https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7

The peer reviewed publication is linked to from the press release. The press release's headline does somewhat overhype up the actual finding though. The actual finding is that different parts of the brain arise from different neural ectoderm progenitors, which explains why it’s so hard to get a forebrain neuron to behave like a hindbrain neuron and vice versa in the lab. The paper then postulates that this difference in progenitors resembles being two different organs evolutionarily, but this is not really the most important part of the paper.

BTW I suspect that this finding comes as completely unsurprising to biologists and the medical field generally. I'm not in either field, but even in high school biology we learned that the brain stem is behaviorally and structurally radically different from the rest of the brain, to the point where it seems almost obvious in hindsight that it's a different cell line and potentially has a different evolutionary history from the rest of the brain.

watson and crick's paper was not peer reviewed, neither were darwin's papers.

not sure what you think happens in peer review but it's probably overrated.