Inside the minds of our ancestors: what do fossilized endocrania reveal?

A lecture organized by the Comédie des Neurones.

By Victor Giolland (National Museum of Natural History, Paris).

The brain itself does not fossilize, but the cast of the inside of the skull—the endocranial cast—allows scientists to study its volume, shape, and even the size of its various lobes. This is a tool traditionally used to infer behavior in many extinct species, from mammals to dinosaurs, but it has certain limitations. What can we actually observe in an endocranial cast? To what extent can we interpret the relationship between form and function? What does this reveal about the behavior of our ancestors? It is within the framework of the ANR PaleoBRAIN project that we are attempting to answer all these questions. Thanks to technical advances in 3D imaging, correspondences between the endocranium and the brain in modern humans have been established. This original approach opens up new perspectives for interpreting neurological information from fossil material. The imprint of cerebral sulci, the complexity of the diploic network, and lateralization are all clues that bring us closer to a better understanding of the cognition of extinct hominins. This lecture will provide an overview of the latest advances in this field at the intersection of paleoanthropology and neuroscience.