ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
A neurochemical hypothesis for the origin of hominids.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 78 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Interspecies Organoids Reveal Human-Specific Molecular Features of Dopaminergic Neuron Development and Vulnerability.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Distribution of Serotonergic Transporter Innervation in the Nucleus Accumbens and Ventral Pallidum Is Highly Conserved Among Primates.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
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- Inhibitory Systems in Brain Evolution: Pathways of Vulnerability in Neurodevelopmental Disorders.Brain, behavior and evolution · 2025Review
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- Parkinson's Disease: Cells Succumbing to Lifelong Dopamine-Related Oxidative Stress and Other Bioenergetic Challenges.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Depression in adolescence and young adulthood: the difficulty to integrate motivational/emotional systems.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- An energy costly architecture of neuromodulators for human brain evolution and cognition.Science advances · 2023Article
- Hedonic eating, obesity, and addiction result from increased neuropeptide Y in the nucleus accumbens during human brain evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Striatonigrostriatal connectivity-based cross-species parcellation of human and macaque substantia nigra.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Review
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Chimpanzee Extraversion scores vary with epigenetic modification of dopamine receptor gene D2 (Epigenetics · 2022Article
- Neuropeptide Y modulates excitatory synaptic transmission and promotes social behavior in the mouse nucleus accumbens.Neuropharmacology · 2022Article
- Molecular and cellular evolution of the primate dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Humanized substitutions ofiScience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
It has always been difficult to account for the evolution of certain human characters such as language, empathy, and altruism via individual reproductive success. However, the striatum, a subcortical region originally thought to be exclusively motor, is now known to contribute to social behaviors and "personality styles" that may link such complexities with natural selection. We here report that the human striatum exhibits a unique neurochemical profile that differs dramatically from those of other primates. The human signature of elevated striatal dopamine, serotonin, and neuropeptide Y, coupled with lowered acetylcholine, systematically favors externally driven behavior and greatly amplifies sensitivity to social cues that promote social conformity, empathy, and altruism. We propose that selection induced an initial form of this profile in early hominids, which increased their affiliative behavior, and that this shift either preceded or accompanied the adoption of bipedality and elimination of the sectorial canine. We further hypothesize that these changes were critical for increased individual fitness and promoted the adoption of social monogamy, which progressively increased cooperation as well as a dependence on tradition-based cultural transmission. These eventually facilitated the acquisition of language by elevating the reproductive advantage afforded those most sensitive to social cues.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.