1. Investigation of Neanderthal skeletons, reveals abundant evidence of traumati
ID: 295796 • Letter: 1
Question
1. Investigation of Neanderthal skeletons, reveals abundant evidence of traumatic injuries associated with rough terrain. What is the significance of this? How did the scientific method help to resolve issues created by the misinterpretation of the first Neanderthal fossils?
2. Among female nonhuman primates, dominance may be related to reproductive success, may play a role in determining the number of offspring a female may have, and may be related to slower or faster maturation rates. How does “Life History Theory” help us to understand this?
3. What is meant by the term “half-life” when talking about decaying isotopes?
Explanation / Answer
Q1)
Ans :
In 1856, a group of quarrymen discovered remnants of a skeleton in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany (hence their name). In a limestone cave, they found 16 pieces of bone, including a skull. Thinking the bones belonged to a bear, the quarrymen gave them to local teacher Johan Karl Fuhlrott. From him, the bones found their way to scientists, and it was eventually determined that they were ancient human relatives. The publication and popularization of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species" in 1859 helped inform the discovery. Since that day in the Neander Valley, more than 400 Neanderthal bones have been found.
Human-Neanderthal interbreeding :
Probably the most debated aspect of Neanderthal life in recent years is whether or not they interbred with other human species. The answer remains ambiguous, with scholarly opinions ranging from belief that they definitely interbred to belief that the two groups didn't exist on Earth at the same time.
Neanderthal expert Erik Trinhaus has long promoted the interbreeding hypothesis, but the theory really caught fire when a 2010 study published in Science magazine determined that Neanderthal DNA is 99.7 percent identical to modern human DNA (a chimp's is 99.8 percent identical). Researchers of the Neanderthal Genome Project found that 2.5 percent of an average non-African human's genome is made up of Neanderthal DNA. The average modern African has no Neanderthal DNA. This information could support the interbreeding hypothesis because it suggests that Neanderthals and other species only bred once the other humans had moved out of Africa, into Eurasia, according to a 2012 paper published in the journal PLOS. They could have interbred as recently as 37,000 years ago.
Recent research published in the October 2017 issue of American Journal of Human Genetics found that genomes of modern human groups originating outside Africa contain between 1.8 and 2.6 percent Neanderthal DNA. "Neandertal DNA is one source of variation for many traits in modern humans," study lead author Michael Dannemann, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Live Science. [Your Hair Color and Sleep Habits May Come from Neanderthals.
Q3)
Ans : Half life of Isotopes,
Symbol is t1?2 is the time required for a quantity to reduce to half its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo, or how long stable atoms survive, radioactive decay. The term is also used more generally to characterize any type of exponential or non-exponential decay. For example, the medical sciences refer to the biological half-life of drugs and other chemicals in the human body. The converse of half-life is doubling time.
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