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Manga Girls Beware: Extra Large Eyes Caused Neanderthal's Demise
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports on a new study of prehistoric skulls which suggests that Neanderthals became extinct because they had larger eyes than our species. As a consequence of having extra sized eyes, an average 6 millimeters larger in radius, more of their backside brain volume was devoted to seeing, at the expense of frontal lobe high-level processing of information and emotions. This difference affected their ability to innovate and socialize the way we, modern people (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) do. When the last Ice Age set on 28,000 years ago, Neanderthals had no sewn clothes and no large organized groups to rely on each other, hastening their fall. Yet, they were not stupid, brutish creatures as portrayed in Hollywood films, they were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as the Homo Sapiens of Cromagnon."
Yeah, no kidding. My first response was, "what the fuck?" This is (seemingly typical) bad science.
I'm sorry, there's more than 10mm variability in eye size in existing populations. That variability is kind of how you get stereotypes and things like manga in the first place. Not only that, but extrapolating "they didn't have mental capacity because they had larger eyes" doesn't even begin to follow, logically. Maybe their visual cortex was the same size? Maybe it was actually smaller and significantly more efficient, allowing them to actually process more of what they saw (unlike us, who ignore most of it)? Maybe, just maybe, they used more of their brains - which were actually bigger, despite the "they were stupid by modern standards" stereotypes.
Pretty tiring. It's pretty irritating to see the "science" out of these types.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
In certain ways, yes. Chimps are known to torture other chimps, and ape packs are known to go after other packs of the same species and try to kill them all off.