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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
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
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
burp
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.
Precisely. We don't know jack about how they lived, what their capabilities were, etc.
What we have had were attempts to use Neanderthals for racist stereotypes, to back up certain belief systems outside the realm of proper science. And now that we have found that white Europeans / Asians have Neanderthal DNA as part of their heritage, and Africans do not, I imagine that one of two things will happen: 1.) Denial, or 2.) a rehabilitation of the Neanderthal.
In any case, articles like these will continue to spout pure nonsense and popular group-think, while every scientist on the planet groans at the thought of humanity having to come to grips with yet another mistruth.
I am John Hurt.
Marty Feldmann
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
Do you reckon they were too dumb to know the difference between size and power?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."