Human Origins—Explorations and Discussions in Anthropology, Biology, Archaeology, and Geology discussion

Highly recommended - on PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolutio...

Paul,
Will check it out! Looks fascinating.

If you're interested in Neanderthals, you might also enjoy a piece I wrote on Neanderthals for this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001...
And I think you might also enjoy Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived, which explores not only Neanderthals, but many of the other human species that co-evolved with us.

Thanks, Chip - will do!

And, if you like your Neanderthals and their capacities speculated upon in fiction, you might enjoy my 1999 novel, The Silk Code, recently reissued in Kindle, etc. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0091W43JW/r...

I hypothesize, as does Decoding Neanderthals, that they had far more in cognitive and below-the-radar technological accomplishment than we give them credit for.

Great! I'll buy it! Did you ever read Björn Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger?

Also, just posted on Slate - http://www.slate.com/articles/health_...

I think you might enjoy it.

Two excellent articles, Chip - I just tweeted about the first, and RT'd the second.

I'm a great believer in the salutary effects of neoteny - I still feel like 17 on a good day and 19 if I run into any problems.

Paul wrote: "Highly recommended - on PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolutio..."
Thanks for that, Paul.

Chip wrote: "If you're interested in Neanderthals, you might also enjoy a piece I wrote on Neanderthals for this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal: ..."

A perpetually fascinating subject. I'll have a look, myself. Cheers!

A J wrote: "Chip wrote: "If you're interested in Neanderthals, you might also enjoy a piece I wrote on Neanderthals for this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal: ..."

A perpetually fascinating s..."

They are utterly fascinating and the whole question of other humans is getting even more interesting with the discoveries of the Denisovan people and the Red Deer Cave people who were living in South China as recently as 11,500 years ago. Not to self-promote, but if you find all of this interesting I think you might like my book Last Ape Standing.

Chip wrote: "A J wrote: "Chip wrote: "If you're interested in Neanderthals, you might also enjoy a piece I wrote on Neanderthals for this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal: ..."

A perpetually f..."

Good stuff, Chip. I see that you make mention of the African savannah with regard to upright walking. What do you make of the Owen Lovejoy-Tim White school of thinking, that for instance the likes of Ardipithecus ramidus were walking competently and routinely in a sort of lush, green, woodsy sort of environment?

A J wrote: "Chip wrote: "A J wrote: "Chip wrote: "If you're interested in Neanderthals, you might also enjoy a piece I wrote on Neanderthals for this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal: ..."

A ..."

Oh, I agree it was a gradual process, and started early with hominins that sometimes walked upright and sometimes knuckle walked or swung from trees. That's the way I lay it out in Last Ape Standing. And it probably unfolded in different ways for different primates. But ultimately it had to happen or there would be no "us." Standing up was a case of convergent evolution, arrived at by many paths, I think. It was the only way any primate could survive in even scrub and clusters of forest as opposed to thick jungle.

Yes, I see. Thanks very much for replying.

Paul wrote: "Two excellent articles, Chip - I just tweeted about the first, and RT'd the second.

I'm a great believer in the salutary effects of neoteny - I still feel like 17 on a good day and 19 if I run int..."

Thanks for the support. When things calm down, I promise to return the favor! And I'm with you on neoteny. Think like 20! Another article you might find interesting -- this in Popular Science from the book's epilogue: ---http://www.popsci.com/science/article...

Best!

Thanks - but your link doesn't work for me (looks like you copied it over from another Goodreads post - for some reason, Goodreads doesn't include complete long links when you copy and paste).

On another Neanderthal matter: do you consider the possibility of their music in your work? Derek Bickerton hypothesizes that, in Cro Magnons, we sang before we talked, which makes sense to me given ubiquity of song in birds, whales, etc.

Based on the possible Neanderthal flute, I have people in 750 AD referring to surviving Neanderthals as "the singers" in The Silk Code.

Hi,

That's cool! Yes, I do deal with the idea that Neanderthals may have developed a kind of singing gestural language because their throats couldn't make as many sounds as ours. Steven Mithen (a British Scientist) developed a whole theory on it and the importance of music in human evolution. His book-- The Singing Neanderthals. Music was clearly a key part of our evolution (and probably several other species, like the ancestor we share with Neanderthals (and probably Denisovans), Homo heidelbergensis, because we are the only living primate that can tap its foot or move its body to a rhythm, our language is filled with lyrical elements (called prosody as you know) and music is so deeply wired into our brains. Dance was probably equally important. I have a large section in the book about this and on creativity as well, and am about to begin work on an article for National Geographic Magazine on the blossoming of human creativity. Hope soon to be holding a Neanderthal flute! Here's the link again: http://www.popsci.com/science/article.... Looking forward to reading your book!

Right - The Singing Neanderthals is an important book. It was published around 2007, and builds on Bickerton's work from the 1990s. The closest I've been to a Neanderthal flute was the one in the Museum of Natural History in New York City (though I can't recall if that was the real one or a replica). I used to play the clarinet, and would love to at least hold a Neanderthal flute in my hands.

Thanks for the article link. I'm a little more optimistic - our ability to understand evolution, and construct technologies (such as gene splicing) to guide it, means were less likely to be victims of our own evolution. I go into this in more detail in my 1988
Mind At Large: Knowing In The Technological Age - straight philosophy and evolutionary theory, not science fiction :)

Newbie here. Thanks for the reading suggestion! I am especially interested in any reference to sung languages. The ancient bardic tradition in Norther Europe -- I'm reading the Finnish epic, The Kalevalla right now -- had to have its origins somewhere, and a sung language predecdessor makes a lot of sense. I've studied remnant Neanderthal culture in many ways, since college, and have begun wondering if theirs was a matrilineal society, as are many indigenous existing cultures. They had a great deal of time to evolve complex organization and survived lots of climate change before the Modern Africans moved North.

Chip -- I just read your article from the link to Popsci. Brilliantly delivered concept. We certainly have reasons to fear. On the other hand, the end of the world (civilization, all we hold dear, etc.) comes daily for someone. I believe Our genome will prevail, even if most of our population doesn't. Then the butterfly will be able to open up the chrysalis and escape again. It is a bit depressing to think that we've honed creating our own demise,to perfection; but then I've seen it coming since I read Walter M. Miller's work. In A Canticle for Leibowitz, he speculates that it just happens again and again. Life eventually wins and technology eventually fails and becomes rubbish underfoot. It would be nice to think that my great-great grandchildren will still be on the planet. Or under it.

Richard wrote: "Newbie here. Thanks for the reading suggestion! I am especially interested in any reference to sung languages. The ancient bardic tradition in Norther Europe -- I'm reading the Finnish epic, The Kalevalla right now -- had to have its origins somewhere, and a sung language predecdessor makes a lot of sense."

One of the great advantages of sung language is that it's easier to remember than spoken language. McLuhan (and others) argue that the Iliad etc were sung not spoken. See Digital McLuhan.

Thanks -- that absolutely confirms how well sung history worked for millennia. Now if only we could get our computers to sing. Wait... they already do! I'll check out the Digital McLuhan, too.

P.S. I once had a language teacher in junior high try to teach us by singing and memorizing lyrics. It worked, up to a point. He just never had enough songs for every situation.

Chip wrote: "Great! I'll buy it! Did you ever read Björn Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger?

Also, just posted on Slate - http://www.slate.com/articles/health_......"

I loved this book, as well as the sequel novel, Singletusk. I also highly recommend the fiction of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. She wrote two novels about anatomically modern humans in eastern Asia about 25,000 years BP. They are Reindeer Moon and The Animal Wife. Enjoy!

Thanks for the recommendations, Christopher - those novels look like just my cups of tea.

Richard wrote: "I once had a language teacher in junior high try to teach us by singing and memorizing lyrics. It worked, up to a point. He just never had enough songs for every situation."

Babies also respond to sung words - hence, lullabies and singing to your baby.

Finally got around to reading Chip's Slate article. Thanks for the link. Great stuff. It really also links to some of the new findings in a st6udy of toddlers (which of course I didn't bookmark or remember the source!)in Sweden, which showed that at a neurological level, toddlers display amazing altruism including sharing and protection of weaker members of the community. If this could be somehow tracked genetically, it might also help explain the edge that brought us forward to the present.

Just jumped into Terry Pratchett's The Long Earth, which seems just custom made for me: interdimensional travel, quantum questions, and singing Neanderthals called Trolls! LOL!

Richard wrote: "showed that at a neurological level, toddlers display amazing altruism including sharing and protection of weaker members of the community. If this could be somehow tracked genetically, it might also help explain the edge that brought us forward to the present. "

There was news, maybe a decade or more ago, about a female great ape who protected a human toddler who had fallen into a place where there were other great apes who might have hurt the toddler. Suggests that altruism may be a primate not an exclusively human feature, or something that comes with the 98+% DNA we share with great apes and chimps.

I remember that event. It may have been here at the Bronx Zoo. It does kind of throw out the Human Exceptionalism canon. Our cats get out of bed almost every clear morning, before we do, to watch the sunrise, so I'm ready to let go of those old concepts. I've heard that the similarity of the placement and proportion of facial features in all baby primates as well as puppies and kittens (big eyes in the front of a broad face) is a shared response for protecting those beings we see as "cute".

Yes, it was at the Bronx Zoo - right across the street from where I teach, at Fordham University. Had I looked in the right direct with a pair of binoculars, I might have witnessed the whole event :)

Hey! YOu might have met my son-in-law who was with the Tremont Ave FDNY house, Engine 79, but maybe the location is off. He used to run the truck through the Botanical Gardens and Zoo with some frequency. Now regarding the examples of Primate behavior visible from your office, did you catch it the day the orangutan threw a perfect handful of his own shit into the face of a guy who'd been making faces and yelling at him? It could well be that retribution is a shared Primate behavior, too.

Ha - no I missed that - but it sounds like it was well-deserved.

It couldn't have happened to a more deserving individual. Orangs are not idiots.

Not in the slightest - they're right up there with chimps and great apes in sharing most of our DNA.

Remember that taxonomically speaking, we humans ARE great apes - African great apes, albeit far weedier than our African cousins the chimps and gorillas.

True!

I remember well my delight as a child in New York at the Central Park Zoo, watching the chimps patiently entice the tourists closer in with their acrobatic antics. Once they'd drawn in an audience of rubes, the chimps would suddenly start throwing feces at them, whooping with delight as the horrified gawkers scattered. Then as new tourists filtered in, the acrobatics would begin again, no one noticing the happy little kid in the corner watching the chimps' small triumph over a few of their unwary cousins.

Richard suggested that " It could well be that retribution is a shared Primate behavior, too."
I suspect that retribution is widespread among intelligent organisms such as birds and mammals. Corvid birds remember for years the appearance of humans who have harmed one of their number, and respond with disruptive noise and display whenever such a human appears; and who living with a cat has not swiftly had his pens hurled from the table when said cat is refused access to the computer mouse? Revenge is sweet.