Here is the study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn9310 (archived)
Spanish paleoanthropologists from the University of Alcala discovered that Neanderthals exhibited social behaviors such as compassion for seriously ill children. The research was published in the scientific journal magazine Science Advances (SciAdv).
The conclusions of scientists are based on the analysis of fossilized remains of a small group of representatives of this species, related to humans, who lived between 273 thousand and 146 thousand years ago in the Cova Negra cave in the province of Valencia, on the territory of modern Spain. Years ago.
Researchers discovered the skeleton of a young Neanderthal man who was about six years old when he died. Although researchers were not sure what the child’s gender was, she was named Tina.
As the analysis showed, Tina suffered from a severe inner ear pathology from birth, which caused complete deafness, attacks of severe dizziness and the inability to maintain balance. It was clear that he could not survive in the prehistoric world without the constant care of his adult relatives.
Scientists noted that Tina’s survival to the age of six indicates that her team provided the necessary care for the child and her mother throughout this period.
According to anthropologists, this discovery proves that Neanderthals felt compassion and did not act solely for pragmatic reasons.
“For decades, Neanderthals have been known to care for and protect their vulnerable companions. However, all known cases of grooming involved adults, leading some scientists to believe that such behavior is not true altruism but merely an exchange of mutual aid between equals,” said lead study author Mercedes Conde-Valverde.
Scientists also noted that Tina’s discovery represents the earliest known case of Down syndrome, as their pathology only occurs in people with the condition.
Previous researchers discovered The link between Neanderthal genes and autism.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with this article but even AI articles are more coherent these days. Old model? Unsupervised machine translation?
The article is coherent (it conveys the relevant info without contradicting itself) albeit poorly written. Most likely the result of someone getting really sloppy while writing it, perhaps sleep-deprived. But it doesn’t read like AI stuff, nor a translation - cue to “Cova Negra cave” (lit. “Black Cave cave”).
Is it?
I can only really guess whether they’re talking about one or two subjects here. In one sentence they call a six year old a man and gender them male, then in the next they gender them female and call them Tina. The pronouns keep switching back and forth.
Her team? Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?
That all reads like bad AI writing to me.
Yes when it comes to the relevant info. The anaphoric references are all over the place; he, her, she, man*, they all refer to the same fossil.
*not quite an anaphoric reference, I know. I’m still treating it as one.
It’s clearly one. Dated to be six years old, of unknown sex, nicknamed “Tina”.
This does not show lack of coherence. Instead it shows the same as the “is it?” from your comment: assuming that a piece of info is clear by context, when it isn’t. [This happens all the time.]
That said, my guess (I’ll repeat for emphasis: this is a guess): I think that this shows that they cared for the mother because, without doing so, the child would’ve died way, way earlier.
I genuinely don’t think so.
Modern LLMs typically don’t leave sentence fragments like “on the territory of modern Spain. Years ago.” They’re consistent with anaphoric references, even when they don’t make sense in the real world. And they don’t screw up with prepositions, like switching “in” with “on”. All those errors are typically human.
On the other hand, LLMs fail hard on a discursive level. They don’t know the topic (in this case, the fossil). At least this error is not present here.
Based on that I think that a better explanation for why this text is so poorly written is “CBA”. The author couldn’t be arsed to review it. Myself wrote a lot of shit like this when drunk, sleepy, or in a rush.
I’ll go a step further and say that the author likely speaks more than one language, and they were copying this stuff from some site in another language that has grammatical gender. I’m saying this because it explains why the anaphoric references are all over the place.
Probably jet lagged, too. A lot of pre-prods are worked on during the flight home from a conference and after one gets home when they can’t sleep.
Jet lag is the hell of a drug. And not a fun one.