Rapid Evolution of the Cerebellum in Humans and Other Great Apes
Rapid Evolution of the Cerebellum in Humans and Other Great Apes
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cub.2014.08.056
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发表时间：
2014-10-20
期刊：
影响因子：
9.2
通讯作者：
Venditti, Chris
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Barton, Robert A.;Venditti, Chris
人类独特的认知能力通常归因于一个大大扩展的新皮层，它被描述为“进化的最高成就和人类智力的生物基质”[1]。然而，人类小脑包含的神经元是新皮层的四倍[2]，并且因其广泛的认知功能而引起越来越多的关注。使用一种方法来检测进化速率的变化沿着分支的系统发育树，我们表明，小脑经历了快速的大小增加，在整个进化的猿，包括人类，扩大显着快于预测的变化，在新皮层的大小。因此，人类和其他猿类明显偏离了新皮层和小脑同步变化的一般进化趋势，与其他灵长类相比，小脑相对于新皮层的大小明显更大。这些结果表明，小脑的专门化是人类大脑进化的一个重要组成部分，比迄今为止所认识的要重要得多，技术智力在人类认知进化中可能至少与社会智力一样重要。考虑到小脑在感觉运动控制和学习复杂动作序列中的作用，小脑的专门化可能支持了人类先进技术能力的进化，而这反过来又可能是语言的预适应。
Humans' unique cognitive abilities are usually attributed to a greatly expanded neocortex, which has been described as "the crowning achievement of evolution and the biological substrate of human mental prowess" [1]. The human cerebellum, however, contains four times more neurons than the neocortex [2] and is attracting increasing attention for its wide range of cognitive functions. Using a method for detecting evolutionary rate changes along the branches of phylogenetic trees, we show that the cerebellum underwent rapid size increase throughout the evolution of apes, including humans, expanding significantly faster than predicted by the change in neocortex size. As a result, humans and other apes deviated significantly from the general evolutionary trend for neocortex and cerebellum to change in tandem, having significantly larger cerebella relative to neocortex size than other anthropoid primates. These results suggest that cerebellar specialization was a far more important component of human brain evolution than hitherto recognized and that technical intelligence was likely to have been at least as important as social intelligence in human cognitive evolution. Given the role of the cerebellum in sensory-motor control and in learning complex action sequences, cerebellar specialization is likely to have underpinned the evolution of humans' advanced technological capacities, which in turn may have been a preadaptation for language.