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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."
What's so surprising about this result? People will fuck anything and everything.
I don't know if it's at all related, but some people have a bump on the back of their head, and I've read before that those with the bump are generally more intelligent than those without. It has a name, can't remember, but I think it was some German word. I'm sure some slashdotter out there will be able to expand on this...
Similes are like metaphors
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
People have been fired from Harvard for saying less than this.
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Were right all along
And the Neanderthals got their big brain from Homo Erectus who traded a mule for it.
Apparently, 70% of the world's population has a variant of a gene regulating brain size, with the variant of this gene 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).
Oh, great. You just know some wingnut wackjob is going to latch onto this nugget of information and try and use it as "evidence" of racial superiority. Then you'll get the 24-hour news networks milking it for all the ratings as they can.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
According to a study of Neanderthal mtDNA by Svante Pääbo et al Neanderthals and modern humans had a common ancestor 500 thousand years ago, this means Neanderthals and modern humans didn't interbreed.
You ever seen Neanderthals? I propose that the invention of Beer and thus Beer Goggles would be needed before this interbreeding occured!
"decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia" you know how these sorta things start out... they knew each other from somebody else... met at a party and after alot of drinking let there hormones get the best of there barely separated genes and they mixed back together.
Oh, yeah, definitely. Know how I know? My wife.
See, she was an anthropology major in college. Back before we got married, we were hanging out in the living room, post-movie-watching, and having one of those shmoopy "gazing into each other's eyes" moments. She reached up to stroke my hair, then looked startled.
"Hey. Did you hit your head?"
Her hand was on the back of my head, right above the neck.
"Huh? No. Oh, that bump? I've had that forever."
She laughed. "That's an occipital bun." When I looked puzzled, she explained what it meant. Then her eyes widened. "And you... you have a supra-orbital ridge!" I knew what that one was, but I wasn't expecting what she said next.
As if she'd discovered something either fantastic or fantastically gross, she leaned in and whispered, her voice full of wonder: "You're a Neanderthal!
All you geeks can thank me for your big brains. Preferably with cash.
somewhere in our lineage ancient humans and neanderthals decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia.
Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia. Everyone knows that.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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."
I have a hard time believing that these ancient humans and neanderthals "made love". I would say it's all the more likely that one group forcibly intermingled with the other.
What is this, some kind of government sting to catch racists that reply?
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
Err, so I guess this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with brain size OR intelligence. The only really significant result of the finding so far is that Homo Sapien and Neaderthal may have interbread. We don't even know what this "brain gene" does.... just that some people have it. It could make people more prone to schizophrenia for all we know. That is, until somebody actually tests for measurable, statistically significant differences between the 30% with and 70% without...
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Making love and war are not mutually exclusive. Throughout most of history, you made war on your neighbors and stole their women.
I'm no scientist, but from my lay-person perspective it seems far more likely that larger brained homo-sapiens would fair better competing against a rival homonid, and therefore persist on, while dumber homo-sapiens would die out.
/shrug what do i know.
that would make far more sense to me than a larger brain resulting from inter-breeding with an obviously inferior sub-specie.
ancient humans and neanderthals decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia
Nice dream, but assuming that this theory is true, it probably happened when a group of neanderthals met a group of humans, killed most of them, and then raped the women (or humans doing it to neanderthals). Romeo was not a neanderthal searching for his human Juliet.
What does bigger brain really mean anyway?
Sort of as a crude example, does a bigger CPU in terms of size mean anything? It might mean more memory, or more pipelines or maybe just old technology when the fabrication needed to be a little more coarse.
The brain controls all sorts of things in all sorts of region. If one region is bigger, it might be for sensory recpetion in your leg. So, you tickle worse or something.
It's like that picture of Homer with a small brain. If his brain was like that, he wouldn't be able to walk or speak.
So, big FU to MCTFB, you little Hitler.
There was a Times article awhile back that involved the mating habits of Neanderthals and humans. It made that assumption from the analysis of the skeleton of a boy found in Portugal that had hybrid characteristics of the two groups.
From the article:
"This skeleton demonstrates that early modern humans and Neanderthals are not all that different," said Dr. Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "They intermixed, interbred and produced offspring."
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
Rather than a crappy overview from CNN, here's the original article's abstract. In fact, it looks like it's in PNASes open access section, so you can all download the PDF for free.
They're basically studying a haplogroup of the microcephalin gene, and show that this gene probably entered the human lineage before 37KYA. The other haplogroups have coalescent times of circa 100KYA (which is around when Homo sapiens arose).
They then use some statistical magic to show that the early coalescence time for the D haplogroup was probably a result of introgression into the population - i.e. it came from another population. Note that they don't stress that it was Neanderthals, it could have been any archaic Homo lineage.
I'm not sure what to make of this yet, as far as I'm aware there's some very strong evidence AGAINST interbreeding between Neanderthals and Humans (e.g. Svante Paabo's work etc)
henry -- the human evolution news relay
For the first false assumption: I doubt that any offspring of human/neanderthal -- if such offspring was possible at all -- would have been able to reproduce.
However, that doesn't stop gene transfer between -- for example -- humans and their dogs, or humans and their cats, or humans and their birds.
There's something called viral gene transfer, and if I understand correctly it works partially through retroviruses. I expect that if there is human/neanderthal gene mixing, it is more likely to have been through viruses that the mixing occurred.
Another possibly false assumpt ion that was not made outright, but implied, is that there is merit to a larger brain. I'm not so sure that's correct. Yes, it stands to reason... if your reason inclines in the direction of "more is better". But there are other factors in intelligence, including bistability, instability, speed, and so on and so forth.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Neanderthals, eh? I think I dated one of those once...
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.
Obviously we inherited our brains from those on the B-ark. Which is why we always have such impeccably clean phones.
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Morg mod WOW
Now Morg happy
(a) Did Humans Get Their Big Brains From Neanderthals?
Article says:
(b) The gene microcephalin (MCPH1) regulates brain size during development
(emphasis mine). Doesn't look like the article claims bigger brains for any group overall. Article further says:
(c) it is not yet clear what advantage the D allele gives the human brain
And both the slashdot summary and the article highlight the notion that the genetic difference in question is prevalent in Europe and not in Africa. So just to put this all out on the line here: do Europeans have bigger brains than Africans? Slashdot headline implies this, but article does not say this. Do Europeans have bigger brains during temporary stages of development? Article implies this with (b), but does not actually say this. Does this gene confer an advantage? It's implied by all of this coverage, but (c) disavows any evidence of such.
So this whole angle (from the slashdot header) of "modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions" would seem to be just a baseless, inflammatory statement injected for sensationalism... or am I missing something here?
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