Humans' evolution of big brains and unique cognitive abilities may be down to key regulators that control gene expression during development.
Philipp Khaitovich and Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and their colleagues compared gene-expression patterns in the brains of dozens of humans, chimpanzees and rhesus macaques of different ages. Relative to those of chimps and macaques, human brains showed many more differences in gene-expression patterns as newborns developed into adults, particularly in a region involved in cognition called the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Genes that encode microRNAs, which regulate the activity of many other genes, were among those whose developmental expression patterns varied most between the PFCs of humans and other primates.
The authors suggest that a small number of microRNAs and proteins controlling brain development could have driven the evolution of the human brain.
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How the brain became human. Nature 480, 295 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/480295b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/480295b
