On an African savanna 10 million years ago, our ancestors may have gazed upon a view much like this one. A new study suggests that this complex scenery influenced the mosaic in which the human retina's red, green, and blue light-sensitive cone cells are arranged. Studies in other species have suggested that cone cells evolve into a configuration that most efficiently takes in an animal's environment. To find out whether the same happened in human eyes, physicist Gasper Tkacik, neurobiologist Vijay Balasubramanian, and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania created a database of more than 5000 high-resolution photographs, including this one, taken at various locations in a primate habitat in Botswana, the general region where humans likely evolved. The researchers measured the color information contained in these images and created an algorithm to predict which pattern of cone cells would extract the most information.
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