ANTB22H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Neocortex, Brain Size, Precocial
10 Jan 2015
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Dexterity: coordination of small muscle movements with the eyes, nails on one side, fleshy sensitive pad on the other side, opposable thumbs, grasping. Grooming: social activity of cleaning another individual"s fur and body. Size: extremely broad size range, eastern gorilla-300kg, madame berthe"s mouse lemur-30g. Brain size vs body size: relatively bigger brains than other mammals, expansion of the neocortex. Large eyes that are close together: reduced nasal region, much more driven by vision rather than olfaction. In non-primates: eyes at the side of the head, parallax: allows for gauging distances, displacement in the apparent position of an object viewed along two lines of sight, calculate differences very well. In primates: worse at calculating distances, better at seeing things in 3d in close distances, critical for seeing cryptic animals and fruits in dense vegetation, likely evolved in association with some feeding strategy, and not arboreal locomotion.
