Background: Humans and other primates have evolved particular morphological and biological traits (e.g., larger brains, slower growth, longer-lived offspring) that distinguish them from most other mammals. The evolution ...

The human brain is often considered to be the most cognitively capable among mammalian brains and to be much larger than expected for a mammal of our body size. Although the number of neurons is generally assumed to be a ...

What makes humans unique? This question has fascinated scientists and philosophers for centuries and it is still a matter of intense debate. Nowadays, human brain expansion during evolution has been acknowledged to explain ...

To identify the evolutionary genetic novelties that contributed to shape human-specific traits such as the use of a complex language, long-term planning and exceptional learning abilities is one of the ultimate frontiers ...

What made us human? Gene expression changes clearly played a significant part in human evolution, but pinpointing the causal regulatory mutations is hard. Comparative genomics enabled the identification of human accelerated ...

The recent finding that the human version of a neurodevelopmental enhancer of the Wnt receptor Frizzled 8 (FZD8) gene alters neural progenitor cell cycle timing and brain size is a step forward to understanding human brain ...

The capacity to learn syntactic rules is a hallmark of the human species, but whether this has been acquired by the process of natural selection has been the subject of controversy. Furthermore, the cortical localization ...

While influential works since the 1970s have widely assumed that imitation is an innate skill in both human and non-human primate neonates, recent empirical studies and meta-analyses have challenged this view, indicating ...