"Language-related neural specialisation in humans likely evolved through gradual strengthening of a pre-existing connection rather than arising de novo." Important conclusion from state-of-the-art neuroimaging in wild & captive chimpanzees by @ybecker.bsky.social, @alfredanwander.bsky.social & co.👇🧪

New paper alert 📢
Long arcuate fascicle in chimpanzees: found in postmortem chimpanzee brains (from @taichimpproject.bsky.social amongst others) from naturally diceased chimps. A potential structural precursor of the language network. Thanks to a great team.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#Evolution of #language revisited: Long arcuate fascicle was found in #chimpanzees using high-resolution diffusion MRI #tractography of animals that died naturally in the jungle.
Now in Nature Comm: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@ybecker.bsky.social @mpicbs.bsky.social @taichimpproject.bsky.social

🚨PAPER ALERT Chimpanzees expand the meanings of their single calls when combining them. They use a variety of mechanisms, analogous to those found in human language, to alter the meanings of single calls in their combinations. Photo by @lirsamuni.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Exciting! @evfedorenko.bsky.social and coll. @natureportfolio.bsky.social (NatRevNeurosci)'s piece functionally separated a core lang network from a percept.-motor network (+others);
and asked for an evo perspective!
Here we go: s.gwdg.de/WUPS8h
(together with A.D. Friederici)

Hey Arcuate freaks and geeks!

I first contacted Erin in 2019. I was working on my PhD in France on communication correlates of homologous language regions in primates. But what about their interconnections?

The article: rdcu.be/eifzU

Hello bluesky. I just migrated from x.com/AlfredAnwander