Not paracetamol - Neanderthal?!?! (Don't tell the US president)

ArchaeC said:

demonstrates much human/chimpanzee shared behaviour.

Ah yes well spotted ArchaeC - you've worked in the public sector as well maybe!  (Ok a cheap joke I did get your point and my apologies to chimpanzees who I am grossly maligning by it...)

Thanks for the link to the article - I recall learning that from a BBC podcast during the past year.  Sorry I neglected to give the appropriate gender in my earlier comment.  As  parent of 2 daughters I say "yey go girls"!   Regretfully I haven't been able to find it to share it.

In searching I did come across this which I now also remember hearing - it's only short but it might be interesting to you

Discovery - Obsessed with the Quest: Inside the Minds of Chimpanzees - BBC Sounds

When I was a uni student a friend said I could go to any lecture I liked on campus and they invited me to come to one on animal behaviour with them.  The lecturer started off by saying words to the effect of "this is animal behaviour not human behaviour I am talking about".  When they got to the bit about hippopotamuses solving territorial disputes by pitching up on their hind legs and breathing in the face of one another I was reminded of a few people tho'.

OK I admit it, I indulge in zoomorphism.  I believe, fortunately, I am a not a zoomorph although come to think of it I have been known to monkey and/or horse about a bit.

Just to be clear no animals were harmed in the writing of this post.  :-)

Best Wishes

Thank you for that Phased  I think the study in your link combined with your account of your role as Union Health & Safety Rep demonstrates much human/chimpanzee shared behaviour.

This article in New Scientists suggests that female chimpanzees leaving a group to join another group can pass on their skills to the new group.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2457464-chimpanzees-seem-to-get-more-technologically-advanced-through-culture/

We know that most of the Neanderthal genome has been winnowed out by selective pressures over the last 50,000 years. If Neanderthal variants still exist they must be either neutral or beneficial overall. There will have been some variation in selective pressure based on climate, isolation, food sources, diseases etc. that ancestral populations have been exposed to, but I think that the overall percentage of Neanderthal DNA in a population would still be indicative. Also, people of sub-Saharan ancestry, with negligible levels of Neanderthal DNA can be autistic. 

ThanksMartin  I suppose the specific genes for the brain differences would need to be measured in that population to explore it further.  Maybe in Asia the genes that are more retained in the East Asian population are not specifically the brain related ones?

It seems a bit thin on evidence. It is known that East Asians have about twice as much, on average, Neanderthal introgression as Europeans. If Neanderthal genetic variants were strongly implicated in autism then a much higher incidence of autism in East Asians compared to Europeans would be expected. I do not think that this is the case.

Drawing conclusions from limited resources and chimpanzees? Sorry again,  Deserves a better answer, sorry for being glib ArchaeC I think that thus focuses on "telling stories" (around the camp fire or otherwise) about something that another group member around the camp fire doesn't know.  Chimpanzees have been demonstrated to do this in respect of pointing out danger to other group members Wild Chimpanzees Inform Ignorant Group Members of Danger - ScienceDirect.   Personally this is a kind of hard wired behaviour I engage in a lot  (hehe I'm a union health and safety rep(  Whether one can expand this to chimpanzees "teaching" other chimps about things they don't know... I seem to recall reading that skills for tool use travel with chimpanzees when they leave their parent group.  Whether this knowledge is gained by members of the new group observing and copying or whether the travelling chimp deliberately decides to go out of their way to pass the skill/knowledge on I don't know :-)

LOL

It is my great regret that I don't know any chimpanzees to ask ArchaeC  :-)

Well, come to think of it, I’m guilty too, as are all Sapiens. Now what about Chimpanzees …?

Hope the storm leaves you and yours safe TheCatWoman  :-)

"it draws conclusions from limited sources" that's me all over ArchaeC !

Ah, I get you - thanks for explaining ArchaeC  Sorry I misunderstood :-)  

It’s fact, but it really is ok because I’m good at other things. My point being (although I didn’t state it here) that some research is doomed to failure because it draws conclusions from limited sources and isn’t representative of the population.

Agreed no genetic "cause" for autism found Iain , however the hereditary link is widely accepted with genetic factors contributing a 40-80% likelihood of being autistic .  Genetics is indeed a highly complicated field tho'.  As I understand it 1000 genes (and counting...) have been shown to be associated with autism.  

hehehe art is a subjective experience!  Or just a load of Jackson Pollock's?  Please, may I say, don't be tough on yourself - leave that to the critics....  

If our descendants in thousands of years from now were to see some of my ‘cave art’, they might suggest that Sapiens were unsophisticated and unintelligent. I suspect that would not be said of the gorilla or chimp!

I get the analogy with other animals TheCatWoman :-) And then there's the added layer that the same species can have it's own social behaviour in distinct "tribes" too.

TheCatWoman said:

Do we know enough about Neanderthals to say how thier brains were organised?

Good question - I think the evidence for this is kind-of worked backwards by looking at modern humans with the same genes as Neanderthals and working out how their brain is compared with the "norm"     as this study I think did  https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/brain.2020.0809

So if we accept that the present can tell us about the past in this respect then the answer is yes in respect of social behaviour and visual function :-)  Agreed, who knows about all the rest of the general Neanderthal brain and behaviour?

TheCatWoman said:

Do we know enough about genes to be able to say this?

Well we don't even know the genes that cause autism (assuming that it is genes - there is no proof yet) so all this talk of linking our ancient ancesters to it seems premature and tenuous.

I share your suspicion ArchaeC  of research limitations and also when there is an element of "fashionability" in this case combining two scientific hot topics.

Nonetheless it is interesting isn't it! (also with Jane Goodall recently passing there's a thread that joins the pattern maybe).

I remember learning on one of the silly number of podcasts that I consume that roughly 60% of the Neanderthal genome is shared out in living hominids - yes I agree that hominid means "human" and maybe in some cases "great apes" - I subscribe to Neanderthals as being humans too :-)

The camp fire is always free for other humans (or should I say trusted animals?) to sit around :-) along with sharing food, water and stories that's a basic given (hehe unless really out of sorts when it's best to tell to go in the cave and do some paintings or clear off and gather some wood for the fire!)  

I'm staying inside the cave, thanks to Storm Amy and her mate who's got here early.

Do we know enough about genes to be able to say this? Do we know enough about Neanderthals to say how thier brains were organised?

Modern humans have interbred with many other species of sapiens, some of who we only know about from relic DNA. I tend to think of us as more like cats, lions and tigers are distinct, but can breed and produce off spring, domestic cats can and do breed with wild cats across the world hence breeds like Bengals. The reason put forwards is that cats only seperated as distinct breeds fairly late on, even in the wild, horses seem to be the same. 

I dont' have a problem with other sapiens being recognised as human, but I can understand why others do, it puts us in a rather messy place, not the divinely inspired, top of the tree species that we've been brought up to believe we are and when you have large numbers of people who believe the Genesis story is the literal truth, then acknowleging our cousin species is difficult.