Skull-blogging: In the country of the blind, the large-eyed man is a friendless social outcast *

What sad fate befall the no-longer-extant Neandertals? If you believe certain WAKEUPSHEEPLE websites, natural disasters broke their bloodthirsty grip on power and led to their extirpation at the hands of their erstwhile Cro-Magnon slaves; they linger on as the Nephilim in folk memories from the time of their dominion. The similarity between this scenario and the story-arc of Battlefield Earth certainly adds to its credibility. It hardly seems fair for they in turn were only puppets of the Starlord Empire. I am not making this up.

Another theory has it that the last Neandertals were recruited by time-travelling talent scouts and transported into the future to act in local repertory productions of Wells' "Time Machine" in the role of the Morlocks. This on account of their enlarged eyes and deficiency of social graces. This theory follows as a natural corollary* of a recent observation: the eye-sockets of Neandertal skulls were 6% larger than those of their Cro-Magnon contemporaries, as an adaptation to the dimmer light of Ice-Age Europe. The Eloi parts are / will be filled by recruiting the remnant population of Homo floresiensis.

According to Pearce &c, the newly-arrived Cro-Magnons were not so well adapted to local illumination. However, they were better able to cooperate in bands and tribes because less of their brains was dedicated to visual processing, leaving more cortex to compute the intricacies of social interaction. Hence their success in out-competing their Morlock cousins.

Neandertal skull [left]. More fractures, due
to -- or causing -- reduced social facility

A similar theory explains the disappearance of the Denisovan people of Siberia: their bland diet of dumplings, millet gruel and borscht forced them to evolve over-sized tongues, and to dedicate too much of their brains to gustatory processing. Leaving only Gene Simmons as the sole survivor of the race.

To say nothing of Homo schwarzeneggeris, doomed by their oversized hands.

Pearce supported her theory by measuring eye-socket capacity from anthropologists' skull collections. More northerly populations have larger skulls, also bigger sockets and presumably eyeballs. To show that visual acuity is equally good for people from all latitudes, Pearce cites century-old visual acuity tests administered to tropical populations by the Myers expedition of 1902 and the Rivers Ethnological Expedition of 1898 [I confess, I lost track of the logic at this point]. The theory predicts that cursed as they are with large eyes, the Inuit of Ultima Thule are not able to make clothes or act cooperatively in groups and could never have survived in their extreme Arctic environment.

It is a silly idea, so I am surprised by its absence so far from the pages of the Com-Post (Wellington's paper of note), encountering it only through M. Bouffant's blog. Pearce admits in passing that for a larger eyeball to be more sensitive and compensate for dimmer light, the number of ganglion cells in the enlarged retina must remain the same -- these are the ones sending messages back to the brain -- with each one pooling signals from a larger catchment area of cone-cell photoreceptors. There is no reason for the total acreage of cortex devoted to the visual sensorium to change.

But let it not be said that Riddled will condemn new ideas out of hand. Even ones coming from you small-eyed gossipy Cro-Magnon bubblebrains. We can test the claim of a good correlation between large eyes and poor social skills -- with SCIENCE. Fortunately there are subjects with enlarged eyes left over from earlier trials with the Evolvamat, sparing us the need to convene a fresh Ethics Review Panel (i.e. Greenish Hugh and Space-Time Eddie, who typically demand a minimum of three pints each of Sasquatch Chick-pea Stout before they'll tick the Approved box).

The subjects seem to be coping well with one-on-one interactions with the soldier. Let's see how well they handle the multiple demands of a larger group.

Never mind.

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* Alternative title: Your moonstone eyes are twice the size of human kind.

** Throckmorton's composition "Corollary in A Natural" should not be confused with "Hypothesis in D Minor" or "Postulate in B Flat" from his later, more symphonic phase.