Reconstructing the Neanderthal brain using computational anatomy

Takanori Kochiyama,Hiromasa Suzuki,Markus Bastir,Kunihiro Hasegawa,Christoph P E Zollikofer,Hideki Amano,Norihiro Sadato,Marcia S Ponce De León,Naomichi Ogihara,Chris Stringer,Hiroki C Tanabe,Osamu Kondo,Takeru Akazawa

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-24331-0

Abstract

The present study attempted to reconstruct 3D brain shape of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens based on computational neuroanatomy. We found that early Homo sapiens had relatively larger cerebellar hemispheres but a smaller occipital region in the cerebrum than Neanderthals long before the time that Neanderthals disappeared. Further, using behavioural and structural imaging data of living humans, the abilities such as cognitive flexibility, attention, the language processing, episodic and working memory capacity were positively correlated with size-adjusted cerebellar volume. As the cerebellar hemispheres are structured as a large array of uniform neural modules, a larger cerebellum may possess a larger capacity for cognitive information processing. Such a neuroanatomical difference in the cerebellum may have caused important differences in cognitive and social abilities between the two species and might have contributed to the replacement of Neanderthals by early Homo sapiens.

Highlights

The present study attempted to reconstruct 3D brain shape of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens based on computational neuroanatomy
We reconstructed the brain morphology of each fossil cranium based on computational anatomy image processing techniques
The 3D structure of the brain and endocast were obtained by segmenting 1,185 cranial MRI scans from living humans based on a probabilistic framework using Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) software

Summary

OPEN Reconstructing the Neanderthal brain using computational anatomy

Takanori Kochiyama[1], Naomichi Ogihara[2], Hiroki C. The present study attempted to reconstruct 3D brain shape of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens based on computational neuroanatomy. As the cerebellar hemispheres are structured as a large array of uniform neural modules, a larger cerebellum may possess a larger capacity for cognitive information processing Such a neuroanatomical difference in the cerebellum may have caused important differences in cognitive and social abilities between the two species and might have contributed to the replacement of Neanderthals by early Homo sapiens. We present a detailed virtual reconstruction of the brains of NT and early Homo sapiens (EH) using computational anatomy, in order to infer possible morphological differences in the brain between the two species. We reconstructed the brain morphology of each fossil cranium based on computational anatomy image processing techniques. If we averaged human brain images using the DARTEL algorithm for estimation of the brain morphology, the estimation accuracy was much improved because the estimated brain was less affected by subject-specific sulcal and gyral patterns and better represented overall general structure of the brain (See Methods)

Results and Discussion

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Materials and Methods

Author Contributions

Additional Information