Reconstructing the ups and downs of primate brain evolution: implications for adaptive hypotheses and Homo floresiensis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Brain size is a key adaptive trait. It is often assumed that increasing brain size was a general evolutionary trend in primates, yet recent fossil discoveries have documented brain size decreases in some lineages, raising the question of how general a trend there was for brains to increase in mass over evolutionary time. We present the first systematic phylogenetic analysis designed to answer this question.

Results

We performed ancestral state reconstructions of three traits (absolute brain mass, absolute body mass, relative brain mass) using 37 extant and 23 extinct primate species and three approaches to ancestral state reconstruction: parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian Markov-chain Monte Carlo. Both absolute and relative brain mass generally increased o

SUBMITTER: Montgomery SH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2825212 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature