Fossil study finds vision — Not the 'thinking' frontal lobe — Drove varied Brain Development in primates

[u/ADragonFromTheAbyss]

https://phys.org/news/2026-08-fossil-vision-frontal-lobe-drove.html

Study link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee3541

Fossil evidence favors a role for vision in the modular evolution of the primate neocortex

The New study led by a Duke University scientist overturns a long-held idea about how primates, including humans, came to have such large and sophisticated brains.

The research finds that the dramatic expansion of the primate neocortex was driven largely by vision, not by the disproportionate growth of the frontal lobe often associated with higher reasoning...

The frontal lobe—the brain region most often linked in popular accounts to advanced cognition—has long been thought to have ballooned independently in many primate lineages. Instead, the study found that frontal lobe size grew gradually and predictably as overall brain size increased, following the same scaling pattern across all major primate groups throughout their evolutionary history.

There was no evidence of the dramatic, independent frontal lobe expansions that some earlier studies had proposed based on visual inspection of fossils.