Saturday, February 20, 2021

Anogenital Distance, Rabbit Holes, And You


Neanderthal sex!

I love science. I'll read anything. I will maintain stoutly that I did not click on this particular article to find out what sex with a Neanderthal was like. I don't even speculate about people I know. Far as I'm willing to go in my imaginings is that Neanderthals probably had to tip their heads sideways to kiss in order to avoid eyebrow-ridge abrasion. If they kissed at all.

No, I clicked on the article to find out how anyone has been able to hypothesize about Neanderthal sex. The things people have been able to figure out from the tiniest clues absolutely blow me away.

I mean, it wasn't too many years ago someone found a molar tooth and a finger bone and discovered a whole new kind of human, the Denisovans. And since then they've found a bone fragment--a fragment--that they've confidently identified as belonging to a young girl with a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father. (They named her Denny, but her real name was NeAnn. She was a Pisces and liked flute music and long walks on the beach.)

The article was specifically referring to sex between Neanderthals and modern humans, however, and doggone if they didn't conclude they did kiss. Because a scientist found a microbe calcified in Neanderthal tooth crud and recognized it as a modern human oral bacterium. The two species of human wouldn't have been expected to be freighting the same mouth bugs, so she ran some numbers and carried the one and determined the Neanderthal and modern versions of the little bugger drifted apart not all that long ago. If they'd both started with the same bacterium it would have happened much earlier, so she concluded there had definitely been mouth-on-mouth action.

Cool.

So, were Neanderthals promiscuous? One would fervently hope the answer could be found in cave paintings. And one would be right, inasmuch as stenciled hand paintings have revealed the artists' Digit Ratios. The what-now?

And this is why I read articles like these. You get sent down all these rabbit holes. I didn't even know Digit Ratios were a thing, but evidently people have drawn all sorts of conclusions from the ratio of the lengths of a person's index and ring fingers. The Neanderthals' lower ratio corresponds with less allegiance to monogamy, shall we say. So now I'm looking up Digit Ratio. Mine is relatively high. I don't know what Dave's is--and now I kinda want to--because we can't straighten out his ring finger. (But I do have a mallet.)

Digit ratio turns out to be a reflection of the available hormones the person was exposed to in the womb, with consequences all down the line. For instance, various digit ratios have been used to predict prostate cancer, aggression, masculinized handwriting, empathy, lesbianism, video game addiction, fear of spiders, and susceptibility to that Sarah McLachlan song about the arms of the angel. Digit-ratio studies have also been done on mice and pheasants.


Mice, and pheasants.
 
All right. I dunno. I was starting to lose interest until I read that digit ratio also correlated to anogenital distance (AGD), the distance between the center of your anus and your vagina and/or scrotum. I will be damned. There is such a thing as Taint Research! It's not a field I ever thought to explore, except at a layman's level, but I'm not about to poo-poo it. I'd think all the fun would be in the actual measuring process, with diminishing returns thereafter. However, Taint Science has given the world stunning sentences such as the following:

"Women who had high levels of phthalates in their urine during pregnancy gave birth to sons who were ten times more likely to have shorter than expected AGDs."
 
Well! I do not know my anogenital distance, offhand, and have no plans to find out, at my age. The only thing I know for certain is that neither my ring or my index finger is quite long enough to be able to play Schumann's Toccata. I blame my Mom.



22 comments:

  1. Poor Dave, getting his fingers er... malleted in the name of science! As for that anus to genital measurement, at least the metal measuring tape has a hook of sorts at one end. I just may... am I to assume the farther apart the two are indicates superior intellect and the like? It’s funny, when I see various people on tv reality shows, I think “if these are ordinary humans, I must be a Metron” (a race of beings on Star Trek that consider themselves 10,000 years superior to humans) but then when I visit smart blogs like yours, and see an artist’s depiction of a Neanderthal and get a stirring in my belly... I guess I’m not a Metron after all. :^(

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  2. A reminder to your readers that if they want to listen to the splendid Martha Argerich Schumann Tocatta at the end of your piece, they need to use the web version, as opposed to the mobile version, of your blog. You can switch from one to the other, at least on my iphone) by scrolling down below the comments and comment window, just below the "home" button. Here's the address of the same YouTube video, if you just want to paste it into your browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT68hCACDQc

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    1. Thanks again, and now I get it: the instructions apply to phone readers, not something I was supposed to do? I was worried I'd somehow put it in wrong and I could fix it.

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    2. No, darlin', I don't know what you can do differently to have the videos appear in both the web and mobile versions. There must be something. Perhaps consult the Googles?

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  3. Y'know... those who "believe" say that "God" is perfect. But I think that "he" made a structural mistake with humans. For instance, WHY is the playground (vagina) next to the toxic waste dump (anus)? And why is the toxic waste dump surrounded by foliage (hairs) that retain all the... um... garbage that one tries to clean off? It seems like poor planning. Even drunk, I could come up with something better than that.

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    1. Some of the things I've come up with drunk were not better than that. And think about birds. It's all one hole.

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    2. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who said, "Love hath pitched his tent in a field of excrement." Oscar is said to have been something of an expert in these matters.

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    3. He was quite the camper all right.

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  4. Do not approach Dave with mallets aforethought..

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  5. Rabbit holes indeed. Please do not subject Dave's ring finger to a mallet, he has another one on the other hand, just measure that one.
    I had no idea that finger ratios were related to monogamy, mine are almost exactly the same length, but I'm no bed-hopper.

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    1. The key is ALMOST exactly. The differences they're talking about are a millimeter or two.

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  6. I have to take umbrage with your characterizing H. sapiens as modern humans in a sentence coupling them with Neandertals. Modern is a really pejorative adjective. Yes, H. saps are a younger species than H. neandertalensis, but H. saps didn’t evolve from Neandertals. Best evidence has H. saps evolving in South Africa from what’s termed archaic H. sap stock (fossils are a bit murky), but given that Neandertals evolved from the same stock, they are more like an older sister species, than an older aunt species or mother species. Hypothetically anyway. There’s also been some interesting thought about all the current groups of Homo sapiens and the now extinct Neandertal, Denisovan and X-species evolving in place from ancestral H. erectus stock. Genetics is turning up all kinds of interesting permutations.

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    1. I hear there's money to be made in that, if you're the kind of fool who plays the market. :^}

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  7. Some of us have remnant DNA from Neandertals and Denisovians. Modurn Scianz ain't arf amazin!

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  8. With such archaeo-oral-microbial (is that a word?) evidence, how do they know that the Neanderthal kissed him when she might actually have eaten him (or the other way around)?

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    1. I'm certain there is an answer to this. If she'd eaten him, there would be whole other bacteria in play...

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