Did Humans Get Their Big Brains From Neanderthals?

MCTFB writes, "According to CNN, human beings may have acquired a gene for developing bigger brains from Neanderthal man. Apparently, 70% of the world's population has a variant of a gene regulating brain size, with this variant being most common in people of European descent (where Neanderthal man lived alongside ancient humans), and least common in people of African descent (where Neanderthal man was non-existent). While modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions, people such as myself, who happen to be of northern European ancestry, may find it fascinating that somewhere in our lineage ancient humans and Neanderthals decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia."

Comments

What evolutionary pressures still exist?

[rwa2]

It's interesting that this gene arises in Neanderthals. Is this because it was so cold that they'd have to do more planning to survive the winters?

What factors force populations to evolve more intelligence? The Jews are probably so damn smart due to years of oppression, not being able to own property and thus farm "the easy life" and thus having to to develop business and finance smarts, and finally the holocaust coming down to weed out most of the ones left in the slums.

But both with the Neanderthals and the Jews, do the intelligent genes get reinforced by allowing populations to grow out of more crowded, competitive regions, or simply due to the fact that the less intelligent ones die out?

Nowadays with advances in medicine and means to deliver sustenance anywhere, it doesn't seem like either factor allows natural selection to take its course. As earlier slashdot links had pointed out, evolution of mankind has eventually stopped, the only trend over the next few hundred to thousand years is for the entire population of earth to blend into a homogenous mutt, or maybe it will even bifurcate into two types of mutts due to artificial selection. But without any life-threatening challenges, there's really no push for "stronger/faster/better/smarter" genes to avoid getting diluted back into the main pool.

So what now??!