A Bit More Detail

• Anthropology.net notes that the analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton from Croatia reveals much common ancestry.


• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares some stunning photos of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe.


• Crooked Timber considers the differences--such as they are--between science fiction and fantasy literature.


• After a conversation with Adam Gopnik, Cody Delistraty makes a case for the importance of high-brow culture.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a paper arguing that Earth-like planets can exist even without active plate tectonics.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas argues that operating systems relying on instinct hurt human thought.


• Language Log considers Twitter post limits for East Asian languages.


• The LRB Blog considers trench fever and the future of nursing in the United Kingdom.


• Marginal Revolution links to a study suggesting people actively look out for bad and threatening news items.


• The NYR Daily examines the reasons why Uber ended up getting banned by the city of London.


• Drew Rowsome reports on an exciting new staging at the Paramount Theatre of Salt-Water Moon.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at the very low proportion of planets in studied exosystems actually detected by Kepler.


• Strange Company tells the story of John Banvard, a 19th century American who lost everything in mounting panorama exhibitions.


• Towleroad reports on how PREP contributed to an 80% fall in new HIV diagnoses in London and wider England.


• Window on Eurasia notes the worsening of HIV/AIDS in Russia, aided by terrible government policy and bad statistics.

• At Anthrodendum, P. Kerim Friedman talks about the technologies he uses to help him navigate Chinese-speaking Taiwan.


• Dead Things notes new dating showing the Neanderthals of Vindija cave, in Croatia, were much older than thought.


• Far Outliers takes a brief look at the history of Temasek, the Malay polity that once thrived in Singapore.


• Hornet Stories shares photos from New York City's Afropunk festival.


• Imageo shows the scale of the devastating wildfires in the western United States, with satellite photos.


• Language Hat looks at the sort of mistakes characteristic of medieval manuscripts written in Latin and Greek.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at Trump's revocation of DACA and the harm that will face the Dreamers. I am so sorry.


• Maximos62 looks at a new book examining how biologists, including Darwin and Wallace, came to draw a borer between Asia and Australia.


• Peter Rukavina blogs about his visit to Wheatley River's Island Honey Wine Company. (Mead, it seems.)


• Strange Company takes a look at the life of violent war-mongering British eccentric Alfred Wintle.


• Window on Eurasia notes the very poor state of sex education in Russia's education system.

Mousterian spearheads, a classic Neanderthal tool type, were excavated from the Stelida archeological site on the Greek island of Naxos by from McMaster University. There has been a long time belief that the first people to colonize this particular region were early farmers who arrived by boat approximately 9,000 years ago. These artifacts imply something much much different as they could be 250,000 years old. Archaeologist, Tristan Carter, co-director, comments on the these artifacts,

““The stone tools they were finding on the site looked nothing like the stone tools that had ever been found before on prehistoric sites in the Cycladic Islands.””

The Mousterian culture is Paleolithic. And these spear heads furnish evidence that humans reached the islands of the Aegean Sea a quarter million years ago and maybe earlier. If confirmed, it means the first people on Naxos were Neanderthals, or their probable ancestors, Homo heidelbergensis or maybe even Homo erectus. But how did they get there -Could these archaic hominins have travelled by boat?

• Bloomberg talks about Poland's problems with economic growth, notes that McMansions are poor investments, considers what to do about the Olympics post-Rio, looks at new Japanese tax incentives for working women, looks at a French war museum that put its stock up for sale, examines the power of the New Zealand dairy, looks at the Yasukuni controversies, and notes Huawei's progress in China.


• Bloomberg View is hopeful for Brazil, argues demographics are dooming Abenomics, suggests ways for the US to pit Russia versus Iran, looks at Chinese fisheries and the survival of the ocean, notes that high American population growth makes the post-2008 economic recovery relatively less notable, looks at Emperor Akihito's opposition to Japanese remilitarization, and argues that Europe's soft response to terrorism is not a weakness.


• CBC notes that Russian doping whistleblowers fear for their lives, looks at how New Brunswick farmers are adapting to climate change, and looks at how Neanderthals' lack of facility with tools may have doomed them.


• The Globe and Mail argues Ontario should imitate Michigan instead of Québec, notes the new Anne of Green Gables series on Netflix, and predicts good things for Tim Horton's in the Philippines.


• The Guardian notes that Canada's impending deal with the European Union is not any model for the United Kingdom.


• The Inter Press Service looks at child executions in Iran.


• MacLean's notes that Great Lakes mayors have joined to challenge a diversion of water from their shared basin.


• National Geographic looks at the elephant ivory trade, considers the abstract intelligence of birds, considers the Mayan calendar's complexities, and looks at how the young generation treats Pluto's dwarf planet status.


• The National Post notes that VIA Rail is interested in offering a low-cost bus route along the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia.


• Open Democracy notes that the last Russian prisoner in Guantanamo does not want to go home, and wonders why the West ignores the Rwandan dictatorship.


• TVO considers how rural communities can attract immigrants.


• Universe Today suggests sending our digital selves to the stars, looks at how cirrus clouds kept early Mars warm and wet, and notes the discovery of an early-forming direct-collapse black hole.


• Variance Explained looks at how Donald Trump's tweets clearly show two authors at work.


• The Washignton Post considers what happens when a gay bar becomes a bar with more general appeal.


• Wired notes that the World Wide Web still is far from achieving its founders' dreams, looks at how news apps are dying off, and reports on the Univision purchase of Gawker.

• Bloomberg notes that Brexit may be good for European criminals, looks at the negative impact of Brexit on Japan's retail chains, examines the way a broken-down road reflects India-China relations, looks at Russia's shadow economy and observes Ukraine's effort to attract shippers to its ports.


• The Globe and Mail notes the mourning in Québec for the Nice attacks.


• MacLean's reports on a New Brunswick high school overwhelmed by Syrian refugees and examines the dynamics of Brazil's wealthy elite.


• National Geographic notes that Brazil's capuchin monkeys have progressed to the stone age.


• The National Post reports on evidence of cannibalism among Neanderthals, notes Kathleen Wynne's criticism of "All Lives Matter", and engages with the idea of a guaranteed minimum income.


• Open Democracy engages with Scotland's strategy for Brexit.


• Wired looks at a New York City park built to withstand rising seas, mourns the disappearance of the CD, and notes that scenes of murder will never disappear from our social media.

• Bloomberg notes how an economic boom will let Sweden postpone hard decisions, looks at the popularity of the Korean Wave in China, suggests that subsidies are going to be a big issue for cash-short Arab governments, looks at the investigation in Bulgaria of groups which arrest refugees, and looks at the long-term problems of the Russian economy.


• CBC reports on a Saskatchewan woman who has a refuge for pet rats.


• Global News illustrates the dire social conditions in the Ontario North, hitting particularly strongly First Nations groups.


• The Guardian reports on speculation that Neanderthals may have died in significant numbers from African diseases brought by human migrants.


• MacLean's notes a study of handwriting styles in ancient Israel which suggest that literacy was reasonably common.


• The Mississauga News reports on a new PFLAG support group for South Asians in Peel.


• National Geographic notes the strong pressures on island birds towards flightlessness.


• Science Mag notes subtle genetic incompatibilities between human women and male Neanderthals which would have hindered reproduction.


• The USA Today network has a story examining the recent HIV outbreak in Indiana.


• Vice reports on the huge cleavages within the NDP, something also examined at the CBC.

• Anthropology.net notes a finding suggesting that Neanderthals deliberately used rocks rich in manganese dioxide to start fires.


• Centauri Dreams considers what could be false signs of life.


• The Crux notes the stone-throwing chimpanzees.


• D-Brief suggests that a fungus was the first form of life to make it onto land.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes exceptionally eccentrically-orbiting gas giant HD 7449Ab.


• The Dragon's Tales notes Russian competition to build India a new aircraft carrier.


• Language Hat notes the complexities of literary translation.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money points to a Robert Farley article imagining an Anglo-American war in the early 1920s.


• The Map Room Blog links to a map of Euroskepticism in the United Kingdom.


• Marginal Revolution tries to map European place names with the word saint in them.


• The NYRB Daily despairs for the American party system.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes the indirect ways in which repealing NAFTA could pay for a US-Mexican border wall.


• Spacing notes how parks can change cities.


• Arnold Zwicky considers a variety of geographic areas with indeterminate boundaries, like the South and northeast Asia.

A series of computer models have shown how even if humans and Neanderthals were equally smart, we still could have beaten them.

It all boils down to our technological advantage. Humans rolled up to the Neanderthal club with some very fancy tools. We would both have hunted the same prey; so whoever had the best tools for the job would outcompete the others. Crucially, this new study shows that this would happen even if the Neanderthals outnumbered the first humans (which they likely did, given it was their home turf). And if humans only had a small technological advantage. Even a slight edge would allow us to reproduce a little bit better, soon allowing us to outnumber the Neanderthals. We could really give them a good kick whilst they were down.

Now to be fair, the Neanderthals had those fancy tools too. However, they seemed to produce them a lot less frequently. In some cases they only seem to have adopted them a few thousand years after humans arrived in the joint (which has led some to speculate they stole them from humans). Thus, even if Neanderthals were as smart as us and making the same tools as us; we brought the better tools to more parties. This would have given us the advantage in hunting resources, allowing us to outcompete the Neanderthals.

Of course, this points rest on the idea that our tools were actually better for hunting than theirs’. Sure they were fancier, but how much does that translate into better hunting ability? Can we really quantify the technological level of the two groups? We can measure a lot of variables about these tools. Some were a more efficient use of raw materials. Others could be repaired quicker. Which of these variables, if any, is the one that gave us the edge? These simulations don’t really tell the answer.

[. . .]

These simulations also identified some other ways that a small group of humans could have gained an advantage over the Neanderthal.

The most significant of these was learning ability. If it turns out we were a bit smarter than Neanderthals (or at least, a bit better at learning) then we could drive them extinct in almost any scenario. No matter how many Neanderthals were living in the region initially, or how few humans turned up, if we could learn better they would all go extinct.

This ultimately works for the same reason that having better culture works. If we can learn we can adapt, innovate, and gain that same cultural edge that would have allowed us to outcompete the Neanderthals.

In a remarkable technical feat, researchers have sequenced DNA from fossils in Spain that are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old and have found an ancestor—or close relative—of Neandertals. The nuclear DNA, which is the oldest ever sequenced from a member of the human family, may push back the date for the origins of the distinct ancestors of Neandertals and modern humans, according to a presentation here yesterday at the fifth annual meeting of the European Society for the study of human evolution.

Ever since researchers first discovered thousands of bones and teeth from 28 individuals in the mid-1990s from Sima de los Huesos (“pit of bones”), a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain, they had noted that the fossils looked a lot like primitive Neandertals. The Sima people, who lived before Neandertals, were thought to have emerged in Europe. Yet their teeth, jaws, and large nasal cavities were among the traits that closely resembled those of Neandertals, according to a team led by paleontologist Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University of Madrid. As a result, his team classified the fossils as members of Homo heidelbergensis, a species that lived about 600,000 to 250,000 years ago in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many researchers have thought H. heidelbergensis gave rise to Neandertals and perhaps also to our species, H. sapiens, in the past 400,000 years or so.

But in 2013, the Sima fossils’ identity suddenly became complicated when a study of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the bones revealed that it did not resemble that of a Neandertal. Instead, it more closely matched the mtDNA of a Denisovan, an elusive type of extinct human discovered when its DNA was sequenced from a finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia. That finding was puzzling, prompting researchers to speculate that perhaps the Sima fossils had interbred with very early Denisovans or that the “Denisovan” mtDNA was the signature of an even more ancient hominin lineage, such as H. erectus. At the time, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who had obtained the mtDNA announced that they would try to sequence the nuclear DNA of the fossils to solve the mystery.

After 2 years of intense effort, paleogeneticist Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has finally sequenced enough nuclear DNA from fossils of a tooth and a leg bone from the pit to solve the mystery. The task was especially challenging because the ancient DNA was degraded to short fragments, made up of as few as 25 to 40 single nucleotides. (Nucleotides—also known as base pairs—are the building blocks of DNA.) Although he and his colleagues did not sequence the entire genomes of the fossils, Meyer reported at the meeting that they did get 1 million to 2 million base pairs of ancient nuclear DNA.

They scanned this DNA for unique markers found only in Neandertals or Denisovans or modern humans, and found that the two Sima fossils shared far more alleles—different nucleotides at the same address in the genome—with Neandertals than Denisovans or modern humans. “Indeed, the Sima de los Huesos specimens are early Neandertals or related to early Neandertals,” suggesting that the split of Denisovans and Neandertals should be moved back in time, Meyer reported at the meeting.

Researchers at the meeting were impressed by this new breakthrough in ancient DNA research. “This has been the next frontier with ancient DNA,” says evolutionary biologist Greger Larson of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

You may not know it, but you probably have some Neanderthal in you. For people around the world, except sub-Saharan Africans, about 1 to 3 percent of their DNA comes from Neanderthals, our close cousins who disappeared roughly 39,000 years ago.

Scientists said on Monday a jawbone unearthed in Romania, of a man who lived about 40,000 years ago, boasts the most Neanderthal ancestry ever seen in a member of our species.

[. . .]

“We show that one of the very first modern humans that is known from Europe had a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six generations back in his family tree,” said geneticist Svante Pääbo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“He carries more Neanderthal DNA than any other present-day or ancient modern human seen to date.”

Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich said 6 to 9 percent of this individual’s genome derived from a Neanderthal ancestor.