A Bit More Detail

In an extensive, multi-institution study led by SUNY Downstate Medical Center, researchers have identified new evidence supporting the growing belief that Neanderthals were a distinct species separate from modern humans (Homo sapiens), and not a subspecies of modern humans.

The study looked at the entire nasal complex of Neanderthals and involved researchers with diverse academic backgrounds. Supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the research also indicates that the Neanderthal nasal complex was not adaptively inferior to that of modern humans, and that the Neanderthals' extinction was likely due to competition from modern humans and not an inability of the Neanderthal nose to process a colder and drier climate.

Samuel Márquez, PhD, associate professor and co-discipline director of gross anatomy in SUNY Downstate's Department of Cell Biology, and his team of specialists published their findings on the Neanderthal nasal complex in the November issue of The Anatomical Record, which is part of a special issue on The Vertebrate Nose: Evolution, Structure, and Function (now online).

They argue that studies of the Neanderthal nose, which have spanned over a century and a half, have been approaching this anatomical enigma from the wrong perspective. Previous work has compared Neanderthal nasal dimensions to modern human populations such as the Inuit and modern Europeans, whose nasal complexes are adapted to cold and temperate climates.

However, the current study joins a growing body of evidence that the upper respiratory tracts of this extinct group functioned via a different set of rules as a result of a separate evolutionary history and overall cranial bauplan (bodyplan), resulting in a mosaic of features not found among any population of Homo sapiens. Thus Dr. Márquez and his team of paleoanthropologists, comparative anatomists, and an otolaryngologist have contributed to the understanding of two of the most controversial topics in paleoanthropology - were Neanderthals a different species from modern humans and which aspects of their cranial morphology evolved as adaptations to cold stress.

• Anthropology.net reacts to the discovery of Neanderthal abstract carvings and what they say about the Neanderthal mind.


• blogTO shares Toronto postcards from the 1980s and lists the five least used TTC subway stations.


• Centauri Dreams reports that potentially habitable exoplanets Gliese 667Cc has been confirmed to exist.


• Crooked Timber's Corey Robin describes the continuing Steven Salaita affair, with another Crooked Timber post and one at Lawyers, Guns and Money providing more context.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper placing HD 10180g in its star's habitable zone and links to another making the case for the potential habitability of exomoons.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird is very concerned for the fate of Ukraine.


• Language Log's Victor Mair examines the pressing question of why Hello Kitty is not a cat.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at rape culture in England.


• Marginal Revolution notes that Bolivians of different classes rarely marry each other and is relatively optimistic about the country's future.


• Spacing Toronto has a lovely picture of a track on a ride at the CNE under construction.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Kazakhstan is ready to leave the Euriasian Union to protect its independence, argues that the Ukrainian war is sparing Tatarstan and North Caucasus attention, and examines the depopulation of Pskov oblast next to the Baltic States.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes the strengths and weaknesses of the Islamic State as described in an article: a willingness to risk death isn't always a plus.

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster visits depictions of Europa in classic science fiction.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper claiming that whether a planet of Earth's mass becomes Earth-like or a mini-Neptune depends not so much on the planet as on the characteristics of its nebula.


• The Dragon's Tales notes archeological analyses which suggest that Neanderthals were just as technologically capable of Homo sapiens.


• Joe. My. God. quotes from ex-ex-gay John Paulk, who describes the factors that led him to flirt with the ex-gay movement.


• Language Log's Victor Mair doesn't think Putonghua will become a world language because of its script. (Me, I think that's decidedly secondary.)


• Lawyers, Guns and Money starts a discussion on nuclear waste that's a bit too panicky for my liking.


• The Power and the Money notes that southern Brazil, like Argentina and Uruguay experienced sharp relative economic decline in the 20th century. This regional decline got missed in national statistics.


• Strange Maps' Frank Jacobs wonders why so many towns in the American South--especially Georgia--seem to be circular.


• Towleroad notes that prominent Russian homophobe and politician Vitaly Milonov is calling on Russia to abandon Eurovision on account of its queer associations.


• Transit Toronto notes a proposal to connect Toronto to London and Kitchener-Waterloo via high-speed train.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the Russian private sector is being undermined and notes that Russians don't travel all that much.

• The Dragon's Tales links to news of remarkably thorough reconstruction of Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes.


• Eastern Approaches visits eastern Ukraine's Donbas region.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis notes that Pakistan still apparently lays claim to the former Muslim-run princely state of Junagadh in Gujarat.


• Joe. My. God. and Towleroad both note a proposed bill before the Russian parliament that would require the fingerprinting of all HIV-positive people in a national database.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes a continuing crisis in the availability of rental spaces in the American housing market, linking it to low-density zoning.


• Torontoist notes the sad loss of a pet pigeon on Queen Street West.


• Towleroad notes continuing controversy over the use of the HIV drug Truvada as a prophylactic against infection.


• The Volokh Conspiracy visits controveries over affirmative action in the United States where different minorities (here, Asian-Americans) have different claims.


• Window on Eurasia visits the increasingly problematic lot of Crimean Tatars in their Russian-occupied homeland, notes that traditionally pro-Russian Belarus is newly wary of its eastern partner, and quotes from a journalist who predicts catastrophe from a Russian pursuit of empire.

The first draft of the Neanderthal genome was too rough to allow scientists to draw further conclusions. But recently, researchers sequenced a far more accurate genome from a Neanderthal toe bone.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany compared this high-quality Neanderthal genome to the genomes of 1,004 living people. They were able to identify specific segments of Neanderthal DNA from each person’s genome.

“It’s a personal map of Neanderthal ancestry,” said David Reich of Harvard Medical School, who led the research team. He and his colleagues published their results in the journal Nature.

Living humans do not have a lot of Neanderthal DNA, Dr. Reich and his colleagues found, but some Neanderthal genes have become very common. That’s because, with natural selection, useful genes survive as species evolve. “What this proves is that these genes were helpful for non-Africans in adapting to the environment,” Dr. Reich said.

[. . .]

Both studies suggest that Neanderthal genes involved in skin and hair were favored by natural selection in humans. Today, they are very common in living non-Africans.

[. . .]

Both teams of scientists also found long stretches of the living human genomes where Neanderthal DNA was glaringly absent. This pattern could be produced if modern humans with certain Neanderthal genes could not have as many children on average as people without them. For example, living humans have very few genes from Neanderthals involved in making sperm. That suggests that male human-Neanderthal hybrids might have had lower fertility or were even sterile.

More than a million years ago, our direct ancestors found themselves in a real evolutionary pickle. One the one hand, their brains were growing larger than those of their rain forest cousins, and on the other, they had taken to walking upright because they spent most of their time in Africa’s expanding savannas. Both features would seem to have substantially increased the likelihood of their survival, and they did, except for one problem: Standing upright favors the evolution of narrow hips and therefore narrows the birth canal. And that made bringing larger-headed infants to full term before birth increasingly difficult.

If we were born as physically mature as, say, an infant gorilla, our mothers would be forced to carry us for 20 months! But if they did carry us that long, our larger heads wouldn’t make it through the birth canal. We would be, literally, unbearable. The solution: Our forerunners, as their brains expanded, began to arrive in the world sooner, essentially as fetuses, far less developed than other newborn primates, and considerably more helpless.

[. . .]

In the nasty and brutish prehistoric world our ancestors inhabited, arriving prematurely could have been a very bad thing. But to see the advantages of being born helpless and fetal, all you have to do is watch a 2-year-old. Human children are the most voracious learners planet Earth has ever seen, and they are that way because their brains are still rapidly developing after birth. Neoteny, and the childhood it spawned, not only extended the time during which we grow up but ensured that we spent it developing not inside the safety of the womb but outside in the wide, convoluted, and unpredictable world.

The same neuronal networks that in other animals are largely set before or shortly after birth remain open and flexible in us. Other primates also exhibit “sensitive periods” for learning as their brains develop, but they pass quickly, and their brain circuitry is mostly established by their first birthday, leaving them far less touched by the experiences of their youth.

Based on the current fossil evidence, this was true to a lesser extent of the 26 other savanna apes and humans. Homo habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, even H. heidelbergensis (which is likely the common ancestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and us), all had prolonged childhoods compared with chimpanzees and gorillas, but none as long as ours. In fact, Harvard paleoanthropologist Tanya Smith and her colleagues have found that Neanderthals reversed the trend. By the time they met their end around 30,000 years ago, they were reaching childbearing age at about the age of 11 or 12, which is three to five years earlier than their Homo sapiens cousins. Was this in response to evolutionary pressure to accelerate childbearing to replenish the dwindling species? Maybe. But in the bargain, they traded away the flexibility that childhood delivers, and that may have ultimately led to their demise.

An interview with paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer:

This raises one more question: Could we ever clone these extinct people?

Science is moving on so fast. The first bit of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was recovered in 1997. No one then could have believed that 10 years later we might have most of the genome. And a few years after that, we’d have whole Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes available. So no one would have thought cloning was a possibility. Now, at least theoretically, if someone had enough money, and I’d say stupidity, to do it, you could cut and paste those Denisovan mutations into a modern human genome, and then implant that into an egg and then grow a Denisovan.

I think it would be completely unethical to do anything like that, but unfortunately someone with enough money, and vanity and arrogance, might attempt it one day. These creatures lived in the past in their own environments, in their own social groups. Bringing isolated individuals back, for our own curiosity or arrogant purposes, would be completely wrong.

[W]e have many cases of more recent replacements and assimilations on the scale of that of the Neandertals. In the New World Europeans and Africans have replaced and assimilated the indigenous population in many regions which were ecologically suitable. In places like the Dominican Republic indigenous ancestry does persist at low levels, especially in the mtDNA, but it is not longer salient or culturally relevant in a concrete (as opposed to symbolic) sense. There were major biological differences between these Old World populations and the indigenous ones, mostly having to do with susceptibility to disease. Still, we can not separate biological advantages of the new populations from their cultural context. Malaria resistance amongst Africans became prevalent only with the rise of agriculture, as broad swaths of wilderness were cleared and transformed into farmland which was a superior environment for the mosquitoes which transmitted the pathogen. Similarly, the various infectious agents to which Europeans were inured spread via long distance contacts, which could exhibit a scale in Eurasia unmatched in the New World thanks to the emergence of a genuine ecumene.

The Columbian Exchange looms large in part because it is well documented and concerns Europeans, but genetic, linguistic, and archaeological data from Southeast Asia strongly implies that the ancient hunter-gatherers of both the mainland and the maritime zones have been assimilated by successive waves of agriculturalists issuing from the margins of southern China. There is also now evidence of massive population shifts in Europe and India due to the spread of agriculturalists. If an alien archaeologist examined the data I do think they might posit that were a biological speciation events which might explain this, as new traits arose which allowed the farming population to expand and replace the hunter-gatherers. Some of this is actually straightforwardly plausible. Consider the spread of lactase persistence or the ability of farming populations to digest amylose.

[. . .]

If there was a great leap forward to behavioral modernity ~40,000 years ago, then I think one should logically assert that there was another “great leap forward” ~10,000 years ago in the Middle East with the first farmers. There was also another “great leap forward” ~5,000 years ago ago with the invention of writing. There was another “great leap forward” ~300 years ago in Western Europea with the crystallization of a genuine scientific community.

I’m not actually suggesting that what happened 10,000 years ago was a speciation event. What I’m suggesting is that the near past may be more similar to the distant past than we imagine. This makes the near past more exotic, and the distant past less exotic.

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness.

The term was coined by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori as Bukimi no Tani Genshō (不気味の谷現象) in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of "the uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny." Jentsch's conception was elaborated by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay entitled "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche").

[. . .]

Mori's original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, a human observer's emotional response to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the appearance continues to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely human" and "fully human" entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that an almost human-looking robot will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

Saygin also recruited the help of Repliee Q2, an especially human-like robot from Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University. Q2 has 13 degrees of freedom on her face alone, and uses her posable eyes, brows, cheeks, lids, lips and neck to make facial expressions and mouth shapes.

The team made videos of Repliee Q2 performing actions like waving, nodding, taking a drink of water and picking up a piece of paper from a table. Then, the same actions were performed by the Japanese woman whom Q2 is based on. Finally, the researchers stripped the robot of its synthetic skin and hair to reveal a Terminator-style metal robot with dangling wires and visible circuits.

The subjects were shown each of the videos and were informed about which was a robot and which human. Then, the subjects’ brains were scanned in an fMRI machine.

When viewing the real human and the metallic robot, the brains showed very typical reactions. But when presented with the uncanny android, the brain “lit up” like a Christmas tree.

When viewing the android, the parietal cortex — and specifically in the areas that connect the part of the brain’s visual cortex that processes bodily movements with the section of the motor cortex thought to contain mirror (or empathy) neurons — saw high levels of activity.

It suggests that the brain couldn’t compute the incongruity between the android’s human-like appearance and its robotic motion. In the other experiments — when the onscreen perfomer looks human and moves likes a human, or looks like a robot and moves like a robot — our brains are fine. But when the two states are in conflict, trouble arises.

“The brain doesn’t seem tuned to care about either biological appearance or biological motion per se,” said Saygin, assistant professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. “What it seems to be doing is looking for its expectations to be met — for appearance and motion to be congruent.”

• Might the existence of the uncanny valley help explain why homo sapiens sapiens is the only hominid species still around? If "nearly-but-not-quite" human beings were around, the commenter suggested, might the reaction have been to kill them off? Maybe, I suppose--certainly there's enough evidence of racism motivated by anger that different population groups don't behave the way that normal people should--but then the latest genetic researches have demonstrated that Neanderthals and the like did interbreed, maybe even that they didn't go extinct so much as get assimilated.


• The second commenter refers to the works of Isaac Asimov, famed science-fiction pioneer of robotics, and his suggestion in his future history that people eventually rejected the "humaniform" robot because it was too uncannily human-like. Did Asimov make a successful prediction about the future?

• At 3 Quarks Daily, Namit Arora describes at length the Indian diaspora in Trinidad, describing how the community evolved from poverty and stigmatization to one of prominence.


• 80 Beats notes that American crows can, in fact, pass on warnings about people to other crows, this message persisting for years.


• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton disagrees with the proposed remedies for solving Greek debt. How can the Greek government raise money if it sells off its profitable businesses?


• blogTO announces the sad news that Sonic Boom, an iconic record shop at Bloor and Bathurst, is moving across the street to Honest Ed's to make space for a dollar store.


• demographer observes that conservative American "pro-family" groups are making headway in Russia, finding allies with that country's Orthodox Church.


• Eastern Approaches is decidedly unimpressed with the plans of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to boost labour participation by creating mandatory workfare programs and cutting the school-leaving age. Isn't Hungary trying to become, well, modern and wealthy?


• The Global Sociology Blog refers to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his argument that the surveillance society is normative.


• GNXP's Razib Khan describes how hominin fossils--including the remains of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Denisovans, and who knows what else--helps describe the history of this group, and hints that greater regional coverage is essential--what of East Asia, for instance?


• io9 notes the unsurprising news that, in fact, captivity in zoos seem to be driving chimpanzees insane.


• Spike Japan describes a visit to the fast-aging and dissolving Japanese mountain town of Shimo Nita.


• Torontoist's Patrick Metzger observes that the Ontario New Democratic Party seems to be following the lead of the very successful federal party in moving towards the center and leaving the Liberals cut out.


• Towleroad reports that the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church was recruited by the FBI to train officers in dealings with morally objectionable people. The idea works, at least.