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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."
And from the departement of wild speculations we have the following gem...
Can you please stop the tabloid headlines. "Extra Large Eyes Caused Neanderthal's Demise" would have been just fine, thanks. No need to try and sex it up with some manga girls. BTW, manga boys have big eyes too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It amazes me that comments like this, with so little data to make such a conjecture, can be taken seriously by people who scoff at religion. We know slightly more about these other branches of humanity (their biology aside) than we do about the historicity and culture of Atlantis. Yet we are supposed to take for granted that we can just know, with virtually nothing known about neanderthal society, what caused them to go extinct.
Unbelievable.
Oh sure, they always blame us tentacle monsters. We're always the villains if we show up in movies at all. Have you ever stopped to think that we have feelings too?
And feelers. Lots and lots of feelers.
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.
Do animals build prisons to hold and torture fellow animals?
There are species of shrimp that keep live starfish alive for months while eating them. Komodo dragons kill with a toxic bite that takes days to die from.
Do animals build concentration camp to hold and kill millions of it's own kind?
No, but pack animals banish members to die of starvation or be killed by others. No other species has built as complex of a societal structure to compare with. So we simply don't know. Most social animals probably wouldn't bother with prisons to begin with, they'd simply kill or banish any drain on the pack or herd, or leave them behind to die. Humans typically don't do this. We take care of our elderly and sick.
Do animals build nuclear bombs to destroy fellow animals far away?
Of course not, they're too fucking stupid to do so. Do animals donate blood or perform surgery so save other members? Do they donate organs to save each others lives? Did they start the Peace Corps? Or donate time to Habitat for Humanity? Have they started shelters to care for homeless humans? Do carnivores and omnivores ever choose to be vegetarians? Have they invented vaccines for chronic illnesses? If they had nuclear weapons to use against their enemies, you can bet your ass there are many species who would.
Animals might be more aggressive, but they sure as fuck aren't as evil as humans...
I'm not sure about evil, as animals don't really think in those terms as far as I can tell. but I would guess that more great ape physical confrontations per incident that end in death than do humans. There are probably less fights over mating in the human world than in the animals. As far as "evil" have you ever seen a cat play with its quarry after it's injured it? Or a Trigger fish eat the eyes of another fish and let it swim aimlessly before eating it? There is plenty of cruelty in the animal kingdom. Don't think for a second that humans are alone in this.