Brain Evolution News

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗘𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 𝗶𝗻 𝗕𝗶𝗹𝗯𝗮𝗼.
To bring together evolutionary, developmental and systems perspectives and to rethink where the field is going next.
June 15–17, 2026 Spain
#CorticalEvolution2026

Importantly, cortical evolution is not just about the past.
Many vulnerabilities of the human brain, from developmental disorders to psychiatric disease, may be inseparable from the evolutionary trajectories that shaped cortical expansion and complexity.

We now describe the cortex in extraordinary detail:
cell types, layers, gene expression, developmental programs.
Yet description alone doesn’t explain why the cortex is built the way it is — or why evolution took such different paths in different lineages.
#CorticalEvolution2026

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗻𝗼𝘄?
Because many of the biggest open questions in neuroscience still revolve around the cerebral cortex — how it emerged, expanded, diversified, and why it differs so much across species.
#CorticalEvolution2026

Fig 2 Top: digital reconstructions of the skulls of (A) American White Ibis (Eudocimus albus skull ROM112456), and (B) Apteribis sp. (USNMPAL377837), with azure circle highlighting the orbit and green segment highlighting the optic foramen. Bottom: endocasts of (C) Roseate Spoonbill (Platalea ajaja), (D) Apteribis sp., (E) Hadada Ibis (Bostrychia hagedash), (F) Sharp-tailed Ibis (Cercibis oxycerca), (G) American White Ibis (Eudocimus albus), (H) Northern Bald Ibis (Geronticus eremita), (I) Madagascar Ibis (Lophotibis cristata), (J) Green Ibis (Mesembrinibis cayennensis), (K) Crested Ibis (Nipponia nippon), (L) Bare-faced Ibis (Phimosus infuscatus), (M) White-faced Ibis (Plegadis chihi), (N) Red-naped Ibis (Pseudibis papillosa), (O) Black-faced Ibis (Theristicus melanopis), and (P) Straw-necked Ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis). The green-marked brain region highlights the optic lobe. Note the reduced optic system of Apteribis for all three traits: orbits, optic foramen, and optic lobes.

" This study provides the first quantitative evidence for the evolution of a kiwi-like niche for a #bird outside New Zealand, and emphasizes the remarkable diversity of #avian lifestyles lost due to #anthropogenic impact..."
ICB's
Sara Citron et al
doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

CORTICAL EVOLUTION CONFERENCE June 15-17, 2026 Organizers: Verónica Martínez Cerdeño, Fernando García Moreno, Elena Vecino, and Stephen Noctor. https://ventricular.org/corticalevolution26/ Topic: The Cortical Evolution symposium will promote the dissemination of novel ideas and concepts to shed light on evolution of the mammalian cerebral cortex. The goal of this conference is to further our understanding of factors involved in cortical evolution that are relevant for human brain function under normal and pathological conditions. Experts from prestigious research universities in the Americas, Europe, and Africa will present their most recent findings at the meeting. 150 faculty, students, and interested parties are expected. Attendees will have the opportunity to present their work in poster format, and six abstract submissions will be selected for a short oral presentation. The meeting will be organized into topical 5 sessions: Cortical Development Cortical Evolution Evolution of Cellular Types Evolution of Cortex and Behavior Paleoanthropology

CORTICAL EVOLUTION CONFERENCE
June 15-17, 2026
Organizers: Verónica Martínez Cerdeño, Fernando García Moreno, Elena Vecino, and Stephen Noctor.
ventricular.org/corticalevol...

Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals | Quanta Magazine Complex neural circuits likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

“A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,” said Onur Güntürkün, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “How is it possible?”

A wide format photo of a small multicoloured parrot, a species known as a mulga parrot, perched at the end of a long branch with the background blurred. At the top of the image it says: "Why study bird brains?"

Anyone in the #Lethbridge area, I will be giving a public talk this week to address the question I get the most: Why study bird brains? I will discuss how studying bird brains led to some major discoveries and helps us understand bird behaviour.
#yql #birds #Alberta
www.sacpa.ca/why-study-bi...

🤩 Join us for the next TIBBE seminar:
Comparative databasing
January 28, 3–4pm UTC

This event hosts an outstanding neuroscientist & biologist particularly interested in insect brains who will present his work, followed by an interactive discussion with the audience: www.crowdcast.io/c/comparativ...

Stanley Heinz on comparing insect connectomes

Stanley Heinz explains the amazing comparative database insectbraindb.org

Behavior without synapses - Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience What a brainless animal can teach us about behavioral control Trichoplax adhaerens (*) (*) (C) Oliver Voigt.  Arjen Boender, a Ramon y Cajal Fellow and IKERBASQUE researcher of the Laboratory of Compa...

What a #brainless animal can teach us about behavioral control

#ikerbasque @zubsaila.bsky.social

www.achucarro.org/news/2026-01...

A new study shows that gut microbes from large-brained primates can boost brain activity and learning pathways. This suggests our microbiome may have helped shape human intelligence through evolution. 🧪

#LifeScience #GutHealth #Research #Neuroscience

Ending my explainer 🧵 with a huge thank you to fab team of authors Barbara Molz, Mikel Lana Alberro, Else Eising, Dick Schijven, @gokberkalagoz.bsky.social, & @clydefrancks.bsky.social, as well as amazing @ukbiobank.bsky.social initiative, without which none of this research would be possible. 16/16

We conclude our paper with some recommendations for future work in this area, including the need to broaden ancestral diversity in biobanking efforts & to develop methods that can better tease apart how multiple evolutionary changes with modest effect sizes interact to shape human biology. 15/n

A catalog of single nucleotide changes distinguishing modern humans from archaic hominins - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - A catalog of single nucleotide changes distinguishing modern humans from archaic hominins

Our findings resonate with important prior work by @kuhlwilm.bsky.social & @cedricboeckx.bsky.social which argued that evolution of human-specific traits involved cumulative changes across gene networks, encompassing not only fixed sites but also variants at high frequency in present-day humans.14/n

Such approaches will likely never have enough power for systematic “phenome-wide” scans of archaic variant effects across every available trait. Plus, population biobanks seldom collect info on some of the most pertinent traits for understanding human origins e.g. measures of language skills. 13/n

Some key caveats. Even if a biobank includes half a million people, rarity of individuals with archaic variants can limit sample size, preclude formal statistical analyses & make it hard to exclude more moderate effects. Meta-analyses across biobanks & normative modeling may help resolve this...12/n

A substantial proportion of people with archaic TKTL1 had college/university degrees, arguing against big impacts on cognition. The results show that the sometimes dramatic effects seen in lab-based experiments on evolutionary variants may not be a guide to real-world impacts in living humans. 11/n

62 people in UK Biobank have archaic TKTL1. 16 are male & (since TKTL1 is on chromosome X) completely lack the human-specific allele. With available neuroimaging data, we looked for effects of carrying archaic TKTL1 on frontal brain structure. No extreme differences were detected even in males. 10/n

Human TKTL1 implies greater neurogenesis in frontal neocortex of modern humans than Neanderthals Neocortical neurogenesis in modern humans differs from that likely to have been observed in Neanderthals, yielding more cortical neurons.

We also studied a variant of special interest in the TKTL1 gene. Big effects in animal models, gene-edited organoids & human fetal brain knockouts had led to the idea that the human TKTL1 variant enhanced generation of neurons in frontal brain & so influenced our cognitive/behavioural evolution. 9/n

We zeroed in on one of the variants with largest number of carriers; in SSH2, a gene linked to development of brain cells, among other functions. Examining a range of pre-selected health, psychiatric & cognitive traits in 19 unrelated carriers, we saw no clear consequence of having archaic SSH2. 8/n

On screening exomes of ~455k people in @ukbiobank.bsky.social, a population resource of healthy adults in the UK, we found that for many supposedly fixed evolutionary changes in protein coding (17 of 37 that could be tested) at least a few living individuals had the archaic version of the gene. 7/n

Research suggests DNA variants with relatively recent origins in our evolution may be especially relevant for health outcomes. Scanning hundreds of thousands of people in a biobank, we can identify individuals with very rare archaic alleles & directly observe real-world effects in living humans. 6/n

Still, it remains challenging to evaluate the roles individual human-specific DNA changes played (if any) in our evolutionary story. To complement experimental lab-based studies, we sought insights from an alternative source: searching large-scale biobanks for people who carry archaic variants. 5/n

Since proteins make up much of the molecular machinery of cells, with diverse roles in development & functions of our bodies, the protein-coding evolutionary changes became a big focus of research e.g. by “humanizing” animal models or inserting archaic alleles into human tissue grown in the lab. 4/n

The Human Condition—A Molecular Approach Research into when and where modern humans originated and how they differ from, and interacted with, other now-extinct forms of human has so far been the realm of archaeologists and paleoanthropologis...

This paleogenomic breakthrough uncovered thousands of derived DNA changes that had apparently spread to become “fixed” (i.e. unvarying) in modern humans after separation from ancestor of Neanderthals & Denisovans. Fewer than a hundred were substitutions predicted to alter structures of proteins. 3/n

The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains - Nature A complete genome sequence is presented of a female Neanderthal from Siberia, providing information about interbreeding between close relatives and uncovering gene flow events among Neanderthals, Deni...

It’s over a decade since a virtually complete Neanderthal genome sequence was first reported. Living humans aren’t direct descendants of Neanderthals but we shared a common ancestor ~600kya. Comparing modern/archaic genomes => catalogues of all the DNA changes that arose uniquely on our lineage. 2/n

Evaluating the effects of archaic protein-altering variants in living human adults Promise and pitfalls of using large biobanks to study impacts of archaic protein-coding variants in living humans.

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪
Explainer🧵👇1/n

Model organisms promise insights into the human brain only if they’re representative. This new paper argues that convenience-driven choices weaken extrapolation in neuroscience, and highlights growing calls for comparative, evolution-informed approaches. link.springer.com/article/10.1...