Did Neandertals Live a Sustainable Lifestyle?

I don't know if any of you saw The Human Spark, the 3-part PBS program hosted by Alan Alda in January. It examined what made us Cro-Magnons different from the Neandertals--basically why they died out and we didn't. Here is a comment I made at the time:

I was disappointed that the point of the program seemed to be to find out why we were "better" than the Neanderthals. I guess Alda was just kidding around, but this furthers the public's misconception that the "winners" in the evolution game--the survivors, the fittest--are objectively better than the species that die out. The winners are just those that are better adapted to the particular environment they find themselves in at that time.

The smaller, more dispersed Neanderthal settlements and their lack of creativity and technological innovation made me think the following: What they seem to have had was a sustainable system . . . the very thing we Moderns have not been able to come up with. What's wrong with using the same toolbox of technological skills for hundreds of thousands of years if it's working just fine?

The differences between us and the Neanderthals are undeniably fascinating. The comments referring to our superiority were tedious.

Also, my husband wants to know how we know all that cultural and genetic innovation that we Cro-Magnons developed, from language to spearpoints, was for hunting . . . maybe it was for waging war instead?

The Invention of Lying

We watched the movie The Invention of Lying this week. It's full of evolutionary psychology themes! And hilarious. It's my new favorite movie. It showed the importance of deception in mate choice, religion, and also in just helping social interaction run more smoothly--something I think about a lot because I have been accused of being "honest to a fault."

In the movie, it has never occurred to anyone in the history of humankind to tell a lie. There also isn't any fiction or story-telling in the society. Then one day a guy discovers he can lie.

When you think about it, to be able to lie is to have a theory of mind, right? You are able to see that another person has their own viewpoint separate from yours, and that if you misrepresent the truth, they won't know because they don't know what's going on in your head. And I think humans might be the only ones who can do this. Although maybe that's not true--there is deception in biology all the time--a bird pretending to be wounded to lure a predator away from its nest might be the classic example. Or, getting beyond behavior to traits themselves, the coloring of a butterfly trying to pass as a monarch. Or weeds that resemble domesticated crops growing among the crop plants, and getting harvested and dispersed by man as he harvests the crop. I think Johnsongrass does this on farms all the time, imitating the corn crop. There must be tons of examples in nature, especially in genetics.

I wonder, though, if purposefully saying something untrue is still another step. Anyway, it makes for an amusing plot.

Neandertal Genes

Science Friday had an interesting segment this week on the recent sequencing of part of the Neandertal genome:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126611419

And here's a nice website by Science magazine:

http://www.sciencemag.org/special/neandertal/feature/index.html

The website points out that "because Neandertals are much closer kin to us than are chimpanzees, which diverged from the human lineage 5 to 7 million years ago, matching Neandertal DNA against our own has the potential to reveal genetic changes that help define who we are."

The authors of the study think that non-African human genomes may have about 1 - 4 % Neandertal genes. (The mixing with the Neandertals could only have happened after humans left Africa, because Neandertals were never in Africa.)

This is particularly interesting to our family because we have a long-running family joke that my husband and his relatives are Neandertals. He first became aware of his Neandertal characteristics in an anthropology class in college when the professor said that the strong brow ridge and occipital bun were distinguishing characteristics. (The occipital bun is a little knob at the back of the skull. His is very pronounced, but my kids have them too.) When my daughter was 3 months old, the doctor was so concerned about her fontanels not closing properly that she sent her for genetic testing (which I am still mad about because the insensitive doctor was clearly hoping that she had discovered a serious genetic problem). But when the geneticist met with us, she took pictures of my husband's head and palms because she found him so interesting ... has to be those Neandertal genes!

Germs influence societal structures

Societal traits may be influenced by how threatened we are by parasitic diseases:

Link to article

I remember reading once the theory that the caste system in India arose when the Indo-Europeans or some other group invaded the locals--the caste system was a way of keeping the germs from crossing caste borders.

I have also wondered over the years of parenting whether the availability of antibiotics influences how reckless we encourage our children to be. I started out really anxious (in parenting as well as in everything else) but then you see that children do seem resilient, and society in general encourages you not to baby them. But I've wondered if we would be less cavalier about allowing them to risk injury if each small injury had the capacity to turn into untreatable sepsis or something.

I don't understand why he talks about parasitic diseases only--would diseases caused by bacteria (which, it seems to me, are the ones that we worry about here in the U.S.) not fall into this model?