Amelie Beaudet

Early hominin brain evolution: what can fossil endocasts tell us?

Abstract

Because of its crucial role in the organism-environment interactions, the brain represents a key-element for understanding human evolution. Despite substantial development in paleogenetics and crucial discoveries in paleoanthropology, a number of questions about the mode and the chronology of the emergence of developmental, structural and functional traits in the human brain remain to be resolved. The endocast (i.e., replica of the inner surface of the braincase) represents the only direct evidence of the cerebral condition in fossil hominins. In this context, a number of methodological barriers limit our understanding of the evolution of brain shape and organization in the hominin lineage. In this talk I present a comprehensive approach that integrates extant human variation and evidence from the African fossil record, as well as newly developed methods in imaging techniques, that aims to provide new insights into the evolutionary history of the human brain.

Bio

Amélie started her research on the African fossil record within the frame of my PhD at the University of Toulouse (France) in 2012 that focused on the study of nonhominin primates that coexisted with hominins during the Plio-Pleistocene transition in Africa. During her postdoctoral contract at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) in 2016 funded by the Erasmus program AESOP+, she developed a particular interest in the hominin brain evolutionary history. Subsequently, she was granted funding from the Claude Leon Foundation and the Center of Excellence in Palaeosciences to study the fossil hominin assemblage from the site of Sterkfontein as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) from 2017 to 2020. She joined the University of Cambridge as a lecturer in 2020.