Tracing three million years of human cognitive evolution: a neuroarchaeology study

Описание: Lithic materials have been used by people for more than 3 million years, and they offer currently the oldest and lengthiest source of information about past minds. In particular, the potential co-evolution of brain areas involved in language and prehistoric stone knapping has been the focus of intense debate in recent years. We present a cognitive archaeology study that used neuroscience methods to explore the brain networks involved in learning to knap. With fMRI we scanned naive participants observing stone knapping hand actions, and spoken syllables, before and after flint knapping training. Through individual analyses, for the first time we found that participants show true overlap in their brain networks for speech and flint knapping observation.Using connectivity analyses we also found corresponding structural changes associated with the knapping training. We could not find separable activation patterns in individual brains for the two tasks, leading us to conclude thatspeech functions co-evolved with tool-making networks. The structural changes due to knapping training could explain why the earliest traces of brain reorganization in our ancestors began 3 million years ago.

MICHAL PARADYSZ, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, UK; NATALIE UOMINI, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, UK AND MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY, GERMANY; LARRY BARHAM, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, UK; RYAN HORSFALL, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, UK; GEORG MEYER, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, UK