ArticleNature ecology & evolution2024
The evolution of human altriciality and brain development in comparative context.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Human-specific morphoregulatory signatures in basal radial glia characterise neocortex evolution.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Humans are not unique: difficult birth is common in placental mammals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Evolutionary Background of Precise Vocal-Respiratory Temporal Coordination in Human Infants.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Article
- Reading hominin life history in fossil bones and teeth: methods to test hypotheses regarding its evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Seasonal surge for mental health demand in the emergency department of Eradah complex for mental health in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia: a retrospective study.The Journal of the Egyptian Public Health Association · 2026Article
- Multi-organ AI endophenotypes chart the heterogeneity of brain, eye and heart pan-disease.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- Complex and diverse patterns of neurocranial development in Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Homo.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Human amygdala nuclei show distinct developmental trajectories from adolescence to adulthood in functional integration with prefrontal circuitry.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Cooperative Breeding as a Likely Early Catalyst of Human Evolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Altricial brains and the evolution of infant vocal learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The emergence of genetic variants linked to brain and cognitive traits in human evolution.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Phylogenetically informed predictions outperform predictive equations in real and simulated data.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Revisiting "Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Longevity" 2003 AJHB https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.10156.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Postnatal dependency as the foundation of social learning in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Inferring the Selective History of CNVs Using a Maximum Likelihood Model.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Expression of synaptic proteins and development of dendritic spines in fetal and postnatal neocortex of the pig, the European wild boar Sus scrofa.Brain structure & function · 2025Article
- Gradual exacerbation of obstetric constraints during hominoid evolution implied by re-evaluation of cephalopelvic fit in chimpanzees.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Human newborns are considered altricial compared with other primates because they are relatively underdeveloped at birth. However, in a broader comparative context, other mammals are more altricial than humans. It has been proposed that altricial development evolved secondarily in humans due to obstetrical or metabolic constraints, and in association with increased brain plasticity. To explore this association, we used comparative data from 140 placental mammals to measure how altriciality evolved in humans and other species. We also estimated how changes in brain size and gestation length influenced the timing of neurodevelopment during hominin evolution. Based on our data, humans show the highest evolutionary rate to become more altricial (measured as the proportion of adult brain size at birth) across all placental mammals, but this results primarily from the pronounced postnatal enlargement of brain size rather than neonatal changes. In addition, we show that only a small number of neurodevelopmental events were shifted to the postnatal period during hominin evolution, and that they were primarily related to the myelination of certain brain pathways. These results indicate that the perception of human altriciality is mostly driven by postnatal changes, and they point to a possible association between the timing of myelination and human neuroplasticity.
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