Saturday Quotes: Armadillos are everywhere; Neanderthals still surprise anthropologists; children are egalitarian

The coolest news of the week is anthropological research that combines cutting-edge imaging technology, medical diagnostics, genetics, and sociology. We’ve covered the implications of a black hole in an expanding universe and the eternal question researchers like to ask about children: Are they really good people? We could go back to that, but current research comes down to “yeah, pretty good, we think.” Also: forget everything you knew about armadillos, the Abrams reservoir of mammals.

Neanderthals were kind, anthropologists say

A multidisciplinary team of anthropologists has reported the first discovery of skeletal remains of a Neanderthal child with Down syndrome in a cave in Valencia, Spain. The discovery has major implications for Neanderthal social life and sheds light on the altruism of archaic humans. CT scans of the child’s right temporal bone showed a congenital malformation of the inner ear associated with Down syndrome. The child, whom the researchers named Tina, survived until she was about six years old but would have required extensive adult care.

Researchers have known for decades that Neanderthals provided care to disabled adults, sparking debate over whether this was altruistic care or a reciprocal exchange of help between equals. But the new discovery concerns the case of an individual who received help even though he could not reciprocate.

Taxonomy elucidated

There are a lot of gardeners in my family, so I grew up under the influence of people who really hated armadillos, who would dig up my aunt’s root vegetables with what she describes as “their ugly little noses.” She installed a chain-link fence around the garden years ago, but she’s still quick to point out that they’re the only species, other than humans, that can carry Hansen’s disease. The state animal of Texas, ladies and gentlemen!

For a long time, researchers considered nine-banded armadillos to be the most widespread invasive armadillo species in the United States, but a new study by a multi-institutional research group reveals that these types actually represent four species genetically distinct, including one that is completely new to biology.

By collecting an unusually large sample of nine-banded armadillos, the team was able to identify differences in physical characteristics and DNA across the vast range of the American cohort of armadillos. The nine-banded armadillo, now called Dasypus mexicanus, has three subspecies that have been elevated to separate species; a fourth, found in northeastern South America, is no longer considered a relative and is now called Dasypus guianensis. These species have very similar morphological characteristics and are difficult to distinguish in the field.

An increasingly vast universe

A new paper posits that a closed universe must have a constant, positive energy density. Therefore, the Hubble parameters at the event horizon of each centrally symmetric black hole must be equal, black holes do not expand with the expansion of the universe and different parts of the universe expand at different paces. Nikodem Popławski, a distinguished professor at the University of New Haven, explains that according to Einstein’s equations, the only energy at the event horizon of a black hole is dark energy, the unknown force that drives the universal expansion. Popławski develops the original concept of a black hole, which at the beginning of the 20th century was assumed to be a perfectly round object in an unchanging universe.

But the discovery in the 1990s of the accelerating expansion of the universe required a rethinking of this model, and Popławski’s calculations were based on a massive, centrally symmetric object in an expanding universe. His paper shows that the statistically significant discrepancy in measurements of the rate of acceleration of universal expansion (the “Hubble voltage”) is “a natural consequence of a correct analysis of the space-time of a hole black in an expanding universe within the framework of Einstein’s general theory of relativity”, and therefore accurately reflects the fact that regions of the universe are expanding at different rates.

Children are nice, like Neanderthals

Are children capable of egalitarian behavior? I mean, yes, obviously they are, as anyone who grew up with fairness-obsessed siblings can attest. But there’s something about altruistic human behavior that still makes researchers wonder whether children are also capable of exhibiting similar traits, which somehow suggests an implicit bias among researchers when it comes to empathic potential children. Did a child steal money from his purse? Regardless, a multi-institutional collaboration of researchers reports in Child development that children notice inequalities in classrooms and are motivated to correct teachers’ unequal or biased treatment of their peers.

They focused on white and Latino children, because they make up the largest majority and largest ethnic and racial minority in the region in which they collected data, asking children ages eight and 14 about bias generated by teachers in assigning important leadership roles. They showed study participants images of a teacher selecting students for different leadership tasks in which only girls, boys, white students, or Latino students were selected.

Adolescents are more likely than children to view inequality in teacher assignments negatively in the context of between-group inequalities: favoring White students over Latino students is viewed more negatively than equality in assignments. However, both age groups feel negatively about the fact that no one from their group is chosen for leadership positions. The researchers believe their findings could contribute to new interventions aimed at creating fair and equitable classrooms.

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