution of human altriciality and brain development in comparative context.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Robust estimation of cortical similarity networks from brain MRI.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Comparative physiological anthropogeny: exploring molecular underpinnings of distinctly human phenotypes.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- From fossils to mind.Communications biology · 2023Review
- Onco-Pathogen Mediated Cancer Progression and Associated Signaling Pathways in Cancer Development.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Genetic determinants of individual variation in the superior temporal sulcus of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Functional connectome fingerprinting across the lifespan.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Variability of the Surface Area of the V1, V2, and V3 Maps in a Large Sample of Human Observers.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Sulci 3D mapping from human cranial endocasts: A powerful tool to study hominin brain evolution.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Neuroanatomical asymmetries in nonhuman primates in the homologs to Broca's and Wernicke's areas: a mini-review.Emerging topics in life sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Ultrasonic bone age fractionates cognitive abilities in adolescence.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Heritability in corpus callosum morphology and its association with tool use skill in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Reproducibility in two genetically isolated populations.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2022Article
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4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The study of hominin brain evolution has focused largely on the neocortical expansion and reorganization undergone by humans as inferred from the endocranial fossil record. Comparisons of modern human brains with those of chimpanzees provide an additional line of evidence to define key neural traits that have emerged in human evolution and that underlie our unique behavioral specializations. In an attempt to identify fundamental developmental differences, we have estimated the genetic bases of brain size and cortical organization in chimpanzees and humans by studying phenotypic similarities between individuals with known kinship relationships. We show that, although heritability for brain size and cortical organization is high in chimpanzees, cerebral cortical anatomy is substantially less genetically heritable than brain size in humans, indicating greater plasticity and increased environmental influence on neurodevelopment in our species. This relaxed genetic control on cortical organization is especially marked in association areas and likely is related to underlying microstructural changes in neural circuitry. A major result of increased plasticity is that the development of neural circuits that underlie behavior is shaped by the environmental, social, and cultural context more intensively in humans than in other primate species, thus providing an anatomical basis for behavioral and cognitive evolution.
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