The Mutation That Allowed Humans To Outsmart Neanderthals

Were ancient humans smarter than the Neanderthals?

That's the question I try to answer in this video... by telling the story of a tiny genetic mutation in the TKTL1 gene - a single amino acid change - that gave ancient humans an edge in intelligence over Neanderthals.

Hope you guys enjoy this video and find it as interesting as I did!

Substack Article:

Citations:

[VVS_Solar.Flare]

My algorithm suggested this video. I hope it makes it to other viewers. Very well done!

[eastafrika]

The mutations occured because of sharded grief from being attacked, killed and cannibalized by neanderthals. By sharing their grief, the homosapien began to organize alternatives for food, eliminating the need to hunt or fight each other, they discovered compassion and teamwork in warfare and creation of shared ideas for weapons. All this while the modern human Afrikan was creating great civilizations like Ancient Egypt.

[daleh]

Nicely done! I like your very personable presentation. You are an excellent and knowledgeable teacher.

I am very hazy on it and I forget the citation, but some recent genetic research I read indicates that the chromosome may itself be a "competitive ecosystem" and thus mutations that would formerly have been considered random are actually the result of natural selection at work on the chromosomal environment level. Now there's a paradigm shift!

I find this of great intellectual relief because the reliance of evolution upon the utter randomness of transcriptional error has to my mind always been very hard to square with the fact that the DNA molecule has itself evolved a number of ways to correct or delete transcriptional errors...which would be very much like sawing off the tree branch that one is sitting upon.

Keep up the good work. I eagerly look forward to more of your thought-provoking content.

[aidanreyes]

Amazing video! I can see this being an amazing educational source for a huge audience, but for now, it was one for me.

[uncleanunicorn]

Apparently Neanderthal glue Had to be formed under anoxic conditions. Which means some kind of a gas pump system, or a chemical process not obvious to us today.

[lawrencemurray]

I've watched this video more than once. Well done.

[sscjessica]

That's incredibly interesting. Thank you for making this!

[soonerredtx]

Wow. I guess I’m weird too. I really enjoyed this video. It was definitely educational as I didn’t know half of this. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. I love learning new things.

[misslayer]

I'm a first-year neuroscience student altho I haven't got to the "exciting" parts of my degree yet lol, I also really like anthropology and human evolution so this was right up my alley! I'm definitely one of the weird ones 😜

[JodiYeager]

Thank you for the fascinating subject. I enjoyed this video very much.

[JACKnJESUS]

I read that somewhere about 800k years ago...our species was down to like 1400 ppl in total. We nearly went extinct. We all come from that severe bottleneck...our DNA does anyways.
I would imagine that only the most vicious and cunning of our people pulled through. This may explain why mankind is so prone to violence and being duplicitous...it's actually in our DNA.

[SevenPhotonsFilms]

I loved this video. Instantly subscribed. Great job.

[seankudler]

Fantastic video, keep up the strong work

[PaulRumbold-wkre]

i hope that people with old a genes are not discriminated against, thought as lazy etc etc

[Madferreiro]

The text is very good but the execution needs some work. Couple pointers:
First that intro song is famous because its already being used by another much larger channel.
Second, at around 3:00 you seem to go out of breath while speaking... thats very distracting, do some breathing exercises.

The content is very good, wish you success.

[MerNikFa]

So good, explaining so clearly such complicated and interesting topics around gene mutations from the Neanderthals to us Homo Sapiens, even some of its relevant implications today! Thank you Hesham for the video 🎉

[NuculearFallout]

This was extremely interesting. Earned my Sub.

[guysome]

Did these mice show signs of self-awareness and depression?

[LuisAldamiz]

I have a serious problem with this narrative, really. Because Neanderthal brains were as big as ours (and their primate neurones were the same size as ours), so they should and almost certainly had about the same total neurons as we do. In fact, for what I've studied about brain formation, neurons are produced way in excess in early childhood and then have to be massively pruned (and that's why we barely remember anything from those early days in life), so it's not as simple as just making more neurons at all. Maybe it has to do with maintenance of the neural system (alias brain and extensions) or whatever but it's definitely not just "more neurons".

Also the max amount of neurons in our brains is largely constrained by the braincase (which again is roughly the same size as that of Neanderthals and not much bigger than that of advanced "H. erectus" such as Denisovans/Dragon Man/H. heidelbergensis (yeah, I'm a "lumpist", I still use H. erectus for most of human evolution, I reserve my learning neurons for something better than navigating confusing nomenclature). In the case of Neanderthals that braincase growth was "linear" within the archaic parameters of Homo sp. (even if their bodies are rather divergent instead), in the case of Homo sapiens however, our bodies evolved very linearly (almost indistinct) from the archaic H. erectus phenotype but our heads... our heads are revolutionary in many ways, not so much in the total amount of neurons they can hold but on how they do it: chins! Not just chins, which allowed us to get rid of most prognathism and thick browridges by Archimedean "lever magic", but the very related innovation of globular heads with high foreheads, which produces new shapes of brain and may (???) have enchanced the frontal lobe (often associated to reasoning and decision making).

This is of course an open question anyhow but what is clear is that Neanderthal brains and ours were of about the same size and could produce about the same (but maybe not quite) creative and techno-cultural results. Neanderthals were almost certainly not dumber than us, they were heavier and had shorter legs, and thus (this is very well documented in Europe) exploited smaller hunting grounds and probably also lesser diversity of resources. Brains are only part of the answer, really, in the end longer legs, dog domestication, ranged weapons and the humble needle even were what decided the broad conflict between our two species for the domination of West Eurasia... which incidentally Neanderthals won c. 70, 000 BP before they lost after c. 50, 000 BP, those strong and smart cousins were not so easy to defeat, better run to India and SE Asia first, then come back with dogs.

[overworlder]

This what they are saying about AI. Neural networks were conceived of decades ago but only now is processing capacity able to deliver their promise.