The Mind of Neandertals

Nature has a review of a book called How To Think Like a Neandertal by Thomas Wynn and Frederick Coolidge. Curiously, the authors spell “Neandertal” correctly but the Nature editors do not. They still spell it the old way, with the “h” in it. The Germans dropped that over a hundred years ago. Clive Gamble writes:

Wynn and Coolidge conclude that today, Neanderthals would be commercial fishermen or mechanics, based on their enormous strength and ability to learn the motor procedures needed. Their capacity for empathy might even have made them competent physicians, the authors say, although a lack of mathematical ability means that they would never have been able to graduate from medical school. Neanderthals would also make excellent army grunts, with their high levels of pain tolerance, and would be good tacticians in small combat units. They would never rewrite the tactical manual — although tearing it up, however thick, would not be a problem.

Without having read the book (and I plan to), it is difficult for me to accept that we could know these sorts of things based on the fossil record that we have. I am also skeptical of the limitations that are attributed to Neandertals. Once again, your life would be different if you lived in the U.S. when the tundra line extended into southern Ohio and there was no Canada. I would also like to know how they have figured out that Neandertals liked “slapstick humor.”

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First Britons at 950Kya Surprisingly Adapted

The site of Happisburgh, in Norfolk has yielded remains of humans that is said to date to around 950 thousand years ago. According to the story in the Guardian, by Ian Sample:

While digging along the north-east coast of East Anglia near the village of Happisburgh, archaeologists discovered 78 pieces of razor-sharp flint shaped into primitive cutting and piercing tools.

The stone tools were unearthed from sediments that are thought to have been laid down either 840,000 or 950,000 years ago, making them the oldest human artefacts ever found in Britain.

The flints were probably left by hunter-gatherers of the human species Homo antecessor who eked out a living on the flood plains and marshes that bordered an ancient course of the river Thames that has long since dried up. The flints were then washed downriver and came to rest at the Happisburgh site.

If this is the earliest occupation of hominids in England, then it took them about 800 thousand years to cross the continent from the gates of Europe in Dmanisi. More pieces of the puzzle.

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Cold Weather and Bigger Brains

Bob Holmes of the NewScientist has a report on brain size and hominid evolution, in which it is hypothesized that modern human brains could only expand when the air temperature was cold enough to allow for adequate heat dissipation—a glacial maximum for example. He writes:

For all its advantages, the modern human brain is a huge energy glutton, accounting for nearly half of our resting metabolic rate. About a decade ago, biologists David Schwartzman and George Middendorf of Howard University in Washington DC hypothesised that our modern brain could not have evolved until the Quaternary ice age started, about 2.5 million years ago. They reckoned such a large brain would have generated heat faster than it could dissipate it in the warmer climate of earlier times, but they lacked evidence to back their hypothesis.

Now hints of that evidence are beginning to emerge. Climate researcher Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, modelled present-day temperature, humidity and wind conditions around the world using an Earth-systems computer model. He used these factors to predict the maximum rate at which a modern human brain can lose heat in different regions. He found that, even today, the ability to dissipate heat should restrict the activity of people in many tropical regions (Climatic Change, vol 95, p 405).

One of the big questions surrounding the research is whether or not the climate data has the kind of resolution that is necessary to support the hypothesis:

Given the timescales involved, it may be near-impossible to match definitively the onset of an ice age with speciation, but a 1.5 °C drop is consistent with the cooling climate of the time, says Middendorf.

It is an intriguing idea and bears more investigation but I suspect it may be one of many variables driving brain size expansion at the time.


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