Humans are master meaning generators

A hashtag in the sky above a school at dusk in southern Rhode Island.  

Was it put there intentionally? What does it mean?

For as long as we’ve been writing about exquisite Paleolithic cave paintings and carefully crafted Stone Age tools we’ve been debating their meanings.  And the debate carries on because meaning is difficult to interpret and that’s largely because “what does it mean?” is a loaded question.

“Meaning” is a hallmark of humanity and, as the thinking often goes, it is a unique aspect of Homo sapiens. No other species is discussing meaning with us. We’re alone here. So we’re supposed to be at least mildly shocked when we learn that Neanderthals decorated their bodies with eagle talons. And it’s supposed to be even harder to fathom that Neanderthals marked symbolic thinking on cave walls. But such is the implication of lines marked by Neanderthals in the shape of a hashtag at Gibraltar. 

source: "The Gibraltar Museum says scratched patterns found in the Gorham’s Cave, in Gibraltar, are believed to be more than 39,000 years old, dating back to the times of the Neanderthals. Credit: EPA/Stewart Finlayson"

This sort of meaningful behavior, combined with the fact that many of us are harboring parts of the Neanderthal genome, encourages us to stop seeing Neanderthals as separate from us. But another interpretation of the hashtag is one of mere doodling; its maker was not permanently and intentionally scarring the rock with meaning. These opposing perspectives on meaning, whether it’s there or not, clash when it comes to chimpanzee behavior as well.  

We’ve grown comfortable with the ever-lengthening list of chimpanzee tool use and tool-making skills that researchers are reporting back to us. But a newly published chimpanzee behavior has humans scratching their heads. Chimpanzees in West Africa fling stones at trees and hollow tree trunks. The stones pile up in and around the trees, looking like a human-made cairn (intentional landmark) in some cases.  Males are most often the throwers, pant-hooting as they go, which is a well-known score to various interludes of chimpanzee social behavior. 

source: "Mysterious stone piles under trees are the work of chimpanzees.© MPI-EVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation"

Until now, chimp behaviors that employ nature’s raw materials—stones, logs, branches, twigs, leaves—have been easy to peg as being “for” a reason. They’re for cracking open nutritious nuts, for stabbing tasty bushbabies (small nocturnal primates), or for termite fishing. But throwing stones at trees has nothing to do with food. If these chimps do it for a reason then it’s a little more esoteric. 

Maybe they do it for pleasure, to let off steam, or to display, or maybe they do it because someone else did it. It may be all of those things at once, and maybe so much more. Maybe you’d call that ritual. Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d say that they do it because that’s what chimps do in those groups: they walk on their knuckles; they eat certain foods; they make certain sounds; they sleep in certain terms in certain trees; and they do certain things with rocks, like fling them in certain places. Maybe we could just say that this behavior is the way of certain chimpanzees, hardly more mystifying than other behaviors that we’ve come to expect of them.

For comparison, I have certain ways. There are piles of books near my desk. They pile up on tables and shelves. I could fling books on the floor but I don’t. I’m not against flinging them on the floor; it’s just not how things are usually done. I share this behavior with many other, but not all, humans in the presence of books, tables, and shelves.  Until I wrote this paragraph, I never gave it much thought, it’s not something that factors even remotely into how I see the world or my place in it, and yet the piling of books on tables and shelves is quite a conspicuous and, therefore, large part of my daily life.

  

So, why isn’t someone setting up a camera trap in my office and writing up “human accumulative book piling” in Nature? Because this type of behavior, whatever it means, is quintessentially human. No one could claim to discover it in a prestigious publication unless they discovered it in a nonhuman. And they did.

Normally what we do when we learn something new about chimpanzee behavior is we end up crossing one more thing off our list of uniquely human traits. “Man the tool-maker” was nixed decades ago. What should we cross off the list now with this new chimp discovery? Would it be “ritual” and by extension “meaning,” or would it be “piling up stuff”? About that Neanderthal hashtag, do we cross off “art” or “symbolism” and by extension “meaning,” or would we just cross off “doodling,” which holds a quite different meaning? Rather than crossing anything off our list, do we welcome Neanderthals into our kind so we can keep our monopoly on hashtags? Whatever we decide, case by case, trait by trait, we usually interpret our shrinking list of uniquely human traits to be clear demonstration that other animals are becoming more human-like the more we learn about the world.

That’s certainly one way to see it.  But there’s another, more existential, and therefore, arguably, more human way to look at that shrinking list of uniquely human traits: Humans are becoming less human-like the more we learn about the world.

#WhatDoesThatEvenMean #PantHoot #Hashtag #ThisIsMyCaveWall 

Walk this way, talk this way, roll in the hay

Teaching anthropology and human evolution involves tearing down stubborn misconceptions and stimulating students to discover and to behold their culturally-limited assumptions objectively.

That's if you're skilled and if you're lucky. OK, let's be honest: that's if you're supernatural.

The job sometimes feels like digging a hole, going deeper and deeper, never having the chance to mold something out of all that dirt, to build upon existing knowledge and insights. To move upward and onward.

Enough preamble though. There's a point today and it's got to do with:

The ever-annoying, but ever-so educationally priceless enigma that is... The Neanderthals [appropriate sound effect... and more].

I just finished a semester of Paleoanthropology where my students were asked to answer, "What happened to the Neanderthals?" for their course-long and final projects.

Even a familiarity with Neanderthals from their Intro to Bioanth or their Intro to Archaeology course does not fully prepare all upper-level Paleoanthropology students to consider them in a more advanced scientific framework. In fact, I think that familiarity combined with the claws of pop culture can inhibit them.

Despite hosting an expert to present to my students the many obstacles and issues with identifying extinction and its causes in the fossil record, and despite an admittedly brief but explicit exposure to the cutting edge genetic evidence, some of them still assumed they were charged to find the cause of Neanderthal extinction.

Two of them went so far as to rewrite my question at the top of their final paper as, "Why did the Neanderthals go extinct?" They had no idea that their version of my question contained assumptions. It's got to have a lot to do with the fact that we kicked off the first week of class and their assignment by binge-reading "The Humans Who Went Extinct" by Finlayson. The book does a wonderfully broad treatment of the issues, but I was completely blind to the title's potential to inhibit nuance. If I'd anticipated this I would have discussed extinction much more during the course. [Consider this post, as so many are, an elaborate note to self.]

The trouble, as I see it, is it's unclear whether the Neanderthals went extinct the same way that we consider the Dodo to have gone extinct or the same way that dinosaurs (except birds) did at the end of the Cretaceous, etc.

Of course there aren't any Neanderthals alive now. But there aren't any australopiths alive now either and nobody's talking about australopith extinction.  Australopiths begat or, if you'd rather, evolved into Homo. Ardipithecus didn't go extinct either.  As of now we think and say that they evolved into (or, e.g., are in an ancestor-descendant relationship with) Australopithecus.

Aside from Neanderthals, Paranthropus is probably the only other hominin taxon that we discuss in terms of extinction. If its phylogenetic position is correct (and there is no dispute that I know of beyond the debate over one or two genera), then it left no living descendants and faded from the fossil record about a million years ago during a time when many other sub-Saharan fauna disappeared too. But these creatures were weird little bipedal apes, not stocky and muscular, big-eyed, big-nosed, ginger-haired, complexly cultured Europeans as the Neanderthals seem to have been. It's obvious to me why we obsess over the demise of the latter and not the former.

Anyway. Point is. I think we're being a bit intellectually reckless assuming Neanderthal "extinction." To me the question of their fate is more fairly posed "What happened to them?" with a strong answer being extinction but with a kind of extinction that needs to be carefully defined.

In order to hold the Neanderthal demise apart as special, as an exclusive story of "extinction," it needs to be shown that other long-dead LSA/UP hominins that we don't call "Neanderthals," but that we might claim as our more direct ancestors, didn't go "extinct" or have no story of extinction to tell. Don't you think?

[Aside: Here's where questions of cultural demise vs. continuity that are being addressed by archaeologists really might help. But again, we face problems because we know from modern examples that culture change does not equal genetic change and culture stasis does not equal genetic stasis.]

Further, and probably more significant here:  If Neanderthal "extinction" is the answer then it needs to account for the factoid that 23andMe says I have 2.9% Neanderthal (77th percentile for site users) in my genome which, as a Homo sapiens, is already more than 99% the same as a Neanderthal's.

There are at least 12 people who are more Neanderthal than I am.

I know that's confusing. I read the 23andMe methods paper, which is supposed to be simpler than the published one, but I still don't understand much about how they make the estimate.

Basically, it's about a percentage of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms, a.k.a. mutations) that I share with dead Neanderthals but that so many live Africans (who I'm more closely related to!) do not. Therefore, if the methods are generally good, my genome contains evidence that people in my ancestry mated with Neanderthals. People who do not have these mutations either (a) never had Neanderthal mutations flow into their ancestors' families, or if they did  (b) those Neanderthal mutations drifted away before science could capture them from descendents today.

[You only got one mutation from mom and one from dad, the other part of the pair in each parent that you didn't get are dead ends (extinct!) unless your siblings or cousins got them. So a lot of SNPs and other variants disappear regularly and, on the other hand, everybody has new variants compared to their parents thanks to constant mutation.]

Tendrils of my ancestry must have been much more Neanderthal than 2.9%, but those SNPs drifted away over time. In other words, far enough back there had to be at least one hominin with a 100% Neanderthal genome in my ancestry (whatever that means), because that's the only way the genes got to me in the first place...but now they're diluted down, drifted away, and maybe even selected against to end  up 2.9% in me. I think that's about right.

These findings, that many people like me with ancestry from the northern hemisphere share small percentages of their DNA with Neanderthals, are not at all surprising to me. And that's for a couple reasons having to do with what we know about Neanderthals at this moment in scientific history, which in turn has a lot to do with why I titled the post the way that I did, which in turn has to do with my love of Young Frankenstein, and I think it's fairly common to think of Frankensteins and golems in the same imagination space as Neanderthals...

Walk this way

People are still studying Neanderthal feet and limb proportions to try to estimate energy expenditure during locomotion. But since we stopped basing all our reconstructions off an old man with arthritis, and a bunch of badass bone breaks that healed, we've accepted that Neanderthals are not clumsy, knuckle-draggers. They were good bipeds like we are--just coming into dangerously close contact with dinner and surviving well enough to string out their suffering before death.

Talk this way

Whether they had language is more of a lingering question but still one that's lop-sided towards yes, with the caveat that it probably wasn't as diverse and therefore wasn't as complex as ours. New research on a Neanderthal hyoid (small horse-shoe shaped bone in our throats that moves when we swallow and speak) claims that its structures reflect speech mechanics. But I really like reading about the work by Lieberman and McCarthy (written about broadly here) that explains how the Neanderthal throat and mouth dimensions probably did not allow for the tongue to move as much as ours does to manipulate expired air. This is how we make different vowels. Lieberman and McCarthy suggest Neanderthals couldn't have made as many distinct vowels as us and probably were as limited as human children in that regard. (Immature throat and mouth dimensions contribute to why kids sound like accented foreigners while they're developing.) Without as many vowel options their vocabulary would have been limited, but not non-existent! Surely they could produce something approximating this, no? Which brings us to...

Roll in the hay

So if it walks like a human, and sort of talks like a human, it probably bleeps like a human too. And our imaginations needn't feel naughty for going there since I already told you, if the methods are good, I carry evidence in every cell of my body that at least one of my ancestors waited until marriage to lose her virginity to a Neanderthal. (If you do want to feel naughty, read Ken's two recent posts here and especially here.)

***

They're so much like us or we're so much like them that we can't always tell their bones from ours! For a fascinating story on this, see Stephanie Pappas's piece "'Neanderthal' Remains Actually Medieval Human."

And yet you might see the latest news of "Neanderthal fossil indicates incest was common" which is about this article and say,  Hey! We're not like those incestuous savages! But ... well.. yes we are. We so are. And remember, we don't exactly have this kind of information from fossils that we welcome under the Homo sapiens umbrella and if we did (or when we do) I can all but guarantee we'll be finding some skeletons in those skeletons' closets too.

Neanderthals even took time away from incest to behave in some other pretty amazingly human ways. Scroll down to the bottom and check out what scientists have discovered about Neanderthal behavior just over the last year in this 2013 roundup by Kate Wong.

So despite the shrinking barrier between us and them, that we continue to call them "Neanderthals," sets them apart from us. It sets them apart from the real, or at least more human-y, Late Stone Age and Upper Paleolithic human hominins who begat us, whoever they are. And there's such a long tradition of differentiating them from us that it's hard to break free of the mold and present their story any other way than cloistered off as just that: "Their" story and one that ended before any of them could write it down. So they must have gone extinct, yo. Poof.

No seriously, which is it? Are they like chimps or dogs to us now, or were they like The French or The Red Sox of their day?

Maybe they're something else that we can't fully understand unless we actually encounter one another. So the best anybody can do is bring them to life from the inanimate material they left behind.

And because this is the best we can do, and because the fascination will always fuel it, the Neanderthal enigma can only intensify with more discoveries. It's so satisfying to say something conclusive at the end.

Neanderthals are Soxier than ever

With the mounting evidence that Neanderthals are just humans, it's easier than ever to compare them to the Red Sox.

With their large brows and their super-jock bods, we have generally held Neanderthals apart as a separate, brutish species. And under the immortal wicked assumption that brawn cannot also have brain, there is practically an industry built on lampooning some members of our own species in comparison.

Exhibit A. (So meta, really.)

Back in Damon's Sox days, the Red Sox even called themselves a "bunch of idiots." (Causing cavemen, who were not idiotic at all, to roll over in their museum drawers.)

But the more that Neanderthal genes are studied (and cross-your- fingers that these results really are based on ancient caveman DNA and not modern lab-rat dandruff),  the harder it is to separate them into a separate species.

That is, the more we know about their DNA, the more fossils that are found to bridge the gaps, and the more artifacts that are found to blur cultural differences, well the less sense it makes to consider Neanderthals as being any different from other Paleolithic humans as the Red Sox are from the rest of us.

And so this begs the question, if Neanderthals are just humans is it appropriate anymore to refer to Neanderthal-human sex as "interbreeding"?

If "the Neanderthals" were just like" the French" or "the Inuit" then describing their extra-population mating behavior as interbreeding would be something you'd probably only do while wearing a white pointy hat or holding your right arm out in front of you like a hemiplegic Frankenstein.

So we could keep calling Neanderthals Neanderthals...okay sure. But instead of thinking of them as a separate animal from neighboring humans, we could just think of them as a separate baseball team.

Neanderthals had their own look, their own strategies, their own traditions, but when they got together with other humans they understood them well enough to play the same games. They could hit a homer just fine, in both senses of the phrase.

This year's Red Sox couldn't have made a link to Neanderthals more complete. They just collapsed--shrouded in mystery with hardly anyone able to really explain why--while others with less muscle managed to go on.

Neanderthals are Soxier than ever. But even though the derogatory stereotype no longer holds, fans would probably flip that thought the other way around.

Further reading: 
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/09/the-red-sox-werent-cursed-they-were-just-terrible/245717/