Separating 'us' from 'them': Neanderthal and modern human behavior

Neanderthal and Denisovan retroviruses in modern humans

distribution of the surrounding downwelling light. Deep-sea fishes that have instead evolved to detect bioluminescent point sources have eyes constructed accordingly, typically having a high spatial resolution provided by a retinal area of tightly packed visual cells arranged in a deep pit-like fovea. Their eyes, though, are often quite small, with pupils only as large as necessary to detect po...

Neanderthal genomics and the evolution of modern humans.

Humans possess unique physical and cognitive characteristics relative to other primates. Comparative analyses of the human and chimpanzee genomes are beginning to reveal sequence changes on the human lineage that may have contributed to the evolution of human traits. However, these studies cannot identify the genetic differences that distinguish modern humans from archaic human species. Here, I...

Robots Show Us How to Teach Them: Feedback from Robots Shapes Tutoring Behavior during Action Learning

Robot learning by imitation requires the detection of a tutor's action demonstration and its relevant parts. Current approaches implicitly assume a unidirectional transfer of knowledge from tutor to learner. The presented work challenges this predominant assumption based on an extensive user study with an autonomously interacting robot. We show that by providing feedback, a robot learner influe...

First Them, Then Us

Anatomy, Behavior, and Modern Human Origins

The fossil record suggests that modern human morphology evolved in Africa between 150,000 and 50,000 years ago, when the sole inhabitants of Eurasia were the Neanderthals and other equally nonmodern people. However, the earliest modern or near-modern Africans were behaviorally (archaeologically) indistinguishable from their nonmodern, Eurasian contemporaries, and it was only around 50,000-40,00...