a bonobo humanity?

the world’s oldest musical instrument? (filched from the internet)

I’m reading an intriguing book called The Learning Gene, by Lynne Kelly. The gene in question is Neurofibromin 1, aka NF1, and it is key, according to Kelly, to understanding how oral cultures, such as Australia’s Aboriginals, retain vast stores of knowledge. Having gotten through the first hundred pages or so, in which it switches from genetics to culture, I know I’m going to have to read it again, because it’s seminal to understanding how humans, from their very beginning, or at least from when they first began to use language, retained knowledge that was essential to their survival and thriving. And here’s a passage that struck me:

over 500,00 years ago a common ancestor of the chimpanzees and humans (and other species) had an ancient version of the NF1 gene. That ancient gene had a lot of biological effects to do with energy and tumour suppression. The human version became fragile, leading to less vigorous tumour suppression for those who had one corrupted copy. But our interest was in the cognitive effects the human allele also handed on.

Lynne Kelly, The Knowledge Gene, p98

Dr Kelly has an impressive resume as a social scientist and physicist, and an author of some twenty books, By contrast, I don’t know the difference between a gene and an allele – but I’m about to find out, maybe.

So genes are essentially codes for building proteins, and alleles are versions of those genes. It might be that I’ve read something about this in more detail in, say, Venki Ramakrishnan’s superb book The Gene Machine, but roughly, it’s a version or variant of a gene – for example the genes for eye colour have different alleles – blue, brown or green. So how/why do our genes have these variants? Well it has everything to do with mutations, and it all has a complexity that I won’t be able to do justice to, especially not in this brief post.

The NF1 gene codes for the protein neurofibromin, and the human version or allele of the gene is unique to us, which is a very recent discovery. Also, a corrupted version of the gene causes a disorder, neurofibromatosis type 1, which is surprisingly little known by the general public, as it affects 1 in 3000 births, ‘more than cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy combined’. Defects in the gene produce a bewilderingly varied set of symptoms, and 60 percent of those with the defective gene have virtually no symptoms at all. For others, tumours appear at around puberty. Motor skills are affected, due to tumours impacting the nervous system, and cognition is also affected, which has led to a recognition, by Kelly and other researchers, of the centrality of the NF1 gene to many aspects of memory retention, spacial reasoning and attention span. Interestingly, Dr Vincent Riccardi, who coined the term neurofibromin, later felt he’d misnamed the protein, and would have preferred ‘attentin’, because of its association with those mental qualities.

And this brings me to the major theme of Kelly’s book, or one of them: the extraordinary capacity of oral cultures to retain information, which is associated with or based on the human allele of the NF1 gene. As to what is retained, that is more culturally determined. One thing is certain, and that I can attest to – music, and with it rhythm, is a great aid to memory, and storage of information. I learned that when, as a kid in the mid-sixties, the songs of the Beatles hit the airwaves, and the lyrics were committed to memory more or less instantly without even trying. I also learned it years later on reading James Gleick’s The Information (2011), the first chapter of which is called ‘Drums that Talk’, another heavy nod to oral and rhythmic culture. But The Knowledge Gene gathers data from oral cultures around the globe, and how they pass their knowledge on through rhythm, music and dance. This form of communication predates writing by many millennia, and has been essential for group cohesion and even survival. Bone flutes have been discovered in Europe that date from 60,000 to 40,000 years ago, and one is even claimed to be Neanderthal, though this is contested. Current initiated members of oral communities can recall long genealogies or are able describe the plants and animals over vast regions, and their diverse qualities. And all of this seems to be traced back to a particular allele of the NF1 gene, which bonobos don’t have, unfortunately….

So that’s enough for now. I’ll surely write more on this when I’ve finished Dr Kelly’s book..

By the way, if you look up NF1 online, you’ll mostly get stuff on neurofibromatosis type 1, so….

References

Lynne Kelly, The Knowledge Gene, 2024.

James Gleick, The Information, 2011