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Fossil Primate Endocasts: Perspectives from Advanced Imaging Techniques

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Digital Endocasts

Part of the book series: Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans Series ((RNMH))

Abstract

Compared to their putative insectivore-like ancestors, extant primates show an enlarged brain relative to body weight, a larger neocortex and proportionally decreased olfactory bulbs. Besides hypotheses based on the comparative neuroanatomy of extant taxa, the only direct evidence documenting such long-term evolutionary history is provided by fossil endocasts. However, due to the unpredictable yet unavoidable impact of taphonomic processes, the reliability of data from the fossil record is complicated by the nature of the investigated structures themselves. Nonetheless, palaeoneurology has recently enlarged its traditional investigative toolkit by integrating descriptive morphology with advanced methods of high-resolution 3D imaging and computing. In addition to the development of digital restoration techniques, the introduction of analytical methods for investigating topographic differences in morphostructural organization and quantitatively characterizing intra- and interspecific variation patterns provides new possibilities for the study of the primate fossil record, especially for assessing brain evolutionary tracks.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors E. Bruner, N. Ogihara and H. Tanabe for their kind invitation to contribute this volume. We are indebted to J. Cuisin (Paris), G. Fleury (Toulouse), S. Potze (Pretoria), W. Wendelen (Tervuren) and B. Zipfel (Johannesburg) for having granted access to fossil and comparative materials under their care from the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History (Pretoria), the Musée d’Histoire naturelle in Toulouse, the Musée national d’Histoire naturelle (Paris), the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg). We also thank K. Carlson and T. Jashashvili (Johannesburg), G. Clément and M. Garcia-Sanz (Paris), B. Duployer and C. Tenailleau (Toulouse), L. Bam, F. de Beer and J. Hoffman (Pretoria) for microtomographic acquisitions performed at the Accès Scientifique à la Tomographie à Rayons-X (AST-RX) imagery platform set at the Musée national d’Histoire naturelle (Paris), at the French Research Federation FERMaT (Toulouse), at the Palaeosciences Centre of the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and at the South African Nuclear Corporation (Pelindaba). For scientific contribution and/or discussion and comments to the results summarized in this study, we are especially grateful to J. Braga (Toulouse), L. Bruxelles (Toulouse), M. Cazenave (Pretoria), E. Delson (New York), J. Dumoncel (Toulouse), S. Durrleman (Paris), D. Ginibriere (Toulouse), J. Heaton (Birmingham), R. Holgate (Pretoria), N. Jablonski (University Park), J.P. Jessel (Toulouse), O. Kullmer (Frankfurt), R. Macchiarelli (Poitiers & Paris), M. Nakatsukasa (Kyoto), L. Pan (Toulouse), G. Subsol (Montpellier), D. Stratford (Johannesburg), J.F. Thackeray (Johannesburg) and C. Zanolli (Toulouse). The French research federation FERMaT (FR3089), the National Research Foundation (NRF) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) of South Africa are acknowledged for providing micro-X-ray tomography laboratory facilities. This work was granted access to the HPC resources of CALMIP supercomputing centre under the allocation 2015-[P1440] attributed to the laboratory AMIS (Toulouse). Research is supported by the Centre of Research and Higher Education (PRES) of Toulouse, the Midi-Pyrénées Region and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Amélie Beaudet

  2. Department of Anatomy, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Amélie Beaudet

  3. Department of African Zoology, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium

    Emmanuel Gilissen

  4. Laboratory of Histology and Neuropathology, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Emmanuel Gilissen

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  1. Amélie Beaudet
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Correspondence to Amélie Beaudet .

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  1. CENIEH, Burgos, Spain

    Emiliano Bruner

  2. Keio University, Yokohama, Japan

    Naomichi Ogihara

  3. Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Hiroki C. Tanabe

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Beaudet, A., Gilissen, E. (2018). Fossil Primate Endocasts: Perspectives from Advanced Imaging Techniques. In: Bruner, E., Ogihara, N., Tanabe, H. (eds) Digital Endocasts. Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans Series. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56582-6_4

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