#christopher stringer

Apple patent application reveals ear wingtips for AirPods and EarPods

“In September, Patently Apple posted a report about Apple winning four design patents in Hong Kong regarding AirPod ear hook tips,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple. “Beyond design patents, today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple relating to this future product titled ‘Earphone Assemblies with Wingtips for Anchoring to a user.'”

“While…

Veteran Apple industrial designer Christopher Stringer leaving the company

“Long time Apple industrial designer Christopher Stringer is leaving the company in another shakeup to Apple’s vaunted design team,” Reed Albergotti reports for The Information.

“Mr. Stringer, who was at Apple for 21 years, was involved in the first iPhones and iPads and has a rare semi-public profile,” Albergotti reports. “He was a key witness in Apple’s years-long legal case against…

An interview from the NY times with Chris Stringer one of the worlds foremost paleoanthropologists working at the Natural History Museum in London.

Some of you might remember him from this previous post here on Sweet Science. A brilliant interview with him from edge.org.

Here is a link to the longer article in print.

excerpts:

First of all, would you explain the title of your new book?

Yes, the title is “Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth.” And this comes from the fact that if we went back 100,000 years, which is very recent, geologically speaking, there might have been as many as six different kinds of humans on the earth. All those other kinds have disappeared, and left us as the sole survivors.

How does the discovery in Indonesia, on the island of Flores, fit in with current thinking about human migrations and lineage? Are the so-called hobbits really members of our genus Homo?

The hobbit, Homo floresiensis, is a really challenging find for everyone. There’s still a minority of scientists who don’t accept that it is a distinct human species; it’s some kind of a weird, maybe diseased form of modern human. But I think it is a genuine distinct form, and actually a very primitive form.

It’s either derived from a very primitive form of Homo erectus, maybe similar to the ones at Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, or it’s evidence of an earlier Africa exit, maybe before two million years ago, by something that’s pre-erectus that somehow got all the way over to the Far East and survived there in isolation, evolving for more than a million years. It’s an extraordinary story, if that’s true. And again, further evidence of how little we know about much of Asia in terms of this story.

In your earlier career, you concentrated on Neanderthals. Do you now accept the new evidence of Neanderthal-Homo sapiens interbreeding, which seems to establish that we are more than 2 percent Neanderthal?

This is one of the remarkable bits of news of the last couple of years. We’ve had the genomes of Neanderthals reconstructed, and yes, indeed, it shows that people outside of Africa have, on average, about 2.5 percent of an input of Neanderthal DNA in them. And, of course, it’s led to a rethinking of our relationship with them; clearly there was viable interbreeding.

We don’t know the circumstances. Maybe a parsimonious view is that there was a single interbreeding period when modern humans came out of Africa. They met some Neanderthals in the Middle East. There was some interbreeding, under circumstances we don’t know yet, and that input of Neanderthal DNA was then transferred as those populations spread to Europe and to China, down to New Guinea, into the Americas; they took that bit of Neanderthal with them.

Archaeologists have found evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens occupied the same caves in Israel. Could this have been an interbreeding contact?

Western Asia becomes a critical area for this possibility of interbreeding. It could have been 25 Neanderthals mixing with 1,000 modern humans. It doesn’t have to be a lot of Neanderthals, but clearly there might have been interbreeding somewhere like Israel or Lebanon or Syria — all possible places where we know Neanderthals lived, and at times modern humans also lived.

There’s also a view that the interbreeding was more widespread, but that either cultural or physiological factors limited the successful births. For example, we know that the pelvic shape of Neanderthal females is different from the pelvic shape of modern human females. If a modern human female was giving birth to a hybrid baby, part Neanderthal, could there have been obstetric problems? We don’t know the circumstances of these encounters: if it was a peaceful mixing and merging of these people, or if the circumstances were violent.

Just who were the Denisovans?

It’s an extraordinary discovery. Two or three years ago I vaguely knew there was an archaeological site in Siberia called Denisova Cave. And then a few teeth, a finger bone have produced a really high-quality genome now that’s posted on the Web site of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany. The preservation of the DNA is exceptional, and well beyond anything we have from Neanderthals. It seems these Denisovans were related to the Neanderthals, an early branch off the Neanderthal line.

We know a lot about the Denisovans genetically, but physically we know very little about them. These fossils are so fragmentary. The even more remarkable thing is they are only known from one site in Siberia, and their DNA turns up in people only in really one region today — not in Siberia, or Asia, but down in Australia and New Guinea. That’s extraordinary.

A man who was for years one of the main proponents of the African single origin of modern humans, basically leaves his concept, and comes very close to main aspects of the Multiregional hypothesis, to which he opposed strongly over years.