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CARTA: Hominin Paleoneurology During the Stone Age - and Before! with Dean Falk
Tuesday, 17 March, 2026
The distinct biology of the human brain, scaffolded by language and culture, allows ideas to be formed, named, shared, and accumulated across generations. Dean Falk, Professor of Anthropology, Florida State University, explains how paleoneurologists study the brains of human ancestors by producing endocasts from fossilized skulls and measuring cranial capacities. Dated skulls indicate brain size more than tripled in hominins during the Stone Age that began around 3.5 million years ago, while endocasts can also preserve traces of blood vessels and convolutions, even though sulci are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. Falk describes how sulcal patterns differ most noticeably between great apes and humans in the lateral prefrontal cortex and in the parieto-occipital association cortices, and she addresses long-running debate about whether the lunate sulcus in evolving hominins marked the anterior border of primary visual cortex as it does in living monkeys and apes. Because few fossils exist from the earlier “Botanic Age,” she outlines how comparative primatology and evolutionary developmental biology can extend the study of brain evolution by considering brain development and locomotion, including bipedalism. She applies this extended paleoneurological synthesis with special attention to auditory entrainment and complex grammatical language. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 41328]
