A Comparative Approach to Study the Evolution of Human Brain Speech/Language Areas in Old World Monkeys and Great Apes

该项目的目标是融合神经生物学和人类学中包含的知识和方法论方法，并以新的方式看待一个老问题，即灵长类动物和早期人类进化过程中人类语音/语言及其神经基质的起源。 目前的假设是，构成人类独特的声音-听觉交流形式的大脑机制的进化基底已经存在于我们与旧大陆猴子的共同祖先中，如果不是更早的话。 此外，当早期人类祖先从长期存在的灵长类动物的领土包容模式转变为在高要求，认知和交流的新环境中广泛分布的两足动物时，这种基础神经子结构被纳入并进一步阐述。 该项目将使用两种现代神经生物学技术，1）磁共振成像与三维，定量，计算机化图像分析，以解决与人类大脑语言区同源的大型猿和猴大脑皮层区域的总体解剖学半球间不对称的突出问题;和2）定量免疫细胞化学以确定，在猕猴中，是否有一个不对称分布的各种大脑化学物质在这些大脑区域，将提供支持的假设，已经建立了半球功能专业化。

The objective of this project is to meld the intellectual and methodological approaches contained within neurobiology and anthropology and arrive at a new way of looking at an old problem, the origin of human speech/language and its neural substrate, during primate and early human evolution. The working hypothesis is that the evolutionary substrate for brain mechanisms which underlie the unique human form of vocal-auditory communication was already present in our common ancestor with Old World monkeys if not much earlier. Further, that this basal neural substructure was incorporated and further elaborated, when early human ancestors changed from the long-standing primate pattern of territorial containment to become wide ranging bipeds in a highly demanding, cognitive and communicative novel environment. This project will use two modern neurobiologic techniques, 1) Magnetic Resonance Imaging with 3-D, quantitative, computerized image analysis, to address outstanding issues of gross anatomic interhemispheric asymmetries in regions of great ape and monkey cerebral cortex that are homologous to human brain language areas; and 2) Quantitative Immunocytochemistry to determine, in macaques, whether there is an asymmetric distribution of various brain chemicals in these brain regions that would lend support to the hypothesis of already well established hemispheric functional specialization.