Neanderthals ... They're Just Like Us?

[Unorthodox]

I know, I know, Nat Geo is readers digest of archeology.  The actual articl has links to the relevent studies.  Mostly posting due to discussing the uncanny vally and interbreeding with Buncle the other day.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121012-neanderthals-science-paabo-dna-sex-breeding-humans/

The Neanderthals are both the most familiar and the least understood of all our fossil kin.

For decades after the initial discovery of their bones in a cave in Germany in 1856 Homo neanderthalensis was viewed as a hairy brute who stumbled around Ice Age Eurasia on bent knees, eventually to be replaced by elegant, upright Cro-Magnon, the true ancestor of modern Europeans.

Science has long since killed off the notion of that witless caveman, but Neanderthals have still been regarded as quintessential losers—a large-brained, well-adapted species of human that went extinct nevertheless, yielding the Eurasian continent to anatomically modern humans, who began to migrate out of Africa some 60,000 years ago.

Lately, the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans has gotten spicier.

According to a new study that analyzed traces of Neanderthal DNA in present-day humans, Neanderthals may have been interbreeding with some of the ancestors of modern Eurasians as recently as 37,000 years ago. And another recent study found that Asian and South American people possess an even greater percentage of Neanderthal genes.

"These are complexities in the out-of-Africa story that certainly I would not have anticipated two or three years ago," said Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London and author of Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth.

(See pictures of a reconstructed Neanderthal and take a Neanderthals quiz.)

Blurring the Line

In their original incarnation, Neanderthals were viewed as the primitive, backward cave dwellers of Eurasia, far less complex than the sophisticated Homo sapiens who used language and developed sophisticated art as they migrated out of Africa and conquered the world.

But new studies are making it much harder to draw a clean line between us and them.
"It's increasingly difficult to point to any one thing that Neanderthals did and Homo sapiens didn't do and vice versa," said John Shea, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York.

"These Ice Age people, both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, survived, thrived, and increased their numbers under conditions that would probably kill people nowadays, even ones that are equipped with modern survival technology."

No Hanky-Panky Necessary?


The draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, published in the journal Science in 2010, provided the first compelling genetic evidence that Neanderthals and H. sapiens had more in common than just an ancestor in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The researchers, under the direction of Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, found that 2.5 percent of the genome of an average human living outside Africa today is made up of Neanderthal DNA. The average modern African has none.

This suggested that some interbreeding had taken place between the two kinds of human, probably in the Middle East, where the early modern humans migrating out of Africa would have encountered Neanderthals already living there.

The even larger percentage of Neanderthal DNA found in Asians and South Americans, announced in Science in August, could indicate additional interbreeding in Asia long ago, or could mean that the percentage of Neanderthal DNA in Europeans was diluted by later encounters.

Not everyone is convinced that interbreeding was responsible for similarities in the Neanderthal and H. sapiens genomes. "The similarities they're seeing may be ancient," Shea noted.

Another recent study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, calculated that the shared DNA could have come from an earlier, common ancestor of Neanderthals and H. sapiens—no hanky-panky necessary.

A new study by Pääbo's team, published last week in PLOS Genetics, also considered the possibility that the presence of Neanderthal DNA in people living outside Africa today could be traced far back, to the common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans in Africa.

Perhaps the early modern humans who left Africa 60,000 years ago were already genetically more similar to the Neanderthals—who had left hundreds of thousands of years before—than were the modern human populations that stayed behind in Africa. In that case, no interbreeding would have needed to occur to account for the trace of Neanderthal DNA in non-Africans today.

To test the two hypotheses, Pääbo's group analyzed the lengths of segments of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans to determine when Neanderthal genes may have mixed with those of modern humans. The date they came up with for the gene flow was 37,000 to 86,000 years ago, and most likely 47,000 to 65,000 years ago.

This date strongly suggests there was indeed interbreeding between "us and them," when H. sapiens was moving into the Middle East from Africa and would have encountered populations of Neanderthals already settled there.

"This [interbreeding] could have been a really powerful mechanism for humans to adapt as they moved into Eurasia," said Sriram Sankararaman, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the PLOS Genetics study.

Another group, publishing last year in Science, for example, determined that modern humans gained from Neanderthals a family of genes that helps the immune system fight off viruses. Breeding with the locals could have unwittingly given H. sapiens a survival advantage in a new land.

"[Neanderthals] are not just some extinct group of related hominids," Pääbo said. "They are partially ancestors to people who live today."

Take any two unrelated humans today, Pääbo noted, and they'll differ in millions of places in their genetic code. But the Neanderthal genome varies on average from that of H. sapiens in only about a hundred thousand positions. Pääbo and his colleagues are now trying to figure out the consequences of those differences.

(Related: "Sex With Humans Made Neanderthals Extinct?")

Act Like a Man?

Regardless of the similarities to our DNA, how "human" were Neanderthals in their sensibilities?

Last month a study led by the Gibraltar Museum and published in PLOS ONE documented a multitude of fossil remains of bird wings, particularly from big black raptors, at Neanderthal sites in southern Europe. The team suggested that Neanderthals could have been plucking feathers from the wings for personal use or even for ritual ornaments.

"We have other evidence for Neanderthals preferring mineral pigments that are dark, blackish color," Stony Brook's Shea said. "There may be something for them with the color black just as there seems to be something for us with the color red."

(Related: "Neanderthals' Last Stand Was in Gibraltar, Study Suggests.")

Sophisticated art, however, still appears to remain in the realm of H. sapiens.

The ancestors of modern humans left behind images of animals and other objects in caves around the world, most famously at Lascaux cave and Chauvet Cave (pictures) in southern France. Paintings in the latter cave could be as ancient as 37,000 years old. (See a prehistoric time line.)

Images found in a cave called El Castillo on the Spanish coast were recently dated at more than 40,800 years old: a time before Neanderthals disappeared, raising the tantalizing possibility that they were indeed the artists. However, "it hasn't been demonstrated that Neanderthals produced any of that cave art," the Natural History Museum's Stringer said.

The simpler answer is that H. sapiens, who had also reached Europe by that time and are known to have produced later but similar art, were responsible.

Neanderthals, though, have proven advanced in other ways.

They used pigments and may have made jewelry; some made complex tools. "We know they buried their dead," Stringer said. In 2010, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution even found evidence that the Neanderthal diet included a diverse mixture of plants, and that they cooked some of the grains. (Related: "Neanderthals Ate Their Veggies, Tooth Study Shows.")

"Cooking something like oatmeal is not what we would have imagined," said John Hawks, paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With no pots, Neanderthals may have cooked inside leaves, Hawks suggested. "That starts to sound like cuisine."

"Neanderthals have gone from being different from us to being like us," Hawks noted. "They're looking like [Homo sapiens] hunter-gatherers look."

But while modern humans continued to develop cultural complexity and spread across the globe, the Neanderthals vanished. Why remains a mystery.

[Buster's Uncle]

None of us being anthropologists, NG is fine. 

Glad to see other people posting science articles - good way to compile EC, too; we are going to have a better selection of Shop goodies someday.

As I said before, almost literally every other article/news I see on the interbreeding takes the opposite position from the last - that's been going on forever.  What I said about the uncanny valley and killing them all doesn't preclude some rape, men in a savage mood being the way they are.  The women could have smelled right, despite being ugly.  They could have made standard practice of killing all the men and children and keeping the women in the right age range for slaves and rumpy-bumpy.  Dunno; I wasn't there.

I am still very confident that our ancestors saw everyone from them to Austrailopithicines as horrible monsters to be fled from or killed.  And I'm sure that evolutionary harwiring in our brains has everything to do with your hobby of creepy stuff.  -Also, racism.

[Unorthodox]

Creepy stuff is a lot more complex than just some evolutionary hardwiring.

Some stuff is definitely inately bred into us, like fear of spiders and snakes and stuff.  Other stuff is learned.  Like zombies.  Babies aren't afraid of zombies.  Hell even most little  (~5 year old cutoff) kids aren't afraid of zombies.  (you could pretty much put most mythical things here)  When it clicks, it's like a lightswitch though.  (I happen to believe that particular one is the blood=bad association)  I could go on as to why this made my skull garden a more effective targetted experience (going right over little one's heads and nailing my target of 8-10 year olds square in the chest) than the current model (I expect tears this year, not happy about it, doing it mostly for my own kids). 

Where you see the uncanny valley is with developementally challenged kids.  Kid's get the "he talks/looks/etc funny" pretty darn quickly.  Yeah, this is why Igor is nearly always deformed, I know. 

I don't know about Neanderthals.  Early reconstructions, I would have tended to agree with you, but more recent reconstructions have them VERY humanlike in appearance.  How much of that is science and how much is artist's preconceptions making their way into reconstructions, I really don't know.  We continue to find more evidence they were more advanced than previously believed.  Used tools, and some say quite potentially language and art as well.  Would early men just see them as another tribe?  Who knows?  How much interaction was there between the two?  Enough to provide sociological influences? 

[Buster's Uncle]

The archeology indicates that Neanderthals weren't big technological innovators - they'd go 10,000 years with littile improvement in their tools.  But where there was homo sap. nearby at the same time, their tools caught up in sophistication almost instantly - clearly, the killing was not so instant and absolute as I was making it sound - if only by running and hiding, they sometimes survived contact with Cro Magnons for a long time.  There was a remnant population in the Pyrenees up to 15.000 years ago, IIRC, though most died out closer to 40,000, always seeming to retreated into the mountains and less hospitable habatats as their populations dwindle.

They at the very least would have been ugly, which is plenty to trigger hostile racist behavior that people struggle with to this day with other fully-human beings.

I wouldn't dream of contradicting the Halloween guy about horror - nonetheless, I think the notion has merits as a root of horror.  No one's actually afraid of Godzilla, they're afraid of Dracula, who looks human but isn't (anymore) -- even though if both were real, Godzilla would win the terror polls hand-down in the regions he frequented.  All this assumes well-done Godzilla (never) and well-done vampires (rarely).  Most effective monsters, the ones that really get to you on a visceral level, are almost human.  It see4ms obvious to me.

Perhaps with the children, the genetic programming doesn't install until they're old enough to effectively run away or fight back badly - this makes evolutionary sense to me, as you'd want your infant/toddler calm and quiet while you carry them and do all the running or fighting, especially when hiding comes into it.

[Unorthodox]

Dracula?

Good lord, your info's out of date.  Practically NO ONE is afraid of vampires as a general rule anymore.  Started with Dark Shadows, on through Anne Rice and Buffy, and finally Twilight.  They've been socially engineered into cuddly sex icons.  Dark, brooding, misunderstood, poor things...

Most shows with "Evil" vamps also have a vamp hero these days.

http://youtu.be/1glNuQiE77E

As for kids, scientifically speaking, virtually EVERY fear (outside falling and loud noise) is learned.  Some associations just happen real quick.  Snakes, Spiders (unknown why these get learned almost immediately outside a contol setting, best guesses are body language from adults), and Heights (probably from falling when learning to walk) are among the first learned, nearly instantly. 

So, what age the 'different=bad' association is made depends on sociological factors. 

But, Neanderthal ugly?  Not necessarily.  Some of the newer reconstructions:





I'm just saying that we're still learning too much about them to be able to make judgements.  We're finding more tools, finding evidence of art and society, all things that were previously thought outside their realm. 

[Buster's Uncle]

I acknowlege your utterly superior authority on the subject of fear.

However, I said "well-done vampires (rarely)".  You know and I know that a really good vampire flick is out there in the potentium and will get made someday.  It will make people pee themselves and watch The Exorcist to relax.  We've both read Salem's Lot, surely - it had a touch of that.

Whoever made those reconstruction had an agenda, if you ask me.  That's trying too hard.  Most Aboriginal Australians aren't that good-looking.

Of course, I still wasn't there. [shrugs]

[Unorthodox]

I stated above, I don't know enough about reconstructive art to be able to say definitively how much of the change is new tech and how much is artist interpretation.  (I do think reconstructive sculpting would be REALLY fun to learn, though)  For what it's worth, though, that's 2 different artists. 

[Buster's Uncle]

[Ninja'd]

-Also, the man's brown eyes and weathered tan?  Please.  Neanderthals were an ice age adaption of the hominids, and I betcha odds they were pale as all get-out.

[So, suspicion cast on that artist just for that.]

[Unorthodox]

As for good vampire movie.  IF one comes out, it'll be foreign.  Mark my words. 

Best one of late is Let the Right One In.  That vamp is a monster...and still charming in a most disturbed sense.  If you MUST the American remake "Let Me In" is pretty good, but there was a particular aspect to the vampire character that was viewed as too radical for the American audience.  Whether it's a huge change or not depends on individual views of sexuality. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, what made Salem's Lot -the book; the miniseries or whatever was rather uninspired, as adaptions of King tend to be- so effective was the careful mundanity established for that community - rather lent it a sense of It Could Happen to You.  It was a long time after I read it that walking down the hall in the dark at night didn't carry a certain unease that Danny Glick might come through an open window and get me.

Now The Stand, they adapted about as well as you could hope for something so long.  The sequence kicking off the minseries, panning over the lab, with Blue Oyster Cult rocking out, was effective.  All those people.  All those poor people.  All dead.  Everybody's dead...

[Unorthodox]

Never did much like King.  Poe on the other hand...

[Buster's Uncle]

Murders in the Rue Morgue?  The Tell-tell Heart?  Fall of the House of Usher?  Am I leaving any major ones out?

None of those did much for me, but I was mighty young to be wading through the florid victorian prose-style when I tried (not for classes, BTW).  The Cask of Amontillado, on the other hand, sticks with you, and is stone-cold.  I remember an English professor saying that critics couldn't settle whether he was a hack or brilliant, but I don't know why both couldn't be the case at the same time - his biography certainly gives it weight.

When I looked up how to spell Amontillado, I saw I left out The Black Cat. Never read that one, I think...

[JarlWolf]

It also seems that Neanderthals were driven into the mountains not only (or not) by our species, but it seems that their retreat coincides with major cold shifts in the climate. Every time one of those shifts happened, their populations got smaller and smaller, being pushed more into the Pyrenees's and into Spain. I think, due to what we know of their anatomy, and what we know of how their brain was structured and how the different lobes, notable the part of the brain associating with social skills, was radically different to humans.

I personally think that while Neanderthals may have been just as intelligent as our breed, they may have either lacked communication or cohesion, the amount our society has. You find evidence of vast amounts of trade within Homo Sapiens and their settlements, trade links that apparently reach up to 600 kilometers in diameter, such as a collection of settlements excavated in the Ukraine and Russia.

Neanderthal settlements? They lacked these exotic commodities within their communities. There has been very little evidence the neanderthals traded or acquired goods from beyond their territory in substantial amounts.

With that in mind, maybe that climatic strike threat was the push needed for a social flaw to be exhibited, that led to their downfall?

Maybe.

[Buster's Uncle]

The lack of trade goods also tells us they didn't trade with homo sap. populations who did engage in trade.  You don't trade when you're on the ragged edge of survival, and you don't trade with mutants who want to kill you...

[Unorthodox]

Murders in the Rue Morgue?  The Tell-tell Heart?  Fall of the House of Usher?  Am I leaving any major ones out?

None of those did much for me, but I was mighty young to be wading through the florid victorian prose-style when I tried (not for classes, BTW).  The Cask of Amontillado, on the other hand, sticks with you, and is stone-cold.  I remember an English professor saying that critics couldn't settle whether he was a hack or brilliant, but I don't know why both couldn't be the case at the same time - his biography certainly gives it weight.

When I looked up how to spell Amontillado, I saw I left out The Black Cat. Never read that one, I think...

The Black Cat is along the lines of Tell Tale Heart...save the lead is given away by the cat who's been living off the corpse. 
Pit and the Pendulum
Ligeia
Masque of the Red Death (which I want to base a haunt on)
Hop Frog is Casque of Amontillado with public flaming death of multiple victims. 


Murders in the Rue Morgue is a very special story for the mere fact it sets the template for all detective stories to come, it being the first known example of one, anywhere.  Holmes is compared to Dupin (Poe's recurring detective, first penned here, also the Mystery of Marie Roget and the Purloined Letter) by Watson early on in that series, a shout out from Doyle to Poe. 

Some other notable firsts include:

The Oval Portrait is basically The Picture of Dorian Gray 50 years before Wilde wrote the latter. 

The Gold Bug is notable for a couple reasons, including as a source of inspiration for the more famous Treasure Island.

'The Balloon Hoax' is notable in that it pulled a sensational hoax across several continents. 

The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar brings the macabre in on the hoax, war of the worlds style, on the general public.  (communing with the dead)

Descent into the Maelstrom may as well have been the world's first twilight zone episode.