Laura said:
If anybody wants a copy of this impossible to get book, I have a scan of it.
If not trouble, I would like to read it. Thanks Laura. :)
Great thematic :D
Found nice artivcle about neanderthals and canibalism and cannibalism and transmissible spongiform encephalopathies:
First about Neanderthal and Canibalism;
Neanderthals Were Cannibals, Bones Show
Elizabeth Culotta
Neanderthals were skilled hunters, working together to fell deer, goats, and perhaps even woolly rhinos with wooden spears. After the kill, they expertly butchered the carcasses, slicing meat and tendons from bone with stone tools and bashing open long bones to get at the fatty marrow inside. Now, on page 128, a French and American team reports that 100,000-year-old Neanderthals at the French cave of Moula-Guercy performed precisely the same kinds of butchery on some of their own kind.
Marks on the bones clearly reveal that these early humans filleted the chewing muscle from the heads of two young Neanderthals, sliced out the tongue of at least one, and smashed the leg bone of a large adult to get at the marrow. The bone fragments were apparently then dumped amid the remains of deer and other butchered mammals. "Human and mammal remains were treated very similarly," says first author Alban Defleur of the Université du Mediterrané at Marseilles. "We can safely infer that both species were exploited for a culinary goal."
Tantalizing hints of cannibalism have been spotted at other Neanderthal sites for decades, but this is far and away the best documented case, say other researchers, who praise the team's careful comparison of breakage and cut marks in deer and human bones. "Quite convincing," says anthropologist Fred H. Smith of Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, noting that there's little sign of gnawing or other indications that carnivores rather than people mauled the bones. "And the documented cut marks seal the deal."
Smith and a few others say that without an eyewitness, we may never know exactly why Neanderthals handled corpses so seemingly brutally. But most paleoanthropologists are unfazed by the idea of early humans eating each other. As Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, puts it, "Why should modern humans be the only violent ones?"
Defleur began to zero in on cannibalism after he saw cut marks on human bones from a test pit sunk into the cave at Moula-Guercy, a site that had previously yielded stone tools characteristic of the Neanderthals' Mousterian culture. He teamed up with paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, to rigorously compare the pattern of marks on the human bones with those on bones from red deer, presumably hunted for meat, at the same site.
The bones--78 pieces identified as belonging to at least six humans and almost 400 fragments attributed to other mammals--were scattered over 20 square meters. All the braincases and long bones of both deer and humans were smashed open, presumably to allow brains and marrow to be extracted. "In both taxa, marrow bones were systematically broken, and bones without marrow were not damaged," says Defleur.
Analysis of three pieces of a large thigh bone showed how, after its muscles were sliced away, it was set on an anvil stone and hit repeatedly with another stone. Telltale striations mark the bone's outer surface on the anvil side, directly opposite "percussion pits" made by the hammerstone. Cut marks on the clavicle also show where the Neanderthals disarticulated the arm at the shoulder. Others reveal where they cut out tongue and jaw muscles, severed the Achilles' tendon, and sliced other tendons below the toes and at the elbow. The bones bear few signs of burning or roasting, says White, suggesting that even though the Neanderthals had fire, they ate this flesh raw or hacked it off the bone before cooking. "The circumstantial forensic evidence [of cannibalism] is excellent. No mortuary practice has ever been shown to leave these patterns on the resulting osteological assemblages," he says.
on: http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/Human%20Nature%20S%201999/neanderthals_were_cannibals.htm
or:
The slashed and butchered bones of at least eight Neanderthal people who lived 43,000 years ago were excavated from a cave called El Sidron in the Asturias region of Spain by a research team led by Antonio Rosas, a paleoanthropologist.
The remains of four young adults, two teenagers, one youngster and an infant all bore deliberate cut marks made by the crude stone tools of the era, including saw-toothed knives, skin scrapers and a single hand ax, report Rosas and his colleagues.
There is also evidence that some of the skulls of the eight Neanderthals were skinned, their leg joints were dismembered, and other long bones were broken -- presumably to extract the fat and protein from the rich marrow, Rosas said.
Rosas' team has been excavating the huge cave near the town of Oviedo for nearly seven years and has discovered more than 1,300 hominid bones and scraps of bone there. But what struck Rosas most sharply was that the cave held no remains of animals that might have preyed on Neanderthals; the team found only seven animal bones there -- from one large browsing elk and a fox. He also pointed out there were no tooth marks on the Neanderthal bones that could have been made by a beast of prey.
A report on the new discoveries at the El Sidron cave was published online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
on: http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-12-11/news/17323158_1_neanderthals-cave-bones
Sci/Tech
Neanderthals were cannibals
This Neanderthal thigh bone was smashed open for its marrow
Gory evidence uncovered in France reveals that the early humans in the region ate one another.
Cheek muscles from children were filleted out, tendons were sliced and skulls were cracked to remove brains.
[ image: Sharp butchering marks made by flint tools]
Sharp butchering marks made by flint tools
Commenting on the research published in the journal Science, anthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga said: "To me this is, paradoxically, a very human behaviour that indicates a human mind. Only humans practice systematic cannibalism - this is the dark side of the human coin."
Excavations at the cave at Moula-Guercy, Ardeche, yielded 78 Neanderthal bones, from at least six individuals who lived 100,000 years ago. Remnants of two adults, two 15 or 16 year-olds, and two six or seven year-olds were dug up as well as nearly 400 pieces of animal bone.
Dr Tim White: We are quite convinced by the evidence
Careful study of tool marks and fractures on the remains shows that these Neanderthals were master butchers.
"If we conclude that the animal remains are the leftovers from a meal, we're obliged to expand that conclusion to include humans," said the research team leader Alban Defleur, at the University of the Mediterranean Marseille.
[ image: Skull fragments: hammered open to remove brains]
Skull fragments: hammered open to remove brains
All the skulls and limb bones were broken apart, presumably to remove brain or marrow. Only the hand and foot bones remained intact, which contain no marrow. Arm and leg tendons were cut, a necessary action if a limb is to be removed. Other cuts show that the thigh muscles were removed, and in at least one case the tongue was cut out.
There have been hints of Neanderthal cannibalism at other sites before but this is the by far the clearest evidence and the first in Europe.
No signs of gnawing were found on the bones, ruling out the possibility that the Neanderthals were eaten by wild animals. There were no signs of charring either suggesting the flesh was either eaten raw or cooked off the bone.
on: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/462048.stm
But most interesting articles about Neanderthal are about posible conection between Neandertals, cannibalism and transmissible spongiform encephalopathies:
Did Neandertals die off because of cannibalism and transmissible spongiform encephalopathies?
So there’s this hypotheses that Neandertal extinction was due to cannibalism. This is an alternative but complementary hypothesis to the climate change one. In an upcoming paper in Medical Hypotheses, Simon Underdown investigates this hypotheses by looking at Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). The paper is titled, “A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction.”
TSEs are also known as prion diseases, a communicable disease where the infectious agent is a malformed protein that replicates by imprinting and transforming other proteins. Most TSEs manifest in the host’s neurological tissues because he or she ate infected nervous tissue. Ultimately, the host’s tissues degenerate and lead to serious problems, most often death. In anthropology, one form of TSEs has been well documented, the spread and eradication of kuru in the Fore from Papua New Guinea.
Before I read the abstract, I assumed Simon looked at Neandertal fossils for paleopathological evidence of spongiform encephalopathies…. at least to some degree. However, the abstract doesn’t definitively indicate whether or not Simon looked into the Neandertal fossil record. Instead, the abstract tells us,
“A modern human hunter-gatherer proxy has been developed and applied as a hypothetical model to the Neanderthals. This hypothesis suggests that the impact of TSEs on the Neanderthals could have been dramatic and have played a large part in contributing to the processes of Neanderthal extinction.”
For those that are curious if there’s evidence of Neandertal cannibalism, you’re in luck. Neandertal cannibalism has been previously documented from remains from sites like Moula-Guercy caves in Ardèche, France, and El Sidrón, Asturias, Spain, so it is totally probable that some got prion diseases. But they were eating each other for 100,000 or so years before the faded out of the picture. You’d think that if they died of prion dieases it wouldn’t take so damn long. Anyways, I just really wonder how Simon went about figuring out if Neandertals really got TSEs.
UNDERDOWN, S. (2008). A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction. Medical Hypotheses DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2007.12.014
on: http://anthropology.net/2008/02/29/did-neandertal-die-off-because-of-cannibalism-and-transmissible-spongiform-encephalopathies/
or:
Mad Neanderthal Disease?
The impact of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE) on Neanderthals is the topic of a short paper by Simon Underdown (2008), in press in Medical Hypotheses. You might be familiar with TSEs already: a few years back, the so-called “Mad Cow Disease” scare was caused by Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.
Getting back to the study at hand, the gist of the paper is this:
1) Neanderthals are known to have practiced cannibalism.
2) Cannibalism is known to result in TSEs in certain cases.
3) In at least one Homo sapiens hunter-gatherer group (in this case the Fore of New Guinea), the relationship between cannibalism and some kind of fatal degenerative neurological disease has been credibly established (the 'Kuru' epidemic'; Farquhar and Gadjusek 1981).
4) Therefore, it is possible that TSEs transmitted through cannibalism and handling dead Neanderthal tissue contributed to the ‘extinction’ Neanderthals, to wit: “… a silent killer in the form of TSEs could have massively weakened the Neanderthal’s ability to compete both within a highly changeable environment and latterly against a highly adaptable new arrival in the form of Homo sapiens” (Underdown in press: p.3).
The paper itself does a much better job of contextualizing this conclusion than headlines related to the diffusion of this study such as “Cannibalism wiped out Neanderthals” which is overly sensationalistic on top of fostering the curious image of Neanderthals eating one another into oblivion (which would certainly put a new spin on the old ‘competition with moderns over animal resources’!).
And, while it is nearly impossible to conclusively disprove many paleoanthropological hypotheses, it is certainly possible to evaluate their plausibility, and the case for TSEs as a, errr, vector in Neanderthal extinction is improbable. First, the use of the Fore as the single analog is problematic on several levels: they are horticulturalists, a poor analog for highly mobile hunter-gatherers; the kuru epidemic on which Underdown’s scenario depends unfolded over a span of only decades whereas he postulates that TSEs would’ve plagued Neanderthals for millennia; and, importantly, the Fore live at population densities (about 21/km2), orders of magnitude greater than those likely to have characterized, and certainly those proposed for them by Underdown (ca. 0.06-0.1/km2).
Second, the ‘Kuru Model’ is based on one case of a TSE decimating a single population. That is to say, not all cannibalism needs to result (or have resulted) in the development and rapid transmission of TSEs among its practitioners. This is a problem of extrapolating from one documented case among modern humans (ironically enough) to the entirety of Neanderthal groups. This is a common logical flaw whereby Neanderthals are not considered as comprising a multitude of groups of hunter-gatherers spread over a vast range and likely relatively well adapted to their local conditions. Neanderthals (or any fossil human species, for that matter) are not just a species of extinct hominins; that label refers to biologically similar hominins spread far and wide across Eurasia and whose primary adaptations to their environment were behavioral in nature. Think of it this way: do all Homo sapiens behave exactly the same across the world today? No, and neither did they in the past. This is why there is so much debate over how to satisfactorily define “behavioral modernity” and why we can’t just talk about modern humans acting in one way. The same was very likely true for Neanderthals.
Third, the two best-publicized cases of Neanderthal cannibalism (i.e., Krapina, and Moula-Guercy) go back to 100-80 kya at the most recent. There is, as far as I know, little in the way of strong evidence for widespread Neanderthal cannibalism after that; although clear anthropic modifications of Neanderthal remains have been documented at later sites, such as El Sidrón (Rosas et al. 2006), the case for cannibalism there has not been demonstrated since these have not been shown to be similar to those found on other animal remains at the site. Thus, there is little evidence that cannibalism was a widespread Neanderthal behavior around for the 50 ky that led up to their disappearance from the Eurasian fossil record. Interestingly, there is also some very suggestive evidence that Mousterian sites increased in density over the course of that time period (e.g., van Andel et al. 2003), as opposed to steadily decreasing in numbers as implied by the Underdown’s TSE model.
Fourth, there is clear evidence of perimortem processing of Homo sapiens remains with stone tools is also reported from the Aurignacian deposits of Brassempouy, Isturitz, Tarté and La Combe, where human teeth were forcefully removed from their gums and pierced to be transformed into ornaments (White et al. 2003), and in the Middle Stone Age deposits of Herto, where human skulls bear unambiguous traces of defleshing (Clark et al. 2003). Given that Underdown (in press: p. 3) states that TSEs can well have been transmitted “through cuts caused by stone tools used by infected and non-infected individuals,” shouldn’t we therefore also assume that TSEs would have been a major concern for modern humans as well?
Overall, then, while TSEs might well have been a problem for some groups of Neanderthals and some groups of Homo sapiens, there is no reason to assume that it was an especially important factor leading to the disappearance of Neanderthals as a distinct fossil hominin in the paleoanthropological record. I will say this, however: theoretically at least, Underdown’s scenario has the merit of having the potential to be tested empirically and independently through genetic studies. In that sense, it is a move forward in paleoanthropology.
on: http://averyremoteperiodindeed.blogspot.com/2008/03/mad-neanderthal-disease.html
Chiarelli B. 1
(1) Laboratori di Antropologia ed Etnologia, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Via del Proconsolo 12, 50122 Firenze, Italy
Received: 2 June 2001 Accepted: 3 June 2003
Abstract There are paleoecological evidences that Neanderthals ate the brains of deers and goats as well that of their own deceased. This would expose each individual and the population to the risks of contracting the Creutzfeldt Jacob disease. Those who consumed the remains of infected individual’s would then contract the disease and eventually infect others. If this is the case then the Neanderthal extinction could be attributed to spongiform encephalopathy and not to the cultural supremacy of the anatomically modern man.
Keywords neanderthals - cannibalism - spongiform encephalopathy
on: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2932322j75728r7/
Cannibalism May Have Wiped Out Neanderthals
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
Feb. 27, 2008 -- A Neanderthal-eat-Neanderthal world may have spread a mad cow-like disease that weakened and reduced populations of the large Eurasian human, thereby contributing to its extinction, according to a new theory based on cannibalism that took place in more recent history.
Aside from illustrating that consumption of one's own species isn't exactly a healthy way to eat, the new theoretical model could resolve the longstanding mystery as to what caused Neanderthals, which emerged around 250,000 years ago, to disappear off the face of the Earth about 30,000 years ago.
"The story of Neanderthal extinction is one of the most intriguing in all of human evolution," author Simon Underdown told Discovery News. "Why did a large-brained, intelligent hominid that shared so many traits with us disappear?"
To resolve that question, Underdown, a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, studied a well-documented tribal group, the Fore of Papua New Guinea, who practiced ritualistic cannibalism.
Gory evidence uncovered in a French cave in 1999 revealed Neanderthals likely practiced cannibalism. The 100,000-120,000 year-old bones discovered at the cave site of Moula-Guercy near the west bank of the Rhone river suggested a group of Neanderthals defleshed the bones of at least six other individuals and then broke the bones apart with a hammerstone and anvil to remove the marrow and brains.
Although it's not clear why Neanderthals may have eaten each other, research on the Fore determined that maternal kin of certain deceased Fore individuals used to dismember corpses and regarded some human flesh as a valuable food source.
Beginning in the early 1900's, anthropologists additionally began to take note of an affliction named Kuru among the Fore. By the 1960's, Kuru reached epidemic levels and killed over 1,100 people.
Subsequent investigations determined that Kuru was related to the Fore's cannibalistic activities and was a form of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy, or TSE. This is a class of disease that includes mad cow disease. Underdown said TSE's have been in existence for possibly millions of years.
According to his new paper, published in the journal Medical Hypotheses, TSE's "cause brain tissue to take on an almost sponge-like appearance, caused by the formation of small holes during the development of the disease."
The disease's latter stages often result in severe mental impairment, loss of speech and an inability to move.
He created a model, based on the Kuru findings, to figure out how the spread of such a disease via cannibalism could reduce a population's size. For example, he calculated that within a hypothetical group of 15,000 individuals, such a disease could reduce the population to non-viable levels within 250 years.
on: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/27/neanderthal-cannibalism.html
Hm, canibals, rapers of Cromagnon females, reduced frontal lobe.
About frontal lobe functions from wiki:
The frontal lobe contains most of the dopamine-sensitive neurons in the cerebral cortex. The dopamine system is associated with reward, attention, long-term memory, planning, and drive. Dopamine tends to limit and select sensory information arriving from the thalamus to the fore-brain. A report from the National Institute of Mental Health says a gene variant that reduces dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex is related to poorer performance and inefficient functioning of that brain region during working memory tasks, and to slightly increased risk for schizophrenia.
or:
Tormented Souls, Diseased Brains
[ A case for the frontal brain | Images of violence | Conclusions | Next ]
Why sociopaths have these characteristics ? Are their brains different from those of normal people ? Do they display pathological alterations ?
Many studies have shown in the last 20 years that murderers and ultraviolent criminals have a startling evidence of brain disease. For example, in one such study, 20 of 31 confessed or sentenced murderers had specific neurological diagnoses. Some of the inmates had more than one disorders, and no subject was normal in all spheres. Among the diagnoses were schizophrenia, depression, epilepsy, alcoholism, alcoholic dementia, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, brain injury, dissociative disorders and others. More than 64 % of them appeared to have frontal lobe abnormalities. Fifty percent had brain atrophy and 40 % had EEG abnormalities. Almost 84 % of the subjects had been victims of severe physical and/or sexual abuse. The group of murderers included gang members, rapists, robbers, serial murderers, mass murderers, one subject who killed his infant son, and another who murdered three siblings.
In another study carried out in Canada in 1994, in the most violent group of 372 males imprisoned in a maximum-security mental hospital, 20 % had focal temporal abnormalities of the EEG, and 41 % had pathologic alterations of the brain structure in the temporal lobe. The corresponding rates for the least violent group were 2.4 % and 6.7 %, respectively, thus suggesting an important role of neurological damage in the genesis of violent personalities.
According to authors Nathaniel J. Pollone and James J. Hennessy, "[Various] studies over a period of nearly 40 years... suggest a relative incidence of neuropathology among violent offenders many times in excess of that found in the general population, at ratios ranging from a high of 31:1 in the case of homicide offenders through 21:1 among `habitual aggressive' offenders to a low of 4:1 in the case of `one-time aggressives.' We propose that, though such discrepancies do not confirm neuropathology as univariately causative of criminal aggression, neither is it reasonable to believe that they are simple artifacts of chance." (35th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, Albuquerque, NM, March 14, 1998)
Although this has been always a very controversial subject, many researchers think that there is now a compelling case for a substrate of brain disease in violent criminals; and this has very important consequences for many things, from the point of view of the law to the prospect of effective prevention and treatment of sociopathy.
A Case for the Frontal Brain
Since sociopathic individuals have marked alterations in their relation to other human beings, it is only natural that we should first seek whether the part of their brains responsible for this has some significant abnormality.
Much of the behavior which makes possible stable and adequate social relations is controlled by the part of the brain called frontal lobe, which is located in the most anterior part of the brain hemispheres. All social primates have highly developed frontal brains, and human beings have the largest one of all. Self-control, planning, judgment, the balance of individual versus social needs, and many other essential functions underlying effective social intercourse are mediated by the frontal structures of the brain (see Dr. Silvia Cardoso's enlightening article on "The External Architecture of the Brain" in Brain & Mind Magazine's first issue, to understand what's the frontal brain)
Why the frontal brain seems to be so important in the genesis of antisocial individuals ?
Research with animals has shown that the right orbitofrontal cortex is involved in fear conditioning. For instance, when a rat is punished with an electrical shock every time a light blinks in its cage, it develops a fear association between the stimulus and the punishment. Normal humans learn very early in life to avoid antisocial behavior because they are punished for it and because they have the brain circuits to associate fear of punishment (feeling emotion) to behavior suppression. This seems to be a key element in the development of personality. When there is no punishment, or when the person is unable to be conditioned by fear, due to a lesion in the orbitofrontal cortex, for example, or due to lowered neural activity in this area, then it develops an antisocial personality.
We have now a direct way of visualizing brain function, which has lead to a remarkable explosion in our knowledge about the inner workings of the psychopath's brain in the last two to three years:
Images of Violence
Functional images of the brain, such as those provided by PET (positron emission tomography) have been used to corroborate the existence of neurological deficits in the frontal lobe in sociopaths. PET shows computer reconstructed transversal sections of the brain, showing in vivid color the level of metabolic activity of neurons. This is achieved by injecting radioactivity-marked glucose molecules into the patient's blood flow and seeing how much of it is incorporated into living brain cells. The more active the cells are (when they are processing information, for example), more intense will be the image at that point (see my article "PET: A New Window Into the Brain", in the first issue of Brain & Mind Magazine, to understand better how this technique works).
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner obtains sectional images of the living brain, using color to depict degree of activity. Crump Institute for Biological Imaging, University of California at Los Angeles.
Using the PET technique, American medical researchers Adrian Raine and colleagues have been studying murderers, with startling results. They found that 41 murderers have a much decreased level of brain functioning in the prefrontal cortex than normal persons, indicating a deficit related to violence. In other words, even when no visible pathological alteration was present, frontal damage was apparent by a abnormal lower activity of the brain in that area. "Damage to this brain region," Raine noted, "can result in impulsivity, loss of self-control, immaturity, altered emotionality, and the inability to modify behavior, which can all in turn facilitate aggressive acts." Other abnormalities observed by the PET study of the murderers' brain included reduced neural metabolism in the superior parietal gyrus, left angular gyrus, and the corpus callosum, and abnormal asymmetries of activity in the amygdala, thalamus, and medial temporal lobe. It is probable that these effects are related to violence and criminality; because some of these structures are part of the so-called limbic brain, which processes emotions and emotional behavior (please see "Limbic System: The Center of Emotions" in Brain & Mind Magazine)
One interesting aspect of Dr. Raine's research is that he correlated the PET brain images to the murderer''s personal history, in order to ascertain whether they were subjected to trauma, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, poverty, when they were children (a deprived environment for the development of personality). Of the murderers, 12 had suffered significant abuse or deprivation. It was discovered that murderer's coming from non-deprived households had much larger deficits in the orbitofrontal area of the brain (14 % on the average) than normal people and murderer's coming from deprived environments.
The initial controlled studies carried out by Raine and colleagues have been confirmed by a series of PET-based investigations with sociopathic individuals and violent criminals. In a study in 1994, 17 patients with diagnoses of personality disorder were subjected to PET scams. The researchers proved that there was a strong inverse correlation between a life history of aggressive impulse difficulties and regional metabolism in the frontal cortex. Six of these patients were antisocial, the rest had several personality disorders (borderline, dependent and narcissistic). PET was used again in 1995 to evaluate brain glucose metabolism in eight normal subjects and eight psychiatric patients with a history of repetitive violent behavior. The authors observed that "seven of the patients showed widespread areas of low brain metabolism, particularly in medial temporal and prefrontal cortices than did normal comparison subjects. These regions have been implicated as substrates for aggression and impulsivity, and their dysfunction may have contributed to the patients' violent behavior". More recently (1997), PET brain imaging technology found that psychopaths differed from nonpsychopaths in the pattern of relative cerebral blood flow during processing of emotional words. Acquired personality changes due to brain injury are also accompanied by a decrease in the neural activity in the frontal area
Indirect evidence of the role of prefrontal cortex in psychopathic behavior is coming from other experiments as well. In Canada, a team headed by Dominique LaPierre compared 30 psychopaths to 30 non-psychopathic criminals, using tests that evaluate the function of two parts of the prefrontal cortex: the orbitofrontal and the frontal ventromedial areas. The results showed that "the psychopaths were significantly impaired on all the orbitofrontal- ventromedial tasks", but not in the function of other areas of the frontal cortex. The similarities between psychopaths and patients with prefrontal cortex damage surfaced in several areas of the study. "Both the psychopath and the orbitofrontal or ventromedial frontal patient show an exaggerated preoccupation with sexual matters, acting in a promiscuous and impersonal maladaptive way," observed the researchers. "Both are remarkable for their lack of social and ethical judgment. Both neglect long-term consequences of their actions, choosing immediate gratification over careful planning."
So, there is a reasonable body of coherent evidence that sociopaths have a dysfunction of the frontal brain. Why and when this dysfunction appears is totally unknown, thus far.
on: http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n07/doencas/disease_i.htm
Neanderthals, archaics, and other peoples of the Middle Paleolithic were not very smart and used
simple stones for tools. In fact, they constructed and made essentially the same stone tools over and
over again for perhaps 200,000 years, until around 35,000 B.P., with little variation or consideration of
alternatives (Binford, 1982; Gowlett, 1984; Mellars, 1989). Neanderthals greatly lacked in creativity,
initiative, imagination, and tended to create simple stone tools that served a single purpose.
As neatly summed up by an ardent defender of Neanderthal cognitive capabilities (Hayden,
1993, p. 139), “as a rule, there is no evidence of private ownership or food storage, no evidence for
the use of economic resources for status or political competition, no elaborate burials, no ornaments
or other status display items, no skin garments requiring intensive labor to produce, no tools requiring
high energy investments, no intensive regional exchange for rare items like sea shells or amber,
no competition for labor to produce economic surpluses and no corporate art or labor intensive rituals
in deep cave recesses to impress onlookers and help attract labor.”
Neanderthals tended to live in the “here and now,” with little ability to think about or consider
the distant future (Binford, 1973, 1982; Dennell, 1985; Mellars, 1989, 1996); the only notable exception,
the future life after death.
This notable dichotomy is in part a function of the differential evolution of the frontal versus
the temporal lobes. The frontal lobes are the senior executive of the brain and are responsible for
initiative, goal formation, long term planning, the generation of multiple alternatives, and the consideration
of multiple alternative consequences (Joseph, 1986a, 1988a, 1999b). The frontal lobes are the
source of creativity and imagination, whereas the temporal lobes are the seat of the soul. It is the
temporal lobes which were maximally developed in archaic and Neanderthals, whereas the frontal
lobe would increase in size by a third in the transition from archaic humans to Cro-Magnon woman
and man.
from: http://brainmind.com/SpiritualEvolution.pdf
So much about Neanderthal for now.
