Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted for a time
Apparently modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals coexisted for a period of nearly 1,000 years. This contradicts previous understanding of Neaderthals, which has traditionally held that they mingled and faded into modern man’s lineage.
It shows that the two hominids did indeed co-exist for a long time but there is no evidence of any intermingling.
Indeed, it points to the likelihood that the Neanderthals petered out, their lineage expiring in starvation and Ice Age cold.
The overlap was found when examining a cave, la Grotte aux Fees, which had archeological layers showing that the cave started out inhabited by Neanderthals. When the temperatures dropped during the last Ice Age, the Neanderthals moved out and Homo sapiens moved in. When the temperatures warmed again, Homo sapiens left and H. neanderthalensis returned. The period of overlap lasted about 1,000 years.
The question now, is what happened to Neanderthals? Modern humans are taller, thinner, and smarter than our ancient cousins, and more capable of adapting to climate and world changes than Neatherthals were, which would seem to make that answer obvious: we destroyed them.
“People point out that Neanderthals were biologically better adapted to living in glacial conditions than modern humans, that they were built a bit like eskimos and were better anatomically at coping with cold conditions, whereas modern humans came in from Africa, where they evolved with bodies that were taller and thinner and did not conserve heat so well,” he said.
“Yet the evidence is here that modern humans could cope with cold conditions better than the Neanderthals thanks to culture and technology, for instance with better clothing, better fire control and perhaps better shelters.”
DNA tests have revealed no Neanderthal genes from 1,000 samples taken from Europeans, which leads researchers to believe that there was little to no mixing of the gene pools. This is hardly surprising given humanity’s racism past and present. I’m sure that ancient Homo sapiens (and probably Neanderthal) society was no different. One could easily imagine forbidden romances being highly “discouraged” by any means necessary — if even this happened because it is postulated that Neanderthals didn’t have spoken language. It is suspected that modern humans destroyed Neanderthals on the road to becoming the dominant species on the planet; unsurprising given the animal kingdom’s propensity to make war on those who have dissimilar genetic background. It’s called “survival of the fittest.”
Hurricane Katrina and price gouging
After creating a new “Economics” post category yesterday, this is my second post on the subject in as many days. In any case, I was reading up on Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath, and I came across this article on price gouging, which I like from a theoretical standpoint. While I largely agree with Mr. Brown’s arguments, I do believe that they are oversimplified — “ceteris paribus” does not apply.
In essence, Brown asserts that price gouging is not unethical because it stems naturally from supply and demand. He uses ice as an example:
But suppose the store owner is operating in an unhampered market. Realizing that many more people than usual will now demand ice, and also realizing that with supply lines temporarily severed it will be difficult or impossible to bring in new supplies of ice for at least several days, he resorts to the expedient of raising the price to, say, $15.39 a bag.
Now customers will act more economically with respect to the available supply. Now, the person who has $60 in his wallet, and who had been willing to pay $17 to buy four bags of ice, may be willing to pay for only one or two bags of ice (because he needs the balance of his ready cash for other immediate needs). Some of the persons seeking ice may decide that they have a large enough reserve of canned food in their homes that they don’t need to worry about preserving the one pound of ground beef in their freezer. They may forgo the purchase of ice altogether, even if they can “afford” it in the sense that they have twenty-dollar bills in their wallets. Meanwhile, the stragglers who in the first scenario lacked any opportunity to purchase ice will now be able to.
Mr. Brown goes on to argue that rationing is not an effective method of controlling distribution for the simple reason that some people may legitimately need more ice, and be willing to pay whatever it takes to get the ice they need. But this argument depends on all other things being equal, and Mr. Brown is making a dangerous assumption: that everyone is on equal economic footing, which is obviously not the case in the real world.
In New Orleans, 28% of the population is below the poverty line. This means that people who legitimately may need a large amount of ice simply won’t be able to afford it, because in absolute terms, they literally don’t have the money to purchase it. (Obviously using ice in the case of the situation in NoLa is superfluous since they can’t even get drinking water.)
Mr. Brown’s theory is nice, but it doesn’t work everywhere, which leaves us back where we started: how do you control distribution of goods in a severely depressed market without resorting to ineffective price controls and rationing? As implied earlier, price controls don’t work because suppressing the price of goods can create an artificial demand and lead to things like hoarding, which creates further shortages. (The NYC rent controls are another example of artificially controlling prices creates more problems then it solves.)
While I like to think I poked a hole or two in Mr. Brown’s thesis, I don’t have a suitable universal solution to offer in its place — probably because there isn’t one. I guess it’s simply a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils, but even that seems like a difficult proposition.
Herbal diet supplements
Back in July, I wrote about a hormone, oxyntomodulin, that had been isolated which tells the brain that the stomach is full. Pharmaceutical companies are now working on turning this knowledge into an oral diet drug. Now, another compound has surfaced which suppresses the desire to eat and drink. This one has its roots in Scottish medieval times: Augustinian monks have chewed the plant to suppress all urges to eat or drink. The plant, lathyrus linfolius, was processed at a hospital there to make a potion. It is thought that this potion was brewed to help villagers lose weight or cope with the effects of a bad harvest.
Lathyrus linfolius appears to be fairly potent:
Dr Moffat said: “These tiny tubers are eaten two or three at a time. Chewed, they taste of leathery liquorice. Quite simply, according to all the reports we’ve compiled, around 300, people forget to eat and drink. They feel no need to eat and drink and this lasts for weeks, sometimes into months.”
The monks were from a 12th century monastery at Soutra Isle. The apparently helped at, or perhaps ran an area hospital (the article is not clear) which was one of the most important medical centers in Scotland for quite some time.
If this plant is ever going to be turned into a viable drug, it will have to be regulated, despite its “natural” origins which would lead one to think that it would be in the over-the-counter, herbal supplement section of your local pharmacy or health food store. The potential for abuse by those with eating disorders is too great to be available without a prescription.
Trust funds for everyone
This is sort of off-beat for polyscience.org, but I thought the social ramifications were worth investigating. In the UK, the British government has instituted a trust fund program for children (or their parents) to save money in. Currently the only restriction on this is the amount that can be saved per year: £1,200. The government gives parents a £250 voucher to parents to be saved for their child’s future. The funds can be saved, tax-free until the child’s 18th birthday.
The program seems so mind-bogglingly obvious that I’m surprised that no one had thought of it before now. I know many parents in the United States buy their children savings bonds for their first couple of birthdays, and I think such a program here in the US would be immensely popular, especially with grandparents. This new UK system is a bit more forward-thinking, I think. I would have used such a system when I was earning money as an early teenager. It was a game to see how much money I could save in my savings account (passbook savings accounts represent!), and a program like this would have been really cool. I could see kids competing to see who could rack up the most money. (Those with the givingest families would win, of course.)
The articles I’ve been able to find on the topic don’t go into much detail — there doesn’t seem to be any information on interest rates (if any) or what happens when the child turns 18: does he or she have to pay taxes on it? Is withdrawal mandatory?
Another issue is that a government system like this is also ripe for abuse. Witness Social Security in the US. Presumably, the government tracks how much money each child has accumulated, and will dole out what they owe on the child’s birthday. So what happens to the money in the meantime? Does the government use it for something else? The whole thing, while socially-progressive seems like a good way to give the government a nice fat loan.
Old-school cures making a comeback
The first time I ever watched the movie Gladiator, I was confused by the scene where Maximus is captured by the slavers. The scene shows his arm where he had been slashed covered in what looked like pieces of rice. I was doubly confused when his friend says “No. They will clean it. Wait and see.” How could pieces of rice clean a wound? Well, I learned later that they were maggots. (Hey, give me a break, I was in high school.) A lot of people are repulsed by this scene, and I was no exception. This revulsion is compounded by internet rumors of maggots eating brains while a person is still alive. (That link is extremely gross; you’ve been warned.)
The truth of the matter is that maggots are useful little creatures, and the only flesh they consume is already dead. Since maggots only consume dead flesh, it makes sense that they would be used to clean especially nasty wounds. Often synonymous with death, maggots can breath fresh life into limbs once thought lost. It is basically only in modern times that maggots have gone out of vogue in the medical community for more modern alternatives like antibiotics.
Well now they’re making a comeback along with medicinal leeches. Maggots can clean particularly nasty wounds better than almost anything else out there. They can prevent infection and allow new tissue to grow in place of the old.
As for maggots, they are unparalleled in their ability to clean festering, gangrenous wounds. For diabetics and others whose wounds fail to heal, maggots, pressed into dying flesh by wire-mesh bandages, can save a limb and speed healing.
The modern champion of the using maggots as a tool to heal wounds is a World War I doctor named William Baer who once saw two soldiers left wounded on the battlefield for days without care. When their clothes were removed, thousands of maggots were found in their wounds, but once the maggots were cleaned out, Dr. Baer discovered clean, pink, new flesh growing.
Leeches are also staging a comeback for the unique properties that they bring to recovery rooms. Leeches secrete a few different things, all of which are useful when re-attaching severed appendages:
Leeches naturally inject patients with a potent chemical cocktail that includes an anticoagulant, an anesthetic, an antibiotic and a substance that dilates blood vessels. This cocktail encourages fast bleeding to empty the appendage of extra blood, reducing pressure and allowing veins to form on their own.
In 20 minutes, a leech is usually engorged and removed, though bleeding from the wound may continue for up to 24 hours. If an appendage is large, several leeches are sometimes used at once, Dr. Levin said, adding, “I’ll use one to three leeches every couple of hours.”
[...]
“It won’t attach if there’s not good arterial blood coming in, and sometimes that tells me that I need to go back in,” Dr. Minkin said.
For some reason I can just imagine a prescription being issued for fresh leeches:
apply 1 leech q3° prn ud
#4
refills x0
Haha! Anyway, it’s nice to see some very useful age-old remedies making a comeback. One can hope that the societal hang-ups associated with such useful creatures will eventually be a thing of the past.
The differences between East and West: more than just geography
A study out of UMich suggests that there is more than physical appearance and geography separating those raised in Chinese culture vs. those raised in Western culture. Researchers showed a series of pictures to two samples: one group of Chinese students and one group of American students. The findings suggest that the group of students from China viewed things more holistically, whereas the American students gravitated towards the main subject of the image:
Researchers compared the way 26 Chinese and 25 US students viewed photographs of animals or inanimate objects set against complex backgrounds.
Westerners’ eyes tended to focus on the main subject while the eyes of their Eastern counterparts kept flicking to background details, they said.
[...]
Its findings appear consistent with previous research which has suggested Eastern people think in a more holistic way than Westerners, instinctively paying greater heed to context.
This suggests that western students are more analytical. Specifically, Americans took in the background in just under half a second, and then focused on the main subject. The Chinese students, however, continued casting glances at the background. Researchers further observed that changing the background had little effect on the western students’ ability to recall the foreground image, which was not the case for the Chinese students.
In their memory, the foreground object and its original background appeared to be bound together.
The researchers, led by Dr Richard Nisbett, wrote: “The Americans’ propensity to fixate sooner and longer on the foregrounded objects suggests that they encoded more visual details of the objects than did the Chinese.
“If so, this could explain the Americans’ more accurate recognition of the objects even against a new background.”
The reasoning for this holistic view of things I can’t really offer any insight into because I am not familiar with eastern, specifically, Chinese culture, so I’m just going to quote the article. (Jacqui, if you feel like offering any insight, that would be nice. :) )
“East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning. In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context. The present results provide a useful warning in a world were opportunities to meet people from other cultural backgrounds continue to increase.”
I think this holistic approach can be seen in all aspects of eastern media. For instance, anime tends to switch back and forth between two frames when a character is in motion, while altering the background to give the appearance of movement. American cartoons change the whole scene, but especially the main subject of the scene. Without getting into details, eastern pornogrraphy tends to be more… er… “holistic” as well.
Conformity: it’s not just for high school kids
Tonight I finished the book The Lucifer Principle, and a great deal of the book is spent unintentionally debunking the popular myth that humans are radically different from animals. The fact of the matter is that while humans possess the ability to be rational and control their behavior, they often choose not to. Or they may act in a way that they feel is rational, but when looked at objectively is anything but. Anyway, I digress. Throughout the book, parrallels and comparisons are drawn between rats, chimpanzees, gorillas, and other animals. The startling truth is that humans mirror animal behavior more than we’d like to think. So it came as no surprise to me this week when I read that chimpanzees are conformists, just like humans. In fact, I was surprised that research hadn’t already discovered this.
In the case of this study, two dominant female chimpanzees were taught two different methods of getting food out of an apparatus, poking versus lifting. Then these chimps were sent back to their respective clans, where they taught others how to get the food out of the apparatus. But a funny thing happened along the way. Some chimps from the lifting group discovered that poking was more effective than lifting. But instead of continuing to poke, they conformed to the method that the others in their group used.
The conformity bias finding was an unexpected, but equally important, result of this culture study, according to Dr. Horner. A few members of each group independently discovered the alternative method for freeing food from the Pan-pipes, but this knowledge did not endanger the groups’ traditions because most of these chimpanzees reverted back to the norm set by their local expert. “Choosing the group norm over the alternative method shows a level of conformity we usually associate only with our own species,” said Dr. Horner. “By using the group’s technique rather than the alternative method, we see the conformity is based more on a social bond with other group members than the simple reward of freeing the food.”
Perhaps not so strangely, this propensity to conform is due to the power of the meme that ties the particular chimpanzee peer group together. While not as complex as, for example, a religious meme, the mere fact that a chimpanzee could be singled out as deviating from his social norm could endanger his position within the social superorganism by causing him to stick out. Standing out in a social group is an easy way to become a social outcast, and more than anything else, social creatures desire acceptance from their peer groups, even if it might be uncomfortable or unhealthy. (Bulemia is a good example of this from the human world.) Even if this new method allows the chimp to get more food out of the apparatus, he will not endanger his position within the superorganism: he will not risk losing his place in the pecking order. Now if that chimp were at the bottom, he would be more inclined to poke rather than lift, simply because he has no place to go but up in the pecking order. Similarly, if he were to be at the top of the pecking order, he might also be inclined to poke rather than lift, though less so than if he were at the bottom, because he would have something to lose by disrupting the status quo.
I would say humanity is almost a perfect mirror of this: those on the bottom generally want to elevate their station in life through one means or another, and those at the top prefer to stay at the top, and thus become more conservative so as to maintain the status quo. I think we’re not as special and different from the rest of the animal world as we would like to think.