Just how connected we primates are

I feel bad just dumping links onto the page, but if I don't do it this way it just isn't going to happen:

Cop still feels guilty about shooting chimp to save woman’s life

Radiolab's tragic story about Lucy, who was raised by humans.

I love political puppets!

I mean the kind of cloth-and-stick puppets that people make to protest or poke fun of politics and politicians.

One example from Kenya:

At a recent prayer breakfast in Kenya, religious matters were pushed aside and instead gluttony was the order of the day.
President Mwai Kibaki struggled to eat a whole chapatti in one go, Prime Minister Raila Odinga spilt tea down his suit and Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka struggled after getting a sausage stuck in his mouth.
Luckily, these were just puppets being filmed in the cramped dining room of a Nairobi home for the latest of 13 episodes of the XYZ show.
The satirical puppet show, which was influenced by the British 1980s show Spitting Image and France's Les Guignols, is a chance for a group of scriptwriters and puppeteers to delve into the murky world of Kenyan politics.

Read full story...

NYT: "Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force"

Ha ha!
 By NICHOLAS WADE, New York Times

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.
The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. The evidence of its activity is the more surprising because culture has long seemed to play just the opposite role. Biologists have seen it as a shield that protects people from the full force of other selective pressures, since clothes and shelter dull the bite of cold and farming helps build surpluses to ride out famine.
Because of this buffering action, culture was thought to have blunted the rate of human evolution, or even brought it to a halt, in the distant past. Many biologists are now seeing the role of culture in a quite different light.
Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. People adapt genetically to sustained cultural changes, like new diets. And this interaction works more quickly than other selective forces, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution,” Kevin N. Laland and colleagues wrote in the February issue of Nature Reviews Genetics. Dr. Laland is an evolutionary biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Read full article

60,000 year old Ostrich shell paintings

From Scienceblogger "Not Rocket Science" : The latest finds show that people were carvings symbolic patterns into ostrich eggs as early as 60,000 years ago. Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux discovered a set of 270 eggshell fragments from Howieson Poort Shelter, a South African cave that has been a rich source of archaeological finds. 

From Science News: The unusually large sample of 270 engraved eggshell fragments, mostly excavated over the past several years at Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa, displays two standard design patterns. Each pattern enjoyed its own heyday between approximately 65,000 and 55,000 years ago, the investigators report in a paper to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(Back to Rocket Science): Judging by their patterns, the fragments must have come from at least 25 separate eggs, although probably many more. Texier says that the sheer number is "exceptional in prehistory". Their unprecedented diversity and etched patterns provide some of the best evidence yet for a prehistoric artistic tradition. While previous digs have thrown up piecemeal examples of symbolic art, Texier's finds allow him to compare patterns across individual pieces, to get a feel of the entire movement, rather than the work of an individual.

 Back to Science News: Researchers already knew that the Howiesons Poort culture, which engraved the eggshells, engaged in other symbolic practices, such as engraving designs into pieces of pigment, that were considered to have been crucial advances in human behavioral evolution. But the Diepkloof finds represent the first archaeological sample large enough to demonstrate that Stone Age people created design traditions, at least in their engravings, Texier says.

(Continue reading full Science News story... )

Physical language

From NYT: Psychologists have long studied the grunts and winks of nonverbal communication, the vocal tones and facial expressions that carry emotion. A warm tone of voice, a hostile stare — both have the same meaning in Terre Haute or Timbuktu, and are among dozens of signals that form a universal human vocabulary.

But in recent years some researchers have begun to focus on a different, often more subtle kind of wordless communication: physical contact. Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.
“It is the first language we learn,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009), and remains, he said, “our richest means of emotional expression” throughout life.

Read full NYT articles

Math shows crime hot spots and how they move

Sorry I've been neglecting this site lately. Lots of birthdays, holidays, life, etc.

From Wired Magazine and Science News: Not all crime hot spots are created equal, a new mathematical model suggests. For some areas repeatedly hit hard with crime, police intervention can shut down lawlessness and keep it down. But for others, police involvement just shifts the trouble around.

“If you see a hot area of crime, you want to know: If you send the police in, will that displace the crime or get rid of the crime altogether?” said Andrea Bertozzi, a mathematician at UCLA who presented the new model Feb. 20 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “We were able to predict the ability to suppress or otherwise displace hot spots.” The results will also appear Feb. 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study “makes a major contribution to the theory of hot spots of crime,” comments John Eck, a criminologist at the University of Cincinnati.

Working with anthropologists, criminologists and the Los Angeles Police Department, Bertozzi built a mathematical representation of how areas with frequent, repeated crimes form within a city and change over time.
The team modeled a city as a two-dimensional grid populated with burglars and houses to rob. The researchers used previous studies to add a mathematical description of how attractive a region is to a burglar. Data has shown, for example, that the house next door to a house with a broken window is more likely to be robbed.
Bertozzi and colleagues ran simulations that led to the formation of crime hot spots and then simulated police intervention. Two sharply distinct outcomes emerged. Certain kinds of hot spots just moved around in response to police efforts to quash them. “It’s impossible,” Bertozzi said. “You hit one and it pops up somewhere else.”
But for others, suppressing the hot spot once erased it forever.
The difference comes from how the hot spot forms in the first place. The model shows that a high-risk zone forms around every break-in. If the boundaries of risk zones overlap, then a persistent hot spot forms. “The diffusion of risk basically binds together local crimes, which then will seed more crimes,” Bertozzi said.
But suppressible hot spots can form from one large crime spike, in which a single event draws in more criminals. A good example of this might be the formation of a drug market, said UCLA anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham, a co-author of the paper.
“You wouldn’t suspect this was the case from just mapping the hot spots,” Brantingham said. “Empirically they look very much the same.” The math was able to show that there may be two different types of hot spots when the data alone could not, he said.

Read More

Abstract thoughts prompt literal physical response

From New York Times:

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.
As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.
“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”
The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.
“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”
Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded.
Read full post

More ancient humans

A couple of the interesting ancient human articles from this month's Scientific American:

Turns out that if you're of European descent, your great-great-great-great granddad was most likely a farmer. Mark Jobling of the University of Leicester in the U.K. and his colleagues found not only that agriculture seems to have spread westward via a new group of Neolithic people from the Near East, but also that these new farmers were incredibly successful with the local ladies, leaving their genetic traces in their modern male descendents.

"We focused on the commonest Y-chromosome lineage in Europe," Jobling said in a prepared statement. The team analyzed a single haplotype, R1b1b2 (which is carried by about 110 million men in Europe today) from 2,574 European men whose families had been living in the same location for at least two generations. This common haplotype, however, is not randomly distributed across the continent. "It follows a gradient from south-east to north-west," he said. About 12 percent of men in eastern Turkey have it, whereas some 85 percent of men carry it in Ireland.


Going back even further, researchers looking at why humans became so hairless speculate it was an adaptation to changing environmental conditions that forced our ancestors to travel longer distances for food and water. Okay, more than speculate...the ability to time when we lost our hair is pretty cool.

Altruism in primates

Bonobos find it easier to share than chimps do, although young chimps do just as well as bonobos of all ages. It was speculated to be because bonobos don't have to worry about having more or less food like chimps do.

At the same time, chimps will adopt orphaned kiddos, according to a new study that found 18 cases of orphaned chimps being adopted in the wild.

Speaking of more and less, researchers based at the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Tubingen in Germany set out to see whether rhesus monkeys could learn and flexibly apply the greater-than and less-than rule. They tested the monkeys with groups of both ordered and random dots, many of which were novel combinations to ensure that the subjects couldn't have simply memorized them. The monkeys were cued into applying either the greater-than or less-than rule by the amount of time that elapsed between being shown the first and second group of dots.

"The monkeys immediately generalized the greater than and less than rules to numerositiesthat had not been presented previously," the two researchers, Sylvia Bongard and Andreas Nieder, wrote. "This indicates that they understood this basic mathematical principle irrespective of the absolute numerical value of the sample displays." In other words: "They had learned an abstract mathematical principle."

Monkey calls translated

Reported by Nicolas Wade, NYT:

Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him.

Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.
The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T.

But with a few exceptions, teaching animals human language has proved to be a dead end. They should speak, perhaps, but they do not. They can communicate very expressively — think how definitely dogs can make their desires known — but they do not link symbolic sounds together in sentences or have anything close to language.

Better insights have come from listening to the sounds made by animals in the wild. Vervet monkeys were found in 1980 to have specific alarm calls for their most serious predators. If the calls were recorded and played back to them, the monkeys would respond appropriately. They jumped into bushes on hearing the leopard call, scanned the ground at the snake call, and looked up when played the eagle call.

More details!

I'm on a boat!

From Wired Science and Science News:

Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species — perhaps Homo erectus — had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island.

Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Archaeology. Many of these finds closely resemble hand axes fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by H. erectus, he says. It was around that time that H. erectus spread from Africa to parts of Asia and Europe. Until now, the oldest known human settlements on Crete dated to around 9,000 years ago. Traditional theories hold that early farming groups in southern Europe and the Middle East first navigated vessels to Crete and other Mediterranean islands at that time.
“We’re just going to have to accept that, as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance seafarers and rapidly spread all over the place,” Strasser says. Other researchers have controversially suggested that H. erectus navigated rafts across short stretches of sea in Indonesia around 800,000 years ago and that Neandertals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar perhaps 60,000 years ago.

Questions remain about whether African hominids used Crete as a stepping stone to reach Europe or, in a Stone Age Gilligan’s Island scenario, accidentally ended up on Crete from time to time when close-to-shore rafts were blown out to sea, remarks archaeologist Robert Tykot of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Only in the past decade have researchers established that people reached Crete before 6,000 years ago, Tykot says.
Strasser’s team cannot yet say precisely when or for what reason hominids traveled to Crete. Large sets of hand axes found on the island suggest a fairly substantial population size, downplaying the possibility of a Gilligan Island’s scenario, in Strasser’s view.
In excavations conducted near Crete’s southwestern coast during 2008 and 2009, Strasser’s team unearthed hand axes at caves and rock shelters. Most of these sites were situated in an area called Preveli Gorge, where a river has gouged through many layers of rocky sediment.
At Preveli Gorge, Stone Age artifacts were excavated from four terraces along a rocky outcrop that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. Tectonic activity has pushed older sediment above younger sediment on Crete, so 130,000-year-old artifacts emerged from the uppermost terrace. Other terraces received age estimates of 110,000 years, 80,000 years and 45,000 years.
These minimum age estimates relied on comparisons of artifact-bearing sediment to sediment from sea cores with known ages. Geologists are now assessing whether absolute dating techniques can be applied to Crete’s Stone Age sites, Strasser says.
Intriguingly, he notes, hand axes found on Crete were made from local quartz but display a style typical of ancient African artifacts.
“Hominids adapted to whatever material was available on the island for tool making,” Strasser proposes. “There could be tools made from different types of stone in other parts of Crete.”
Strasser has conducted excavations on Crete for the past 20 years. He had been searching for relatively small implements that would have been made from chunks of chert no more than 11,000 years ago. But a current team member, archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University, pointed out that Stone Age folk would likely have favored quartz for their larger implements. “Once we started looking for quartz tools, everything changed,” Strasser says.

Read More

Neanderthal Shell Art

From Scientific American:

Newly discovered painted scallops and cockleshells in Spain are the first hard evidence that Neandertals made jewelry. These findings suggest humanity's closest extinct relatives might have been capable of symbolism, after all.

Body ornaments made of painted and pierced seashells dating back 70,000 to 120,000 years have been found in Africa and the Near East for years, and serve as evidence of symbolic thought among the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens). The absence of similar finds in Europe at that time, when it was Neandertal territory, has supported the notion that they lacked symbolism, a potential sign of mental inferiority that might help explain why modern humans eventually replaced them.

Although hints of Neandertal art and jewelry have cropped up in recent years, such as pierced and grooved animal-tooth pendants or a decorated limestone slab on the grave of a child, these have often been shrugged off as artifacts mixed in from modern humans, imitation without understanding, or ambiguous in nature. Now archaeologist João Zilhão at the University of Bristol in England and his colleagues have found 50,000-year-old jewelry at two caves in southeastern Spain, art dating back 10,000 years before the fossil record reveals evidence of modern humans entering Europe.

Full article

2009: The Year of Cute

I could go into the social and biological implications of why we're turning away from sex to cute to sell things because it's the latest trendy thing to do, or because both sex and cute are biological impulses ingrained in us and we as humans react to sub-consciously. But, eh, I just like this post because Cute Is Back.! 

Kia Hamsters (Vid)

To check out all the cute vids, go to CuteOverload.

Jell-o enrichment for squirrel monkeys

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZpoyuVP98A

More mysterious hominids

Featured in Discover Magazine: The Boskops.
Skulls found of this group had a cranial capacity of 1,980 cc and a child-like face. The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies.


The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:
“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”

Boskops, then, were much talked and written about, by many of the most prominent figures in the fields of paleontology and anthropology.

Yet today, although Neanderthals and Homo erectus are widely known, Boskops are almost entirely forgotten. Some of our ancestors are clearly inferior to us, with smaller brains and apelike countenances. They’re easy to make fun of and easy to accept as our precursors. In contrast, the very fact of an ancient ancestor like Boskop, who appears un-apelike and in fact in most ways seems to have had characteristics superior to ours, was destined never to be popular.

Read the whole article
...