Spread the word: Abstracts for the 10th annual MPIG meeting hosted by Dr. Jill Pruetz at Iowa State are due Sunday, September 1. Send your abstracts as a Word document to Dr. Julienne Rutherford: ruther4d at uic dot com. Indicate in your email your preference for poster or podium presentation. Abstracts are limited to 275 words. Please use 12 point Arial font (if possible) and format your abstract as follows: Developing the brain: A potential role for the placenta in hominin brain evolution Authors: Julienne Rutherford 1,2,*, Elizabeth Abrams 2, Kate Clancy 3, Victoria DeMartelly 1, Sana Said 2 1 University of Illinois at Chicago, Comparative Primate Biology Laboratory 2 UIC, Department of Anthropology 3 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Anthropology * Of all primates, humans produce the largest-bodied and –brained neonates, relative to maternal size. This suggests that the intrauterine supply of nutrients available to the developing fetus by the placenta has increased or been made more efficiently available in hominins compared to other primates. The monkeys, apes, and humans all have hemochorial placentas: within that framework, do they differ from one another in ways that could explain differences in fetal brain growth? We compared descriptions and consequences of placental invasion and vascular remodeling across primate taxa. To calculate placental efficiencies at term we performed literature searches to extract data regarding placental, neonatal body, and brain weights in as many primate taxa as we could find. We compared the magnitude in increases in efficiency across late gestation between humans and vervet monkeys. We compared increases in villous surface area relative to fetal growth across late gestation between humand and vervet monkeys. Several lines of evidence suggest that human and ape placentation is more invasive than monkey placentation. Apes and humans, the largest-brained primates, have the most efficient placentas, both in terms of supporting overall fetal growth and brain growth specifically. While placental efficiency increases across gestation for both the vervet and the human, the magnitude is significantly greater in humans (65% vs. 48%). It takes 8 times as much surface area to build one gram of human fetus as it does vervet fetus (4.0 mm2 vs. 0.5 mm2, p
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 16:42:17 +0000
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