Expensive Tissue Hypothesis

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The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis (German about: Hypothesis of expensive tissue ) is an explanatory approach from paleoanthropology , anthropology and evolutionary biology . It is attributed to the researchers Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler (1995) and states that in the course of the development of the human brain, other tissue had to regress in order to enable this development in humans . The thesis was taken up comparatively quickly and often shortened in popular scientific literature as the view that cooking or meat consumption played an important role in human tribal history. The palaeo diet , which attributes the consumption of large quantities of meat to humans, experienced a brief renaissance and used the thesis as its argumentative foundation.

The proportion of the human brain in the body mass is relatively large compared to other taxa (→ encephalization quotient ). In addition, the brain uses a relatively large amount of energy compared to other tissue. It is therefore said that it is 'expensive fabric'. Because, according to Kleiber's law, the basic energetic metabolism of an organism is limited by body mass, Aiello and Wheeler suspected that in the course of human evolution an exchange took place between the further development of the brain and another 'expensive' tissue. In considering various possibilities, they then developed the view that the tissue of the digestive system was most likely to be considered for this exchange.

Although the empirical basis for its intuitive explanation was rather thin from the start, it was relatively quickly accepted relatively quickly. The first data on fish could also confirm the thesis and in molecular biology the investigation of a connection between encephalization and the concentration of carbonic anhydrase II , a digestive enzyme , was started and proposed for further research. Later studies on bats, birds and New World monkeys assumed the opposite.

In 2011, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich published the most extensive study on the thesis to date (as of March 2012) in Nature . They examined 100 species , including 24 primate species, and subsequently rejected the thesis. An exchange between brain tissue and other tissues, as the hypothesis predicts, does not take place in practice. Instead, they suggest that the development of the brain was mainly made possible by the advantage of being able to make better decisions in more complex situations (so-called cognitive buffer hypothesis ). The ability to create and utilize adipose tissue, combined with walking upright , was also an efficient strategy against periods of food shortage.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b L.C. Aiello, P. Wheeler: The expensive-tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution . In: Current Anthropology . 36, No. 2, 1995, pp. 199-221.
  2. ↑ See e.g. BC Joyce: Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter . In: NPR.org , August 2, 2010.  or J. Reichholf, conversation with K. Heise: Biologist: Man needs meat . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur , 2011. 
    • R. Wrangham: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human . Basic Books, 2009, ISBN 0-465-01362-7 . or catching fire: How cooking made us human - a new theory of human evolution . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2009, ISBN 3-421-04399-X .
  3. ↑ See e.g. B. " thepaleodiet.com " or " urgeschmack.de "
  4. ^ LC Aiello: Brains and guts in human evolution: The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis . In: Brazilian Journal of Genetics . 20, No. 1, 1997. doi : 10.1590 / S0100-84551997000100023 .
  5. ↑ a b L.C. Aiello, N. Bates, T. Joffe: In defense of the expensive tissue hypothesis . In: Evolutionary anatomy of the primate cerebral cortex . 2001, pp. 57-78.
  6. ^ R. Potts, others: Environmental hypotheses of hominin evolution . In: American journal of physical anthropology . 107, No. s 27, 1998, pp. 93-136.
  7. ^ JA Kaufman: On the Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis: Independent Support from Highly Encephalized Fish . In: Current Anthropology . 44, No. 5, 2003, pp. 705-707.
  8. ↑ M. Mau, KH Südekum, TM Kaiser: Why cattle feed much and humans think much - New approach to confirm the expensive tissue hypothesis by molecular data . In: Bioscience Hypotheses . 2, No. 4, 2009, pp. 205-208.
  9. ↑ KE Jones, AM MacLarnon: Affording larger brains: testing hypotheses of mammalian brain evolution on bats Archived from the original on April 20, 2014. In: The American Naturalist . 164, No. 1, 2004, pp. E20-E31.
  10. ^ K. Isler, Carel van Schaik: Costs of encephalization: the energy trade-off hypothesis tested on birds . In: Journal of Human Evolution . 51, No. 3, 2006, ISSN  0047-2484 , pp. 228-243. doi : 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2006.03.006 .
  11. ^ KLA, RF Kay: Dietary Quality and Encephalization in Platyrrhine Primates . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences . 2011, ISSN  0962-8452 . doi : 10.1098 / rspb.2011.1311 .
  12. ↑ K. Isler, CP van Schaik: The Expensive Brain: A framework for explaining evolutionary changes in brain size . In: Journal of Human Evolution . 57, No. 4, 2009, ISSN  0047-2484 , pp. 392-400. doi : 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2009.04.009 .
  13. ↑ A. Navarrete, CP van Schaik, K. Isler: Energetics and the evolution of human brain size . In: Nature . 480, No. 7375, 2011, ISSN  0028-0836 , pp. 91-93. doi : 10.1038 / nature10629 .
  14. ↑ D. Sol: Revisiting the Cognitive Buffer Hypothesis for the Evolution of Large Brains . In: Biology Letters . 5, No. 1, February 23, 2009, ISSN  1744-9561 , pp. 130-133. doi : 10.1098 / rsbl.2008.0621 .