Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

I became fascinated with Neanderthal humans ten or twelve years ago, and was trying to concoct an SF story concept around them when I got the idea for The Cunning Blood—and that was the end of that. Recently, cavemen have returned to our cultural consciousness in a big way, thanks to a series of brilliant and sometimes hilarious commercials for insurance company Geico. Several of them are on YouTube, and if you simply don't watch TV and have never seen them (and cripes, I almost never watch TV and yet see them constantly) this is the commercial that put them on the map, and here's the best one. The commercials have become so popular that ABC recently ordered a pilot of a sitcom starring the three Geico cavemen as roomies in modern-day Atlanta. There's no promise that the pilot will graduate to an actual series, but I'm rooting for them. (I haven't watched a TV series regularly since Firefly.)

A catchphrase from the second commercial I cited is already being used as an online scold for people showing a little too much whiny indignation: "Oooh. Sounds like somebody woke up on the wrong side of the rock."

Most people probably still think of Neanderthals as knuckle-dragging brutes, but recent science seems to be pointing in the other direction. Although they were a little shorter than we are, their arms were in the same proportions as ours, and their brain cases were actually significantly larger. Facial reconstruction of a female child from a skull found in Gibraltar shows a girl better looking than some of those I went to grade school with. Evidently the Cro-Magnons thought so too, as we have found evidence of Neanderthal genes in a several Northern European ethnic groups. The bump on the back of my head (called an "occipital bun," as I mentioned a couple of months ago) could be a Neanderthal holdover. More remarkably, we've been able to extract Neanderthal DNA from a particularly well-preserved bone, and at some point we will probably sequence their genome as completely as we have sequenced our own. And most remarkably (and ironically) of all, we may have come upon our supersized brains by borrowing some brain genes from our cave cousins.

If re-creating an extinct species from DNA ever becomes possible (and the barriers still appear to be purely technical) one has to assume that Neanderthals will be high on the list. The question thus arises: Could a Neanderthal human function in modern human society? Much depends on whether or not they had the power of language, something still being debated with the fury of a soccer match. Certainly they had enough gray matter to do it, but we may never have any proof that they did—until we have a Neanderthal child to observe. Matt Ridley, in The Red Queen, argues that we developed our large brains in order to gossip—that is, to categorize large numbers of human relationships (especially sexual relationships) and keep them in a constantly refreshed database. Big brains suggest gossip, and gossip requires language.

Language, however, implies culture, and the problem is that we cannot reconstruct Neanderthal culture from their DNA. A Neanderthal child raised on Sesame Street, and educated at Colorado State University with an IPod in her pocket, would be a bit of a nonesuch. There's a lot of New Age crapola speculating that Neanderthals were telepathic in dangerous ways, which is why we exterminated them. (This is the theme of John Darnton's rather silly novel, Neanderthal.) Telepathy aside, my expectation (and if it ever happens, my hope) is that Neanderthals think in remarkable ways, and might be able to teach us something about how to solve really difficult problems. Colin Wilson suggested in one of his books that ancient humans had a different grasp of mathematics than we have, in that they could envision number lines and planes and even higher dimensions, and perceive values like points on a map rather than logical abstractions. A person with that sort of mind could "see" a number and all its factors, and spot prime numbers without calculation. This suggests a kind of whole-brain consciousness that we lack, rather like Julian Jaynes' "bicameral mind" evolution in reverse. What sort of creature would that be?

I'd want them among my friends. I would certainly want them as my advisors—assuming I could communicate meaningfully with them. I would not want them as my enemies, particularly if they developed an intuitive, whole-brain grip on modern technology. There's a story (or fifty) in there somewhere.

• Sun is releasing Java under the same GPL V2 license that governs use and distribution of the Linux kernel. Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun, fills in some of the details here. It's interesting how the three big players in this particular game (Sun, Adobe, and Microsoft) all seem to be realizing how holding tight to a technology isn't the way to get the world to embrace it.
• In response to my half-serious Odd Lot about my Neanderthalic occipital bun, I was pointed to a couple of Web documents on craniometry, or the study of brain size and shape, and their implications. On average (and taking general body size into account) Asian brain cases are the largest, followed by European brain cases, followed by African brain cases. Much nastiness has been tossed around during discussion of such data, but what no one seems to mention is that the Neanderthals had way bigger brains (and somewhat bigger bodies) than any of us, and no one is quite sure why. (Here's a short, accessible introduction to this issue.) Craniometry was not new to me, but what I hadn't heard is that in general, the higher you go in latitude, the larger brain cases become. Maybe it's a square-cube law thing: Bigger brains generate more heat and would cook in equatorial climates, but not in Sweden. I'm personally much more interested in how small a brain case could be and yet still support intelligence like that of modern humanity. Are Piper's Little Fuzzies (14-inch-high humanoids) a physiological possibility? I don't think we know enough about brain function yet to be sure.
• Jim Strickland sent me a link to the European home of the Hubble Space Telescope, with a nicely organized archive of spectacular photos. Dig in.
• I'm sympathetic to robots made out of all kinds of things, but if I had to pick a system I'd want to fool with myself, I'd pick Vex five throws out of three. The Mythbusters guys did a nice review on Robot Magazine, and I would characterize it as a true Meccano/Erector Set descendent slanted toward robots. Vex builders have a forum, and I've seen a Vex robot beat all comers in a "critter crunch" robot battle held at a Chicago SF con. I have too much invested in vintage Meccano and Exacto to throw money into Vex, but it seems to me that the Vex remote control systems and power trains might be adapted to Meccano girder hole spacings.

• Slashdot aggregated an article about brain size and Neanderthal genes, with all the silly jokes and breathless recriminations that any such business now generates...but it also gave a name to the bump that I have on the back of my head: It's an occipital bun. It's present in some northern European groups, but almost nonexistent elsewhere. People say we inherited it from the Neanderthals, which implies that I'm part caveman. Maybe I should make a Geico commercial.
• My observation of the transit of Mercury yesterday went very well, and I showed the event to a fair number of people from our church, as well as a couple of curious passers-by. The small size of the planet's image caused one woman to remark that she thought it was dirt on the foamcore sheet. Spectacular, well, it wasn't—but I was very glad to have seen it, as there won't be another for ten years. See Pete Albrecht's blog for a nice photo. Mine were not so good, because the foamcore on which I projected the Sun's image was a little too shiny. We learn, we learn.
• One major objection to Flash as a development platform is that it's proprietary, and while there's some significance in that (and .NET isn't?) Adobe seems to be doing right right thing to promote the platform, by contributing source code for the ActionScript virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will be incorporating the new source code into the Tamarin open-source ECMAScript virtual machine, which will eventually make its way into Firefox. It's not the whole solution, but it's a significant step in the right direction for Flash.
• Michael Covington pointed me to a link indicating that demand for $2 bills is increasing, and nobody can explain the trend. I thought they were extinct, and haven't gotten one in change in 25 years. One fascinating note in the article describes a wine shop operator who gives the bills out in change, which makes people remember his shop. That's certainly a marketing strategy I wouldn't have come up with myself!
• According to 1960s music expert Kent Kotal, the very first Beatles single in America was published by Chicago record company Vee Jay, and was played for the first time in America on Chicago station WLS by DJ Dick Biondi in early 1963. The single was "Please Please Me," and it was also significant as the first rock single I ever bought with my own money. (I was 11 at the time, and disposable income was a new thing for me.)