Neanderthals as living breathing people

What follows below is an audio version (with slides) of a presentation given at the Yale Medical School by science writer Carl Zimmer. His lecture starts with the discovery of the first recognized Neanderthal bones, and brings us up to modern times. The general theme of the talk is that those beings who have been recognized to be different have traditionally been characterized as barbaric and inferior. This theme holds true regarding Neanderthals, who have been traditionally characterized as brutish and uncivilized. Zimmer's talk includes numerous vivid reconstructed images, and the evidence on which they are based, suggesting that Neanderthals looked and acted quite human, indeed. The emerging truth is that Neanderthals were big-brained hominids who lived across great expanses of Europe from 200,000 to 20,000 years ago. They were prolific tool-users: For example, they made stone tools such as spear tips and bows and arrows; they cleaned hides and fashioned clothing. they lived in communities where they would have specialized areas for storing and preparing food. It appears that they left flowers at their burials sites. They made jewelry out of painted shells, suggesting that they were self aware.

The Red Headed Neanderthal from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.

Starting at the 20 minute mark, Zimmer discusses the work of Svante Paabo of the Max Plank institute, which recently completed its analysis of DNA found in the bones of Neanderthals. Neanderthal skeletons that appeared to be hybrids provoked researchers to obtain an entire Neanderthal genome. Researchers then found that the Neanderthals have the same FoxP2 gene that we do, suggesting that they might have had language. The elephant in the room is that Neanderthals are no longer here and we are. But they are still living on in one sense, as Zimmer explains at the 41 minute mark. The Planke institute determined that between 1-4% of non-African DNA is Neanderthal. How's that for humanizing Neanderthals?

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William K. Black notes the lack of prosecutions regarding financial fraud, and offers a solution

William K. Black previously worked as an investigator of financial institutions during the S&L crisis. In a detailed article at Huffpo, Black laments the almost total lack of criminal prosecutions related to our recent financial meltdown. Here's the problem in a nutshell: "What has gone so catastrophically wrong with DOJ, and why has it continued so long? The fundamental flaw is that DOJ's senior leadership cannot conceive of elite bankers as criminals." Here's what we need to do about it:

Our best bet is to continue to win the scholarly disputes and to continue to push media representatives to take fraud seriously. If the media demands for prosecution of the elite banking frauds expand there is a chance to create a bipartisan coalition in Congress and the administration supporting prosecutions. In the S&L debacle, Representative Annunzio was one of the leading opponents of reregulation and leading supporters of Charles Keating. After we brought several hundred successful prosecutions he began wearing a huge button: "Jail the S&L Crooks!" Bringing many hundreds of enforcement actions, civil suits, and prosecutions causes huge changes in the way a crisis is perceived. It makes tens of thousands of documents detailing the frauds public. It generates thousands of national and local news stories discussing the nature of the frauds and how wealthy the senior officers became through the frauds. All of this increases the saliency of fraud and increases demands for serious reforms, adequate resources for the regulators and criminal justice bodies, and makes clear that elite fraud poses a severe danger. Collectively, this creates the political space for real reform, vigorous regulators, and real prosecutors.

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World’s best magazine – National Geographic

As the new year began, I found myself finishing up the January, 2011 edition of National Geographic. This is not a magazine to be merely scanned. In my experience, National Geographic deserves its own special time. It needs to be read slowly so that its exquisite prose and photography can be deeply appreciated. Every minute invested is paid back tenfold, and National Geographic has been written in this high-quality way for as long as I can remember. So… If you're going to put me on a deserted island and I can only have one magazine subscription, please make it National Geographic. The cover story of the current issue is "Population 7 Billion: How Your World Will Change." In the introduction, the Editor notes that "the issues associated with population growth seem endless: poverty, food and water supply, world health, climate change, before station, fertility rates, and more." Therefore, it would seem that we would insist on discussing the carrying capacity of Earth. We talk about the capacity of motor vehicles and houses and hotel rooms and conference centers, because we can't deny that human animals take up space and use up resources. We can't put 12 people in a boat that is designed to carry four, because it would cause a disaster. Yet many of us simply refuse to consider whether there is such a thing as a carrying capacity of the earth, and we utterly refuse to attempt any sort of quantification of the carrying capacity of the earth. Therefore, as we are approaching 7 billion people on earth, it is preordained by many people that population is simply not a problem, even though societies all over the earth, rich and poor, traditional and modern, are exhausting the resources that are available to them.

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