Does a Mammal's Brain Also Carry the History of Others?
Does a Mammal's Brain Also Carry the History of Others?
An embrace, a stone, a tool. From Serra da Capivara to the Umbu tradition and the shell mound builders of South America, how many histories of learning can exist within the same living world?
BrainLatam Special Series | 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at UFABC — 2026
AN EMBRACE THAT CONTINUES TO HAPPEN
Perhaps you can remember an embrace you received during a difficult moment.
The warmth of another body. The pressure of someone's arms. A familiar voice. Perhaps your breathing changed.
Now imagine that same embrace coming from a stranger.
The movements might be similar. The experience could be entirely different.
What transforms physical contact into comfort? How does another individual participate in the conditions through which we experience safety, belonging, or threat?
Could a brain also carry the history of the relationships its organism has experienced?
This question accompanies our participation as a sponsor of the 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), scheduled for November 16–19, 2026, under the theme “The Brain in Context: Contemporary Challenges in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience.”
We can begin with mammals, but our investigation will also take us through Latin American archaeology.
CARE PARTICIPATES IN DEVELOPMENT
Many mammals depend on care during important stages of development.
Feeding, protection, proximity, and learning contribute to their life histories, although caregiving strategies vary enormously across species.
The presence of another individual can modify behavior and physiological responses associated with stress.
Yet proximity does not necessarily mean safety. Relationships may also involve competition, aggression, or uncertainty.
This diversity helps us distinguish biological bonding from an individual's experience of belonging.
Among the researchers announced for the UFABC symposium are Renata Frazão, who investigates neural circuits involved in reproduction and metabolic regulation, and Felipe C. Ribeiro, who studies molecular mechanisms associated with Alzheimer's disease.
Their research areas are distinct, but both help us recognize that development, reproduction, and memory depend on biological conditions throughout life.
WHEN A STONE BECOMES A TOOL
Now imagine the Caatinga of Serra da Capivara, in Piauí, northeastern Brazil.
A capuchin monkey watches another individual using a stone to process food.
A younger monkey approaches. Observes. Perhaps experiments with another movement.
Brazilian researcher Tiago Falótico, together with Eduardo Ottoni and colleagues, investigated tools used by Sapajus libidinosus recovered through archaeological excavations.
In a study published in 2019, they identified evidence of stone tool use dating back approximately 2,400 to 3,000 years.
The characteristics of these tools changed across different periods, including between approximately one hundred years ago and the present.
This reveals an ancient technological history among nonhuman primates.
However, it does not demonstrate uninterrupted cultural transmission across three millennia, nor that present-day monkeys learned directly from individuals living in that distant past.
The question remains fascinating:
How many generations can participate in transforming a way of using the world?
LEARNING REQUIRES THE POSSIBILITY OF APPROACHING OTHERS
In 2024, researchers experimentally investigated how information about a food-extraction task circulated among wild capuchin monkeys in Serra da Capivara.
The findings showed that social tolerance facilitated opportunities for observation and influenced pathways of learning.
The animals also paid greater attention to certain successful individuals.
The existence of someone who knows a technique is not enough.
Others must have opportunities to observe, approach, and experiment.
This finding connects directly with our investigation of collectives.
The possibility of learning also depends on relationships that allow encounters to happen.
We cannot conclude that capuchin monkeys organize their relationships according to human principles of freedom or justice.
But we can investigate how proximity, tolerance, and individual differences influence the circulation of knowledge.
TWO HISTORIES WRITTEN IN THE STONES OF SERRA DA CAPIVARA
In the same region, we find evidence of ancient human occupations.
Rock paintings and archaeological sites testify to different periods within a long history of human presence.
Imagine people working with stone tools while other primates, somewhere in that territory, were also manipulating materials.
We do not know whether specific encounters occurred in this way.
Nor is there sufficient evidence to claim that monkeys learned their techniques from humans, or vice versa.
Yet we can recognize two technological trajectories that can be investigated within the same Biome.
Human tools and those produced by capuchin monkeys have distinct histories, functions, and learning processes.
Perhaps the most interesting realization is that the production of a material history is not exclusive to our species.
Primate archaeology expands our ability to ask how different organisms transform materials across generations.
WHAT ABOUT THE HUNTER-GATHERERS ASSOCIATED WITH THE UMBU TRADITION?
Let us travel imaginatively through southern South America, thousands of years before European colonization.
A human group moves across a landscape in what is now southern Brazil.
Someone recognizes a possible route. Another observes an animal. A person prepares a stone projectile point.
This scene is a narrative reconstruction, not a record of a known event.
Brazilian archaeologist Mercedes Okumura and archaeologist Astolfo Araujo investigated bifacial projectile points associated with the so-called Umbu tradition.
These archaeological remains exhibit a long chronological distribution and significant regional differences.
Archaeologist João Carlos Moreno de Sousa has also questioned the assumption that this diversity represents a single homogeneous culture.
Therefore, referring to “the Umbu people” requires caution: we are dealing with an archaeological classification, not a proven unified collective identity.
Even so, these tools reveal technical knowledge, material choices, and practices associated with different human occupations.
SHELL MOUNDS: WHEN TERRITORY ALSO PRESERVES MEMORIES
Now imagine the Atlantic coast of southern and southeastern Brazil.
Generations of people participate in constructing large structures from shells, sediments, and other materials.
These constructions, known as sambaquis, or shell mounds, may be associated with funerary practices, food-related activities, settlement, and social organization.
Some developed over thousands of years.
In 2023, Tiago Ferraz da Silva, Tábita Hünemeier, André Strauss, and colleagues participated in an archaeogenomic study of ancient coastal South American populations.
Their findings revealed genetic diversity among shell mound-building groups that shared certain material similarities.
This offers a fundamental reminder:
Similarities in tools, constructions, or practices do not necessarily mean that everyone belonged to the same people.
We also cannot assume direct ancestral relationships between all groups classified within the Umbu tradition and shell mound-building populations.
Territories preserve different histories, including those whose relationships we do not yet understand.
THE BIOME IS MORE THAN A BACKDROP
From the Caatinga to the Atlantic Forest, we encounter organisms and collectives developing relationships with materials, food, other living beings, and their environments.
A stone may help a monkey obtain food.
Another may become part of a human tool.
Shells may participate in constructions that remain in the landscape for centuries.
The Biome offers conditions and possibilities, but it does not independently determine behavior.
From this perspective, we can bring neuroscience, archaeology, ecology, and anthropology into dialogue without reducing their different subjects to a single explanation.
Latin American research reveals that histories of knowledge production began long before the colonial institutions that would later classify them.
BODY-TERRITORY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF BEING MANY
At BrainLatam, we propose Body-Territory (Corpo-Território) as an indivisible unit of existence, sensitivity, and participation in the world.
Our original conceptual hypothesis states:
Consciousness is a movement that perceives itself as Being within the metabolism it produces.
This philosophical formulation is not an experimentally validated neuroscientific theory.
Nevertheless, it invites us to investigate how different organisms participate in relationships that transform their possibilities of existence.
We also use Jiwasa to explore shared agency without eliminating the uniqueness of those involved.
Animal collectives and human groups from the past cannot automatically be classified as Jiwasa.
But their histories allow us to ask:
How does knowledge circulate? Which conditions make learning possible? When does belonging expand individual possibilities?
A THOUSAND-YEAR FUTURE WITHIN A PRESERVED BIOME
Imagine researchers observing primates in a preserved Caatinga, using technologies capable of monitoring movement and physiological signals with minimal interference.
Today, EEG, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and other techniques already make it possible to investigate different processes, although important limitations remain for naturalistic and cross-species applications.
As a representative of Artinis & NIRx and Brain Products, BrainLatam connects researchers with technologies for functional neuroimaging, electroencephalography, and multimodal investigation.
We seek to imagine increasingly advanced instruments, alongside scientific questions that recognize the value of the environments and organisms being studied.
HOW MANY OTHERS HAVE PARTICIPATED IN WHO WE ARE?
Let us return to the embrace at the beginning.
Perhaps you can still remember something of that experience within your body.
The person who participated in your history may now be far away. Yet the experience remains accessible through your memory.
In Serra da Capivara, stones preserve evidence of different technological histories.
In southern South America, stone projectile points and shell mounds reveal diverse human trajectories.
And among mammals, bonds and opportunities for learning continue transforming behavior.
The UFABC symposium invites us to investigate the brain in context.
Perhaps we can add another question:
How many other living beings have participated in creating the conditions that made possible what we now perceive as our own Being?
Jiwasa: the possibility of Being many without anyone having to stop Being.
About This Series
This article is part of a special series by BrainLatam, a sponsor of the 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), scheduled for November 16–19, 2026, in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil.
The article engages with research topics announced for Renata Frazão and Felipe C. Ribeiro, expanding the discussion to primatology, archaeology, and social behavior research in Latin America.
BrainLatam's original interpretations do not necessarily represent the positions of the researchers or event organizers.
Official event website: https://www.even3.com.br/viii-simposio-em-neurociencia-e-cognicao-da-universidade-federal-do-abc-761401/
References — A Second Reading of the Article
1. Mammalian development involves relationships among care, physiology, and environment.
Frazão, R. Laboratório de Neurofisiologia da Reprodução [Reproductive Neurophysiology Laboratory]. Institute of Biomedical Sciences, University of São Paulo.
Researches neuroendocrine mechanisms involved in reproduction and the integration of metabolic and hormonal signals.
https://sites.usp.br/neuroreplab/pt/home/
2. Capuchin monkeys have a history of tool use extending across thousands of years.
Falótico, T.; Proffitt, T.; Ottoni, E. B.; Staff, R. A.; Haslam, M. (2019). Three thousand years of wild capuchin stone tool use. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 3, 1034–1038.
The research identifies archaeological evidence of stone tools and changes in their patterns of use over time.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0904-4
3. Learning from others also depends on tolerance and opportunities for observation.
Social tolerance and success-biased social learning underlie the cultural transmission of an induced extractive foraging tradition in a wild tool-using primate. (2024). Research involving capuchin monkeys from Serra da Capivara.
The experimental study demonstrates how social relationships influence the circulation of information about new tasks.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39556750/
4. Different human populations produced stone tools across southern South America.
Okumura, M.; Araujo, A. G. M. (2013). Pontas bifaciais no Brasil Meridional: caracterização estatística das formas e suas implicações culturais [Bifacial Points in Southern Brazil: Statistical Characterization of Forms and Their Cultural Implications]. Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia.
The authors identify regional variation in projectile points associated with the Umbu tradition.
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2448-1750.revmae.2013.106842
5. An archaeological classification does not necessarily represent a single homogeneous culture.
Moreno de Sousa, J. C. (2019). Tecnologia de ponta a ponta: em busca de mudanças culturais durante o Holoceno em indústrias líticas do Sudeste e Sul do Brasil [Technology from Point to Point: Investigating Cultural Change in Holocene Lithic Industries of Southeastern and Southern Brazil]. Revista de Arqueologia, 32(1).
The study questions the cultural homogeneity traditionally attributed to lithic assemblages classified as Umbu.
https://doi.org/10.24885/sab.v32i1.637
6. Shell mound builders had diverse regional and genetic histories.
Silva, T. F. et al. (2023). Genomic history of coastal societies from eastern South America. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7, 1315–1330.
Archaeogenomic research reveals diversity among ancient populations that constructed sambaquis.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02114-9
7. Understanding the brain in context requires dialogue among scientific disciplines.
UFABC (2026). 8th Symposium on Neuroscience and Cognition — The Brain in Context: Contemporary Challenges in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience.
The symposium brings together biological, cognitive, technological, and social research to broaden scientific questions about the brain.
8. We can investigate belonging and territorial memory from a decolonial perspective.
Cionek, J. (2025). O Renascimento do Pertencimento Natural — Joinville, Umbus, Sambaquis e a Prosperidade Bribri [The Rebirth of Natural Belonging — Joinville, Umbu, Shell Mounds, and Bribri Prosperity]. BrainLatam.
This original essay connects Body-Territory, ancestral knowledge, and the continuity of life, proposing questions that extend beyond strictly archaeological evidence.
Conceptual note: Body-Territory, 5D Consciousness, and Jiwasa are original conceptual proposals developed by BrainLatam. The cited studies support specific aspects of the discussion but do not constitute experimental validation of these formulations.
BRAINLATAM · W45/2026 · BLOG 03 · ENGLISH EDITION
