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Did Large Eyes Lead To Neanderthals' Demise?
An anonymous reader writes "Bigger eyes and a corresponding greater allocation of the brain to process visual information is the most recent theory about the reasons that led to the extinction of Neanderthals, our closest relatives. Neanderthals split from the primate line that gave rise to modern humans about 400,000 years ago. This group then moved to Eurasia and completely disappeared from the world about 30,000 years back. Other studies have shown that Neanderthals might have lived near the Arctic Circle around 31,000 to 34,000 years ago."
Dupe... http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/03/13/1247255/manga-girls-beware-extra-large-eyes-caused-neanderthals-demise
What?
Neanderthals died out because they weren't smart enough. In other news, they had big eyes.
No. But perhaps if they had stuck around the large eyes would help the Slashdot editors spot their dupes.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/03/13/1247255/manga-girls-beware-extra-large-eyes-caused-neanderthals-demise
Twice within a week? Talk about fucking slow news day.
As if it wasn't already obvious editors don't give a single fuck.
the BIG TITS of Neanderthal women you'd have had BIG EYES too. Neanderthal tits were big but tough as leather. I know. I married one.
Here we go again.
Neanderthals didn't disappear. As a distinct culture they "disappeared" from the archaeological record, but that certainly doesn't mean Neanderthals disappeared from existence. A big chunk of the world's population have a significant proportion of Neanderthal genes. You can't say a population went extinct if their descendants are still alive!
Will duplicate storys cause the demise of slashdot?
Lets watch and find out.
you know what they say about neanderthals with big eyes...
even with their big eyes - The double post that is.
Smivs on the intertubes!
Horses have huge eyes and aren't going extinct any time soon.
Has anyone taken a close look at the Inuit? They may have more Neanderthal genes than most.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The neanderthals didn't extinct. They lost all their hair, lot of weight, their eyes got even bigger and they were transformed into grey aliens. Well, at least some of them. The rest got sick and turned green. That's why we don't find neanderthals fossils lately: they are all in UFOs.
DUP... oh, too late, never mind.
obviously that's "breeding" program not "breading" program, unless the Neanderthals want to bake bread and cookies out of humans.
Are these cookies made from real Girl Scouts?
Dupe of previous article. And it's still stupid this time around.
Well, you think the Neanderthals have such discriminating exquisite taste that they would be able to tell the difference between cookies baked with Girl Scouts rather than with, let's say US Congressmen?
I hope the Neanderthals go for the Congressmen first and leave the Girl Scouts for dessert.
You can't handle the truth.
The latest research I'm familiar with says the Neanderthals probably never went extinct at all, but rather inter-bread into larger human populations and essentially merged with humans. The large eyes thing might have played a role, but I don't see how since the premise that they became extinct due to a weakness (or at all) isn't broadly accepted anymore.
Color me blind but I didn't find the summary useful as it was referencing more about when they may have died out instead of getting to the point on why the article suggests the big eye hypothesis. in b4 "you must be new here"
Another interesting theory.
Dice is trying to revive the old Slashdot by upping the frequency of dupes.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The Galactica crew screwed them all off the Earth. Isn't that what Baltar said?
I think they shouldn't pull shit out of their asses and call it fact. FTA
Someone submitted a story with updates here:
http://slashdot.org/submission/2551363/did-large-eyes-lead-to-neanderthals-demise
Be sure to click through to the original source to see the fully updated article.
It feels to me like the editors never actually look at the site, and they have such short memory that they become useless as editors.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
If nature needed more neaderthal brain area, she would have created it. Big eyes are meaningless as a reason for the extinction of the species.
E Proelio Veritas.
No, but small brains lead to posting duplicate stories: . http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/03/13/1247255/manga-girls-beware-extra-large-eyes-caused-neanderthals-demise [slashdot.org]
"... they'd seen too much."
I rarely comment on /. innner workings but honestly, samzenpus needs some retraining. Last night it was the 'microsoft killing windows phone' fantasy headline.. now an obvious dupe.. among quite a few others of recent vintage.
it's the smaller ability to handle large social groups, which is based on the smaller amount of space in the brain due to better sight.
What needs to be proven with the theory given is why better sight was responsible for lesser social skills. As our brain is big enough to handle large defects without noticeble limitations, I doubt better sight was responsible but just a concurrent feature.
Actually, Neanderthals had bigger brain mass than we do. So it was the dumbest species that won, not the smartest. I imagine your eyes have grown a bit bigger now ?
I don't get why the article feels the need to grab to these far-fetched explanations. They do not seem to have read the speciation theories of Charles Darwin (which, unlike his evolution theory, is still pretty current). It basically states that if any 2 groups can (and do) interbreed, you might expect their genes to mix in their offspring. But that only happens in the short term. In the medium to long term one set of genes, never a mix, will "win out".
It could simply be that we were at peace with the Neanderthals, and intermarried, but moderns had greater numbers. If neanderthals allowed sufficient modern human genes to enter their race, they would have disappeared that way, like so many of the bird species Darwin described. There would have been a few mixed specimens, but only a few generations. The mixed Neanderthal-Modern "hybrid" humans would only have existed for a short period, maybe even only half a millenium (even shorter is possible, Charles Darwin described races disappearing in less than 10 generations, which for birds is less than a decade), which could explain why we haven't found them.
And yes the same will happen to current human races. They only developed because different human groups got separated, and now that we're flying humans around the planet, it is a matter of time until only a single species is left. The question is which one, of course. It seems a safe bet to say that Africans are doomed (they're getting near majority mixed blood and there are already reports of mixed-blood Africans getting white children (because both parents have black skin but 75% or more indo-european genes), something which will massively increase in the future), unless something changes, and so are ethnicities like Arabs. But a winner is not certain, Indo-Europeans have a decent shot, but are currently losing ground, while the Han Chinese are gaining ground. A distant third is the Indians. They're probably out of the race too, but ... you know, maybe. And of course, a big war might change the equation entirely.
Some groups do not have the numbers to defend their genes in, shall we say, the "open market", but intermarriage does not seem to occur, well, almost not at all, really. Obvious examples are the Japanese and Ashkenazi here. Something is holding up the barrier between those ethnicities and others. Those ethnicities will definitely not take over the planet, but they won't disappear either, unless something changes.
The weird part is how fast this will occur. In 100 years black skin will be a rare sight indeed in America. Another skin type will be about as common as blacks are today, and maybe white will have been replaced by yellow. Interesting times.
obviously that's "breeding" program not "breading" program, unless the Neanderthals want to bake bread and cookies out of humans.
Are these cookies made from real Girl Scouts?
Mine are. But only the ones with real mince meat fillings.
unless the Neanderthals want to bake bread and cookies out of humans.
That depends on what happens over the next 800 millennia.
Inuit are generally considered to be northern Asians
I guess that's why the Ice Climbers from Super Smash Bros. series don't look much different from the default "stateless" race of Japanese cartoon characters.
Nobody cares.
Not about the original article or whether it was correct.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
"Neanderthals may not have been able to coordinate such a large social group as modern humans".
It is quite possible that modern humans are not able to coordinate as large social groups as they now have to. No system of government or economic management has yet been proven over a long enough period to engender confidence. For example, no system of paper money has ever lasted more than a century or so without undergoing catastrophic inflation. We are just about getting to the critical point - and it shows.
Neither have we been able to find a system of government that can handle billions of people fairly, safely, and sustainably. A visiting Martian would perhaps be puzzled by the complete absence of any attempt to research, let alone safeguard, the future security of the human race. Instead, everywhere we see businesspeople frantically enriching themselves while politicians plot their strategies to gain or retain power. Very few, if any, think more than five years ahead.
According to an old story, during Nixon's visit to China in 1972 someone asked Zhou Enlai what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution. "Too early to say," he is supposed to have replied, thus giving a fine example of long-term thinking. It's now thought he was referring to the disturbances going on in France at the time, not in 1789, but it's still a nice story. Just so, it's far too early to tell whether modern man has really done much better than the Neanderthals. Indeed, we may turn out to have done much worse, if we pull much of our ecosystem down with us.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Forget the eye....tell us why the neanderthal women were stupid. I am betting they were all blonde too!
burp
The curious thing about Human history is how people are taught that, if their are no records, the events never happened. This propaganda push in schools, universal across the planet, is so the the 'victors' get to 'create' the history, '1984' style. Real history is VERY different from that which is taught in school, and can best be comprehended using the scientific method- IE., assuming that the circumstances that apply to us also largely applied to Humans living in the past too.
What do I mean. Well our living history is more difficult to massage. The difference between how the mass media portrays the life of ordinary people versus our own actual experience of the same. In two hundreds years time, we will be long gone, and future Humans will believe the Hollywood version of our history. Think how fake and inaccurate that is.
Organised religion is a cancer on our planet. Wherever a handful of people bring themselves together in 'common purpose', a 'Wizard of Oz' type alpha will appear to explain the world and its needs in terms of concepts that will be the embryo of a growing and self-perpetuating system we call 'organised religion'. Within no time flat, you are either a 'believer' or a dangerous 'infidel'. Clearly the believers are the 'good guys', so by definition, anyone who won't (or can't) join is 'bad' and must be either destroyed or enslaved.
The Neanderthals were different. They couldn't hide in plain sight. What choices did they have? The Humans were more dynamic in every sense, so they couldn't win a fair fight against us. The Neanderthals would have tried hiding, but Humans love the hunt. The Neanderthals would have tried compromise, under the most humiliating terms, but the reservations they would have been placed in would become slaughter grounds sooner or later.
Early organised religion would have codified the extermination of Neanderthals over and over. When the 'believers' were feeling less murderous, the priests of these religions would have kept ultimate plans to wipe out all Neanderthals as the inner secrets known only by the highest members of the church.
Consider the ethnic slaughters of our times (especially the worst Holocaust of the 20th century- the christian-judaic extermination of dark-skinned Humans in the Congo). We have mass media communication, ethical training of our children, and a scientific civilization, and the end result is Seth MacFarlane making an episode of the 'Family Guy' in which he states "all muslims are terrorists" in order to make more likely the US nuclear strikes against Iran.
If we are this bad, what the hell do you think it was like back in the times when Humans and Neanderthals co-existed? You really think it was some sort of hippy love-fest?
Re: Our study provides a more direct approach by estimating how much of their brain was allocated to cognitive functions, including the regulation of social group size; a smaller size for the latter would have had implications for their level of social complexity and their ability to create, conserve and build on innovations.
As a visual thinker myself, much of my "idea processing" is visual. (I come from a long line of professional artists and cartoonists.) I create little visual mental models to emulate and test ideas. Kekule came up with the proper shape of the benzene molecule after envisioning a snake eating it's own tail, for example.
I've also found ways to speed up verification of math problems using visual techniques in school. This allowed me to check and review my test problems via approximate visual models before I submitted the test. It was especially helpful in Calculus. (It caught about 80% of those that were wrong due to an improperly done detail step, at least those that had a visual counterpart.)
Thus, there may be a false dichotomy between being "visual" and "reasoning" or "creating". One can reason visually also. It's not the only way.
Granted, it has limitations. My brother, also a visual thinker, started out in electrical engineering in college, but switched to mechanical engineering because he couldn't produce sufficient visual models of electronic behavior. But fortunately the world has different kinds of thinkers for different tasks and viewpoints.
Table-ized A.I.
I call BS on any story that claims that anything with close set, beady little eyes is a more evolved species.
If that was true, Bush would have been a genius instead of a mediocre painter of dogs.
Marty Feldmann
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!