Have you ever wondered why?

A German researcher at the University of Bamberg with the unlikely-yet-oddly-appropriate name of Claus-Christian Carbon did, and the results of his study were recently published in the journal Acta Psychologica under the title “The cycle of preference: Long-term dynamics of aesthetic appreciation.”

Carbon suggests that two basic but somewhat conflicting human tendencies influence our reaction to automobile designs: a natural inclination to prefer curved objects, and a fascination with the new.

Normally, humans avoid sharp objects, because sharp objects—fangs, claws, knives, thorns—can hurt us. Rhinoceroses are more alarming than hippos, for example.

Indeed, MRI studies have found that the amygdala, a brain structure activated by fear-inducing stimuli, “lights up” more when sharp-edged objects are in view than when rounded ones are.

But we have another natural inclination, which is to take notice of the new and unexpected. Place a black obelisk like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey in a field full of tulips, and our attention will be drawn to the sharp-edged obelisk rather than the flowers.

The ebb and flow of curviness and sharpness in car design vocabulary (“Formensprache” is the wonderful German word) is a result of these conflicting impulses, Carbon suggests.

For his research, he had four different groups of participants rate car models from 1950 to 1999, but he primed each group a little differently. In the first study, participants, who were asked to rate curvature, complexity, quality, innovation and security, were given no historical context: they didn’t know when the cars were built.

In the second study, historical context was provided, so the viewers knew what era the cars originated from, the goal being to identify what Carbon calls “Zietgeist-dependent” effects. In a third study, before being shown the cars from 1950 to 1999, participants were first shown futuristic concept cars; in the fourth, participants were first shown highly angular historical cars.

In the third study, where the participants were first shown futuristic cars before being shown models from the past 50 years, the “shock of the new” influenced their opinion: they rated cars from the past 15 years as being lower in innovation and also didn’t like them as much as participants who weren’t first shown concept cars. “We experience similar cognitive processes when coming back from influential international motor shows in Frankfurt, Tokyo or Detroit,” Carbon says:  suddenly everyday cars look old-fashioned…no matter what their curvature.

So: our natural preference for curvy cars can be overcome by the novelty factor of sharp-edged cars. But after a few years of boxy cars, curvy ones, which we naturally prefer anyway, begin to look fresh again…and so car designers and buyers move back toward them.  As Carbon puts it, “The evolutionary program (favouring curves) is always running, but on top of it can be running a cultural program,” which favors innovation.

Interestingly, that cultural program seems to be running faster: Carbon says the cycle in car design between curvy to sharp and back again is speeding up. He says that while it used to take 50 years for car designs to swing between rounded and boxy, now it’s more like 20 years: in fact, he predicts an increase in sharply angled cars in the coming decade.

Oddly enough, sharp-edged designs’ association with things that can hurt us may be part of their appeal. The amygdala lights up, warning us, but we know there’s not really anything to fear from a car’s sharp edges: it becomes a safe thrill, like the thrill we get on a rollercoaster.

Ultimately, this explains more about human nature than just how we like our cars to look, of course. As Carbon puts it, “although humans might generally be pre-shaped by evolution to prefer specific properties preventing them from danger, they are specifically shaped to explore innovative and challenging properties.”

And, he adds, the push-and-pull between those conflicting impulses may ultimately explain why humans are both so successful in designing objects, and in adapting to them.

Well, as breaking as any news can be when it deals with something that’s been around for half a billion years.

Onions have always made humans cry, or at least for as long as humans have been eating them, which seems to be a long time indeed—so far back in pre-history that we can’t even say for sure where onions originated. Central Asia? Iran?  West Pakistan?

In any event, once humans started farming, onions were quite likely one of their very first crops. As I wrote in my column back in 2008, “They’re less perishable than many others, can be easily transported, and will grow in a variety of soils and climates. They’re full of water, so they help prevent thirst, but they can also be dried and stored for eating later when food is scarce.

“Chinese gardens had onions 5,000 years ago. The Egyptians, for whom the onion symbolized eternity, buried them with their Pharaohs and frequently depicted them in religious imagery. Onions are mentioned in the Bible The ancient Greeks fed onions to athletes to fortify them for the Olympic Games.

“Onions were a staple in the Middle Ages in Europe, and the first Europeans brought onions with them to North America—only to discover the First Nations people were already using onions in a variety of ways.”

But even while humans were eating onions, they were crying about it. That’s because breaking open the cells of an onion releases enzymes that decompose some of the other substances that escape from the broken cells. That produces sulfenic acids, which escape the onion as a volatile gas.

This gas reacts with the water in your eyes, and among the products of that reaction is a mild sulphuric acid, and very irritating. Irritated eyes produce extra tears in an effort to wash away or at least dilute whatever it is that’s irritating them.

But…why do our eyes find sulphuric acid, or any other kind of chemical, irritating in the first place?

That’s where the new research, reported in the March 17 issue of the science magazine Nature, provides enlightenment.

In order for chemical irritation to occur, a protein has to sense the offending chemical and send a signal to your nervous system that the brain interprets as pain. The protein that does this is called TRPA1, and scientists have discovered that this very same protein is present in fruit flies, and serves exactly the same purpose. Not only that, the researchers (from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.), think the protein could date back so far in evolutionary history that it was present in the common ancestor of all the creatures in the animal kingdom.

“While many aspects of other chemical senses like taste and smell have been independently invented multiple times over the course of animal evolution, the chemical sense that detects these reactive compounds…uses a detector we have inherited in largely unaltered form from an organism that lived a half-billion years ago,” says study author Paul Garrity.

What kind of organism? Something primitive and marine: a worm, a sponge, or something like a sea cucumber.

Using statistics and computers, a process called bioinformatics, the researcher compared various versions of TRPA1 in assorted organisms today and figuring out how those variations relate to each other evolutionarily. They believe that the branch of the animal kingdom containing TRPA1 split off about 500 million years ago, and “since that time…most animals, including humans, have maintained this same ancient system for detecting reactive chemicals.”

Something that has stuck around that long obviously has important survival benefits, and indeed TRPA1 allows organisms to avoid harmful compounds potentially present in food, fumes or liquid.

Knowing more about TRPA1 could potentially lead to drugs that could turn off its function, helping to treat pain and inflammation in humans.

But never mind that. Personally, I just find it cool to imagine a giant herbivorous dinosaur, something the length of an airliner, chowing down on a field of onions…and crying the same tears I do when I slice them for a stir-fry.

The fact is, we’re all influenced by the people around us…and we often think of that influence as a bad thing.

As the Bible puts it, “Evil companions corrupt good morals.” And other kinds of companions can have other effects.

For instance, an analysis of 12,067 people that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 revealed that you are more likely to be obese if your best friend is obese. (Overstuffed siblings or spouses also makes a difference, but the greatest negative effect comes from fat friends.)

To a certain extent, it seems, obesity is a kind of societal disease, rather like the mysterious fainting disorders Victorian women seemed to be heir to, or the bizarre disorder koro, which in South China convinces men that their genitals are shrinking inward and they will die once they disappear.

Which they don’t, of course, but the affliction is real even if the symptoms are imagined.

High anxiety, depression, anorexia and bulimia are also contagious, and if you believe all these things are being foisted upon us by a secret government agency, perhaps you have fallen prey to another contagious state of mind, paranoia.

But not all social contagions are bad.

Back around Christmas of 2008 I wrote a column on the discovery that happiness is contagious, spreading rather like influenza. It seemed a particularly fitting column for the holiday season…and the newest research along those lines seems particularly fitting for a post-holiday column, because now comes word that self-control is also contagious.

At the University of Georgia, psychology professor Michelle vanDellen and colleagues were able to measure the effect in the laboratory, through a variety of studies over two years.

In one, they randomly assigned 36 volunteers to think about a friend with either good or bad self-control. They found that those thinking about a friend with good self-control squeezed a handgrip (a standard method of measuring self-control, since you have to force yourself to keep squeezing it as your hand gets more and more tired) longer than those who were asked to think about a friend who had poor self-control.

In a second test, 71 volunteers were again randomly assigned to either watch other people exert self-control by choosing to eat a carrot rather than a cookie when presented with both options, or fail to exert self-control by eating a cookie rather than a carrot. The mere act of watching those acts of good and bad self-control altered the volunteers’ performances on a later test of self-control.

In a third experiment, 42 volunteers were randomly assigned to list friends with both good and bad self-control. Then, as they were working their way through a computerized test designed to measure self-restraint, the computer would flash, for just 10 milliseconds–too fast to be read, but enough to bring the names to mind–the names of those friends. Volunteers who were flashed the name of a self-disciplined friend did better on the test than those who were flashed the name of a non-self-disciplined friend.

VanDellen believes that the influence is great enough that hanging around with friends who exhibit self-control could help us keep from eating an extra high-calorie snack at a party, or drive us to go to the gym for a workout at the end of a hard day at work. It’s only a nudge, but sometimes a nudge is all that’s needed.

And just why are we so susceptible to peer pressure?

Because we’re primates, and, as science writer Meredith F. Small puts it, “A primate’s day is all about everyone else.”

Chimpanzees and other primates spend all their time touching each other, keeping track of each other, and building interpersonal relationships…and in a very real sense, so do we. We are constantly influenced by those around us…and influence them, in turn.

Rather alarming, if you ask me. I think I’ll just sit in my office from now on and not talk to anyone.

I wouldn’t want to catch anything.

At which point a large percentage of us screamed and ran the other way, because surveys show that one fifth of men and a third of women are frightened of arachnids.

It makes sense, right? Spiders can be poisonous.

But so are stinging insects such as bees and wasps, and yet we seem to hate spiders more. At the University of Wurzburg, Germany, psychologist Georg Alpers asked 76 students to rate photos of spiders, wasps, bees, beetles, butterflies and moths on how much fear and disgust they inspired and how dangerous they were. Spiders topped the list in all three categories—even though all bees can sting, but only some spiders are poisonous.

So are we born with a fear of spiders, or is it something we learn, something that perhaps, as Stuart Hine, an entomologist at London’s Natural History Museum, told New Scientist magazine “stems back to the days of plagues when people suspected anything that crawled out of the thatch as carrying disease.”

Certainly we seem to be born with the ability to recognize spiders over other objects. Recently New Scientist reported on the research of David Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who showed five-month-old babies simple representations of spiders, made up of block-like shapes, plus other, more jumbled, images made of the same shapes.

He found that the babies looked at the “spiders” for an average of 24 seconds, but at the jumbled images for only around 16 seconds—a full eight seconds less. That suggests babies are born with a “mental template” for spider shapes, and possibly for other things that could harm us (snakes comes to mind).

For safe objects, however, no such template seems to exist. Rakison repeated his experiment with a representation of a flower. The babies didn’t spend any more time looking at that than they did looking at the images made with jumbled shapes.

Now New Scientist has reported on a new study by Rakison, one that suggests not only that fear of spiders is something that is learned sometime after birth, but also suggests women learn that fear more readily than men—which explains why more women than men fear spiders.

This time Rakison worked with 11-month-olds. In the training phase of the test he showed 10 girls and 10 boys a picture of a spider alongside a fearful face. In the following phase he showed them the image of a spider alongside a happy face, and then the image of a flower paired with a fearful face.

He found that even when the spider was paired with a happy face, the girls looked at it significantly longer than at the flower, which he interpreted as meaning that after the initial phase, the girls had already learned to link spiders with fear. The boys, on the other hand, spent the same amount of time looking at both images: they hadn’t made that assumption.

With a different group of babies, Rakison skipped the training phase featuring the spider with the fearful face, and simply showed them a spider with a happy face and a flower with a fearful face. This time both boys and girls looked at the images for the same length of time.

That implies both that babies don’t have an inborn fear of spiders and that girls are more prone than boys to develop that fear.

Rakison thinks girls may be more inclined than boys to learn to fear all kinds of dangerous animals, a gender difference which may have evolved during humanity’s long hunter-gatherer phase, when to be successful at hunting men had to be more willing to take risks, whereas women had to be good at avoiding dangerous animals, including spiders.

Acquiring, rather than being born with, a fear of spiders also makes sense, Rakison says, since there’s no point in an infant fearing spiders until it can respond to them in some way, by crawling away, for instance.

More mature responses include screaming, running, climbing on chairs or smashing the nasty little eight-legged monstrosity into paste with repeated blows of a…

Sorry. Got a little carried away.

Spiders. Yecch.

Why we find things funny has long been a matter of contention in the scientific world, probably because humor itself is so subjective. I think the preceding paragraph is funny. You might disagree. But now I can trump your disagreement with science: that paragraph is funny because it’s based on the surprise repetition of patterns.

Until recently, theories of humour have focused on what is technically known as “getting the joke.” Rather than looking at why people find things funny, they’ve looked at what people find funny.

But last year Alastair Clarke, a British evolutionary theorist (who, judging by his online photo, is a very serious man indeed) published the first universal theory of humour: the Pattern Recognition Theory.

According to Clarke, who is nothing if not confident, his theory “changes thousands of years of incorrect analyses and mini-theories that have applied to only a small proportion of instances of humour,” offering “a vital answer as to why humour exists in every human society.”

Clarke believes that humour occurs when the brain is surprised by the recognition of a pattern, and that the humourous response is a reward that encourages more pattern recognition in the future.

That award response has evolved, Clarke says, because “an ability to recognize patterns instantly and unconsciously” has been important to our species’ survival, helping us to quickly understand our environment and function effectively within it. He points out that language, which is unique to humans, is based on patterns.

Pattern recognition kicks in early, Clarke says, noting that children as young as four months old laugh at Peek-A-Boo. Peek-A-Boo involves surprise repetition: a clear, simple pattern that changes unexpectedly.

Many years later you may find that infant laughing at a stand-up comic…or the cast of Corner Gas, the hit Canadian TV comedy that wrapped up this week. Clarke refers to the “It’s so true” form of humor, in which audience members recognize the similarities between a situation and something they have their own mental image of, but are surprised to hear it described or see it acted out.

Clarke is continuing to explore and expand his theory. Just last month, he set out what he believes are the eight patterns that are the cause of all humor “that has ever been imagined or expressed, regardless of civilization, culture or personal taste” as a press release put it (in fairly grandiose terms).

The eight patterns break down into four “patterns of fidelity,” involving the recognition of units within the same context, and four “patterns of magnitude,” involving recognition of the same unit repeated in multiple contexts.

One pattern, and probably the most basic, is positive repetition: the “unit” (whatever pattern is being recognized, an image, an action, an object, a phrase, etc.) is repeated in a similar form with the same purpose. (Rodney Dangerfield’s “I don’t get no respect!”)

Another common pattern is scale: repeating the unit in an exaggerated format. (Throw one turkey out of a helicopter and you’ve got animal abuse. Thrown a dozen out while the news anchor shouts, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!” and you’ve got a classic comedy bit.)

For the benefit of those wishing to base their future joke-telling on sound scientific principles, the remaining patterns are division, completion, translation, applicative and qualitative recontextualization, and opposition.

Clarke says all human humour involves at least one of the eight forms of pattern recognition, and may involve multiple examples.

That being the case, can we use this universal theory to say, once and for all, whether or not I am funny?

Alas, no. “Pattern recognition remains a subjective matter, just like any other perception,” says Clarke.

In other words, what you find funny still won’t necessarily be what I find funny.

So you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you, I’m a very funny man.

Would I lie to you?

I say that just so you know I can’t personally vouch for the accuracy of the study that caught my eye this week.

The study, authored by Jeffrey Braithewaite of the University of New South Wales in Australia, just appeared in the Journal of Health Organisation and Management under the catchy title of “Lekking displays in contemporary organizations: Ethologically oriented, evolutionary and cross-species accounts of male dominance.”

The university’s press release was more succinct: “Why your boss is white, middle-class and a show-off.”

A lek (the word is Swedish for the kind of fun, free-form games children play) is a gathering of males, in certain species, for the purposes of competitive mating display.

According to the abstract of Braithwaite’s paper, “such lekking behavior involves…strutting, puffing out, catching attention via the use of ornamental physical characteristics, exhibiting gaudily-coloured body parts, singing or splashing, and other courting and wooing strategies.”

Lekking is particularly common among the various species of grouse, several of which are native to Saskatchewan. However, according to Braithwaite, it’s also common among another species we’re much more familiar with–us.

The paper’s abstract sums up his findings this way: “Within the organizational lek male managers display mainly by power dressing, positioning, and exercising power and influence via verbal and behavioural means. Social and religious mores prohibit overt sexual coupling in organizations but lekking for other rewards is nevertheless pursued by male managers.”

Braithwaite arrived at this conclusion after interviewing and observing hundreds of health workers over 15 years, and drawing on the archaeology and anthropology of the earliest known humans. Essentially he decided that much of what goes on within organizations (his particular focus was health organizations, but he thinks the results can be applied more widely) is the result of behaviours hard-wired into us by evolution.

These behaviours include male domination, people protecting their turf and ostracizing those who don’t agree with the group (including whistleblowers), and bullying.

“This tribal culture is similar to what we would have seen in hunter gatherer bands on the savannah in southern Africa,” Braithwaite says. “Groups were territorial in the past because it helped them survive. If you weren’t in a tight band, you didn’t get to pass on your genes.

“Such tribalism is not necessary in the same way now, yet we still have those characteristics because they have evolved over two million years.”

Some specific examples: male managers often combine a dark suit (to show how serious they are) with a pink shirt or bright tie to draw attention to themselvves (similar to male peacocks flaunting their tail feathers). They like to brag about their fancy cars and expensive gadgets. They have larger chairs than everyone else. They talk more loudly and interrupt more often. They like to use lots of management jargon and acronyms to set themselves apart. They spend most of the day in meetings, which they tend to dominate–and prefer to hold in their own offices, which are typically larger and nicer than everyone else’s, and which they jealously guard. (On the lek, male birds claim and defend a specific piece of land.)

Although the paper specifically compares these behaviours to lekking, it also points out that male chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys and Japanese macaques assert themselves in very similar ways.

And just to be fair, Braithwaite notes that although the study focused exclusively on men, he has found that some female managers become “Alpha females” to compete with men, while others adopt “a more team-oriented style.”

Knowing how hard-wired this behavior is is important, Braithwaite feels, because “we need to stop being simplistic and realize that changing behaviours and encouraging teamwork is much harder than we think.” Understanding “the unwritten rules which drive people” can help us recognize those rules and work round them.

Maintaining civilization, after all, is primarily a matter of working against the animal instincts that may have served our ancestors well but are counter-productive today.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I feel a sudden urge to go buy a bright-red tie.

Chlorophyll, it seems, may have been a relative latecomer.

Allow me to set the record straight: Neanderthals were none of the above.

Neanderthals were a type of human that lived between 350,000 and 27,000 years ago, mostly in Europe. They get their name from the Neander Valley (in German, “thal”) near Dusseldorf, where German workmen discovered a strange skeleton in 1856.

Charles Darwin hadn’t published his theory of evolution yet suggesting that humans might have evolved from a different ancestral form, so the prevailing opinion at the time was that the strange-looking bones were those of an ordinary human afflicted with rickets in childhood and arthritis later in life, who had also suffered deforming blows to the head.

Then more skeletons were discovered, evolution became an accepted notion, and scientists realized Neanderthals were an earlier race of human–though quite different from us.

Neanderthals had short powerful limbs, stocky trunks and a wide-hipped, knock-kneed stance. (Short limbs are characteristic of humans who live in extremely cold climates; they provide less surface area from which heat can escape.) They were very strong: a Neanderthal of the same height as a modern human would weigh 20 pounds more, all of it muscle. (Which means, as one writer put it, a Neanderthal man could pick up an NFL lineman and throw him between the goalposts.)

The wide hips were necessary to allow the birth of babies with large heads: Neanderthals’ brains were, on average, larger than our own. (So much for being stupid.) They were protected by a skull with a shelf-like ridge over the eyes. Neanderthals also had a pronounced nose bridge, large, round nostrils, a protruding jaw with no chin, and large teeth.

The negative popular impression of Neanderthals can be traced back to the work of French paleontologist Marcellin Broule, who said Neanderthals had ape-like feet, could not fully extend their legs, and had to thrust their heads awkwardly forward because their spines prevented them from standing upright. His reconstruction gave us our stereotypical cartoon caveman, with bad posture, sloping forehead, and knuckles almost dragging on the ground.

Now we know that the skeleton Broule worked from belonged to an old man crippled by arthritis: healthy Neanderthals walked just as upright as we do. And while they may have sometimes lived in caves, they also lived in tents, cared for their sick and elderly, conducted burial ceremonies and created tools and ornaments…just like our own branch of humanity.

But how closely related are we? Ancient DNA from Neanderthal remains differs significantly from our own. This supports the “Out of Africa” theory, which argues that all modern humans are descendants of early modern humans that arose in Africa 200,000 years ago, and over the next 160,000 years or so displaced all other types of humans, including the Neanderthals, all over the world.

A competing theory, the “multiregional evolution” theory, argues that humans first left Africa one to two million years ago, and spawned various archaic human populations, including the Neanderthals, who then evolved into modern humans within their own geographic regions; later out-migrations from Africa interbred with these local populations, so that today, supporters of this theory claim, characteristics of archaic human populations can still be found in modern humans in the regions where those archaic humans lived. As for the differences between Neanderthal DNA and ours, well, they point out that DNA from modern humans from the same era also differs considerably from ours.

Still, the Out-of-Africa theory is the most widely accepted. If it’s true, then we have to wonder, “What happened to the Neanderthals?” By 27,000 years ago they were all gone.

One theory has been that perhaps Neanderthals were unable to use tools as effectively as modern humans—but that theory was shot down last week, thanks to research conducted by Wesley Niewoehner at California State University in San Bernadino. He scanned epoxy casts of the thumb and index finger bones of a Neanderthal skeleton found in 1909 in La Ferrasie, France, in order to produce three-dimensional computer models. The computer determined that the Neanderthal hand had at least as much dexterity as that of modern humans, even though it was much more heavily muscled than modern human hands, and had broad finger tips.

Other theories: perhaps Neanderthals weren’t as inventive as modern humans; maybe they lacked language skills. Perhaps modern humans were better at finding food, or maybe they introduced diseases the Neanderthals had little immunity to. Or maybe the modern humans simply banded together and slaughtered the Neanderthals wherever they came into conflict.

Whatever happened, the Neanderthals are gone—and since they were stronger than us, and probably just as smart, that’s a sobering thought.

In another 25,000 years, will anything be left of us?

Of course, if we said this about any existing group of humans–expatriate Texans, for instance–we would be accused of being racist. Neanderthals, alas, cannot seek redress for libel, being all dead, but allow me to put the record straight: they were none of the above.

Neanderthals were a type of human that lived between 200,000 and 27,000 years ago, mostly in Europe. They get their name from the Neander Valley (in German, “thal”) near Dusseldorf, where German workmen discovered a strange skeleton in 1856.

Charles Darwin hadn’t published The Origin of Species, so the notion that humans might have evolved from a different ancestral form didn’t cross most people’s minds. The prevailing opinion was that the bones were those of a modern human afflicted with rickets in childhood and arthritis later in life, who had also suffered deforming blows to the head.

Then more skeletons were discovered, evolution became an accepted notion, and scientists realized Neanderthals were an earlier race of human–though quite different from us.

Neanderthals had short powerful limbs, stocky trunks and a wide-hipped, knock-kneed stance. (Short limbs are characteristic of humans who live in extremely cold climates; they provide less surface area from which heat can escape.) They were very strong: a Neanderthal of the same height as a modern human would weigh 20 pounds more, all of it muscle. (Which means, as one writer put it, a Neanderthal man could pick up an NFL lineman and throw him between the goalposts.)

The wide hips were necessary to allow the birth of babies with large heads. Yes, Neanderthal babies had large heads: despite the modern inclination to equate “Neanderthal” with stupid, Neanderthals’ brains were, on average, larger than our own.

Those large brains were protected by a skull with a shelf-like ridge over the eyes. Neanderthals had a pronounced nose bridge, large, round nostrils, a protruding jaw with no chin, and large teeth.

Popular impressions of Neanderthals as stupid brutes can be traced back to the work of French paleontologist Marcellin Broule, who said Neanderthals had prehensile feet (like apes), could not fully extend their legs, and had to thrust their heads awkwardly forward because their spines prevented them from standing upright. Illustrations based on his reconstruction gave us the stereotypical “caveman,” with his bad posture, large club, and tendency to drag women around by the hair.

Now we know that the skeleton Broule worked from belonged to an old man crippled by arthritis: healthy Neanderthals walked just as upright as we do. And while they may have sometimes lived in caves, they also lived in tents, cared for their sick and elderly, conducted burial ceremonies and created tools and ornaments. In other words, they had every bit as much on the ball as Cro-Magnon Man, our direct ancestors.

Which raises the question: what happened to them? Cro-Magnon Man is still here: he’s us. But Neanderthals disappeared not long after Cro-Magnons moved into their territory.

That question is as hotly debated as any in science. Some scientists say nothing happened to the Neanderthals: they mingled with Cro-Magnon Man and disappeared into the general population. Unfortunately, the fossil record doesn’t support this: even in areas where Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals co-existed, there doesn’t seem to have been any mixing.

That brings up another possibility: that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, though equally “human,” were biologically distinct species. Anthropologists are divided on this subject into two camps: the “lumpers,” who would lump Neanderthals in with us as one species, and the “splitters,” who feel the Neanderthals were a different species. New research supports the splitters: an analysis of the nasal structures of five Neanderthals revealed far more extensive differences from ordinary humans than would be expected within the same species.

If Neanderthals were a different species, maybe that’s why they vanished. Maybe they weren’t as inventive as homo sapiens, or lacked language. Maybe the better-adapted homo sapiens ate up all the available food, or (knowing humans) simply slaughtered them. Or perhaps homo sapiens brought in new diseases.

Whatever happened, the Neanderthals are gone; a warning to us. They were smart, they were strong, and it wasn’t enough.

If we’re not careful, we may be the ones whose disappearance will be a topic of academic debate a few millennia hence.

Here’s hoping we don’t also end up a synonym for nasty and brutish.

When people think of science, they think of physics or chemistry or astronomy, of particle accelerators, of racks of test tubes or giant telescopes. They don’t think of taxonomy; yet this less-than-glamorous science is at the heart of modern biology.

Taxonomy is not, as you might suppose, the scientific study of taxes. Instead it’s the science of classifying living organisms into hierarchical groups that represent the relationships among them. It’s been going on since the first humans started calling some living things “birds” and other living things “fish” to distinguish between them.

The ancient Jews had quite an extensive taxonomic system to help decide which animals could and could not be eaten. Aristotle resolved the living world into 14 groups, such as mammals and birds, and then arranged creatures within the groups according to size–ignoring an enormous range of other characteristics.

A 17th-century English naturalist, John Ray, was the first to try to classify living things based on their anatomical similarities, because, as he put it, “When men do not know the names and properties of natural objects…they cannot see and record accurately.”

However, the most famous taxonomist (which isn’t quite the oxymoron it may appear) was the 18th century Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, who founded the modern science of taxonomy by writing Systema Naturae. (Since he wrote in Latin, he’s better known by his Latinized surname, Linnaeus.)

Linnaeus invented many of the names that are still used today to describe the hierarchy of nature. The fundamental group is the “species.” Related species are grouped into a “genus.” Thus, horses and zebras are two different species, but they belong to the same genus, Equus. (Partly because Linnaeus wrote in Latin and partly because Latin, as a dead language, does not change, the scientific names of creatures are usually Latin or, at least, Latinized.)

Related genera, such as the asses and onagers, are grouped together into “families”–in this case, the Family Equidae. Equidae is then grouped with two other families, the rhinoceroses and the tapirs, to make up an “order,” Perissodactyla, the odd-toed ungulates. (All of these animals have either one or three toes per foot.)

Perissodactyla and all the other orders of hair-covered, milk-producing animals are grouped together in a “class,” Mammalia. Mammals are then grouped with the classes of other backboned animals, such as reptiles, into a “subphylum,” Vertebrata, which is part of the “phylum” Chordata, containing all animals which have a nerve chord at some time in their life cycle.

Finally, the Chordata are placed with all the other phyla of living creatures that are multicellular and “heterotrophic” (meaning they have to eat), into a “kingdom,” Animalia.

Each species has a two-word name. The first word is the genus; the second is species-specific. Thus, the common European starling goes by the scientific name of Sturnus vulgaris, Sturnus being the genus of starlings and vulgaris meaning “common.”

(These names aren’t written in stone. As classifications are revised or updated in the light of new data, the name may change. For example, Linnaeus designated the bluebell as Hyacinthus non-scriptus. Since then it has also been known as Agraphis festalis, Scilla festalis, Scilla non-scripta, Scilla nutans, Endymion non-scriptus, Hyacinthoides non-scripta and, currently, Scilla non-scripta again.)

Darwin saw in the successful Linnaean system further evidence for his theory of evolution, and neatly turned Linnaeus’s hierarchy into evolutionary trees. (Linnaeus himself believed his classifications were revealing the work of the Creator.) The explanation of why some organisms are more closely related than others is called systematics.

Today there is more than one approach to taxonomy. Traditional, or evolutionary, taxonomy, is based on Darwin’s feeling that classification should represent the genealogy of the organism. Gaining ground today is the cladistic system, introduced by German biologist William Hennig in the 1960s in an attempt to turn the “art” of taxonomy into more of a true, methodological science.

Cladists emphasize classifying creatures solely on the basis of their particular characteristics, without reference to how they may have evolved. Fossils can be classified using this same approach, but cladistic taxonomists avoid designating any particular fossil as an ancestor of a living form, because there is no objective way of knowing all the features a living ancestral form would have had.

Another method of classification called phenetics makes use of computers to compare vast numbers of characteristics to assess similarity. In this approach even the absence of a characteristic in two organisms counts as a similarity.

Maybe this all sounds a bit dry, and maybe that’s why taxonomy is not a glamorous science. But taxonomy really is the underpinning of biology, and its importance is thus hard to overstate.

As Robert M. May, an English zoologist, puts it, “Without taxonomy to give shape to the bricks, and systematics to tell us how to put them together, the house of biological science is a meaningless jumble.”

And as Tim T. Tokaryk, Paul C. James and John E. Storer, curators at the Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History, recently wrote in a letter to the Leader-Post: “If we ask how many species are near extinction in the rain-forests or what effect global warming has on various ecosystems, we must first find out which species, extinct and extant, there are. This is the job of a taxonomist.”

It may not be a glamorous job, but somebody has to do it!