26.11.2024 - Paola Cerrito

Humans stand out from their closest living relatives, the great apes, in several aspects, including high reproductive frequency and dependance on shared infant care, marked prosociality, and a communication system that marks us to the point that J. Lacan defined humans as parlêtre – a crasis between the French parler and être. Others have previously proposed that these three aspects entertain with each other causal relationships. My work builds on this hypothesis and: 1) takes a comparative approach across primates to verify the co-evolution between shared infant care and neuroanatomical structures facilitating non-verbal communication, which is what human infants rely on, and which sets a common ground for language acquisition; 2) takes an evolutionary approach to investigate when, and in conjunction with which social behaviors, humans evolved such early weaning and high reproductive frequency, which requires shared infant care to be sustainable. Essentially, my work tries to better understand how reproductive physiology and sociality co-evolved during human evolution, and what are the neuroanatomical structures and neurodevelopmental trajectories that form the basis upon which language can emerge. I will be talking about a bit of work carried out in both of these areas, as well as provide an outlook for future research directions.