Human History is but a Thin Slice of Time

Our narrow slice of time is just that!  A mere fraction of thin line at the very end of modern man's time.

Here to put it into perspective is Vsause who's video everything into perspective is so very short of time.

Pay attention, you will be surprised at just how little influence we have in the overall scene of things.....

"Missing Link" Between Humans and Monkeys Found

Hows that for a headline!?  You want to start a riot you can always count on this one to really come with emotional baggage big time! But still......

The "missing link" comes in from an unexpected direction when scientists discovered a link between human speech and monkey chatter.    The "chatter" in question is a distinctive lip-smacking sounds 

made by baboons in the Ethopian highlands.  Researchers  found striking similarities between these lip-smacking sounds and human speech.

The sounds that these gelada baboons make are often so human sounding that researchers often are fooled into thinking there are humans close by talking. 

What this ability demonstrates is that the ability to make complex sounds may have developed well before speech.  When  the need to communicate complex ideas, the ability was already in place.  However the need to communicate complex ideas possibly drove the evolutionary process. 

It should also be noted that monkeys in general smack their lips when eating, it seems to only the gelada who use the "sounds" for communication or the males calling to the females.

link to the Register file

Great apes might be just as smart as humans

hooooooooo boy, you want to really get a heated discussion started...start with that statement. And until recently the belief was supported by scientific results. Intelligence is very difficult to quantify. Many scientists can not even agree on what intelligence is let alone how to measure it. One of the strongest indicators of overall cognitive development, appears during infancy. This ability is known as joint attention. To put it simply it is the ability to get another person to focus on something simply by pointing at it. Humans have always out performed the great apes at this ability and there for these results were used as proof that humans were more intelligent. Recent studies however have questioned these results. Researchers may have been tilting the tests in favor of humans. Test subjects were often whatever was available. For apes, these were always laboratory grown animals where as humans were almost always from western countries with strong family ties. That seems to be what could have twisted the results. Psychologists at the UK's University of Portsmouth hope that new research will fix the errors of earlier researchers.

IO9 article
wiki on inteligence

New Study looks at CroMag + Neander for Modern HomoSap

Ever in search of the kink, IO9 spots an article in Plos One that deals with a new Italian study which revisits the possibility that in some part modern homo-sapiens are the result of blended genetic material from Neanderthal and Cro-magnon or more accurately the early ancestors of Homo-sapiens.

A group of Italian researchers published a new study comparing the DNA from early human bones from about 28,000 years ago with DNA Neanderthal bones.

What is very interesting about the study and ultimately the findings centers on the early HS bones. These bones were discovered very recently and as such are not as likely as earlier samples to be contaminated by genetic material from modern humans handling them.

The researchers sequenced DNA from these bones, testing to see if there was significant overlap with Neanderthal DNA, which would indicate that homo sapiens' DNA had been changed by interbreeding with Neanderthals. But tests of the fossilized DNA revealed no matches. The early HS material looks essentially identical to modern humans while looking significantly different from Neanderthal DNA.


Plos One via IO9

Key Found to Making Robots Human-Friendly

On average, robots today can hold human interest for only about 10 hours, but in a new study, a humanoid robot dubbed QRIO (pronounced "curio") was accepted by human toddlers as "one of them" for 5 months before it was taken away. Why? Well it is no mystery that humans revel in the sense of touch. The premise that if a robot responded when touched - would improve the chances that the robot would be much more acceptable was proven out when QRIO was programmed to have a crude sense of touch. In the study, QRIO was introduced into a classroom of toddlers aged 18 months to 24 months. Children of this age group were chosen because they have no preconceived notions of robots and they communicate using touch as much as speech. In phase I of the experiment, which lasted 27 sessions, QRIO was instructed to interact with the children using its full behavioral repertoire, which included head-turning, dancing and giggling. At first, the children would touch the robot on its face, but as they warmed to him, the majority of their touches were to its hands and arms—a pattern the children also displayed toward each other. During phase II, which lasted 15 sessions, QRIO ignored the children's touches and danced throughout the session. At that point, the [children] quickly lost interest. When QRIO's ability to respond to touch and giggle were returned for three sessions in phase III, the children became friendly with the robot again. What proved even more interesting is that the response to touch is more important than being humaniform. QRIO only basically mimics the human form, this however seemed no impediment to it being accepted as long as it responded when touched.

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post

pic credit Credit: J. Movellan et al., UCSD

Chimps 'more evolved' than humans

Humans, it seems, have been taken down a notch or rung on the evolutionary ladder!
Chimpanzees are the more highly evolved species, according to new research. Evolutionary geneticists at the University of Michigan compared DNA sequences for 13,888 genes shared by human, chimp and rhesus macaques. The research team found that 233 chimp genes, compared with only 154 human ones, have been changed by selection since chimps and humans split from their common ancestor about 6 million years ago.

Click here for more info

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

The Human Brain....

Jeff Hawkins created the Palm Pilot and the Treo. Now he says he’s got the ultimate invention: software that mimics the human brain.

Jeff Hawkins of Palm Computing and Handspring is at it again. This time he is going where conventional wisdom has cashed in and given up the ghost. Hakins has set up a new company
called Numenta. Numenta's product will be something different for Hawkins - a data set based on how the human mind thinks, and learns. Hawkins has some radically different ways of
expressing how the mind learns and thinks, which puts him ahead of how conventional have addressed the problem of a true human level AI.

click the article title to go to the complete story. Its truly fascinating.

submitted by Shaun Saunders