Evolution of intelligence
Brain Food: How Did Human Intelligence Evolve?
DOWN FROM THE TREES
As we made our way down from the trees
we were careful. We stayed close to one another.
The grasslands stretched in all directions, and we
felt them pulling us, ineffably, elsewhere.
As we made our way down from the trees
we were careful to pluck with each hand a fig
from the sturdy branches. We didn't know
how the universe might unfold, but we knew
it would bloom from these orbs.
Humans and chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives, share 98.8 percent of their DNA.1 That similarity extends, unsurprisingly, to our brains. At a fundamental level, the resemblance between a human brain and a chimp brain is striking. To put it in perspective: There is more variation between different structures within the human brain than there is between parallel structures across human and chimp brains.
For example, take the cerebellum, a part of the brain involved in coordinating bodily movements, among other things. The molecular structure of a human cerebellum is closer to the molecular structure of a chimp's cerebellum than it is to the molecular structure of a human hippocampus, a separate part of the human brain that processes episodic memories.
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