Journal
JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE NEUROLOGY
Volume 520, Issue 13, Pages 3035-3054Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/cne.23118
Keywords
amygdala; comparative neuroanatomy; human evolution; lateral nucleus; ape; stereology
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Funding
- National Science Foundation [BCS-0726240]
- Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
- University of California, San Diego
- Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, The University of California, San Diego
- James S. MacDonnell Foundation [22002078]
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In human and nonhuman primates, the amygdala is known to play critical roles in emotional and social behavior. Anatomically, individual amygdaloid nuclei are connected with many neural systems that are either differentially expanded or conserved over the course of primate evolution. To address amygdala evolution in humans and our closest living relatives, the apes, we used design-based stereological methods to obtain neuron counts for the amygdala and each of four major amygdaloid nuclei (the lateral, basal, accessory basal, and central nuclei) in humans, all great ape species, lesser apes, and one monkey species. Our goal was to determine whether there were significant differences in the number or percent of neurons distributed to individual nuclei among species. Additionally, regression analyses were performed on independent contrast data to determine whether any individual species deviated from allometric trends. There were two major findings. In humans, the lateral nucleus contained the highest number of neurons in the amygdala, whereas in apes the basal nucleus contained the highest number of neurons. Additionally, the human lateral nucleus contained 59% more neurons than predicted by allometric regressions on nonhuman primate data. Based on the largest sample ever analyzed in a comparative study of the hominoid amygdala, our findings suggest that an emphasis on the lateral nucleus is the main characteristic of amygdala specialization over the course of human evolution. J. Comp. Neurol. 520:30353054, 2012. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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