No relative expansion of the number of prefrontal neurons in primate and human evolution
| Autor: | Carolinne C Masseron, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Kleber Neves, Jon H. Kaas, Laila Brito Torres, Mariana Gabi, Lissa Ventura-Antunes, Bruno Mota, Pedro Ribeiro |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
Male Primates Prefrontal Cortex Cell Count White matter 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Species Specificity Relative Volume biology.animal medicine Animals Humans Primate Gray Matter Prefrontal cortex Neurons Multidisciplinary Absolute number biology Cortical neurons Microtomy Biological Sciences Biological Evolution White Matter 030104 developmental biology medicine.anatomical_structure Human evolution Female Neuroscience 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 113(34) |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 |
| Popis: | 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. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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