This story was originally published in our May/June 2022 issue as "Tracing Back Brains." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
The secrets behind the evolution of the human mind might lie within the thousands of tiny “brains” called organoids that neuroscientist Alysson Muotri has grown in his laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, since 2011.
His team placed a Neanderthal gene into each organoid to learn how it affects brain growth. The experiment marks the beginning of an effort to understand how genetic mutations set our minds apart from those of earlier hominins and from our closest evolutionary cousins, the great apes. In this intellectual quest, Muotri and other scientists around the world have pioneered techniques for growing brain cell cultures in three dimensions — a novel way to revive the past.
The mystery arose about 7 million years ago, when our primate ...
