Nature Neuroscience 9, 1064 - 1070 (2006)
Published online: 23 July 2006; | doi:10.1038/nn1741
Species-specific calls activate homologs of Broca's and Wernicke's areas in the macaqueRicardo Gil-da-Costa1, 2, 3, 4, Alex Martin2, Marco A Lopes1, Monica Muñoz5, Jonathan B Fritz6 &
Allen R Braun11
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA. 2
National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA. 3
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. 4
Program in Biology and Medicine, Gulbenkian Science Institute, Oeiras P-2781-901, Portugal. 5
University College London, Institute of Child Health, London WC1N 3JH, UK. 6
Center for Auditory and Acoustic Research, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Correspondence should be addressed to Allen R Braun brauna@nidcd.nih.gov The origin of brain mechanisms that support human language—whether these originated de novo in humans or evolved from a neural substrate that existed in a common ancestor—remains a controversial issue. Although the answer is not provided by the fossil record, it is possible to make inferences by studying living species of nonhuman primates. Here we identified neural systems associated with perceiving species-specific vocalizations in rhesus macaques using H2
15O positron emission tomography (PET). These vocalizations evoke distinct patterns of brain activity in homologs of the human perisylvian language areas. Rather than resulting from differences in elementary acoustic properties, this activity seems to reflect higher order auditory processing. Although parallel evolution within independent primate species is feasible, this finding suggests the possibility that the last common ancestor of macaques and humans, which lived 25–30 million years ago, possessed key neural mechanisms that were plausible candidates for exaptation during the evolution of language.
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