john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

sex

  • Mankind in the unmaking

    Tue, 2012-11-20 19:59 -- John Hawks

    Annalee Newitz gives a worthwhile etymological lesson: "Think twice before using “mankind” to mean “all humanity,” say scholars".

    In modern English, man is used very infrequently as an autohyponym. Possibly that's because it's become too confusing to use "man" — it's hard to know what it means in any given context when we have no word like wæpenmann that refers exclusively to males. But we do have the words "person" and "human" that clearly refer to both sexes, so those have eclipsed "man" when speaking about everyone.

    More at the link. "Mankind" used to be very common in paleoanthropology, most notably in the title of W.W. Howells' Mankind in the Making: The Story of Human Evolution, last published in 1967. Howells cribbed his title from H. G. Wells, whose own Mankind in the Making came out in 1909. It's available for free on the Kindle, or from Project Gutenberg in multiple formats. A name with a long pedigree, that we simply don't use anymore. Star Trek was a few years behind science when it gave up the "no man has gone before".

    I guess that popular culture is usually recycling the science of a decade ago. We've just gotten to where popular culture treatments of human evolution suffer through a volcanic winter, and where Neandertals are extinct. Guess that makes a fertile ground for rewriting over the next decade!

    Tags: 
    sex
    language
    popular culture

  • Quote: Paleolithic religion as sex mysticism

    Sun, 2012-10-07 13:39 -- John Hawks

    I ran across a 1940 paper by George Barton, a specialist on Near Eastern religious tradition, during the course of researching a paper I'm writing. The paper is entitled, "The Palaeolithic origins of religion" [1], and it has one of the most incredible abstracts I've ever seen:

    The burials and the art of the Aurignacian period show that men then worshipped a mother goddess, and this worship can be traced back to Mousterian times, when Neanderthal man flourished. The same art shows that women reverenced the erect phallus. These are the only objects that they seem to have considered divine. There is reason to believe that the part of a father in procreation was not yet known. The worship was not a fertility-cult in the later sense. No privacy existed; men and women knew the details of each others' physical forms. Men saw women miraculously produce children. Like the male animals, they had from instinct coitus with her. Orgasm give them the divinest thrills they knew. It was to them like the later bacchic ecstasy of intoxication. Women became their goddesses. Probably they did not generalize more than the dog, but each was devoted to his mistress. Women obtained a similar mystic ecstasy from the experience. She did not deify man, but the erect phallus. The heart of religion is a mystic thrill, uplift or satisfaction. Creeds, rituals, and conduct are all subordinate to this. Palæolithic religion was, then, sex-mysticism. The psychologic unity of the race made it universal as its survivals in the historic period prove. This is the real origin of religion. It was not begotten by fear (Lucretius), nor by animism (Tylor), nor by ancestor worship (Herbert Spencer), nor by the mysterium tremendum (Otto), but by the mysterium feminium -a mysterium tremendum indeed, but scarcely that which Otto contemplated. In adult life we forget the umbilical cord and the nursing; similarly religion has now almost everywhere left far behind its biological beginnings.

    They just don't write them like that anymore.

    The article fits perfectly as an illustration of the excesses of using prehistoric evidence from archaeology as a strut for interpreting the evolution of behavior, which is why I'm citing it. The article as a whole is less foolish-sounding than the abstract, rooted in exposition of the archaeological record of "ritual" then known. These aspects of the archaeological record were often wishful thinking, but that wasn't Barton's fault.

    References

    1. Barton GA. The Palæolithic Beginnings of Religion-An Interpretation. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society [Internet]. 1940;82:pp. 131-149. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/985012
    Tags: 
    religion
    ritual
    sex
    magic

  • Baldness genetics

    Sun, 2012-03-25 17:29 -- John Hawks

    I've been doing some literature research on the genetics of baldness. Yes, I'm trying to work out what we can say about Neandertal phenotypes, if you're wondering. I share part of my androgen receptor gene with the Vindija Neandertals, and so I'm interested.

    Anyway, I was reading today a new paper that suggests the involvement of prostaglandin D2 in male pattern hair loss [1]. The paper gives a good, dense account of what is known about the mechanism:

    In AGA, large “terminal” hair follicles forming thick hair shafts miniaturize over time to small follicles that generate microscopic effete hairs (8). Follicle miniaturization is accompanied by a decrease in the duration of the growing phase of the follicle (anagen), which normally lasts several years to produce hair more than 1 m long, but which decreases to only days or weeks in AGA. This results in an increase in the percentage of resting (telogen) hair follicles containing microscopic hairs in bald scalp (4). In addition to these intrinsic changes to the hair follicle, infiltrating lymphocytes and mast cells have been identified around the miniaturizing follicle (9), especially in the area of the stem cell–rich bulge area (10). Sebaceous glands, which attach to each follicle, hypertrophy in bald scalp (8). In balding scalp, the number of hair follicle stem cells remains intact, whereas the number of more actively proliferating progenitor cells markedly decreases (11). This suggests that balding scalp either lacks an activator or has an inhibitor of hair follicle growth.

    The paper itself focuses on the molecular mechanism at work in a mouse model, and does not examine the genetics of risk within human samples. So no targets for me to look at yet. But the role of prostaglandins in sex development might have something to do with the reason male pattern baldness is such a common polymorphism in human populations worldwide.

    References

    1. Garza LA, Liu Y, Yang Z, Alagesan B, Lawson JA, Norberg SM, Loy DE, Zhao T, Blatt HB, Stanton DC, et al. Prostaglandin D2 Inhibits Hair Growth and Is Elevated in Bald Scalp of Men with Androgenetic Alopecia. Science translational medicine. 2012;4(126):126ra34.
    Tags: 
    hair
    sex
    development
    testosterone
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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.