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Past Shows
March 27, 2004
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Neanderthals R Us?
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Artist's rendition of Earth approx. 60,000 years ago - Courtesy NASA |
For close to half a million years our nearest human cousins, the
Neanderthals, successfully survived in the often difficult environment
of Europe and the near east. Then, about 40,000 years ago, the first
modern humans began to move into the Neanderthals' homeland, and within
10,000 years the Neanderthals were gone. For generations researchers
have puzzled over what happened to these distant relatives and whether we
humans were responsible for their extinction.
The picture has changed
recently, due to a shift in the way we see Neanderthals. Dr.
Ariane Burke, an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Montreal,
says that the old caricature of the primitive Neanderthal is fading away. We now understand them
as a sophisticated and advanced human species. In fact, according to
Dr. Erik Trinkaus, a professor of Anthropology at Washington University
in St. Louis, there's no biological evidence to suggest that the
Neanderthals were inferior to modern humans in any way, which deepens
the mystery of how they disappeared.
New research on climate has
provided some potential answers. Dr. Chris Stringer, an anthropologist
from the Natural History Museum in London, has found that climate models
show that the time at which the Neanderthals disappeared would have been
one of the most unpleasant periods of extended climate change in Europe. Dr. Burke suspects the communication skills of modern
humans, skills the Neanderthals might not have had, could have made a
critical difference in allowing the humans to survive while the
Neanderthals perished.
Dr. Trinkaus, on the other hand, doesn't believe the Neanderthals
died off. He's convinced they simply joined the new human
population settling in Europe and that, as a result, the Neanderthals
still walk among us today. Dr. Hendrik Poinar, an assistant professor of
Anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton has been involved in
testing this idea, by looking for Neanderthal DNA in the human genome.
That work continues, but so far hasn't found any evidence that humans
and Neanderthals interbred.
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Io Volcanoes
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Voyager photo of Io - Courtesy NASA |
There is little geological evidence from the first half billion years of the planet Earth's life, which makes it difficult to determine how our planet came to be what it is today. But a new theory has erupted. Dr. Tracy Gregg is an assistant professor of geology at the University at Buffalo, and she thinks Io - Jupiter's innermost moon - might hold the answer. Io's orbiting between Jupiter and Europa, and the gravitational pull of those two much larger bodies, is creating so much friction and energy on Io that there are constant volcanic eruptions to get rid of some of the heat. Because the friction is constant, Io has never cooled down like other planets, so it might offer some insight into what our own planet looked like when it was very young.
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Ancient Butterflies in Amber
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Ancient butterflies in Amber - Chip Clark, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
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A rare gem has landed on the desk of Dr. Robert Robbins, a research entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It's a piece of golden amber from the Dominican Republic. Inside it is the first butterfly ever found preserved in the ancient golden resin. This amber specimen might date butterflies further back than scientists previously thought. It looks like dinosaurs might have had butterflies fluttering around their heads when they roamed the earth more than 65 million years ago.
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Question of the Week: Muscle Cramps
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This week we have a rather painful question from Andrew Kurn in Burnaby, BC, who asks: “What is the cause of muscle cramps? And could I counter them by a change of diet?”
For the answer we go to McMaster University where Dr. Stuart Phillips is an associate professor of Kinesiology.
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