Researcher Brian Butterworth

One of the earliest things American children are taught is how to count items out loud: one, two, three… But how much do humans understand about numbers before they learn this vocabulary? An interesting study conducted by Brian Butterworth and colleagues at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London addressed this question with Australian Aboriginal children, whose society doesn’t use counting words beyond one, two, few and many.

Check out these articles for more info:

• TVNZ: Humans may have innate math skills
• redOrbit: Is the ability to count innate?

The Human Spark crew visited Helen Neville in her Brain Development Lab at the University of Oregon. Check out some behind-the-scenes photos from our day filming with her and colleagues — and research volunteers.

Remember those counting monkeys?

Earlier this summer, we posted about a study that revealed that monkeys could listen to a series of beeps and then equate it to a visual representation of the same number. One of the researchers behind the study, Kerry Jordan, explained that we have a primitive number system that “allows us to estimate quantities without using language” and that we share this ability with many animals. Humans also have another number system that is symbolic and must be learned.

An article in The New York Times this week discusses a batch of new research that seems to show that these two number systems are actually more connected than was previously thought.

In one study, a group of 14-year-olds were given a test to evaluate their approximating prowess. On a computer screen, they watched as slides covered with blue and yellow dots flashed across the screen. After each slide they were asked whether there were more blue dots or yellow dots.

The results were very interesting:

Comparing the acuity scores with other test results that Dr. Mazzocco had collected from the students over the past 10 years, the researchers found a robust correlation between dot-spotting prowess at age 14 and strong performance on a raft of standardized math tests from kindergarten onward. “We can’t draw causal arrows one way or another,” Dr. Feigenson said, “but your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math.”

While they note that it’s difficult to determine a causal relationship between symbolic math skills and those required for approximation, the findings certainly provide some food for thought. And if you want to test your own number instinct, you can try out a version of the dot-spotting test on The New York Times Web site.

Tanya Smith shows 3-D images of Neanderthal teeth photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Graham Chedd here. Last time, I was telling you about our visit to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility – and about the trouble I got into there.

We’d come to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility at the invitation of Tanya Smith, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (where there’s a lot of very cool Human Spark-type research going on, so we’ll be filming there later). Tanya is an expert on teeth, which as she points out are by far the most durable parts of our bodies – in fact they are practically fossilized as they grow. What’s more – and I found this astonishing when she first told me – teeth have daily growth lines hidden inside them, much like tree rings, which can reveal their owner’s early life history – and how quickly they grew up.

Here’s Tanya, alongside some 3-D images of Neanderthal teeth.

Peering inside teeth to see those growth rings needs very powerful X-ray beams – beams millions of times stronger than you get from your dentist. That’s where the synchrotron comes in. And because the X-rays are so potent they are also deadly, which is why there are all sorts of safety precautions. For instance, we were allowed inside the synchrotron while the beam was turned off for routine maintenance for an hour or so, and we were all given special little keys. The synchrotron can’t be turned on until all these keys are returned and in their little locks.

The Emergency Stop button photo © Larry Engel, 2008

There are also big buttons like this everywhere…

including in the room where the teeth were actually scanned. Now, before the beam is activated the room it has to be cleared of people, and to make sure the room is thoroughly checked, there are buttons in the corners that have to be pushed. I volunteered to push one of these buttons – and pushed this one.

Of course, it was the wrong one (pretty obvious now, but at the time… not so much). An eerie silence fell as the entire facility, except for the lights, shut down.

After a moment of shocked disbelief (“What did you do!?”), Paul Tafforeau, who is Tanya’s collaborator at the ESRF, recovered his composure and set about informing the authorities what had happened and getting everything back up and running again. He even forgave me (sort of) and no one came to haul me away.

Here’s Paul, with another set of Neanderthal teeth, these from a child.

Paul Tafforeau examines a set of Neanderthal teeth photo © Larry Engel, 2008

This fossil has a fascinating story, and one we’ll tell in the show, because it was the first Neanderthal fossil ever discovered, in 1829, long before Neanderthals were officially recognized and named, and long before Darwin suggested that humans had evolved.

We don’t yet know what Paul and Tanya found out from the scans. That’s going to take several months of careful growth ring counting and analysis. But we do know they were happy with the images they got, and that by the time we get to putting together our program, they’ll be able to tell us how quickly these Neanderthal children grew up.

Next we’re off to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where we’ll find out what parts of Alan’s brain provide him with a couple of uniquely human skills – his facility with language, and the ability to use a screwdriver….

I just hope there are no big red buttons.

Belgian archeologist Michel Toussaint, with the Neanderthal skull photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Hi, I’m Graham Chedd, who with Alan Alda first came up with the idea for The Human Spark a couple of years ago. We’ve just finished our first shoot, so this is a good moment to begin what will be a regular series of blogs as the production makes its way to your PBS station, we hope some time next year.

Alan will chime in soon. But on this first shoot, while I was in Grenoble, France, filming a 50,000 year-old Neanderthal skull getting its teeth X-rayed, Alan was lying in a tube in Los Angeles having his head scanned – so that we can all peer into his brain later.

Here’s Belgian archaeologist Michel Toussaint holding the fragile Neanderthal skull at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. Normally it resides under lock and key at the national archaeology museum in Paris. The photo was taken by Larry Engel, by the way. Larry is The Human Spark’s director, and will also be the cameraman for most of the filming

The big question we’re trying to answer in the first show of The Human Spark is how, when, where and why we got to be who we are from who we used to be. Humans that looked much like us existed some 200,000 years ago, but the first obvious evidence of people with minds like ours – people we’d recognize as us – dates to about 35,000 years ago, when they started painting the walls of caves in Europe, like the famous Lascaux caves in France. We want to know where these people – and their minds – came from.

More on that in later blogs (hint: much of the story takes place in Africa). But this first shoot was with researchers seeking the answer to a simple question: how long did it take Neanderthals to grow up?

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Neanderthals had been living in Europe and getting along just fine for at least 100,000 years before our ancestors showed up. Then the Neanderthals disappeared. Just how and why we replaced them – what gave us the edge – is one of the most fascinating mysteries of archeology, and one we’ll be diving into in this show. But one intriguing idea is that our ancestors had longer childhoods than did Neanderthals, and so more time to absorb all the complicated stuff we need to learn.

So how do you find out how quickly Neanderthals grew up? That’s where this machine comes in – a giant particle accelerator that generates one of the most powerful and concentrated beam of X-rays in the world – and a machine that I managed, in an act of stunning stupidity, to shut down entirely.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on that next time.