Watch Now. Featured on Shop. Appearance Adjust the colors to reduce glare and give your eyes a break. You have the maximum of videos in My List. You have the maximum of shows in My List. Embed Video. Season 6 Episode 1. Width: in pixels px Height: in pixels px. Copy Copied! Copy failed. Please try again. Report a Problem. Cancel Submit Report. We find this trace in our genome today. Okay, the suspense is killing me.
I've got to check this out to see if I, too, carry the Neanderthal gene within me. There are several private services now offering to decode your personal genome, including whether you have any Neanderthal D. You simply spit in the tube, wrap it up and send it off. The company sends you the results in a matter of weeks. I'm getting my results from none other than Ed Green, the geneticist from the team that first mapped the Neanderthal genome. And I'm going to get to the bottom of this sensational story.
It's just as, it's just as dirty as you say it. There was sex between humans and Neanderthals at some point in the past, and their genes wound up, through this interbreeding event, in the genomes of some people who are alive today. This is chromosome It all comes down to how those four base letters line up, on the human side or the Neanderthal side.
And now, we can ask, do you look like the Neanderthal, or do you look like most of the humans up here? And it's the Neanderthal. In sum total, you are, according to the 23andMe analysis, 2. I've come to grips with this though, I think. If you are a descendent of the modern humans who left Africa over 50, years ago, you have between one and four percent Neanderthal genes within you.
While it's too early to tell what it all means, there are some indications that Neanderthal genes are present in our immune system, the part of the body that fights disease. Some scientists believe that adding Neanderthal genes to our own may have helped us survive strange diseases, as we fanned out across the earth.
Perhaps that may have had something to do with our surviving our Neanderthal cousins and going on to create civilization as we know it. Did Neanderthals care About their looks? Inside Neanderthal caves, Archeologists have found Seashells and mineral pigment That some say were used for… Jewelry and make-up!
Our ability to share our thoughts and complex information with others far surpasses all the barks, squeaks and growls of our animal friends. So where did it come from? Believe it or not, the origin of language is one of the biggest mysteries in human evolution, but could an amazing new solution be found in this suitcase? Inside, anthropologist David Frayer, of the University of Kansas, has samples of the kind of evidence scientists depend on to trace the history of language. But our language investigation soon centers on the oldest skull in Frayer's case.
When it was found, it was considered to be really revolutionary, because it showed this really large brain. So this ancient ancestor might have had the capacity for language. DAVID POGUE: The remains of early humans are extremely rare, and, of course all the soft tissue —noses, ears, tongues—that may be clues to speech are long gone, but Frayer does have one more item that may be a key clue to the origins of language.
When you're at 2,, years ago, you don't have a lot of complete fossils. But what this tells us is that mindset of…the individual that made this had a brain that was thinking about a shape, when they were making the tool, as opposed to just whacking away at a rock. DAVID POGUE: It turns out, when scientists are looking at the mysterious business of where language began, stone tools provide some of their best clues, because they offer a tiny glimpse into the workings of an ancient mind.
Something called the "Oldowan chopper," which looks like a charcoal briquet, is considered the first tool, two and a half million years old. But scientists get really jazzed when it comes to another tool, the "Acheulean handaxe," the very tool David Frayer is waving in front of my face. Chimpanzees make tools like this. If I held these two tools up and I said, "Which kind of tool would you think was made by a human-like ancestor as opposed to something else?
The Acheulean handaxe was born when Homo erectus got a bright idea for stone tool 2. Dietrich Stout at Emory University is investigating the possibility that making the Acheulean handaxe actually helped prepare the brain for language.
DAVID POGUE: Now that's an intriguing hypothesis: a million years of, years of making a gazillion stone tools may have established pathways in the brain humans could use for something else: language.
Stout turned to Bruce Bradley, experimental archeologist and stone-toolmaker extraordinaire, to try to understand the mental skills required to craft these ancient objects. Bradley has trained himself to make stone tools using the same materials early humans would have used. Just give that a try. That'll help your wrist, and not, not inward, outward. Getting from flake to handaxe proves far more complicated than I imagined. When rock star Bruce Bradley's making a tool, he's thinking several steps ahead, using more brain than brawn, a key point for Dietrich Stout.
There are certain rules. In order to do this, you have to do that, but all the time they are related to the goal. And it's the same thing in language. Because what is language? It's complex sequential thought, okay? So in order to have language, you first have to have the same sorts of mental skills that, that we're seeing. DAVID POGUE: But for the tool-to-language hypothesis to work, there would have to be similarities between what the brain is doing while making a handaxe, and how it behaves while forming a sentence.
Following a stroke, four years ago, Kristen became one of a million Americans with a condition called "aphasia". Thompson found that agrammatic aphasia patients do share a striking characteristic, damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, home to a mysterious region known as Broca's area. One of the many parts of the brain associated with language, Broca's area's seems especially important when it comes to grammar. When we have patients who have stroke, and they have damage that encroaches on Broca's area, that's when we start to see problems with sentences.
Since it's impossible to have people actually make stone tools while having their brains scanned, Chaminade set up the next best thing: a special projector that could beam images of stone-tool-making into the M. Studies have shown that watching an activity excites the same areas of the brain as actually performing the activity. So perceiving and performing an action activates the same regions.
In one video, the subjects were observing the creation of a simple tool, the Oldowan chopper. In another, they were observing a complex tool, the Acheulean handaxe. The results were, pardon the pun, striking. Watching the video of simple choppers resulted in mild activity in Broca's area, but observing the complex Acheulean handaxe caused four times more activity.
So, the same area of the brain we use in forming complex sentences is also hard at work when we make complex tools. These two things co-evolved.
They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but these studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.
How early in life do babies Start to learn language? Could it be…in the womb? Studies of newborn babies Found that their cries mimic The speech patterns of their mothers. French newborns cry More with a rising pitch German cries have A falling pitch So when you hear this… Remember, there could be A lot more going on Than a wet diaper.
We begin to laugh. Home videos on the Web featuring baby laughter get tens of millions of hits. Why would so many people feel compelled to watch babies simply laughing? Gina Mireault studies baby laughter. She says home movies, posted on the Web, support her research in the lab, revealing that laughter is less about humor and more about the serious business of survival. Newborn babies smile, they smile in their sleep. It's an involuntary reflex, so this is something that they come equipped to do, ready to do.
We can't walk, we can't talk, we can't get our own food. But we can laugh and, according to Mireault, that's a powerful secret weapon to get adults fully our side. These are, these are really critical communicative signals that babies give to parents, when the baby is particularly helpless. Go ahead and reach down and touch him. There you go. That's what a male does when they want to court a female and then say "Are you ready to breed?
Oh, my gosh! It sounds a little bit more like: "I'm going to kill you now. Do they laugh. In the wild, when apes play wrestle, they make a distinctive sound that some scientists believe is a form of laughter. Zoologist Marina Davila-Ross has been studying and recording primate laughter.
Today, she's observing an orphaned gorilla, named Okanda, during a play session with his caretaker at the Stuttgart Zoo, in Germany. BEA Okanda's Caretaker : gibt es die flasche! Jetzt gibt es die flasche! Marina collected sounds from all five of the great ape babies being tickled.
In order of relation to humans, orangutans are the most distant from us genetically; gorillas are a bit closer; then come chimpanzees and bonobos; and then us, humans. Listen carefully as the sound made by these five primates changes, on its way up the genetic family tree:baby organutan,. Analyzing these sounds convinced Marina she was hearing the evolution of laughter. What begins as just panting in the orangutan, becomes more controlled in the vocalized "ha-ha" sound of the bonobo and finally the humans.
It's the melodic laughter, this "ha ha" kind of laughter. In other words, when they are saying, "I may seem to be trying to kill you, but I'm just playing around right now.
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