Chimp vs. human brain; big lipid difference (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 09, 2015, 02:00 (3427 days ago) @ David Turell

The chimp brain in the neo-cortex has one-third as many lipid types as in human brains:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fats-in-the-brain-may-help-explain-how-human-intelligence-evolved/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20150708-"The team discovered that the levels of various lipids found in human brain samples, especially from the neocortex, stood out. Humans and chimps diverged from their common ancestor around the same time, according to much evolutionary evidence. Because the two species have had about the same amount of time to rack up changes to their lipid profiles, the investigators expected them to have roughly the same number of species-specific lipid concentrations, explains computational biologist and study leader Kasia Bozek of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Indeed, lipid changes in the cerebellum, a primitive part of the brain similar in all vertebrates, were comparable between humans and chimps. But the human neocortex has accumulated about three times more lipid changes than the chimpanzee cortex has since we split from our common ancestor.-"The results suggest that as human cognition evolved, the types and amounts of fat in key brain areas were rapidly shifting and mutating—and this growth was crucial to the development of our complex abilities."