La evolución del cerebro humano

The complexity of the human brain is such that it has sometimes been compared to that of the entire universe: close to one hundred billion neurons, with trillions of connections between them. All this neural swarm is capable of generating surprising capacities, from language, symbolic thought or imagination. The question that arises spontaneously is: How did evolution come to shape such a "machinery"? This question is the center of gravity around which this book by paleoanthropologist Emiliano Bruner, a researcher at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution in Burgos, revolves. A fascinating journey in which we will have to explore different disciplines and approaches, such as anthropology, neuroscience, the comparative analysis of our brain with other primates, archaeology, psychology and, of course, the study of fossils. It will therefore be a journey between fossils and monkeys, between brains and skulls, between arteries and genes, without neglecting the importance of what remains outside the body: society and technology. And in all this we will not forget something fundamental, a nuance that was very clear to the dedicated and competent scientists of the prequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes: we know everything about the brain, except how it works.