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

Point, counter-point

[Lord Kano]

While modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions...

Eugeneticists may use this information to claim the superiority of Europeans, a counterpoint can be made that these people can't be superior because were having sex with sub-humans.

LK

Harvard

[Sqwubbsy]

People have been fired from Harvard for saying less than this.

who wants better science coverage on slashdot?

[sentientbrendan]

This summary and article, which I list complaints about below, is symptomatic of the sparse and incredibly poor science reporting that has been coming out of slashdot. This "news for nerds site" has better coverage of battlestar galactica, and whatever RMS and linus torvalds has for breakfast this morning than anything substantive about the sciences. I for one would like to see some effort to improve on the part of the editorial staff. If you are with me on this and would like slashdot to become a more informative and less glitzy news site, please post replies outlining problems you've seen and possible solutions.

The article mentions that more neanderthals lived in europe than africa, and that distribution of this gene that may or may not have come from neanderthals corresponds to that. However, the article also mentions that *70% of the human population* has this gene. If the gene's presence in africa is lower, they don't say how much lower. The data mentioned in the article gives no indication whether the gene is present in a majority or a minority of africans.

Given all of these qualifications present in the article, the submitter was obviously trying to spice up his submission to get it posted by playing up the race element and drawing a strong connection between this gene and race *that the original article doesn't actually show*.

Personally, I would be curious to see more of the data that these people collected; maybe even see the actual distribution of this gene by geographic location. However, lately a lot of incredibly poor science reporting has been posted on slashdot. By poor science reporting, I mean articles that include a lot of fantastic speculation (often primarily in the summary...) but no hard data.

This is a site for news for nerds! We want numbers graphs and PI charts! Not some f*cking cnn article with incredibly vague details about research the submitter obviously doesn't understand. Let's see some positive change hear.