Manga Girls Beware: Extra Large Eyes Caused Neanderthal's Demise 290
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports on a new study of prehistoric skulls which suggests that Neanderthals became extinct because they had larger eyes than our species. As a consequence of having extra sized eyes, an average 6 millimeters larger in radius, more of their backside brain volume was devoted to seeing, at the expense of frontal lobe high-level processing of information and emotions. This difference affected their ability to innovate and socialize the way we, modern people (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) do. When the last Ice Age set on 28,000 years ago, Neanderthals had no sewn clothes and no large organized groups to rely on each other, hastening their fall. Yet, they were not stupid, brutish creatures as portrayed in Hollywood films, they were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as the Homo Sapiens of Cromagnon."
This just in (Score:5, Insightful)
And from the departement of wild speculations we have the following gem...
Re:Idle speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Homo Sapiens seems quite "stupid and brutish" most of the time. Just saying.
Tabloid headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you please stop the tabloid headlines. "Extra Large Eyes Caused Neanderthal's Demise" would have been just fine, thanks. No need to try and sex it up with some manga girls. BTW, manga boys have big eyes too.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Demise? (Score:4, Insightful)
Brain Size == Simplistic Drivel (Score:5, Insightful)
Equating intelligence with brain size has always been both stupid and puzzling to me, particularly since there's no good evidence to support it that can't be countered by contra-evidence that at least as good or better.
While size does matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
While size does matter, larger eye sockets does not automatically mean more of their brain was used for processing visual stimuli. For that to be valid, one would need to know what the size of the pupil and retina was, not the eye socket. It is quite possible that Neanderthals has more muscular eyes, just like they had more muscular bodies, but the actual visual portion of their eyes, the part that actually sees, was not significantly different than homo sapiens. Another explanation could also be that when Neanderthal developed, during the ice age, light levels were lower in the climates that they inhabited and the larger eyes were an adaptation, which again would not indicate more of their brain was used to process visual stimuli, but instead the larger eye was simply to enable more light gathering capability than their ancestors near the equator.
Without having an actual Neanderthal brains and eyes to examine, one cannot simply make this determination simply based on the size of the eye socket.
Re:Idle speculation (Score:2, Insightful)
We can be, we can be.
We've also got Medicine sans Frontier, Engineers without Borders, Save the Children, and footprints on the moon.
So we can also be pretty fucking rad when we want to be.
Re:Idle speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Animals might be more aggressive, but they sure as fuck aren't as evil as humans...
You're confusing motives with capabilities. Chimps, baboons, etc., are practically psychotic compared to us. If the few of them that are "nice" could build prisons to keep the really dangerous, murderous ones from bothering them and killing their offspring, I expect they certainly would.
Re:Idle speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Do animals build prisons to hold and torture fellow animals?
There are species of shrimp that keep live starfish alive for months while eating them. Komodo dragons kill with a toxic bite that takes days to die from.
Do animals build concentration camp to hold and kill millions of it's own kind?
No, but pack animals banish members to die of starvation or be killed by others. No other species has built as complex of a societal structure to compare with. So we simply don't know. Most social animals probably wouldn't bother with prisons to begin with, they'd simply kill or banish any drain on the pack or herd, or leave them behind to die. Humans typically don't do this. We take care of our elderly and sick.
Do animals build nuclear bombs to destroy fellow animals far away?
Of course not, they're too fucking stupid to do so. Do animals donate blood or perform surgery so save other members? Do they donate organs to save each others lives? Did they start the Peace Corps? Or donate time to Habitat for Humanity? Have they started shelters to care for homeless humans? Do carnivores and omnivores ever choose to be vegetarians? Have they invented vaccines for chronic illnesses? If they had nuclear weapons to use against their enemies, you can bet your ass there are many species who would.
Animals might be more aggressive, but they sure as fuck aren't as evil as humans...
I'm not sure about evil, as animals don't really think in those terms as far as I can tell. but I would guess that more great ape physical confrontations per incident that end in death than do humans. There are probably less fights over mating in the human world than in the animals. As far as "evil" have you ever seen a cat play with its quarry after it's injured it? Or a Trigger fish eat the eyes of another fish and let it swim aimlessly before eating it? There is plenty of cruelty in the animal kingdom. Don't think for a second that humans are alone in this.
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Re:This just in (Score:5, Insightful)
More likely they just take a large tissue sample from one well-preserved Neanderthal, do a standard "puree a bunch of cells, scan the DNA fragments, then reassemble the data into a complete genome". It's unlikely that any given section of DNA will be damaged in all, or even most cells. Then you just send the genome to a DNA synthesis lab and get a vial containing fresh new pristine DNA to inject into your target egg. That's a lot easier than trying to piece together a viable genome from multiple disparate individuals.
Of course you still wouldn't have a "true" Neanderthal since it's mitochondria and probably much of it's epigenetics would be inherited from the egg donor, still, we appear to have been able to interbreed with them so the chimeric child would at least probably be viable, and could give us *some* insight into the differences between our species.
Might even turn out that they were actually more intelligent than us, and our advantage was purely a cultural accident. I mean come on - we were all wandering around as the dominant predators in pretty much our current (physical) state for what, 50-100,000 years? But no, instead it's: Oh, this other species with bigger brains than us also had bigger eyes, and clearly using them drained their brainpower. Nevermind that they say nothing about the relative number of photoreceptors (big lenses don't consume brain power), or that there's not a 1:1 correspondance between photoreceptor and nerves signals reaching the brain. Or that visual processing is a complex process, many of whose subsystems actually appear to get re-purposed on demand for abstract reasoning purposes.