5 ms·

Lead Limited Brain and Language Development in Neanderthals and Other Hominids?

99 points by gmays 1y ago

steveBK123 1y ago
Just like Huel!
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  What, did they have a lead contamination issue?
  - Legend2440 1y ago
    A report recently came out that found lead in nearly every brand of protein powder, especially plant-based ones. It seems to be from lead naturally occurring in the soil where crops are grown. There is a similar problem with arsenic in rice.
    - loeg 1y ago
      There is nothing new under the sun. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675538 More recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582809
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - ch4s3 1y ago
    Any time you collect a bunch of plants, dehydrate them, and pulverize them you’ll end up with a powdered concentration of whatever was in the plants. Since many plants can fix lead and because lead is everywhere you’ll get a little lead. It won’t be much, barely more than 1000x lower than the safe level, but some. Also cadmium probably.
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago
  I really wanted to like Huel. I like the idea of their meals, like chilli, but I didn't like it. Their Soylent type drink wasn't good either. Soylent 1.5 was the best.
- MountDoom 1y ago
  I get your joke, but the thesis here isn't that Neanderthals were exposed to more lead. Instead, the claim is that we might have evolved a mutation that protects our brain against lead to some extent.
8bitsrule 1y ago
Conceivable. And not just that far back. It's been thought that Beethoven's deafness was largely the result of the way wine was stored back in the 18th century. And what did we learn from history? "The federal government banned the use of leaded pipe and solder in new plumbing systems in 1986, but many remaining pipe networks in older cities and homes predate the policy; the EPA estimates there are still 6 to 10 million lead service lines across the country." - https://greenyplace.com/when-did-they-stop-using-lead-pipes-in-houses https://greenyplace.com/when-did-they-stop-using-lead-pipes-...
- j45 1y ago
  Meaningful in-home water filtration increasingly seems pretty much mandatory. The degree of water filtration often requires about having to learn about re-mineralizing.
  - 05 1y ago
    > The degree of water filtration often requires about having to learn about re-mineralizing. You can drink distilled water all day every day, you get all the minerals you'd ever need from food. Remineralization post-filters are purely for better taste (subjective of course).
    - oneshtein 1y ago
      I ate salty products like crazy after year or two on pure water. My doctor told me to drink mineral water or tap water instead of pure water — the problem is gone.
    - j45 1y ago
      Drinking distilled water can create micro deficiencies that can contribute to things like brain fog, etc depending on the type of water you normally have. Drinking distilled water strips your body of things that naturally are in water, because no fresh water lake, river, etc is distilled water. Another key part of distilled water is that it also has fewer electrolytes. Electrolytes to a good degree are our friend. If water already has a bit of magnesium in it, it's helpful, everyone just gets it. I respect if it's working for you but I have met many folks who it didn't work for. Remineralization felt like a pain, but like most things it doesn't hurt to try and collect your own experience rather than understand everything before beginning. Since drinking water can be location based, some water may have more calcium naturally in it, or something else, etc.
JoelMcCracken 1y ago
Do most people just not know how to write an interrogative sentence anymore? It is wild to me how often these fragments of questions appear on the front page. I use this form sometimes myself in a dialogue, as it fits that context. But as an isolated story title, I invariably end up reading the whole sentence several times, trying to parse it.
- bawolff 1y ago
  I think Hacker news removes "filler" words from headlines, which is why it is so weirdly phrased. The original headline is different.
  - floam 1y ago
    HN doesn’t do it but it does have a character limit: go to the submission form and paste the original title (“Did Lead Limit Brain and Language Development in Neanderthals and Other Extinct Hominids?”) and you’ll see too long. People lazily remove words until it fits instead of reworking the whole thing sometimes.
    - krapp 1y ago
      HN does actually have automatic text filters to remove "extraneous" words from titles, even when they do fit. People have complained that the filters are too naive and sometimes destroy necessary context but for whatever reason the mods consider it necessary.
      - floam 1y ago
        Oh, TIL. I guess in this case it couldn’t have been since you can’t submit if too long but I was unaware.
        krapp 1y ago
        Could be one or the other, or both, but the filter's definitely there. Fair warning HN also automatically replaces submitted links with canonical links despite most canoncial links pointing to the original domain for SEO purposes. There is no warning or feedback for any of this, you're just expected to notice and edit your post after the fact.
rendall 1y ago
Seems implausible that the entire taxonomic family of Homidae would be exposed to neurotoxic levels of lead because of cave water. I'm not convinced. Something is off, here.
- rotis 1y ago
  Agreed. Lead main source in nature is galena, which is relatively nontoxic. It rarely occurs in metallic form.
  - daviesiesies 1y ago
    It is ok to handle galena if you don't eat with your fingers. But it is highly toxic if swallowed or inhaled.
- stevenwoo 1y ago
  Somewhat coincidentally I am reading "The Language Puzzle" and the author puts forward the theory that based on the tool evidence left behind that the language development of Neanderthals was as much as they could do with their brain physiology and environment, i.e. there was no improvement in stone tools over their entire history versus the other human population evidence we have at close to the same time and that the improvement in stone tools in other populations had to be verbally communicated. There of course is the bias in the evidence we have may not be fully representative and this theory is not mutually exclusive with the genetic argument in the article.
bell-cot 1y ago
> “We stopped using lead in our daily lives when we realized how toxic it is, [...]” said corresponding author Alysson Muotri, Ph.D. I'd say that's a "willfully optimistic" take. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History
- Jackson__ 1y ago
  > In the late 1950s through the 1970s Herbert Needleman and Clair Cameron Patterson did research trying to prove lead's toxicity to humans. In the 1980s Needleman was falsely accused of scientific misconduct by lead industry associates > In 1991, together with Claire Ernhart, Scarr was involved as an expert witness on behalf of the lead industry in the lawsuit United States v. Sharon Steel Corp., on the opposite side of Herbert Needleman who was testifying for the U.S. Justice Department owing to his research on the relationship between lead exposure and IQ.[0] > When the trial was declared open to the public, Scarr initially refused to come and later when she was persuaded she constantly refused to answer questions. Scarr received money from the lead industry for consulting services which creates a conflict of interest. > Scarr retired to Hawaii in 1997, where she learned scuba diving, even obtaining a rescue diver certification. She also traveled "a lot, especially on cruise ships" Jesus Christ. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Scarr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Scarr
p0w3n3d 1y ago
I was taught by parents to not pour hot water to the kettle, because the water heater might have lead pipes and cold water was omitting them. I wonder was it the case...
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  That might have been true locally, but you need to know the actual lead levels (which can change with infrastructure changes) in cold and hot water to know for sure. I replaced my hot water heater and supply pipes myself, so it has no more lead than the cold. They're currently tearing up my street to replace the lead in supply lines, so... everything will hopefully improve here.
- dpark 1y ago
  It’s more that hot water will leech more lead from whatever lines do you have, including in the water heater itself. The biggest concern would generally be lead solder. There’s no reason you would have lead lines for hot water and copper lines for cold. Also the hot water sits in a tank (in most homes) full of scale and may just taste worse.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  Your parents were correct about the advice, but wrong about the reasoning. Possibly hot water leaches out lead easier, but it’s more about water sitting in a hot water tank. Hot water in a home usually sits in a metal tank that is full of scale/minerals. Once the sacrificial anode is used up (maybe 1% of people actually replace their anode when needed), the tank begins corroding. Hot water is for washing things, cold water is for consumption.
- roryirvine 1y ago
  I grew up doing this, though in our case the old heating system drew water from a tank in the roofspace where it could have been left sitting for a long time before being used. We were also taught to run the cold tap until it got really cold (indicating that fresh water from the mains was coming out) before drinking from it. Weirdly, I remember that we had our water pipes replaced with plastic and the heating system modernised when the house was renovated in the late 80s, but we still persisted with those habits afterwards... Australian friends still get super upset with me for wasting so much water - they have water conservation drummed into them from an early age, so tend to see running the tap even for a second or two too long as being some sort of terrible sin.
dr_dshiv 1y ago
Incredible. How did they know to search for this relationship! So many dependencies. Now, how can I get my family tested for lead exposure? I worry about the old silverware…
hyghjiyhu 1y ago
What seems off to me is that lead (at that level) must have been a factor in the natural environment for a very long time, so it's strange for a tolerance mutation to be recent.
Ericson2314 1y ago
We gotta clone some neanderthals to really figure out! (No I don't mean lead poison them, I mine figure out what they are like without lead.)
IAmBroom 1y ago
> “One possibility is that they were looking for caves with running water inside,” Muotri said. “Caves contain lead, so they were all contaminated. I'm not buying this claim that all caves contain lead (throughout Europe, at least). Europe is not a wonderland for lead mining. Southern Missouri (USA) historically produced a significant amount of the world's lead supply, but no early hominids evolved there. And I don't understand the figure early in the article. It seems to show that Homo sapiens evolved with quite a lot of lead exposure, while H. neanderthalis did not - so they didn't need our "immunity" to lead. Finally, > “If all humans have this newer mutation in all corners of the world, very strong genetic pressure must have selected for it in our species.” Or, it was present in the bottleneck die-off of H. sapiens 800kya, and hasn't mutated since. The added complexity in organoids in the lab is interesting, but the mere presence of a single base pair in a gene doesn't guarantee that it is genetically important. > “The FOXP2 gene is identical between us and the Neanderthals, but it's how the gene is regulated by NOVA1 that likely contributes to language differences.” That at least does underline the importance of this genetic difference.

99 points by gmays 1y ago

steveBK123 1y ago

Just like Huel!

andrewflnr 1y ago
What, did they have a lead contamination issue?
- Legend2440 1y ago
  A report recently came out that found lead in nearly every brand of protein powder, especially plant-based ones. It seems to be from lead naturally occurring in the soil where crops are grown. There is a similar problem with arsenic in rice.
  - loeg 1y ago
    There is nothing new under the sun. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675538 More recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582809
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- ch4s3 1y ago
  Any time you collect a bunch of plants, dehydrate them, and pulverize them you’ll end up with a powdered concentration of whatever was in the plants. Since many plants can fix lead and because lead is everywhere you’ll get a little lead. It won’t be much, barely more than 1000x lower than the safe level, but some. Also cadmium probably.
zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago
I really wanted to like Huel. I like the idea of their meals, like chilli, but I didn't like it. Their Soylent type drink wasn't good either. Soylent 1.5 was the best.
MountDoom 1y ago
I get your joke, but the thesis here isn't that Neanderthals were exposed to more lead. Instead, the claim is that we might have evolved a mutation that protects our brain against lead to some extent.

8bitsrule 1y ago

Conceivable. And not just that far back. It's been thought that Beethoven's deafness was largely the result of the way wine was stored back in the 18th century. And what did we learn from history? "The federal government banned the use of leaded pipe and solder in new plumbing systems in 1986, but many remaining pipe networks in older cities and homes predate the policy; the EPA estimates there are still 6 to 10 million lead service lines across the country." - https://greenyplace.com/when-did-they-stop-using-lead-pipes-in-houses https://greenyplace.com/when-did-they-stop-using-lead-pipes-...

j45 1y ago
Meaningful in-home water filtration increasingly seems pretty much mandatory. The degree of water filtration often requires about having to learn about re-mineralizing.
- 05 1y ago
  > The degree of water filtration often requires about having to learn about re-mineralizing. You can drink distilled water all day every day, you get all the minerals you'd ever need from food. Remineralization post-filters are purely for better taste (subjective of course).
  - oneshtein 1y ago
    I ate salty products like crazy after year or two on pure water. My doctor told me to drink mineral water or tap water instead of pure water — the problem is gone.
  - j45 1y ago
    Drinking distilled water can create micro deficiencies that can contribute to things like brain fog, etc depending on the type of water you normally have. Drinking distilled water strips your body of things that naturally are in water, because no fresh water lake, river, etc is distilled water. Another key part of distilled water is that it also has fewer electrolytes. Electrolytes to a good degree are our friend. If water already has a bit of magnesium in it, it's helpful, everyone just gets it. I respect if it's working for you but I have met many folks who it didn't work for. Remineralization felt like a pain, but like most things it doesn't hurt to try and collect your own experience rather than understand everything before beginning. Since drinking water can be location based, some water may have more calcium naturally in it, or something else, etc.

JoelMcCracken 1y ago

Do most people just not know how to write an interrogative sentence anymore? It is wild to me how often these fragments of questions appear on the front page. I use this form sometimes myself in a dialogue, as it fits that context. But as an isolated story title, I invariably end up reading the whole sentence several times, trying to parse it.

bawolff 1y ago
I think Hacker news removes "filler" words from headlines, which is why it is so weirdly phrased. The original headline is different.
- floam 1y ago
  HN doesn’t do it but it does have a character limit: go to the submission form and paste the original title (“Did Lead Limit Brain and Language Development in Neanderthals and Other Extinct Hominids?”) and you’ll see too long. People lazily remove words until it fits instead of reworking the whole thing sometimes.
  - krapp 1y ago
    HN does actually have automatic text filters to remove "extraneous" words from titles, even when they do fit. People have complained that the filters are too naive and sometimes destroy necessary context but for whatever reason the mods consider it necessary.
    - floam 1y ago
      Oh, TIL. I guess in this case it couldn’t have been since you can’t submit if too long but I was unaware.
      - krapp 1y ago
        Could be one or the other, or both, but the filter's definitely there. Fair warning HN also automatically replaces submitted links with canonical links despite most canoncial links pointing to the original domain for SEO purposes. There is no warning or feedback for any of this, you're just expected to notice and edit your post after the fact.

rendall 1y ago

Seems implausible that the entire taxonomic family of Homidae would be exposed to neurotoxic levels of lead because of cave water. I'm not convinced. Something is off, here.

rotis 1y ago
Agreed. Lead main source in nature is galena, which is relatively nontoxic. It rarely occurs in metallic form.
- daviesiesies 1y ago
  It is ok to handle galena if you don't eat with your fingers. But it is highly toxic if swallowed or inhaled.
stevenwoo 1y ago
Somewhat coincidentally I am reading "The Language Puzzle" and the author puts forward the theory that based on the tool evidence left behind that the language development of Neanderthals was as much as they could do with their brain physiology and environment, i.e. there was no improvement in stone tools over their entire history versus the other human population evidence we have at close to the same time and that the improvement in stone tools in other populations had to be verbally communicated. There of course is the bias in the evidence we have may not be fully representative and this theory is not mutually exclusive with the genetic argument in the article.

bell-cot 1y ago

> “We stopped using lead in our daily lives when we realized how toxic it is, [...]” said corresponding author Alysson Muotri, Ph.D. I'd say that's a "willfully optimistic" take. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#History

Jackson__ 1y ago
> In the late 1950s through the 1970s Herbert Needleman and Clair Cameron Patterson did research trying to prove lead's toxicity to humans. In the 1980s Needleman was falsely accused of scientific misconduct by lead industry associates > In 1991, together with Claire Ernhart, Scarr was involved as an expert witness on behalf of the lead industry in the lawsuit United States v. Sharon Steel Corp., on the opposite side of Herbert Needleman who was testifying for the U.S. Justice Department owing to his research on the relationship between lead exposure and IQ.[0] > When the trial was declared open to the public, Scarr initially refused to come and later when she was persuaded she constantly refused to answer questions. Scarr received money from the lead industry for consulting services which creates a conflict of interest. > Scarr retired to Hawaii in 1997, where she learned scuba diving, even obtaining a rescue diver certification. She also traveled "a lot, especially on cruise ships" Jesus Christ. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Scarr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Scarr

p0w3n3d 1y ago

I was taught by parents to not pour hot water to the kettle, because the water heater might have lead pipes and cold water was omitting them. I wonder was it the case...

IAmBroom 1y ago
That might have been true locally, but you need to know the actual lead levels (which can change with infrastructure changes) in cold and hot water to know for sure. I replaced my hot water heater and supply pipes myself, so it has no more lead than the cold. They're currently tearing up my street to replace the lead in supply lines, so... everything will hopefully improve here.
dpark 1y ago
It’s more that hot water will leech more lead from whatever lines do you have, including in the water heater itself. The biggest concern would generally be lead solder. There’s no reason you would have lead lines for hot water and copper lines for cold. Also the hot water sits in a tank (in most homes) full of scale and may just taste worse.
quickthrowman 1y ago
Your parents were correct about the advice, but wrong about the reasoning. Possibly hot water leaches out lead easier, but it’s more about water sitting in a hot water tank. Hot water in a home usually sits in a metal tank that is full of scale/minerals. Once the sacrificial anode is used up (maybe 1% of people actually replace their anode when needed), the tank begins corroding. Hot water is for washing things, cold water is for consumption.
roryirvine 1y ago
I grew up doing this, though in our case the old heating system drew water from a tank in the roofspace where it could have been left sitting for a long time before being used. We were also taught to run the cold tap until it got really cold (indicating that fresh water from the mains was coming out) before drinking from it. Weirdly, I remember that we had our water pipes replaced with plastic and the heating system modernised when the house was renovated in the late 80s, but we still persisted with those habits afterwards... Australian friends still get super upset with me for wasting so much water - they have water conservation drummed into them from an early age, so tend to see running the tap even for a second or two too long as being some sort of terrible sin.

dr_dshiv 1y ago

Incredible. How did they know to search for this relationship! So many dependencies. Now, how can I get my family tested for lead exposure? I worry about the old silverware…

hyghjiyhu 1y ago

What seems off to me is that lead (at that level) must have been a factor in the natural environment for a very long time, so it's strange for a tolerance mutation to be recent.

Ericson2314 1y ago

We gotta clone some neanderthals to really figure out! (No I don't mean lead poison them, I mine figure out what they are like without lead.)

IAmBroom 1y ago

> “One possibility is that they were looking for caves with running water inside,” Muotri said. “Caves contain lead, so they were all contaminated. I'm not buying this claim that all caves contain lead (throughout Europe, at least). Europe is not a wonderland for lead mining. Southern Missouri (USA) historically produced a significant amount of the world's lead supply, but no early hominids evolved there. And I don't understand the figure early in the article. It seems to show that Homo sapiens evolved with quite a lot of lead exposure, while H. neanderthalis did not - so they didn't need our "immunity" to lead. Finally, > “If all humans have this newer mutation in all corners of the world, very strong genetic pressure must have selected for it in our species.” Or, it was present in the bottleneck die-off of H. sapiens 800kya, and hasn't mutated since. The added complexity in organoids in the lab is interesting, but the mere presence of a single base pair in a gene doesn't guarantee that it is genetically important. > “The FOXP2 gene is identical between us and the Neanderthals, but it's how the gene is regulated by NOVA1 that likely contributes to language differences.” That at least does underline the importance of this genetic difference.