Evolution News: Human Brains Did NOT Get Bigger Via Neanderthal Sex

Elaine Meinel Supkis

A romantic notion is the idea we didn't murder or eat all the Neandertals but instead, interbred with some of them and seeking this holy genetic grail pops up in the news at regular intervals. The latest example jumps to this conclusion based on nearly no credible evidence. On the other hand, maybe we should have been more Neanderthalish. Peaceful and kindly, eh? Naw.

Based on very slender evidence, researchers jump to astonishing conclusions about the evolution of the human brain.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Neanderthals may have given the modern humans who replaced them a priceless gift -- a gene that helped them develop superior brains, U.S. researchers reported Tuesday.

And the only way they could have provided that gift would have been by interbreeding, the team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Chicago said.

Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides indirect evidence that modern Homo sapiens and so-called Neanderthals interbred at some point when they lived side by side in Europe.

"Finding evidence of mixing is not all that surprising. But our study demonstrates the possibility that interbreeding contributed advantageous variants into the human gene pool that subsequently spread," said Bruce Lahn, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at the University of Chicago who led the study.

Scientists have been debating whether Neanderthals, who died out about 35,000 years ago, ever bred with modern Homo sapiens. Neanderthals are considered more primitive, with robust bones but a smaller intellect than modern humans.

Lahn's team found a brain gene that appears to have entered the human lineage about 1.1 million years ago, and that has a modern form, or allele, that appeared about 37,000 years ago -- right before Neanderthals became extinct.

"The gene microcephalin (MCPH1) regulates brain size during development and has experienced positive selection in the lineage leading to Homo sapiens," the researchers wrote.

The body of evidence fails utterly. If the Neandertal's brains were smaller, how would interbreeding make homosapien's brains larger? If you breed animals, and I do, this makes zero sense. The breeding of large-brained humans is directly connected with the evolution of the pelvis. Not the brain.

I speak from experience! I had a child with a very large head. He was nearly impossible to push out and if I were living in a cave, I wouldn't be alive anymore! Indeed, the gene for large brains has always been in conflict with the facts of a woman's pelvis: I have a very large pelvis, I am 'pear shaped'--this means my hips are wider than my chest.

Pear-shaped women are more able to bear large-headed children except for another trick up Mother Nature's sleeve: how quickly the pelvis can widen during labor coupled with how soft the baby's head is.

The development of all this came quite brutally. Namely, many mothers who didn't have a perfect match of baby's soft skull plus a quickly expanding pelvis of sufficient size, died. And so did the baby. Life tended to be more successful for mothers bearing babies with small heads, not ever-expanding heads.

So the other force at work was equally brutal: the lucky mothers bearing the painfully big headed babies produced offspring that could fool or manipulate or retain important cultural information more so than smaller-brained babies and once they survived birth and if mother survived, both in tandem were very, very dangerous and extremely successful for throughout our evolution, almost always, the bigger brained sapien killed off or drove away or pretty much annihilated all competition of smaller brained sapiens.

To the point, not one of them survived, only great apes living deep in inpenetrable jungles eluded the eagle eye and vicious temperment of the ever-bigger brained sapiens. This includes the poor Neanderthals: they didn't survive the competition which is also called WAR. And any gene they may have introduced, a larger brain isn't one of them!

As for big bones: humans are very elastic. When Asians ate a very poor diet with little calcium and other bone builders, they were all very tiny. When my milk-fed, upperclass mother went to China in 1976, she was such a tremendous wonder to everyone, she literally stopped traffic. At over six feet tall, she towered over absolutely everyone. We have a very funny photo of a line of school children falling over each other as they and their teachers craned their necks to see my mother in Tiananmin Square.

We have many funny photos from all over the third world of short men staring openmouthed at her. Today, she is a lot less noticable in China. For the diet has changed. Not the genes. And suddenly, bones are bigger. Wellllll!!!!! When people study bones from long ago, they forget these simple facts. Diet changes means many things that are not genetic! So we can't assume anything from bones we find for there are so many effects caused by the environment, there is only a few things we can really 'know'.

One is, relative size of things. The Chinese of 50 years ago compared to today's much bigger Chinese, one sees the brain isn't bigger vis a vis the proportions of the body as the body grows in size due to adding milk to the diet. Indeed, the near-universal effect is for the brain to be relatively smaller compared to the body when a population grows in size suddenly.

There are tall and short genes, too. For example, my family has been meat/milk eaters for many generations because we were Normans and upperclass, not peasant, stock. This means tall genes get expressed very often and indeed, during the 19th century, when the average person was a good 8-10" shorter than today, I had ancestors who were female who still rose to nearly six feet in height. Indeed, my aunt Helen, born right after WWI, had a size 9 shoe and thus, couldn't buy shoes in stores! For all the shoes were much smaller.

I am not six feet tall like my sisters. I inherited the 'short' gene from some wayward ancestor. So my shoe size isn't a 9+ like the rest of the females in my family, nor do I tower over everyone. But all our brains are roughly the same size (hahaha) which means I can't buy regular hats for women because they are mostly too small. My mother's babies were all pretty big, nearly all (except for me) over 8 lbs and I had a child way over that size. Like my brothers. And from my mother, I did inherit her large pelvis as did all my sisters. And to my mind, that is the key to evolution: successful PELVISES.

If a homosapiens had sex with a Neanderthaler female, because their brains were smaller, the possibility of her pelvis being smaller is very high since mothers with smaller pelvises didn't die trying to give birth to babies with smaller heads! So if she did get raped by a homosapien male, if her baby had a BIGGER head, she would die. Period. This is why interbreeding with lower brain-sized females failed. If a Neanderthaler male had sex with a female homosapiens, this could work but then, genetics would mean a smaller brained baby who would then suffer the taunts and arrows of other tribal members and thus, not thrive.

So, back to this news: genetic drift plus mutations that can suddenly crop up out of nowhere, as humans poured out of Africa carrying their new weapons and being the survivors of the wars in Africa, when they poured into Europe and Asia, they ceased to be easily intermixed like in the northern Sahara which was still savannah, not desert yet, when they spread out all over the place, the genetic mix changed rapidly. We can't unravel all the elements yet for there are no sub-species to compare us with, we killed all possible relatives!

And the tool we used was our bigger brains. And if Neandertals had that, they would be us, not we, us. Ahem. On the otherhand, maybe this explains the existence of all those freepers, eh?

One of the founders of Microsoft has funded research into how the brain works and now has a fully-diagrammed mouse brain online for other researchers.

Aalok Mehta
National Geographic News
September 26, 2006
Scientists have made a complete "atlas" of the mouse brain, which they hope will spark a new era of insight into how the brain works and what happens when it breaks down.

The Allen Brain Atlas, launched with a hundred million U.S. dollars from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, provides an online, three-dimensional map showing where each of more than 21,000 genes is activated in the mouse brain.

This was obviously a monumental effort. And a mouse's brain is much smaller and less complex than a human's brain (outside of the Bush family, that is). Since we and mice both evolved from the same genetic pool, understanding how a mouse brain works does shed light on our own brains, at least the innermost layers.

Here is the web page where one can access this information:

The Allen Brain Atlas (ABA) is an interactive, genome-wide image database of gene expression in the mouse brain. A combination of RNA in situ hybridization data, detailed Reference Atlases and informatics analysis tools are integrated to provide a searchable digital atlas of gene expression. Together, these resources present a comprehensive online platform for exploration of the brain at the cellular and molecular level.

The race to understand our own brains is an important effort, thanks to modern medicine and social structures, the number of elderly is exploding and one of the most dreadful side effects of this fact is, the brain deteriorates over time in nearly all of our homosapien population. This is an effect of evolution: seldom did anyone live past 40 years in our past even up until the last 100 years. The big killer of women was birthing due to the oversized brains of 20% of the fetuses. The rejection rate of ever-expanding brains had slowed down the evolution of brain size in humans. But at the other end, keeping humans alive long after evolution removed most individuals means the hazards, diseases and deteriorations hidden within our genes are being expressed increasingly such as Alzheimer's disease.

It is a non-surprising fact that female fertility abruptly ends at the same point when most of us died anyway. In my case, at 52 years of age, suddenly, my periods stopped. I got pregnant last when 42 years of age which is pretty much the upper limit for female human fertility in nature.

To rid ourselves of these diseases means finding a way of preventing babies from being born before 40 years of age. Thus, only the children of long-living, long-bearing mothers would be born. Only this has a severe downside: genetic mutations accumulate over time as the human organism wanders about the planet, exposed to the x-rays periodically spewed by the sun, radiation in caves as rocks degrade over the eons, etc.

So the plan is to find some other trick, to change ourselves, genetically, before these deteriorations eat our brains out.

Indeed, the problems of modern technology and culture means fetuses and children are suffering brain damage from various chemicals not to mention the side effects of all those nuclear bomb tests in the past as well as American military use of chemicals and DU arms.

November 2006

Chemicals that seep into our environment may be causing a "silent pandemic" of brain diseases, researchers claim, impairing brain development, lowering IQs and costing billions of dollars in lost productivity.

A new review paper in The Lancet lists 201 commercially used chemicals that previous studies have shown are neurotoxic to adults. These include pesticides and cleaning products. Philippe Grandjean, at the University of Southern Denmark, and Philip Ladrigan at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, US, argue that it is likely many of these chemicals pose an even greater risk to fetuses and children.

The list represents a small fraction of the 100,000 chemicals used commercially in the US and Europe, most of which have not been tested for their effects on brain development.

To date, five chemicals have been proven to impair how the brain develops: lead, methylmercury, PCBs (found, for example, in electrical circuits and pesticides), arsenic and toluene (used in paint thinners, ink and glues).

The advantages of civilization always has to be weighed against the disadvantages. One is, we are evolving in the 'wrong' direction. Namely, we are adding more and more 'unhelpful' genes in the general population which is due to the fact that anyone can and does breed and bear offspring even if the organism is one that would die in 'nature'.

This is our reality and we need tools to prevent things from spinning out of control. Everyone wants 'healthy' genes, not genetic diseases. Just like diet changes body size and shape, so do chemicals, and what we eat and what we are exposed to definitely affects the development and function of our brains.

And this never ceases to amaze me, how people assume animals are 'stupid.'

By JULIE WHELDON, Science CorrespondentLast updated at 22:25pm on 6th November 2006

Pigeon: In a controlled test pigeons were able to memorise up to 1,200 pictures

Scientists have discovered that the common pigeon actually has an astonishingly good long-term memory.

In tests they found a single bird can memorise 1,200 pictures.

Of course, birds remember many things! Good grief. Anyone interacting with birds can see this clearly. Just like the habitats I have for many bird species, the same families fly off to Florida or Central America and then, the minute spring pops up here, they return, and not just any birds, I track them from oddities like missing flight feathers or oddities in markings and sure enough, the same birds, if they survive the winter, do come back and they know exactly where their nest boxes are and they know me for they are unafraid of me, unlike strange birds who are always alarmed at first, when they see me.

The feat of flying down south and back is no minor thing. It takes great thinking and recognition abilities. You can bet, these birds recognize the mountain ranges and rivers and fly along them, spotting one landmark after another, and they make a bee-line to places like mine because they KNOW they will succeed in raising young due to great food services and wonderful nesting opportunities.

All animals including humans, need to remember many places and situations as well as identify each other so they know who they are interacting with. This means the deepest parts of our brains are an amazing storehouse of data. And smells as well as sight and texture of things we want to remember are all very embedded there, at the very roots of our evolutionary brain structures.

Last of all, here is continuing proof that homosapiens is very nasty to all near relatives.

By NINIEK KARMINI, Associated Press Writer 45 minutes ago

MANTANGAI, Indonesia - Dozens of endangered orangutans have been driven from their dwindling jungle habitat in Borneo by months of land-clearing fires that have shrouded parts of the region in a choking haze, conservationists said Monday.

Around 43 orangutans have been taken for medical treatment to centers in the Indonesian provinces of Central and West Kalimantan, said Anand Ramanathan, an emergency relief worker with the Washington-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, or IFAW.

Most were beaten by humans after fleeing from the burning jungle to nearby plantations in recent weeks, but several are being treated for respiratory problems and burns, he said.

All this research comes to a point in a very strange and rather unsettling way:

By Fergus Walsh
BBC News, Medical correspondent

UK scientists have applied for permission to create embryos by fusing human DNA with cow eggs.

Researchers from Newcastle University and Kings College, London, have asked the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for a three-year licence.

The hybrid human-bovine embryos would be used for stem cell research and would not be allowed to develop for more than a few days. But critics say it is unethical and potentially dangerous.

They want to do this with mice, too. And always, they say they won't let them live but will terminate them as soon as they are done. This is not a good way to do things, it doesn't 'fix' the ethical problem at all. Indeed, it harks back to our very deepest being: we kill anything and everything connected with us leaving only ourselves, and even in that case, we still kill and kill.

It is all very troubling.

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Comments

"The body of evidence fails utterly. If the Neandertal's brains were smaller, how would interbreeding make homosapien's brains larger? If you breed animals, and I do, this makes zero sense. The breeding of large-brained humans is directly connected with the evolution of the pelvis."

Geeze talk about dense??? The Neandertal actually had a larger brain than Homo Sapien did. But then the people that flunked everything else majored in Journalism. Perhaps we are deevolving?

Posted by: Ed | December 18, 2006 at 02:51 AM