Long thread on exciting work on how vocal learning (thought to be crucial also for human language) works in the brains of seals and sea lions. Massive effort to scan very many brains & species. In evolution, it may have started with volitional control over breathing!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Seals and sea lions have highly developed volitional breathing control, to which the phocid seals add vocal production learning, including mimicry. In this work, using histology and ex vivo diffusion ...
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As Greg Berns notes: “By using these neuroimaging techniques to compare the brains of mammalian species wired to have vocal flexibility with those that are not, we might be able to build up an evolutionary tree for language.” And all with opportunistically and ethically collected brains.
