Towards an archaeology of attention: A neuro-genetic exploration

Late, large-brained humans such as Homo sapiens, Denisovans and Neanderthals are/were obligatory tool users. Making and using technology requires attention. The archaeological record may thus contain aspects of how people were able to allocate and regulate attention, but few technologies have been studied in this context. Here I use a neuro-genetic triangulation approach consisting of: a) An overlap between genes associated with attention network theory, genes with non-synonymous changes at high frequency in current humans compared to Neanderthal-Denisovan genomes, and genes classified as brain-elevated; b) the transcripts per million expression throughout the human brain detected for the resulting gene-overlap list; c) attention-related phenotypes and/or conditions associated with both the resulting genes and brain regions. This approach led to a list of 18 genes, seven brain regions, and white matter pathways as probably representing variation in the development of attentional ranges in Homo sapiens, Denisovans and Neanderthals. Interestingly, most of the brain regions highlighted by this study reflect selection for sub-cortical interconnectivity hubs, as opposed to cortical regions associated with traditional attention network theory areas. I therefore propose the following working hypothesis: The separate brain regions associated with alerting, orienting/selective and executive/controlling attention were already in place in a common ancestor, but after the H. sapiens-Denisovan-Neanderthal split, human ways of paying attention developed differently in degrees of interconnective robusticity, speed and efficacy.