期刊
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
卷 113, 期 34, 页码 9617-9622出版社
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1610178113
关键词
cortical expansion; evolution; number of neurons; primate; prefrontal cortex
资金
- National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq)
- Research Support Foundation of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ)
- Ministry of Science and Technology/National Institutes of Science and Technology (MCT/INCT)
- James McDonnell Foundation
- Mathers Foundation
Human evolution is widely thought to have involved a particular expansion of prefrontal cortex. This popular notion has recently been challenged, although controversies remain. Here we show that the prefrontal region of both human and nonhuman primates holds about 8% of cortical neurons, with no clear difference across humans and other primates in the distribution of cortical neurons or white matter cells along the anteroposterior axis. Further, we find that the volumes of human prefrontal gray and white matter match the expected volumes for the number of neurons in the gray matter and for the number of other cells in the white matter compared with other primate species. These results indicate that prefrontal cortical expansion in human evolution happened along the same allometric trajectory as for other primate species, without modification of the distribution of neurons across its surface or of the volume of the underlying white matter. We thus propose that the most distinctive feature of the human prefrontal cortex is its absolute number of neurons, not its relative volume.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据