Elizabeth Kolbert - 15 August 2011
- "Leaky Replacement" - Before modern humans replaced the Neanderthals, they had sex with them and produced children who helped populate Europe, Asia and the New World; Offspring were functional enough to be integrated with human society.
- All non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA.
- Leipzig performed tests on chimps, orangutans, and 2.5 year old children and found that they all preformed comparably on tasks involved in understanding the physical world.
- Apes grasped quantity as well as kids--choosing the dish that contained more treats rather than less treats which is rudimentary understanding of mathematics.
- Kids perfromed better in reading social cues--adults pointing to things to help the kids pick something whereas the apes didn't realize this as help.
- Apes seem to lack the impulse towards collective problem solving which is central to human society.
- From archaeological records, Neanderthals evolved in Europe or western Asia and spread out from there, stopping when they reached an obstacle like a body of water--only modern humans tried venturing out in the ocean when they don't see land---which suggests that there is some kind of adventuring or madness encoded in modern humans--the need to explore.
- Neanderthals and modern humnas share an ancestor that is about 400,000 years old whereas our common ancestor with chimps is 5-7 million years ago.
- People who have faulty copies of RUNX2 often develop conditions with Nenderthal like features including flared rib cages. Two genes that have been implicated in autism also appears to have changed substantially between Neanderthals and humans---interesting because one of the symptoms of autism is inability to read social cues
