https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/neanderthals-invented-their-own-bone-weapon-tec...

"Archaeologists recently unearthed a bone projectile point someone dropped on a cave floor between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago — which, based on its location, means that said someone must have been a Neanderthal.

"The point (or in paleoarchaeologist Liubov V. Golovanova and colleagues’ super-technical archaeological terms, “a unique pointy bone artifact”) is the oldest bone tip from a hunting weapon ever found in Europe. It’s also evidence that Neanderthals figured out how to shape bone into smooth, aerodynamic projectiles on their own, without needing to copy those upstart Homo sapiens. Along with the bone tools, jewelry, and even rope that archaeologists have found at other Neanderthal sites, the projectile is one more clue pointing to the fact that Neanderthals were actually pretty sharp.

***

"The point is shaped from the hard outer layer of bone (called cortical bone), probably from one of the massive leg bones of a bison. Under the microscope, Golovanova and colleagues could still see the grain pattern that marked where muscle once attached to the bone, even though the original knob of bone that formed the attachment had been ground flat and smooth by the Neanderthal who made the point.

"Golovanova and colleagues’ microscopes also revealed shallow, parallel grooves where Neanderthal crafters had used stone tools and carefully scraped, ground, and polished the bone into exactly the right shape without breaking or splintering it. A couple of discolored spots also reveal that the point’s maker hardened its tip in a fire.

"And if the tip doesn't seem as sharp as you'd expect, Golovanova and colleagues say it's sharp enough.

"To be an effective hunting weapon," write the archaeologists, "the bone point does not need to have a sharply pointed (needle-like) distal end (in contrast to bone awls), but it needs to have a strong, conical tip, symmetrical outlines, and a straight profile."

"Traces of bitumen, or tar, on the point—which Golovanova and colleagues identified using spectroscopy—show that it must have been secured to its wooden haft with the sticky substance. That’s also how Neanderthals mounted many of their stone tools, so it’s not surprising that they’d do the same with a bone point. But making and using tar or resin requires a fair amount of technical know-how, and it’s easy to get it wrong and end up with an unusable mess.

"Earlier hominins made bone tools, too; archaeologists have found a hippo femur hand ax made by Homo erectus and even some knapped bone dating back 1.5 million years. But those tools were roughly shaped, using the same chipping and flaking methods their makers would have used on stone. For some things, that works, but for something like the streamlined spear point from Mezmaiskaya, working bone takes different techniques: less flaking, more grinding.

"Working bone into a streamlined, aerodynamic spear point, then hafting it onto a shaft with tar that had to be extracted and refined before use takes some sophisticated knowledge and skill. And it’s clear that the Neanderthals developed that skill on their own, instead of acquiring it from our species through some sort of prehistoric ITAR violation. Even so, Golovanova and colleagues note in their paper that “the production technology of bone-tipped hunting weapons used by Neanderthals was in the nascent level in comparison to those used and introduced by modern humans.” (Which seems a bit rude.)"

Comment: Neanderthal 'smarts' are obvious.

https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/library/item/11_april_2025/42649...

"... we identified 180 loci associated with seven highly heritable pelvic phenotypes. Birth canal phenotypes showed sex-specific genetic architecture, aligning with reproductive function. Larger birth canals were linked to slower walking pace and reduced back pain but increased hip osteoarthritis risk, whereas narrower birth canals were associated with reduced pelvic floor disorder risk but increased obstructed labor risk. Lastly, genetic correlation between birth canal and head widths provides evidence of coevolution between the human pelvis and brain, partially mitigating the dilemma.

***

"...One area of contention centers on the relationship between pelvic shape and walking efficiency or walking speed. Some studies have found that there is an association between the two, whereas others have not. Another point of debate revolves around whether variation in birth canal proportions is associated with obstruction during delivery. Recently, appreciation has grown for the concept of a multifactorial pelvis, which proposes that the role of pelvic width reduction is not just to facilitate efficient bipedal locomotion but also to reduce the risk of pelvic floor disorders. Pelvic canal width reduction improves the pelvic floor’s ability to support the fetus and the internal organs and to prevent incontinence.

***

"... recent data on a fairly large sample of great apes suggesting that human children are not born significantly earlier than those of the other apes. However, we observed a significant genetic correlation between adult head width and pelvic inlet width (rg = 0.22, P = 2.3 × 10–3) as well as a significant correlation between the width of the birth canal and neonatal birth weight, a proxy for neonatal head size [Pearson correlation, r ∼ 0.7 (58)] (regression slope = 0.01, P = 2.4 × 10–4). This suggests that natural selection might have led to genetic correlation between pelvic and head proportions, potentially reducing the risk of labor obstruction."

Comment: how female pelvic size adjusted to increasing fetal head size is amazing and suggests a dsigner at work.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-wiring-human-genome.html#google_vignette

"Understanding the non-coding portion of our DNA is critical for understanding the genetic components of disease, says Steven Reilly, an assistant professor of genetics at Yale School of Medicine who co-led the study.

"'When we find mutations in DNA that are associated with some trait or disease, they're often in these non-coding regions," said Reilly. "Being able to understand which genes these mutations impact is really critical."

"For the study, Reilly and his colleagues set out to understand how non-coding regions of DNA known as "enhancers" and "promoters" are linked to genes. Promoters are bits of DNA just upstream of genes that control whether the genes are transcribed into mRNA, which will eventually be turned into protein. Molecules that activate genes bind to promoters to initiate the process.

"Enhancers are regions of DNA that act as additional control elements for promoters, instructing them where and when to turn on. However, they can be quite far away from the genes they control, making it hard to predict which genes a mutation in an enhancer might impact.

"Essentially, these genetic regulators help turn genes on and off.

"The research effort is part of a 20-year-long project known as the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or ENCODE, Consortium.

***

"'The good news was that the only things that seemed to do anything were the things we'd already mapped out as enhancers or promoters," said Reilly. "So there weren't some secret light switches we hadn't known about. That confirms that when we're looking at a DNA variation that might impact disease, the enhancers and promoter maps we have are the places to look."

"In a more surprising finding, the researchers discovered that individual enhancers could affect multiple genes. It was as if one light switch turned on several lights.

"'We originally had tended to think that one enhancer was affecting one gene, but we found it was really common for one enhancer to impact many genes," said Reilly. "That says that if you have a mutation in an enhancer that's associated with a disease, you might need to be looking for several impacted genes, not just one."

***

"'Depending on which strand you target, you will get different results of how big of an effect the CRISPR-mediated DNA repression has on genes," said Reilly. "Knowing these differences will allow researchers to design the right analysis methods."

This particular finding wouldn't have been possible without the large collaborative effort of this work, he added.

***

"The ENCODE Consortium, which was launched in 2003, is coming to an end with many of its main goals achieved. Going forward, Reilly aims to use the best practices that have come out of this work to do these types of analyses in more complicated systems. One goal is to better understand how many genes are involved in the development of disease or in conferring observable traits like height.

"'We have a good sense of what DNA variants exist, but we don't have a good sense of how those variants affect genes," said Reilly. "This study gives us a roadmap to do those experiments better.'"

Comment: 21 years of work are coming to a very fruitful close. Our gene total may by relatively small but the 3-D relationships, the complexities of teamed genes, and the work of promoters and enhancers all create a very powerful control system.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-lobby-where-a-molecule-mob-tells-genes-what-to-do-2024...

"the human genome is rich in regulatory connections. Our genes interact in a dense network, in which pieces of DNA and the molecules they encode (RNA and proteins) control the “expression” of other genes, influencing whether they make their respective RNA and proteins. To understand the human genome, we needed to understand this process of gene regulation.

***

"gene regulation... involves a gang of molecules, including proteins, RNAs and pieces of DNA from throughout a chromosome, that somehow collaborate to control the expression of a gene.

***

"have uncovered a component of this fuzzy mode of gene regulation. Their work, published last September in Science, suggests that the DNA near a gene acts as a kind of shallow well for trapping diverse regulatory molecules, keeping them ready for action so that, when needed, they can add their voice to the decision about whether to activate the gene.

"These regulatory wells are made from decidedly odd stretches of DNA. They consist of sequences in which a short stretch of DNA, from one to six base pairs long, repeats many times over. Tens of copies of these “short tandem repeats” (STRs) can be strung together in these sequences, like the same little “word” written again and again. (my bold)

"STRs are abundant in the human genome: They comprise about 5% of all our DNA. They were once thought to be classic examples of “junk” DNA because a repetitive DNA “text” made up only of STRs can’t hold nearly as much meaningful information as, say, the irregular sequence of letters that make up a sentence in this article.

***

"In humans and other eukaryotes, the regulatory sequences can be more numerous, various — and perplexing. Regions called enhancers, for example, affect the probability that a gene will be transcribed. Enhancers are often the targets for proteins called transcription factors, which can bind to boost or inhibit gene expression. Weirdly, some enhancers are tens of thousands of base pairs away from the genes they regulate, and are only brought close to them through the physical rearrangement of the loops of DNA in a packed chromosome.

***

“Traditionally in genomics, the goal has been to classify genomic sites in a [binary] way as either ‘bound’ or ‘unbound’” by transcription factors, Fordyce said. “But the picture is way more nuanced than that.” The individual members of those gene regulatory “committees” don’t seem to be invariably present for or absent from their meetings, but rather have different probabilities of being there or not.

"The tendency of gene regulation in eukaryotes to rely on so many diverse weak interactions among large molecular complexes “is one of the things that makes it notoriously difficult to get a handle on theoretically,” said the biophysicist Thomas Kuhlman ... It’s a profound puzzle how, out of this seemingly chaotic process, precise decisions about turning genes on and off emerge.

***

"Molecules generally move around the cell by diffusion, buffeted by all the other surrounding molecules, such as water, and wandering in random directions. We might expect these loose committees to drift apart too quickly to do their regulatory job.

"That, Fordyce and her colleagues think, is where the STRs come in. STRs are strikingly common within enhancer sites on DNA. In their paper, the researchers argue that the STRs act as sticky patches that convene transcription factors and stop them from straying.

***

"The Stanford team found that different STR sequences can alter the binding affinities of transcription factors to DNA by as much as a factor of 70; they sometimes have more impact on transcription factor binding than changing the sequence of the binding motif itself. And the effects were different for the two different transcription factors they looked at.

So STRs seem able to fine-tune the ability of transcription factors to dock at a DNA site and thus to regulate a gene. But how, exactly?

***

“'There are now multiple examples that support the idea that DNA elements can crowd transcription factors to the point where they form condensates with cofactors,” said Richard Young, a cell biologist ... Enhancers bind many transcription factors to produce that crowding. STRs may be an ingredient that helps muster transcription factors to cluster near a gene, but they won’t be the whole story.

"Why regulate genes in this complicated manner, rather than relying on the kind of strong and specific interactions between regulatory proteins and DNA sites that dominate in prokaryotes? It’s possible that such fuzziness is what made large complex metazoans possible at all.

***

"To Fordyce, it suggests that STRs “may therefore serve as the raw material for evolving new regulatory elements and fine-tuning existing regulatory modules for sensitive transcriptional programs,” such as those governing the development of animals and plants.

***

***

“The gene regulatory systems in bacteria and eukaryotes do seem to have diverged quite substantially,” Tjian agreed."

Comment: human gene fuzziness gives many more results the rigidity of bacterial DNA controls.

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-neanderthal-cuisine-excavations-reveal-neanderthals.html

"The fact that Neanderthals were able to make a fire and use it, among other things, for cooking, demonstrates their intelligence. "This confirms our observations and theories from previous studies," explains Diego Angelucci, archaeologist at the University of Trento and co-author of the study.

"'Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought, could create artistic objects, knew how to decorate their bodies using personal ornaments and had an extremely varied diet. Add to that that, based on our findings, we can say with certainty that they habitually ate cooked food. This ability confirms that they were as skilled as the Homo sapiens who lived millennia later."

***

"In this study we demonstrate that there is no doubt that Neanderthals could make a fire and that fire was a central element in their daily life."

***

"The cave is part of the Almonda karst system, a vast network of caves placed at different elevations above a large spring that have been inhabited in different periods during Prehistory. The oldest layers of the Gruta de Oliveira, which includes a number of passages, date back to about 120,000 years ago, the most recent to about 40,000: It is believed that Neanderthals inhabited this place between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago.

***

"In this case however, what caught the attention of archaeologists were the traces of hearths intentionally built and used in the cave. The archaeologists found about a dozen hearths at various stratigraphic levels in an excavation area of about 30 square meters and six meters deep. The unmistakable basin-like, circular structures were filled with remains.

"Findings from inside and near the hearths demonstrate that the inhabitants of the caves used to cook their food. "We found burnt bones, burnt wood and ash remains. And the rock underneath—continues Angelucci—has been reddened by the heat: This is a crucial detail because it tells us that the structure is in a primary position. And it has always been there. Fire is a fundamental element in their daily lives. It makes the place comfortable and helps socialization. It gives back that basic idea of 'home' that perhaps could also apply to them."

***

"What did Neanderthals eat? "We were able to find out what they ate and even the cooking techniques they used. We found the remains and burnt bones of cooked goats, deer, horses, aurochs (extinct bulls), rhinos, turtles, which were probably laid on their carapace and stewed on hot stones.'"

"'Meat was on the menu in this inland cave, but in other excavations in caves overlooking the western Mediterranean Sea near Cartagena (Spain), remains of fish, mussels and mollusks, even roasted pine nuts, were found. We had already demonstrated in 2020 in another paper that appeared in Science that Neanderthals had a varied diet, but the Portuguese excavations have further confirmed that they used fire to cook food."

"Despite the excavations, the archaeologists were not able to determine how the Neanderthals started a fire."

Comment: this certainly rehabilitates the Neanderthal story to show they were quite advanced.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGtwzsqMPVQnvJRVqcqVggDNQjx

"...eastern Asia was home to the Denisovans, while the island of Flores had the hobbits (Homo floresiensis) and the Philippines had Homo luzonensis. It’s often hypothesised, or even assumed, that H. erectus was the ancestor of all these populations, but we don’t have DNA from H. erectus so we don’t actually know.

"And then along came modern humans (Homo sapiens). Our species seems to have expanded from Africa in multiple waves: H. sapiens remains are known from Israel from 177,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago, but genetic evidence suggests most non-Africans today are descended from a migration out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. Other hominin groups vanish from the fossil record not long after.

"In other words, there were two main waves of migration from Africa to Asia. The first was Homo erectus, which then gave rise to a bunch of other groups. The second was Homo sapiens, which replaced all of them.

"Seems simple enough, right? The thing is, there’s a bunch of fossils from southern Asia that don’t neatly fit, and nobody is quite sure what to make of them.

"One of the studies from the aforementioned special issue describes a lower jawbone from Hualongdong, a cave in eastern China...we have pronounced chins and the Hualongdong jawbone doesn’t, and on other measures it looks like an older species. The overall mix of features is unique.

"The jawbone is about 300,000 years old. That’s a curious bit of timing, because it’s about when the oldest known Homo sapiens were living in what’s now Morocco, in northern Africa.

***

"if the Hualongdong jawbone really does belong to the same population as the Moroccan Homo sapiens, it would mean hominins made the journey from northern Africa to eastern China within a few tens of thousands of years. That’s surely possible but I would want to see evidence.

"An alternative explanation is that the Hualongdong jawbone is a case of convergent evolution: that is, the same features evolved independently in certain east Asian and African populations.

***

"There are lots of other hominin fossils from eastern Asia that are similarly odd. The Dali cranium from China is 260,000 years old and has also been (controversially) interpreted as early Homo sapiens. Other specimens don’t quite fit H. erectus or H. sapiens: some have old-looking shapes but lived recently, others look recent but are actually ancient. And we haven’t even got to the stone tool record, or instances of prehistoric art.

***

"The genetic evidence is unambiguous that our species hails from Africa: that conclusion was true in the 1990s and it’s only been strengthened by the swathes of genomic data we’ve obtained since. But that doesn’t mean the traffic was one way. Overall, yes, we come from Africa. But I’m now convinced there was a lot of back and forth.

***

"...maybe some of the features we now associate with Homo sapiens first evolved in southern Asia and were then carried into Africa by a westward migration – before being carried right back out of Africa and all around the world when our species went global. This would explain the Hualongdong and Dali remains, without contradicting the genetics.

***

"If there’s one simple thing we can draw out of all this, it may be that prehistoric populations were more connected than we imagine. We tend to think of prehistoric people living in isolated tribes, each with its own patch of land. But that isolation is partly a reflection of how hunter-gatherers live today, when agriculture has forced them to the fringes of society.

"In earlier times, the hunter-gatherer network spanned continents. I don’t mean that people living in modern Tanzania were personally acquainted with those living in what’s now Laos – clearly, they weren’t. But there was a long chain of communities linking them

***

"If that’s true, then once upon a time a new and advantageous gene variant could spread rapidly across thousands of kilometres, as people moved and intermarried. In other words, prehistory may have been globalised.

Comment: The conclusion is 315,000-year-old H. sapiens had an enormous wanderlust or was the result of convergent evolution. Or it shows God wanted to be sure His goal was met.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-have-humans-evolved-to-have-a-long-journey-to-adulthood?utm_...

"Our babies require an intense amount of investment, and as a species we have gone to staggering lengths to give it to them. As placental mammals, we solved the limitations placed on babies who are gestated in eggs with a fixed amount of resources by capturing the code of an RNA virus in our DNA to create the placenta: a temporary organ that allows our embryos and foetuses to draw sustenance directly from our bodies. As humans, however, we have gone a step further and altered the signalling mechanisms that maintain the delicate balance between our voracious young and the mothers they feed off. Our species’ pregnancies – and only our species’ pregnancies – have become life-threatening ordeals specifically to deal with the outrageous demands of our babies. Gestational diabetes and preeclampsia are conditions virtually unknown in the animal kingdom, but common killers of pregnant humans thanks to this subtle alteration. Babies grow to an enormous size and plumpness, and they’re so demanding that the resources in one body aren’t enough to sustain them. They emerge into the world with large brains and a hefty 15 per cent lard, but still unripe and unready.

***

"Our babies have very large heads, and our mothers quite narrow pelvises, and what seems a trivial question about furniture logistics is in fact a huge impediment to the successful reproduction of our species: this makes human birth dangerous, and mothers die giving birth at a far higher rate than any other species.

"Classically, this was viewed as an acceptable trade-off between competing evolutionary demands. This is what the anthropologist Sherwood Washburn in 1960 called the ‘obstetrical dilemma’: the dangerous trip down the birth canal is necessitated by our upright posture and the tight fit required by our big brains. (My bold)

***

"...human babies really do have a terrible time coming into the world, above and beyond other species, due to that tight fit. So what gives?

"The answer may be in that glorious pinchable baby fat. Having precision-engineered our offspring to siphon resources from their mothers in order to build calorifically expensive structures like our big brains and our chubby cheeks, we have, perhaps, become victims of our own success. Our babies can build themselves up to an impressive size in the womb, one that comes near to being unsurvivable. But the truly fantastic thing is that, having poured so much into our pregnancies, after we hit the limit of what our babies can catabolise from their mothers’ bodies, they are forced to emerge into the world still fantastically needy. For any mammal, survival after birth calls for the magic of milk, and our babies are no different, but here we find another very unusual feature of humans: our long childhood starts with cutting off infancy early.

***

"we kick off our babies from the breast quick – but, once they’ve moved from infancy into childhood, there is yet another surprise: we let them stay there longer than any other species on the planet.

"Childhood in humans is extended, by any measure you care to use. We can look at the 25-odd years it takes to get to physical maturity (in fact, the tiny end plate of your clavicle where it meets the sternum doesn’t fully finish forming until your early 30s) and compare it with our nearest relatives, to see that we have slowed down by a decade or more the time it takes to build something great-ape sized.

***

"There is one more adaptation at play in the support of our needy offspring that should be accounted for: the utter unlikeliness that is a grandmother. Specifically, it is the almost unheard-of biological process of menopause, and the creation of a stage of life for half of our species where reproduction just stops. This is outrageous in evolutionary terms and it occurs only in humans (and a handful of whales).

***

"A long childhood is our greatest evolutionary adaptation. It means that we have created needy offspring, and this has surprising knock-on effects in every single aspect of our lives, from our pair bonds to our dads to our boring genitals to our dangerous pregnancies and births and our fat-cheeked babies and even that unlikely creature, the grandmother. The amount of time and energy required to grow a human child, and to let it learn the things it needs to learn, is so great that we have stopped the clock: we have given ourselves longer to do it, and critically, made sure there are more and more investors ready to contribute to each of our fantastically expensive children."

Comment: this is an old story. Low reproduction rates, a dangerous way to give birth, lengthy childhood, and yet we are the most successful species on Earth. This is the way it had to be.
The obstetrical dilemma was mentioned before. The DNA of Mother, Father and baby have to evolve in coordinated fashion for 'tight fit' pregnancies to work. Not by chance evolution.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/how-genes-from-neanderthals-predispose-peopl...

"One of the biggest lingering questions surrounding COVID-19 is why some people with the disease get sicker than others. While many factors are likely at play, numerous studies suggest a person’s genetics can predispose them to severe disease. Indeed, a genome-wide association study and a COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative dataset specifically point to a 50 kilobase-sized genomic segment on chromosome 3 as a major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19—a segment that, back in 2020, paleogenomicist Svante Pääbo and his collaborator Hugo Zeberg showed was inherited from Neanderthals some 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. However, the genetic variants on this segment—all strongly linked to each other.

***

"Now, Terence Capellini, a Harvard University human evolutionary biologist, and colleagues have systematically evaluated the more than 600 genetic variants in the region. Ultimately, they homed in on three variants that regulate two key chemokine receptor genes that play a role in mediating the cytokine storm that is often involved in the pathogenesis of severe COVID-19. The results, published February 10 in eLife, shed new light on the interplay between the host genome and COVID-19 outcomes and help unravel the molecular mechanisms that underpin severe COVID-19.

“'From an evolutionary perspective, this work provides a beautiful example, all the way to the molecular level, of how a small part of our genome that was inherited from Neanderthals is impacting our health . . . to this day,” says Steven Reilly, a geneticist at the Yale School of Medicine, who wasn’t involved in the research. He adds that “the fact that this risk comes from DNA that originated in Neanderthals is very interesting and highlights how complex human ancestry is.'”

Comment: if it is also known Neanderthal genes help us with immunity.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-types-of-tools-did-neanderthals-use-...

"From the origin of the species around 400,000 years ago to their disappearance around 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals behaved in a somewhat solitary way, spending their time in small, itinerant tribes with 12 to 25 individuals. That said, some studies are starting to suggest that they also gathered in much more substantial groups, too.

"Never prone to staying in the same space, these tribes bounced between several sites according to the season, returning to the same settlements sporadically across centuries. But, these tribes weren’t completely cut off from their counterparts, occasionally coming across 10 to 20 other troops, with whom they shared similar social identities and skill sets,

"Almost from the start of the species, this centered around the creation of sophisticated stone “flakes” with flat faces, thin, sharp sides and a flair for cutting, carving and scraping.

"To form these flakes, the Neanderthals selected small chunks of stone, also called “cores,” and trimmed their sides until they took the shape of a tortoiseshell — flat on one side and spherical on the other. They then smashed the top of the trimmed stone with a single smash, spitting out flakes of a standard shape and size, which were then wielded as tools.

***

"Neanderthals employed these tools to slaughter animals, to work wood and other malleable materials, and to prepare and punch holes into hides, which were then tied together to create clothing. And though the species’ strong, skilled hands helped them manipulate these implements, the Neanderthals eventually hafted their tools to make them even easier to maneuver, setting them into handles and securing them with ties and adhesives, such as birch tar, which was formulated from the bark of birch trees.

"Today, archaeologists understand the uses of these tools thanks to their shape, size and pattern of wear and tear. In fact, the tools that they’ve found across Neanderthal sites all show a unique smattering of scratches. Tools used for shaping stone displayed a different type of damage than those used for molding other materials or slicing meat, for instance.

"But some scientists stress that many of the Neanderthals’ tools weren’t so well preserved. While archaeologists have found an abundance of stone tools, they’ve identified far fewer implements made out of other more fragile or flimsy materials, though their finds of wooden spears and bone lissoirs suggest that the Neanderthals manipulated these materials, too.

***

"...archaeologists are always finding surprising new traces of Neanderthal technologies, stressing the significance of further work within their field. Some studies suggest, for instance, that the Neanderthals did dabble in projectile weaponry, with their skeletons showing signs of throwing trauma and their spears being an appropriate shape and size for flying through the air.

"Some scientists also add that the Neanderthals were adept at twisting fibers together, too, fabricating the world’s first forms of string. In fact, early examples of cordage could count as an indication of a much more intensive fiber industry, potentially involving the production of fabrics, bags, baskets and nets."

Comment: not equal to us, but very bright.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/were-different-from-neanderthals-because-...

"But, while several studies show that humans boast a similar sized brain to the Neanderthals, almost no research weighs in on whether we produce similar amounts of neurons to our closest cousins. That is, until now.

"According to a new study in Science, researchers identified a variation in one of the proteins in our brains that bolsters our brain progenitor cell counts. This suggests that our species makes more neurons during our development than the Neanderthals did during theirs around 130,000 to 40,000 years ago. Occurring primarily in the neocortex, our increased neural production brings scientists a step closer to understanding why our species is so distinct.

"Modern humans and Neanderthals have comparably sized brains, and strikingly similar neocortexes, which are the big areas of the brain that command complex functions such as sensory perception, attention and memory. But whether this similar size implies a similar production of neurons remains mysterious.

"Researchers are studying the variations in the proteins inside the brains of both modern humans and Neanderthals to solve this mystery.

"They are focusing on the protein TKTL1, which is present in the frontal lobes of the neocortexes of both modern humans and Neanderthals with only a single variation in their sequences of amino acid building blocks. To be specific, the only difference between the two is that the TKTL1 protein contains an occurrence of arginine in a particular spot of its modern human sequence and lysine in the same spot of its Neanderthal sequence.

"According to the researchers, even this slight variation in the amino acid sequence of the protein causes a substantial increase in the number of basal radial glial cells, a type of brain progenitor cell present in the frontal lobe in the modern human brain. Because these cells are in charge of producing new neurons, their increase, in turn, yields a much greater number of neural cells in the brains of modern humans.

***

"'We found that with the Neanderthal-type of amino acid in TKTL1, fewer basal radial glial cells were produced than with the modern human-type and, as a consequence, also fewer neurons," says Anneline Pinson, a study author and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, in a press release. "This shows us that even though we do not know how many neurons the Neanderthal brain had, we can assume that modern humans have more neurons in the frontal lobe of the brain, where TKTL1 activity is highest, than Neanderthals.'"

Comment: the study shows how neuron production differs, but still doesn't tell us about specialized network formation in both types of brains.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/identical-twins-raised-in-different-countries/?utm_sour...

"About 45 years later, the identical twins reunited after the American sister submitted a DNA sample as part of South Korea’s program for locating lost family members. Their story is now the focus of an intriguing scientific case study. As identical twins, the sisters share the same genes. So, how similar would they be given their remarkably different upbringings?

"Despite growing up in vastly different cultures and households, the identical twins shared very similar personalities, the researchers found. Both are hard workers, job-oriented, well-organized, enjoy playing sports, and strive for achievements. The Korean sister “was raised in a more supportive and cohesive family atmosphere where personal growth was encouraged. In contrast, the [American sister] was raised in a stricter, more religiously-oriented environment with higher levels of family conflict,” the researchers described.

"In line with the differences in American and Korean cultures, the American sister expressed “the self as autonomous and believes that all members of a collective are of equal status,” while the Korean sister “perceives the self as a part of a collective, and accepts hierarchy and inequality within that collective.”

"Consistent with their shared genetics, the identical twins were of a similar height and weight and both have diabetes. Both also had to undergo surgeries in their teen years to remove tumors from their ovaries.

"The sharpest difference between the twins was in intelligence. The Korean sister outscored the American sister by 16 points on an IQ test. What explains this difference? While environment is one potential explanation, the study didn’t show that it necessarily was the cause. After all, partially explaining the variance is the fact that the American sister suffered three concussions as an adult, the most recent in 2018, which resulted in emotional changes and slight cognitive impairment.

***

"Identical twins raised apart have actually been studied before, though it’s rare to find them raised in different countries. Published in 1990, the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart examined over 100 sets of twins from around the world that were separated very early in life, reared apart during their formative years, and reunited in adulthood. The researchers behind the massive effort found that an identical twin raised apart from their sibling had “about an equal chance of being similar to the co-twin in terms of personality, interests, and attitudes as one who has been reared with his or her co-twin.”

“'This finding leads us to believe that the similarities between twins are due to genes, not environment,” they concluded.

"The most amazing example of twin similarity from the study was the “Jim twins.” Separated at four weeks of age, each were named James by their adoptive parents. After finding each other at age 39, the identical twins learned that they each enjoyed carpentry, mechanical drawing, and block lettering, did poorly in spelling and well in math, and had law-enforcement training, among many other eerie similarities."

Comment: just an addition to our discussion about personality development

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/amon-rmh050521.php

"In the 150 years since Charles Darwin speculated that humans originated in Africa, the number of species in the human family tree has exploded, but so has the level of dispute concerning early human evolution. Fossil apes are often at the center of the debate, with some scientists dismissing their importance to the origins of the human lineage (the "hominins"), and others conferring them starring evolutionary roles. A new review out on May 7 in the journal Science looks at the major discoveries in hominin origins since Darwin's works and argues that fossil apes can inform us about essential aspects of ape and human evolution, including the nature of our last common ancestor.

***

"'When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it's just a big mess--there's no consensus whatsoever," said Sergio Almécija, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the review. "People are working under completely different paradigms, and that's something that I don't see happening in other fields of science."

"There are two major approaches to resolving the human origins problem: "Top-down," which relies on analysis of living apes, especially chimpanzees; and "bottom-up," which puts importance on the larger tree of mostly extinct apes. For example, some scientists assume that hominins originated from a chimp-like knuckle-walking ancestor. Others argue that the human lineage originated from an ancestor more closely resembling, in some features, some of the strange Miocene apes.

***

"'In The Descent of Man in 1871, Darwin speculated that humans originated in Africa from an ancestor different from any living species. However, he remained cautious given the scarcity of fossils at the time," Almécija said. "One hundred fifty years later, possible hominins--approaching the time of the human-chimpanzee divergence--have been found in eastern and central Africa, and some claim even in Europe. In addition, more than 50 fossil ape genera are now documented across Africa and Eurasia. However, many of these fossils show mosaic combinations of features that do not match expectations for ancient representatives of the modern ape and human lineages. As a consequence, there is no scientific consensus on the evolutionary role played by these fossil apes."

"Overall, the researchers found that most stories of human origins are not compatible with the fossils that we have today.

"'Living ape species are specialized species, relicts of a much larger group of now extinct apes. When we consider all evidence--that is, both living and fossil apes and hominins--it is clear that a human evolutionary story based on the few ape species currently alive is missing much of the bigger picture," said study co-author Ashley Hammond, an assistant curator in the Museum's Division of Anthropology.

"Kelsey Pugh, a Museum postdoctoral fellow and study co-author adds, "The unique and sometimes unexpected features and combinations of features observed among fossil apes, which often differ from those of living apes, are necessary to untangle which features hominins inherited from our ape ancestors and which are unique to our lineage."

"Living apes alone, the authors conclude, offer insufficient evidence. "Current disparate theories regarding ape and human evolution would be much more informed if, together with early hominins and living apes, Miocene apes were also included in the equation," says Almécija. "In other words, fossil apes are essential to reconstruct the 'starting point' from which humans and chimpanzees evolved.'"

Comment: The concept of starting in deeper time is very reasonable. The broad bush of branches evolution creates can be confusing if all stages are not carefully analyzed. I discussed a finding by Dr. Aaron Filler of a 21-million-year-old lumbar vertebrae in a primate, showing early changes toward upright posture, in The Atheist Delusion.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/neanderthals-carb-loaded-helping-grow-their-big...

"A new study of bacteria collected from Neanderthal teeth shows that our close cousins ate so many roots, nuts, or other starchy foods that they dramatically altered the type of bacteria in their mouths. The finding suggests our ancestors had adapted to eating lots of starch by at least 600,000 years ago—about the same time as they needed more sugars to fuel a big expansion of their brains.

***

"The starchy plants gathered by many living hunter-gatherers are an excellent source of glucose, however. To figure out whether oral bacteria track changes in diet or the environment, Warinner, Max Planck graduate student James Fellows Yates, and a large international team looked at the oral bacteria stuck to the teeth of Neanderthals, preagriculture modern humans that lived more than 10,000 years ago, chimps, gorillas, and howler monkeys. The researchers analyzed billions of DNA fragments from long-dead bacteria still preserved on the teeth of 124 individuals. One was a Neanderthal who lived 100,000 years ago at Pešturina Cave in Serbia, which produced the oldest oral microbiome genome reconstructed to date.

***

“'This pushes the importance of starch in the diet further back in time,” to when human brains were still expanding, Warinner says. Because the amylase enzyme is much more efficient at digesting cooked rather than raw starch, the finding also suggests cooking, too, was common by 600,000 years ago, Carmody says. Researchers have debated whether cooking became common when the big brain began to expand almost 2 million years ago or it spread later, during a second surge of growth.

"The study offers a new way to detect major shifts in diet, says geneticist Ran Blekhman of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In the case of Neanderthals, it reveals how much they depended on plants.

“'We sometimes have given short shrift to the plant components of the diet,” says anthropological geneticist Anne Stone of Arizona State University, Tempe. “As we know from modern hunter-gatherers, it’s often the gathering that ends up providing a substantial portion of the calories.'”

Comment: Big brains require 20% of all daily calories. Seems we knew we had to be omnivores, without the benefit of nutrition classes.

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2026309118

"We show that a haplotype on chromosome 12, which is associated with a ∼22% reduction in relative risk of becoming severely ill with COVID-19 when infected by SARS-CoV-2, is inherited from Neandertals. This haplotype is present at substantial frequencies in all regions of the world outside Africa. The genomic region where this haplotype occurs encodes proteins that are important during infections with RNA viruses.

"It was recently shown that the major genetic risk factor associated with becoming severely ill with COVID-19 when infected by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is inherited from Neandertals. New, larger genetic association studies now allow additional genetic risk factors to be discovered. Using data from the Genetics of Mortality in Critical Care (GenOMICC) consortium, we show that a haplotype at a region on chromosome 12 associated with requiring intensive care when infected with the virus is inherited from Neandertals. This region encodes proteins that activate enzymes that are important during infections with RNA viruses. In contrast to the previously described Neandertal haplotype that increases the risk for severe COVID-19, this Neandertal haplotype is protective against severe disease. It also differs from the risk haplotype in that it has a more moderate effect and occurs at substantial frequencies in all regions of the world outside Africa. Among ancient human genomes in western Eurasia, the frequency of the protective Neandertal haplotype may have increased between 20,000 and 10,000 y ago and again during the past 1,000 y.

***

"Some of these contributions may reflect adaptations to environments outside Africa where Neandertals lived over several hundred thousands of years. During this time, they are likely to have adapted to infectious diseases, which are known to be strong selective factors that may, at least partly, have differed between sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia. Indeed, several genetic variants contributed by archaic hominins to modern humans have been shown to affect genes involved in immunity. In particular, variants at several loci containing genes involved in innate immunity come from Neandertals and Denisovans, for example, toll-like receptor gene variants which decrease the susceptibility to Helicobacter pylori infections and the risk for allergies. Furthermore, proteins interacting with RNA viruses have been shown to be encoded by DNA regions introgressed from Neandertals more often than expected, and RNA viruses might have driven many adaptive events in humans."

Comment: More evidence that interbreeding of human types aided in our overall immunities. Since different environments had different viruses the different disease experiences were combined in sapiens as as final product of evolution.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2021/02/17/the_renewable_energy_disaster_far_more...

"Decades ago, a single energy disaster left three million acres of land uninhabitable to humans and killed between 85,600 and 240,000 people. A casual student of history might assume these shocking statistics refer to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but that would be incorrect. No, this catastrophic specter was the fault of the Banqiao Dam collapse in Henan, China. By comparison, Chernobyl killed fifteen times fewer people and desolated an area of land one-sixth as large.

"Though sharply different in magnitude, the Banqiao and Chernobyl disasters occurred under similar circumstances. Constructed by the Chinese Communist party during the Great Leap Forward, with guidance from the Soviet Union, the dam was poorly designed and hastily constructed – just like the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Moreover, party officials wanted it to retain as much water as possible because it would be "more revolutionary." Hydrologist Chen Xing, Chief Engineer of dam projects, warned against that superficial goal and advocated for additional safety features. He was overruled and later reassigned.

"Chen Xing's warnings proved prescient in early August 1975 when Typhoon Nina battered Banqiao and dumped a meter of water in three days. The dam didn't stand a chance.

***

"Six hundred million cubic meters of water would eventually pour through the remains of the ruptured dam, forming a wall of water six meters high and twelve kilometers wide moving up to fifty kilometers per hour. The towering deluge eventually collapsed 62 more dams, flooded thirty cities, and destroyed 6.8 million houses. Thousands of people drowned. Far more would eventually die of starvation and disease. The Chinese Communist Party silenced all public accounts of the calamity for more than ten years.

"With the full, deadly scope of the Banqiao dam failure now known, there has been no worldwide movement to halt construction of hydropower dams to save lives.

***

"In the 1980s, 46 nuclear power plants came online in the United States. After Chernobyl, only four have even started being constructed, and none of these have been completed. Despite producing emission-free energy, "nuclear" has become a dirty word.

"Evidence firmly dispels this unfounded belief. Various studies have reached the same conclusion: nuclear power is one of the safest – and perhaps the safest – source of electricity on planet Earth.

"We shouldn't let the minute threat of disaster scare us away from a safe, clean, and dependable source of energy, one that could easily power humanity and prevent carbon pollution for centuries to come."

Comment: We can manipulate the Earth in many massive ways. Dams present danger of collapse as the recent one in Peru (earthen). The known and ignored future problem is the build up of silt behind dams. They will end up destroyed as waterfalls over them appear. Preventive dredging is ignored as too expensive. This is what will happen to the giant dams eventually. I know of Three-mile island, Chernobyl, and Fukushema. We have learned from those mistakes. Humans need not be fearful and should push politicians whose only fear is loss of elections through imagined future mistakes.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/18/why-i-am-a-climate-realist/

I pursued my graduate studies at one of the world’s leading universities for climate studies, the University of East Anglia in the UK. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) there is responsible—along with the Hadley Centre—for developing global temperature datasets, known as HadCRUT datasets.

***

I understood that the University’s email system had been breached, and email content scientists from the CRU leaked to the public. The event is infamously known as “Climategate.”

It took me a few more years before I completely understood the implications of that email leak. Email exchanges between scientists from the CRU and other universities revealed a deliberate attempt to exaggerate the present warming and make it appear unprecedented.

Ross McKitrick in “Understanding the Climategate Inquiries” showed how the evidence proves that “The scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulated evidence in IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and WMO [World Meteorological Organization] reports with the effect of misleading readers, including policymakers.”

***

The Climategate episode certainly made me question whether the global warming was as dangerous as it is made up to be.

The answer to my question trickled in slowly over a number of years. Evidence began to emerge that scientists acknowledged a large gap between the actual observed real-world temperature datasets (from satellites) and those temperature predictions from computer climate models.

While these differences may not prove the allegations against the Climategate scientists, they do confirm us about one thing: the computer climate models exaggerate the future warming rate due to their high sensitivity to carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, the models continue to show an excessive and unreal warming rate for future decades.

Despite plenty of evidence, the IPCC continues to use these faulty model predictions to inform the public and policymakers about future changes in temperature.

A steady stream of scientific studies has documented the evidence for lack of dangerous warming—IPCC’s level of warming based on fifth- and sixth-generation (CMIP5 and CMIP6) models and the apparent absence of climate-induced ecological collapse.

In 2020 alone, over 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers took up a skeptical position on climate alarmism. These papers—and hundreds from previous years—address various issues related to climate change, including problems with climate change observation, climate reconstructions, lack of anthropogenic/CO2 signal in sea-level rise, natural mechanisms that drive climate change (solar influence on climate, ocean circulations, cloud climate influence, ice sheet melting in high geothermal heat flux areas), hydrological trends that do not follow modeled expectations, the fact that corals thrive in warm, high-CO2 environments, elevated CO2 and higher crop yields, no increasing trends in intense hurricanes and drought frequency, the myth of mass extinctions due to global cooling, etc.

***

In simple words, Gore misled the world and promoted falsehood as science, and he continues to do so while profiting from a renewable industry that is sold as the cure for global warming. Yet, he himself generates carbon dioxide emissions and many times higher than an average family’s.

So, not only are the predictions of models are wrong, but also the interpretations of climate data and the propaganda of a climate doomsday were also wrong.

***

So, I am a climate realist. I acknowledge that there has been a gradual increase in global average temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 17th century. I acknowledge that climate change can happen in both ways—warming and cooling. I do understand that anthropogenic CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases could have positively contributed to the warming from mid-20th century onwards.

I also acknowledge that warming and the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide that has contributed to it have actually helped society. The current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, nearly 50 percent higher than in the 17th century, and the warming—which has occurred chiefly in winter, in higher latitudes and altitudes, and at night, thus raising cold temperatures but with little effect on hot temperatures—have actually resulted in optimal conditions for global plant growth, thus aiding in the flourishing of the agricultural sector.

***

The models do not know the future, and neither do the Climategate scientists. But an exaggerated view of future warming provides the ideal background for anti-carbon-based fuels policies that will undermine the economic well-being of every society in the world. We must not allow that.

Be a climate realist.

Comment: I am a twin with this guy. A knew all the material presented long ago.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210215092436.htm

"New analysis of a fossil tooth and stone tools from Shukbah Cave reveals Neanderthals used stone tool technologies thought to have been unique to modern humans.

***

"Although Homo sapiens and Neanderthals shared the use of a wide suite of stone tool technologies, Nubian Levallois technology has recently been argued to have been exclusively used by Homo sapiens. The argument has been made particularly in southwest Asia, where Nubian Levallois tools have been used to track human dispersals in the absence of fossils.

"'Illustrations of the stone tool collections from Shukbah hinted at the presence of Nubian Levallois technology so we revisited the collections to investigate further. In the end, we identified many more artefacts produced using the Nubian Levallois methods than we had anticipated," says Blinkhorn. "This is the first time they've been found in direct association with Neanderthal fossils, which suggests we can't make a simple link between this technology and Homo sapiens."

"'Southwest Asia is a dynamic region in terms of hominin demography, behaviour and environmental change, and may be particularly important to examine interactions between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens," adds Prof Simon Blockley, of Royal Holloway, University of London. "This study highlights the geographic range of Neanderthal populations and their behavioural flexibility, but also issues a timely note of caution that there are no straightforward links between particular hominins and specific stone tool technologies."

"'Up to now we have no direct evidence of a Neanderthal presence in Africa," said Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum. "But the southerly location of Shukbah, only about 400 km from Cairo, should remind us that they may have even dispersed into Africa at times.'"

Comment: Neanderthals are growing smarter in new archeological studies.

QUOTE: Neanderthals are archaic humans that lived from 500,000 years ago to about 11,700 years ago, interbreeding with our species, Homo sapiens, for much of that time. Their brains were about as big as ours, but anthropologists think they must have worked incredibly differently, because in those hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals never achieved the sophisticated technology and artistry humans have.

dhw: I find this a bit confusing. Neanderthals WERE humans, and recent discoveries suggested that they WERE sophisticated, and since they interbred for much of that time, how can we attribute their sophistication to just one of the two species of humans? Have I misunderstood something here? But of course neither the Neanderthals nor the sapiens of that time achieved the sophisticated technology and artistry of modern humans.

You are right. It is unfair to compare modern human achievements to Neanderthals of many thousands of years ago.

DAVID: Of course there had to be differences, but the key statement to me is that only 61 genes make the whole difference between us and Neanderthal/Denisovan brain structure. It didn't take much DNA change to create us. And I'd best repeat my form of dualism: these are the mechanical material brains that souls are given to use with the resulting differences in artifact production.

dhw: Why on earth do you have to bring your form of dualism into it? The whole thrust of this article is that the different genes (changes to DNA) were the cause of the greater sophistication in technology and art. The Neanderthal brain, not the Neanderthal soul, “worked incredibly differently”. Your theory is presumably that your God stepped in to fiddle with 61 genes in anticipation of the sapiens soul coming up with new ideas. If there is such a thing as the soul, I propose that it was the soul that came up with the ideas, and the brain had to change in order to implement them. Do we really have to go over all this again?

I did it because we are reviewing the material differences in brains but shouldn't ignore the
dualism inferences. Neanderthal dualism and human dualism must remain the same concepts. And from your response to it simply exposes our continuing differences. I didn't want the inference left that brains on their own created the differences in artifact production. I would remind you that Neanderthals died out well before we produced our current advanced civilization, but the article's inference is our brains were very different 315,000 years ago when we appeared, with those 61 genes, and long before our current productions. Sure looks like an anticipated-usage preparation.

I find this a bit confusing. Neanderthals WERE humans, and recent discoveries suggested that they WERE sophisticated, and since they interbred for much of that time, how can we attribute their sophistication to just one of the two species of humans? Have I misunderstood something here? But of course neither the Neanderthals nor the sapiens of that time achieved the sophisticated technology and artistry of modern humans.

DAVID: Of course there had to be differences, but the key statement to me is that only 61 genes make the whole difference between us and Neanderthal/Denisovan brain structure. It didn't take much DNA change to create us. And I'd best repeat my form of dualism: these are the mechanical material brains that souls are given to use with the resulting differences in artifact production.

Why on earth do you have to bring your form of dualism into it? The whole thrust of this article is that the different genes (changes to DNA) were the cause of the greater sophistication in technology and art. The Neanderthal brain, not the Neanderthal soul, “worked incredibly differently”. Your theory is presumably that your God stepped in to fiddle with 61 genes in anticipation of the sapiens soul coming up with new ideas. If there is such a thing as the soul, I propose that it was the soul that came up with the ideas, and the brain had to change in order to implement them. Do we really have to go over all this again?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/neanderthal-inspired-minibrains-hint-what-makes...

"What is it about DNA that makes the human brain “human?” Seeking to understand how our complex brains evolved, researchers have now switched a single human gene out for its Neanderthal counterpart in brain tissue grown in a lab dish. Changes to the resulting organoid reveal the role this gene may have played in ancient—and modern—brain development.

“'This is amongst the first studies of its kind to investigate how specific changes in the DNA of modern humans influences brain development,” says Debra Silver, a developmental neurobiologist at Duke University who was not involved with the work.

***

"Neanderthals are archaic humans that lived from 500,000 years ago to about 11,700 years ago, interbreeding with our species, Homo sapiens, for much of that time. Their brains were about as big as ours, but anthropologists think they must have worked incredibly differently, because in those hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals never achieved the sophisticated technology and artistry humans have.

"To explore what differences might exist, neuroscientist Alysson Muotri at the University of California (UC), San Diego, and his team first compared the genomes of modern humans with those of Neanderthals and Denisovans—another archaic human—reconstructed from excavated bones. They found 61 genes for which modern humans all had one version and the archaic humans had another.

***

"His team then used the gene-editing tool CRISPR on stem cells derived from human skin cells to modify a gene, NOVA1, known to regulate the activity of other genes during early brain development. Switching out just one DNA base turned that gene into a Neanderthal NOVA1. Next, the researchers grew little clusters of brain cells called organoids, with and without the Neanderthal version, and compared them.

***

"Nonetheless, changing that one gene altered the organoid’s growth, appearance, and electrical activity, Muotri and his colleagues report today in Science. The modified organoid matured faster, yielding an uneven, complex surface instead of a smooth one. Its electrical activity revved up more quickly than that of its counterpart, and the connections between nerves, the synapses, depended on slightly different versions and interactions of key proteins. What’s more, the electrical impulses were not as synchronized as in the fully modern human organoid. “It looks almost like anything they could [test] showed a difference,” says Arnold Kriegstein, a developmental neurobiologist at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine.

"The results, which held up in tests using human stem cells derived from a different donor’s skin cells, “tell us their brains probably worked in a different way than [ours] do,” Muotri says.

"Researchers are excited but cautious about these results. “It is amazing that by changing a single amino acid in a single protein, one creates an effect that is visible even in how the organoids look in the microscope,” says Svante Pääbo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But because organoids represent only the earliest stages of development, “it’s difficult to know how [the changes] would manifest in a more mature brain,” Kriegstein says."

Comment: Of course there had to be differences, but the key statement to me is that only 61 genes make the whole difference between us and Neanderthal/Denisovan brain structure. It didn't take much DNA change to create us. And I'd best repeat my form of dualism: these are the mechanical material brains that souls are given to use with the resulting differences in artifact production.