Origines de la musique / Evolution actuelle de l'humain

Lu dans la presse :

"Investigators at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, scanned monkey brains while the rhesus macaques listened to either drumming or monkey calls. They found overlapping networks activated in the temporal lobe, which in humans is key to processing meaning in both speech and vision.

"Monkeys respond to drumming sounds as they would to vocalizations," researcher Christoph Kayser, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, told LiveScience. "Hence, drumming originated as a form of expression or communication, possibly in an ancestral species common to apes and old-world monkeys, early during primate evolution."

(...)

The researchers suggest primate drumming might represent a precursor of musical abilities in humans.

The fact that vocal and nonvocal communication have common origins in the brain in monkeys could support the notion that both co-evolved "to support the human faculties of language and music," he added. "This also provides evolutionary support for the gestural theory of communication, which proposes that human speech and language developed from gestures and hand actions. We provide the functional link between gestural communication and vocal communication by identifying brain areas activated by sounds associated with gestures and vocalizations." " le reste de l'article est ici.

" Shorter, heavier women tended to have more children, on average, than taller, lighter ones. Women with lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels likewise reared more children, and – not surprisingly – so did women who had their first child at a younger age or who entered menopause later. Strikingly, these traits were passed on to their daughters, who in turn also had more children.

If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today." (le reste de l'article est ici)

" The guesswork becomes even murkier when it comes to figuring out why genetic coding linked to redheadedness and lighter skin color is becoming more prevalent among Asians. "Our species is evolving like crazy in pigmentation in different ways in different populations, presumably because of the same underlying selection pressures," Hawks said.

Hawks doesn't think the vitamin D factor alone can explain why skin color is being affected by natural selection. Some theorists, including Charles Darwin himself, have suggested that sexual selection may be at work - that having lighter skin somehow improves an individual's reproductive prospects. But in this more evolved age, voicing that kind of view can make your typical researcher sound like a Neanderthal." (suite de l'article ici et son blog ici)