Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals.

Genomic analyses of Neanderthals have previously provided insights into their population history and relationship to modern humans1-8, but the social organization of Neanderthal communities remains poorly understood. Here we present genetic data for 13 Neanderthals from two Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia: 11 from Chagyrskaya Cave9,10 and 2 from Okladnikov Cave11-making this one of the largest genetic studies of a Neanderthal population to date. We used hybridization capture to obtain genome-wide nuclear data, as well as mitochondrial and Y-chromosome sequences. Some Chagyrskaya individuals were closely related, including a father-daughter pair and a pair of second-degree relatives, indicating that at least some of the individuals lived at the same time. Up to one-third of these individuals' genomes had long segments of homozygosity, suggesting that the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals were part of a small community. In addition, the Y-chromosome diversity is an order of magnitude lower than the mitochondrial diversity, a pattern that we found is best explained by female migration between communities. Thus, the genetic data presented here provide a detailed documentation of the social organization of an isolated Neanderthal community at the easternmost extent of their known range.

Sex-biased sound symbolism in French first names.

Summary: Low- and high-frequency vowels in the stressed syllable of French first names may respectively project impressions of largeness/masculinity and smallness/femininity. Abstract: Given that first names can have a lifelong impact on the bearer, parents should choose a name based on the impressions they want their offspring to evoke in other people. This name-to-mental-image association can be mediated through sound symbolism: a natural link between the sounds and meaning of a word. From an evolutionary perspective, parents should pick names which sounds convey traits advantageous in human sexual selection: largeness and masculinity for males through lower-frequency sounds as opposed to smallness and femininity for females through higher-frequency sounds. Using a database of French first names from 1900 to 2009, we observed a sex-biased sound symbolism pattern in the last syllable, which is the perceptually prominent one in French. Male names were more likely to include lower-frequency vowels (e.g. /o/, /ã/) and female names higher-frequency vowels (e.g. /i/, /e/). Unexpected patterns in consonants were observed in masculine names with higher-frequency sounds (e.g. /s/, /ʃ/) in the last syllable and lower-frequency sounds (e.g. /b/, /g/) in the first syllable. However, little variance was explained and the modest size effect suggests that cultural traits influence these sex differences. Lastly, exploratory analyses revealed a phonetic masculinization in women's first names that has increased since the 1960s.