Objects

• Dené–Yeniseian languages, a proposed language family. This year marks the 100th since its first proposal by Italian linguist Alfredo Trombetti in 1923, though it only entered the linguistic mainstream after being presented at an Alaska symposium by historical linguist Edward Vajda in 2008. It has been cautiously endorsed by academics since. The family would link the Na-Dené languages (which include a staggering range of Native American language stretching from Navajo to the Alaskan languages) with the Yeniseian languages of Siberia (a formerly much greater family which has provided many famous words, including khan). Could the Navajo really be traceable cousins with Genghis Khan? (As another linguistic fact of interest lately: the pandanus languages of Papua New Guinea, specialized ritual languages used only when collecting a specific kind of nut to avoid words that would be “unhealthy for the plants”.)


• Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago, a mind-blowing development that warranted a Smithsonian Magazine article on the subject. A team of largely British researchers uncovered interlocking logs with intentional notches in them along the Kalambo River in Zambia. One would think this is somewhat standard fare for researchers of ancient humans—except for that the logs were dated to be 476,000 years old. We are aware of nearly million-year-old tools, but this would become the oldest wooden structure ever discovered. In other news to push back human chronologies: this month, further weight was put behind a 2021 study suggesting Native Americans entered the Americas more than 20,000 years ago.

Conclusions

Jake’s October subjects began with Bayes’ theorem, the notion that statistics should be weighed against the conditions likely related to an event. His example presented a hypothetical test that can detect a disease with 80% sensitivity and 90% specificity. At first, the percentages make the test seem like a reasonably accurate indicator of the disease. However, if the disease only occurs in, for example, 1% of the population, testing the entire population for the disease would yield an enormous amount of false positives: the chances of a positive result actually indicating the disease would be around 7.5%, defying the human intuition that the test is accurate. We delved into how this theorem is increasingly important as statistics are now frequent visitors in debates and conversation—judging the merits of a statistic can help discern, as Jake said, “a true conclusion from a false impression”. The next subject and the first on the above list—the Dené–Yeniseian languages—was also of interest; Jake observed that the evidence increasingly supporting the proposed family demonstrated the power of modern computational linguistics, soon to be augmented by artificial intelligence. The pandanus languages were likewise fascinating because, in their ritualized usage, they reflect how Latin is used for liturgy and scholarship in the Western world.

The use of wood almost half a million years ago is obviously unsettling, indicating that either our ancestors or their cousin-species were of an impressive intelligence. It segued to a fascinating subject of Jake’s indicating that the firing rate of the human brain’s neurons exist on a log-normal distribution: a staggering insight that could inform the transition to modern human intelligence. Indeed, a hyperproductive 10% of human neurons contribute 50% of the brain’s information processing; the other half is underpinned by a more specialized 90%. That 10% would thus seem to be our base consciousness, or subconscious mind, able to discern immediately the basic details our situation, movement, and status: the heavy lifting of relatively simple sensory information. The slower, more specialized 90% has to do with our more advanced processing: questioning and exploring certian details, recalling sophisticated ideas, comprehending complex concepts, and so on. This might be the difference in brain architecture that sets humans so far beyond other species—while others, even Neanderthals, may have larger minds, the human brain has a far more optimized one able to distribute its energy more efficiently. The Neanderthal brain may have been bigger, but may also have comprised—to put it in simple terms—one ‘big subconscious’ rather than one capable of more delicate thought.