Early Humans’ Brains Were More Apelike than Modern

Researchers mount a cranium from Dmanisi, Georgia, for synchrotron tomography at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.

Paul Tafforeau, ESRF

In the mid-1990s, University of Zurich paleoanthropologists Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer started developing techniques to analyze the inner surface of skulls and infer the brain structures of fossilized hominins. Nowadays, they use computed tomography and MRI to evaluate the imprint, which they call an endocast, that a brain leaves on the internal cranial vault. 

In the new study, Ponce de León, Zollikofer, and colleagues analyzed for the first time the endocasts of five Homo erectus fossils found in Dmanisi, Georgia, in Western Asia. The fossils date to as early as 1.8 million years ago and are thought to be some of the first Homo individuals to leave Africa. The researchers also studied endocasts from fossilized remains of hominins ranging from 2.03 million to 70,000 years old from Africa, Europe, and other parts of Asia, and those of modern humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.

Even if you have kind of an ancestral brain, that doesn’t mean that you are incapable of doing interesting things like venturing out of Africa, caring for elderly people, exploiting meat resources, et cetera.

—Christoph Zollikofer, University of Zurich

“The prevailing idea up to now was that human-like brains evolved at the very beginning of our own genus Homo, so probably two million years ago or even earlier,” Zollikofer says. But the researchers found that some of the earliest representatives of the genus Homo—both from Africa and the samples from Dmanisi that were older than 1.7 million years—had brains that were much more similar to those of the australopithecines, the mostly bipedal early hominins such as Lucy, or to modern great apes, in terms of size and organization. “There’s not much similarity with modern human brains,” Zollikofer adds.

By comparing the position of the coronal suture—a part of the skull where the bones knit together—and impressions in the skulls from a groove on the surface of the brain called the precentral sulcus, the researchers were able to narrow down the time range within which modern brain structures evolved to between 1.7 million and 1.5 million years ago. “Even if you have kind of an ancestral brain, that doesn’t mean that you are incapable of doing interesting things like venturing out of Africa, caring for elderly people, exploiting meat resources, et cetera,” says Zollikofer.

In contrast, Homo specimens younger than 1.5 million years from Africa and all Southeast Asian H. erectus remains, ranging in age from about 70,000 to 1.49 million years old, had more human-like brains.

Virtually filling the brain cases of the skulls of early Homo from Dmanisi, Georgia, (left, approximately 1.77 million years old) and Sangiran, Indonesia, (right, approximately 1.3 million years old) allows researchers to make inferences about brain organization (blue).

M. Ponce de León and C. Zollikofer, University of Zurich

“In their new paper Marcia Ponce de León and her colleagues reinforce this idea of late brain reorganization and argue that even early representatives of the human genus have an apelike organization of the prefrontal cortex,” writes Philipp Gunz, a biological anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and leader of the A. afarensis study with Falk last year, in an email to The Scientist. “The implication of these studies is that important aspects of brain reorganization evolved much later in the course of hominin evolution than previously thought.” 

M.S. Ponce de León et al., “The primitive brain of early Homo,” Science, doi:10.1126/science.aaz0032, 2021.