Brain Parasites That Affect Dopamine Found In 2/9th of Americans

[I]nfection by the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii, found in 10-20 per cent of the UK's population, directly affects the production of dopamine, a key chemical messenger in the brain. . . . Toxoplasmosis, which is transmitted via cat faeces (found on unwashed vegetables) and raw or undercooked infected meat, is relatively common, with 10-20% of the UK population and 22% of the US population estimated to carry the parasite as cysts. Most people with the parasite are healthy, but for those who are immune-suppressed -- and particularly for pregnant women -- there are significant health risks that can occasionally be fatal.

The parasite infects the brain by forming a cyst within its cells and produces an enzyme called tyrosine hydroxylase, which is needed to make dopamine. Dopamine's role in mood, sociability, attention, motivation and sleep patterns are well documented and schizophrenia has long been associated with dopamine, which is the target of all current schizophrenia drugs on the market.

From here.

The role of dopamine in ADHD and schizophrenia is discussed here.

I certainly admit to being absolutely shocked to discover that there is any brain parasite in human beings that can impact an important brain subsystem with observable effects is anywhere near as common as Toxoplasma gondii. It brings to mind a subplot of some of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series in which a communicable disease affecting the brain is intentionally employed to prevent humanity from making certain kinds of scientific progress.

Usually the brain is unusually free of outside agents because the brain-blood barrier does a better job of keeping these agents out than the systems that protect the rest of the body. But, these cysts somehow manage to cross that barrier.

I would very much like to know if there are other common brain parasites out there, what percentage of carriers of this parasite suffer any symptoms from it, and what kind of diagnosis and treatment regimes are out there to deal with it. Even a quite low percentage of cases that are symptomatic could conceivably account for a quite high percentage of dopamine related conditions that do not have a clear genetic basis, and if I've never heard of it, the odds that it is not widely considered as a possibility by mental health professionals is substantial. This kind of causation suggests a very different treatment regime than the default assumption in mental health circles that a condition is congenital. More here (from 2007).

The Millenium Problem In Yang-Mills Theory

Marco Frasca and some of his colleagues are making good progress in solving the Millenium Problem in Yang Mills Theory:

Quantum Yang-Mills theory is now the foundation of most of elementary particle theory, and its predictions have been tested at many experimental laboratories, but its mathematical foundation is still unclear. The successful use of Yang-Mills theory to describe the strong interactions of elementary particles depends on a subtle quantum mechanical property called the "mass gap:" the quantum particles have positive masses, even though the classical waves travel at the speed of light. This property has been discovered by physicists from experiment and confirmed by computer simulations, but it still has not been understood from a theoretical point of view. Progress in establishing the existence of the Yang-Mills theory and a mass gap and will require the introduction of fundamental new ideas both in physics and in mathematics.

Basically, this means that quantum chromodynamics implies the existence of at least one kind of massive glueball, which is a composite particles made of massless gluons, that the numerical solutions to the theory imply, but that have not yet been definitively observed and have not been proven to exist analytically, although there have been strongly suggestive experimental observations of some kinds of glueballs and many steps in the analytical proof have been completed.

Frasca's primary contribution relates to the relationship between the strength of the strong force and the energy scale of the transaction, called that "beta function" that describes the "running coupling constant" of the strong force. Essentially the strong force is very strong at a scale associated with quark confinement, but quarks are not bound by the strong force at low energies and short distances, or beyond a certain long distance range.

When he says that a function is trivial he means that under certain conditions (one in the low energy "infrared" regime in which quarks move more or less freely within hadrons, and one in the high energy "ultraviolet" regime in which quarks are too distant from each other to be bound by the strong force), the strength of the strong force is zero and it does not interact with the particles in the system. Questions of quantum trivality are central to both the Higgs mechanism of the Standard Model, and the high energy behavior of the electroweak forces.

This beta function is essentially the same as function that describes a harmonic oscillator, a function that also has an important role to play in classical electromagnetism (i.e. Maxwell's equations) and Newtonian gravitational fields. Kepler's law (which says that two body systems orbit in perfect ellipses) is a special case of the more general relationship.

The weak force and electromagnetic force coupling constants also run, but according to different formulas.

Particle Width and Decay Rates

Footnote: Tommaso Dorigo again kindly answers one of my questions, about the unhadronized nature of the top quark, in the comments to this post. I've heard it explained before, but never as clearly with the relevant values of the physical constants set out.

He writes:

[T]he top quark is the only quark that lives its life free of QCD infrared slavery. The price to pay for this luxury is that it lives a very short life!

It is the width of the top quark (the inverse of its lifetime) what guarantees that the top quark does not hadronize before decaying: G_t is 1.5 GeV, while Lambda_QCD is 0.2 GeV. So the scale of its lifetime is one order of magnitude shorter than the scale of time needed for QCD interactions.

But saying that the top quark is free does not lead us very far. QCD still applies. Yes, we cannot observe them directly, because we do not have cameras with a 1/10000000000000000000000000 sec shutter...

Cheers,
T.

A post on particle width, decay rates and some of the general patterns they show is on my to do list. Generally speaking, the heavier something is the more rapidly it decays, and the more spin a composite particle has, the more rapidly it decays, even if its component parts have the same masses. Higher generation fundamental particles are the most empheral of all, with the top quark being the most short lived of any of the massive fundamental particles (photons are eternal, and theoretically massless gluons don't seem to have much meaning separate and apart from their role in the strong force which has a time scale slower than the top quark decay rate).

An important corollary of the top quark's rapid decay rate is that composite particles made of quarks (hadrons) are a combination of five rather than six kinds of quarks (in three colors and three antiparticle versions each).

The half life of the W and Z bosons is about 3×10^−25 seconds. The mean lifetime of a top quark is 5×10^−25 seconds, which translates to a half life of about 7x10^-25 seconds. The time scale comparable to the half life time scale in which the strong force operates to form hadrons is about 53x10^-25 seconds.

As I summed it up six years ago:

Why is the world almost entirely composed of up quarks, down quarks, electrons and neutrinos? Because everything else is highly unstable and rapidly undergoes decay.

There are at least 165 different kinds of unstable particles whose lifetimes have been experimentally measured. Protons, electrons and first generation neutrinos appear not to decay. A neutron is the longest lived unstable particle and lasts on average about 886 seconds.

The muon (a second generation electron) lasts on average for only 10^-6 seconds (a hundred million times shorter than a neutron). The next three longest lived particles that decay, kaons and pions (common two quark particles called mesons), last 1% of the life of a muon (one ten billionth as long as a neutron), which is 10^-8 seconds, and no other particle lasts more than about 1% of the life of a kaon or pion (a trillionth as long as a neutron), which is 10^-10 seconds. Only 36 possible particles last on average longer than 10^-22 seconds. The W and Z particles discussed above last on average 10^-25 seconds.

The data is reviewed at length in this very long paper. In short, anything with a second generation particle in it is unstable, anything with a third generation particle in it is even more unstable, and the more unstable particles there are in something, the more unstable it will be.

LHC Narrowing SUSY Landscape

[T]hroughout 2011, low-energy supersymmetry with conserved R-parity has been dying as a solution to the hierarchy problem. . . . Let's be fast and cruel and simply declare the R-parity-conserving theories to be excluded. We may add lots of a posteriori explanations why we should have always expected the R-parity to be broken and why we were just brainwashed into mindless thinking that R-parity had to be conserved (I surely feel this way today). . . . When it comes to supersymmetric phenomenology, R-parity-conserving theories out, R-parity-violating theories in. That's the message of the LHC at the end of 2011.

From Lubos Motl, a strong SUSY advocate.

He goes on to note that R-parity conservation is not, as many believe, necessary to obtain a suitable dark matter candidate or a suitably long proton decay rate, and explores the latest and greatest R-parity violating SUSY theory out of Cornell.

Notes On Ancient European Y-DNA and Ancient European Cultures

* Some ancient DNA from Eulau in Central Europe with material culture and dated associations with the Corded Ware culture from ca. 1600 BCE (strictly speaking later than the canonical date for the Corded Ware culture) shows three Y-DNA R1a samples, and also shows direct evidence of patrilocality from stronium types which fit the local value for the men and children but not for the women. There are many other Bronze Age sites are far east as the Tarim Basin showing Y-DNA type R1a. Corded Ware is quite strongly associated with Indo-European cultural markers, while the contemporaneous Bell Beaker culture, while having similarities has more cryptic origins. Of course, R1a remains one of the most common Y-DNA haplogroups in the Central and Eastern European regions where the Corded Ware culture was present. The arcaheological dates for the earliest Corded Ware artifacts suggest an origin for Corded War culture ca. 3000 BCE in Poland in a region directly adjacent to the Yamna culture of the European Steppe which is also associated with the early Indo-Europeans.

* Older ancient DNA both from the LBK area and era in Germany, where G2 and F* are found, and from Treilles, France (ca. 3000 BCE), where G2 is found as are subtypes of haplogroup E still found in Europe. Otzi the Ice Man from about 3000 BCE, is also G2a in Y-DNA haplogroup. All of these early European Neolithic examples of ancient Y-DNA lack R1a and R1b.

* The oldest purported R1b ancient DNA finds in Europe of which I am aware are from a 670 CE grave in Bavaria.

* R1b was also purportedly found in King Tut and his grandfather (whose earliest definitive paternal ancestors date to the 16th to 17th centuries depending on how intent one is upon being definitive). But, the King Tut information is partially rumor and the rumor is not specific enough to distinguish African centered R1b-V88 (particularly common among Chadic language speakers of the African Sahel) from the R1b haplogroup types found in Europe. King Tut's patriline is specific to Upper Egypt on the Sudanese side of the country, rather than Lower Egypt (i.e. Northern Egypt). His paternal ancestors ruled an Uper Egyptian kingdom at a time when the Semitic language speaking Hyskos prevailed in Lower Egypt in one of the Intermediary periods.

Analysis

The data are obviously thin. But, the little data we do have suggests that G2a and perhaps also some haplogroups of E and F* were important in the early Neolithic, both LBK and Cardial Pottery. Y-DNA haplogroups R1a and R1b are completely absent in both Neolithic ancient Y-DNA datasets.

While direct evidence concerning paleolithic Y-DNA is almost absent, there is a considerable amount of paleolithic mtDNA available (almost all U4 and U5) and this shows a stark contrast with the mtDNA of the Neolithic and later eras. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Europe experiences dramatic mtDNA shifts, while very little Y-DNA shifts consistent with the archaeological cultures we know to have existed then. History has shown major Y-DNA shifts without nearly as great mtDNA shifts much more often than the reverse, and the available physical anthropology also suggests a major Paleolithic/Neolithic shift in the LBK area, at least.

The ancient Y-DNA data also suggest that R1a was dominant in the Indo-European societies of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the Bronze Age (and in some places, earlier dating back to the Copper Age aka Eneolithic period), suggesting a major demographic shift between and perhaps as a result of, the succession from early Neolithic to Indo-European in these areas (at least, that is, in areas where there was food production in the first place).

Perhaps this shift took place with the with Corded Ware culture, or perhaps it took place with an earlier culture, and the demographic shift wouldn't necessarily have had to coincide with the cultural shift in all places. But, there are few good candidates between the LBK and Corded Ware to bring about such a decisive shift that are not themselves in strong continuity with Corded Ware.

The data are not inconsistent with the Bell Beaker civilization as the primary source of R1b in Western Europe, but the data also don't show the origins or timing of R1b's appearance on a widespread basis in Western Europe with direct evidence.

The distribution patterns one would expect from an expansion from a Franco-Cantabrian refuge in the Epipaleolithic are not so different from what one would expect from an Eneolithic Bell Beaker expansion, for example, since the source points would be roughly the same relative to non-Iberian Europe, and since the means of transportation weren't necessarily profoundly different. Similarly, one could imagine R1a being associated with one of the Epipaleolithic refugia from which Europe was repopulated that was centered further East, rather than from Indo-Europeans, based on geographic distribution alone.

The R1a/R1b boundary in Europe, while muddy at the boundaries (reflecting perhaps, the shifting extent of the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures respectively), is pretty close to the Western limit of Corded Ware. The cultures belonging to the Corded Ware culture and their Western neighbors were apparently engaged in stalemated military conflict with each other at about that boundary for something on the order of a thousand years.

One could imagine the LBK and Cardial Pottery branches of the early European Neolithic (or perhaps two branches of the LBK Neolithic) squaring off against each other at the R1a/R1b boundary, but would have to explain why both sides were Y-DNA haplogroup G2 dominated in that scenario. Of course, the genetics look the same if Bell Beaker is an Indo-European source of R1b in Europe as it does if Bell Beaker is a non-Indo-European source of R1b in Europe, and the identity between the anti-Corded Ware front in the West with Bell Beaker isn't as perfectly established as one might hope. There is suggestive evidence to point towards the anti-Corded Ware fron as non-Indo-European, and a deep linguistic/cultural clash despite the use of similar technologies would certainly help to explain why the two sides would stay at odds with each other for centuries, but that evidence is pretty thin.

The Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures were roughly "contemporaneous with the Sumer period in Mesopotamia, the Early Dynastic period in Egypt and the early Troy (I and II)."

The Minoans ca. 3500 BCE-1450 BCE were also contemporaneous with them. The Minoans had a script that probably recounted a language rather than a proto-language in a somewhat phonetic way, but it has not been deciphered and the extant Minoan Linear A script appears to consist mostly of bureaucratic records of ration programs, taxes and religious sacrifices. My own impression is that Minoan bore a striking similarity to the non-Indo-European language of the Hattic people whose language was superceded by the Indo-European Hittites in the time period from ca. 2000 BCE to 1500 BCE, by which time Hattic had ceased to be used outside religious ceremonies.

Unlike some of the their more Southerly contemporaneous cultures, the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures were apparently illiterate (or at best proto-literate) and were located in places largely outside the awareness of the literate cultures of their era. The first literate accounts of Indo-Europeans are from Egyptian and Sumerian records from ca. 2000 BCE and thereafter and describe the Hittites and Mycenean Greeks, who are from the areas closest to the literate world.

Etruscan Considered

Any time one thinks about non-Indo-European cultures in Europe, another question that hops out at you is the larger linguistic affiliations and origins of the Etruscans, one of the last well attested non-Indo-European language of Europe to die (Raetic in the Alps survived to the 3rd century CE). The Etruscans came into their own as a culture in what is now Northern Italy (and in particular Tuscany), but appear to have been intrusive iron age arrivals there from the Alps, who had many cultural and technological similarities with contemporaneous, Indo-European Italic and Urnfield cultures. Arguably, they survived so long because they borrowed so much from the adversaries and hence were able to compete with them. The Roman Empire ultimately crushed them around 0 CE. Sometimes the Etuscans are associated with the other non-Indo-European languages of the Aegean (e.g. Minoan), but given their lack of obvious maritime origins, this hypothesis isn't necessarily solid.

The ancient mtDNA evidence do agree with a view of the Etruscans as intrusive, or at least, divergent from the rest of Italy:

Genetic distances and sequence comparisons show closer evolutionary relationships with the eastern Mediterranean shores for the Etruscans than for modern Italian populations. All mitochondrial lineages observed among the Etruscans appear typically European or West Asian, but only a few haplotypes were found to have an exact match in a modern mitochondrial database, raising new questions about the Etruscans’ fate after their assimilation into the Roman state.

They are an outlier European compared to modern populations as viewed in a principle component analysis chart.

On one dimension the Etruscans are at an extreme in the same direction as the Azerbaijanis, with the Italian Ladins, Druze, Egyptians, Near Easterners and Central Asians at the other extremes, and the bulk of Europeans in a cluster closer to the Etrustcans than to the outliers in the other direction with Danes, Armenians and Basques at one side of the cluster and Estonians, Sardians and Turks at the more distant side of that cluster.

On the other dimension the Estruscans are at an extreme in the same direction as the Italian Ladins and with Haviks of India, Central Asians, and Spanish Catalans as outliers in the other direction, and Sicilians, Southern Italians, Turks and Armenians at the distant side of the core European cluster, while the Swiss, Austrians, Danes and Icelanders are at the close side of the cluster.

Modern Tuscany is rich in Y-DNA haplogroup G. Tuscan cattle are closer genetically to cattle from the Near East than that of other parts of Italy or Europe. Other genetic studies link Tuscans with at least some Turks.

One narrative connects the Etruscans to the Lydians of Southwestern Anatolia, in accordinance with Herodotus writing in the 5th century BCE. But, there are good linguistic reasons to doubt that analysis because ca. 1200 BCE, when the Etruscan culture began to emerge, non-Indo-European languages had been pretty much squeezed out of existence in Anatolia between the Indo-European speaking Hittites and related Anatolian Indo-European languages that emerged when the Hittite empire fell in Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE (the Lydian language, for example, was an Anatolian Indo-European language), and the Afro-Asiatic language family members to the South.

There are arguments to connect Etruscan to Northwest Caucuasian, a connection that could arguably be traced to the Cardial Pottery Neolithic or an exodus of non-Indo-European Anatolians (e.g. Hurrians) to an Alpine refugium at some point. Notably, one of the proposed places of origin for the Cardium Pottery Neolithic is a close match to the place Herodotus attributes their origin to at a time when Indo-European languages were probably not spoken there, and largely skips over the Aegean.

(Genetically, the case to link them in some way to the Bell Beaker people via the Stele people seems very weak if those people were the main source of R1b in Western Europe and perhaps an important source of European cattle as well, although linguistically, the Stele people would make a good source for Raetian-Etruscan).

The timing of early Villanovan (i.e. proto-Etruscan) culture emergence suggests that some sort of push factor or vacuum created by Bronze Age collapse drove a migration from the Raetian Alps to Northern Italy. Pliny writing in the 1st century who proposes that the Raetians were driven out of their homeland into the mountains by the Celtic Gauls and are of "the same race" as the Etruscans seems closer to the mark.

Overall, the notion of Etruscans as legacies of the early Neolithic who survived by copying technologies and cultural traits from invading Indo-European Italo-Celtic peoples seems like one of the stronger interpretations available. The similarity to Northwest Caucasian, Hurrian languages probably reflects the fact that there are the best attested examples of languages related to the language most prominent in the early European Neolithic (of which Hurrian rather than Northwest Caucasian may very well be the more basal form).

Is Neutrino Antimatter Like Other Antimatter?

According to people who know better than I do, fermion-antifermion pair production from photons never produces neutrinos, and pair production by photons is a function of charge squared, subject to energetic limitations. Thus, photons can produce charged lepton-charge antilepton pairs, quark-antiquark pairs (presumably of identical and opposite color charge) and perhaps even W+ boson-W- boson pairs (yes), but seemingly not Z bosons, neutrinos, other photons, or gluons, although annihilation of positrons and electrons can produce Z bosons.

Photons only couple to electromagnetically charged particles, regardless of how you rotation the space and time axis on a Feynman diagram of its couplings.

Now, since the Fermi exclusion principle doesn't apply to bosons, there is no problem with multiple Z bosons or photons or gluons being in the same place at the same time.

But, what about neutrinos? They can't occupy the same place at the same time, but it would seem by the reasoning above that a neutrino and an antineutrino to collide cannot annihilate into a photon, as that would be equivalent in Feynman diagram to neutrino-antineutrino pair production by a photon, which I have on good authority doesn't happen.

W boson interactions with neutrinos while common, and indeed the main reason that the rest of physics needs neutrinos, don't generally involve neutrino-antineutrino pairs. They involve the intersection in a Feynman diagram of a W boson, a charged lepton and an antineutrino, or a W boson, a charged antilepton and an ordinary neutrino. So, W boson interactions can't tell us what happens when a neutrino and antineutrino collide.

A Z boson does, of course, decay into neutrino and antineutrino pairs of exactly three types (electron, muon and tau). So, just as a Z boson decay could create a neutrino-antineutrino pair, a neutrino and antineutrino could annihilate into a Z boson. See, e.g. here:

Unless I'm mixed up, the most likely annihilation process creates
a virtual Z boson which can then decay into stuff with total charge
zero. If the neutrinos collide at sufficiently low energies,
the only final result allowed by conservation of energy is some
mix of photons, neutrinos and antineutrinos. One can't get just a
*single* photon, thanks to conservation of energy-momentum.
Conservation of parity and angular momentum put some other
limitations on what one can get.... but I'm too lazy to figure it out!

LEP did the reverse process: creation of neutrino-antineutrino
pairs! . . .

As the other posts have correctly stated, they do annihilate into a Z-zero
then whatever, but the cross section for neutrino-antineutrino annihilation
is tiny in the extreme, particularly at low energies. At low energy Z-zero
will just decay back to neutrinos, so you will see neutrino-neutrino
scattering (rotate the diagram by 90 degrees is the other option, so
multiply cross section by 2 if you want). Cross section is in region of
10^-45.

Incidentally it cannot decay into 1 photon, for energy/ momentum reasons,
and 2 photon's is a 3rd order rate so effectively impossible. The reason
being neutrinos cannot couple to photons, and neither can Z-zero, so we
need:

nu + nubar --> Z-zero
Z-zero --> W+ W-
W+ W- --> gamma gamma

Hence cross section surpressed by around 10^-20 . . .

Sorry that was wrong anyway should be of order 10^-36 and thats in m^2.

so 10^-8 mb if you prefer

i.e. v v small

I've also remembered that the single feynmann diagram needs multipliplying
by 4, one for the simple scattering and 3 from the three different neutrino
pairs that could be produced. Not that that makes much of a difference at
this level ==> 4 x 10^-8 mb . . .

Of course for few-MeV neutrinos that Z0 is
far off mass shell, which is partly why the cross-section is so tiny;
the coupling constant is also small for low energies.

But, given the fact that mass-energy is conserved and that energetic limitations can prevent otherwise possible couplings from happening, and that unlike photons, which despite Planck's constant can have very low energies via infrared wavelengths, there is a minimum mass-energy necessary to give rise to a Z boson (91.1 GeV/c^2).

Similarly, since weak force bosons operate only a short ranges (they promptly decay before they get too far), and simply emitting them is energetically limited, low energy neutrinos and antineutrinos might not even be able to interact with each other via the weak force. Yet, since they are fermions, there must be some sort of contact force that prevents them from occupying the same space.

One possibility to prevent this problem from arising would be that the chain of neutrino production is such that every neutrino and antineutrino has at least half of the Z boson mass-energy, which is definitionally true in the case of neutrinos and antineutrinos produced in Z boson decay that have not emitted Z bosons of their own. But, this is manifestly not the case when neutrinos are produced by W bosons and there are neutrinos in the literature with mass-energies in the 10 MeV range, far less than necessary to produce a Z boson upon contact with its antiparticle. (Stable heavy neutrinos are also disfavored by cosmology data in certain mass ranges and by LEP data under certain assumptions.)

Another possibility is that neutrinos and antineutrinos could interact in some way, either a neutral current interactions or in an annihilation event, that would seem to be energetically prohibited via some sort of quantum tunnelling or virtual particle interaction. Perhaps a neutrino and antineutrino could give rise to a virtual Z boson which could decay to a virtual electron-positron pair which could in turn decay to an energetically permitted photon or something like that. (This sounds like what the block quote implies, but I'm not really clear on it.)

But, I'm not certain that there are any experiments that directly look at same type neutrino and antineutrino collisions, or, in particular, collisions of neutrinos and antineutrions sufficiently low in energy to energetically prohibit the formation of a Z boson. Given the limited about of interaction that a neutrino has with everything else, trying to make that kind of collision happen would have a herding cats element to it. Indeed, the whole discussion of the source of neutrino mass fundamentally has at its root a lack of clarity concerning the way that neutrinos and antineutrinos are related.

Another concern along the same lines is that it isn't clear if a low kinetic energy neutrino, even if it had enough kinetic energy to energetically allow it to oscillate into another generation of neutrino, would be energetically limited in a way that prevented that from happening if it lacked the energy to emit a W or Z boson.

If neutrinos can oscillate when it has less than 80 GeV of combined kinetic energy and rest mass, does it follow that (1) oscillations only derived from aborbsion of a weak force boson from some other source, followed by emission of a weak force boson, (2) oscillations are made possible by quantum tunnelling with virtual particles between end states that are not subject to energetic limitations or that can overcome energetic limitations as a result of the uncertainty principle, or (3) that oscillations of neutrinos involve some beyond the Standard Model process other than W or Z boson mediated interactions.

There has been some theoretical exploration of what happens near black holes, in exploding stars, and for high kinetic energy neutrinos in cosmic rays (also here) via Z boson decay, but the low energy, non-relativistic regime is really more interesting than the high energy, relativistic regime from the theoretical perspective, and there seems to be at least one paper from 1992 on the subject of 17 keV neutrino annihilations. See also here (abstract only) and here and here.

There may be well established, textbook answers to some of these questions, but I don't know them.

Scattered Data and Preliminary Musings About Basque Prehistory

I've been digging around the archaeological cultures and archaeology of Basque prehistory and the immediate vicinity.

Particularly interesting have been the links between Artenacian culture and the closely related Aquitani people ca. 2600 BCE (also here and here), geographical extents suggested by toponymns (also here), megalithic monuments (and also here), nearby and potentially relevant cultural complexes such as the Beaker culture, the Rossen culture and the Chasseen culture, and the culture of the Stele people (also here, and here), the role of RH negative genetics, lactase persistance genetics, Y-DNA genetics for R1b1b2, linguistic landscape considerations, outstanding academic issues in the Upper Paleolithic transition, and more.

Either in one of the links above, or somewhere else that I'll have to track down, was some discussion of the timing of the arrival of cattle herding and megalithic structures in Basque country (which was quite a bit later, at least in the case of the megalithic structures, than the rest of Iberia and close in time to the rise in cattle herding and the end of the Artenacian). The Artenacian also is quite a good fit to some guesses I'd made based on latase persistance genetics before I learned that it even existed, in terms of timing, geographical extent, and direction of migration, which is just the kind of thing you like to see happen.

The Stele people story unfolds close in time, and importantly pre-Bell Beaker, but post Cardial Pottery in Iberia. But, given that the oldest evidence of the Bell Beaker people is ca. 2900 BCE in Iberia, about three centuries after the Stele people are seen in Sardinia, it is hard to make out if they are proto-Bell Beaker people (and hence arguably Indo-Europeans, which would be consistent with their place of origin), or are a layer that comes earlier and integrates with the later megalithic culture.

Then come the complexities and question marks.

We have basically no pre-Neolithic Y-DNA samples from Europe that are R1b, and indeed, basically no pre-Neolithic Y-DNA samples anywhere in Europe. We do have lots of R1a from ca. 2000 BCE and a bit older in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but that doesn't resolve the R1b timeline much at all.

To answer the question of Basque origins, you have to say what you mean by the Basque people (which in turn flows from why you want to know the answer to that question) and entertain the possibility of phenomena like language shift due to elite dominance, demic migration accompanied by admixture with existing populations (possibly on a sex biased basis), Iberian demic interactions with North Africa in each direction, transfers with technology and cultures with neighboring cultures (e.g. bow wave models in which cultures neighboring Indo-Europeans that have adopted IE technologies and cultural features migrate with expanding Indo-Europeans at their heels), the relationship of the Corded Ware (which the Artenacian held at bay in Western Europe) to proto-Indo-European culture, and the deeper roots of the immediate antecedents to the Basque people.

I haven't digested the information to my satisfaction enough to write a post reaching strong conclusions. My preliminary avenues of inquiry are (1) to see the time period from about 3500 BCE to 2500 BCE (and especially 3000 BCE to 2600 BCE) as central to the ethnogenesis of the Basque people in the region where they are found today, (2) to see them as arriving by land from what is now France with the Aternican which is probably an important source of the Y-DNA R1b and lactose persistence genes in modern Basque, (3) to see significant amounts Paleolithic era mtDNA as the product of admixture between proto-Basque and indigeneous hunter-gatherer or Cardial Pottery populations, (4) to see Basque society at a remote level going back to the early Neolithic as probably more culturally derived from the LBK than the Cardial Pottery Neolithic, (5) to see the Basque people as either derived from or significantly influenced by upon contact with the Atlantic megalithic culture in France, (6) to conclude that anything the Basque and Indo-European populations of Iberia differ in is probably largely attributable to the later waves of Indo-European migration (Bell Beaker, Celt, Roman and Reconquest), (7) to see strong suggestive connections between the Basque and Sardinians that nevertheless remain cryptic, and (8) to have continuing uncertainty regarding the linguistic affiliations of the Bell Beaker people.

Scenarios in which the Bell Beaker people are culturally Pre-Vasconic, with the Celts representing the first Indo-European migration wave, and those in which the Bell Beaker people are culturally Indo-European and are the first Indo-European migration wave both have some plausibility. Bell Beaker integration into megalithic culture by 2500BCE-2400 BCE argues for a Pre-Vasconic reading, but there are arguments that Celtic origins are too young to account for the spread of Indo-European culture. The Bell Beaker geographic distribution is a decent fit to the Old European toponym area. Bell Beaker is sometimes seen as having Funnelbeaker culture antecedents (TRB) which was a clearly megalithic culture, and at other times seen as having antecedents in Corded Ware to whom the Aternicians were opposed. Neither of these theories, however, is a fit to the oldest Bell Beaker wares being found in Iberia ca. 2900 BCE.

The Bell Beaker physical anthropology, a discipline with a good track record of predicting genetic links in these kinds of situations carries its own implications:

Historical craniometric studies found that the Beaker people appeared to be of a different physical type than those earlier populations in the same geographic areas. They were described as tall, heavy boned and brachycephalic. The early studies on the Beakers which were based on the analysis of their skeletal remains, were craniometric. This apparent evidence of migration was in line with archaeological discoveries linking Beaker culture to new farming techniques, mortuary practices, copper-working skills, and other cultural innovations. . . . Margaret Cox and Simon Mays sum up the position: "Although it can hardly be said that craniometric data provide an unequivocal answer to the problem of the Beaker folk, the balance of the evidence would at present seem to favour a migration hypothesis."

Non-metrical research concerning the Beaker people in Britain also cautiously pointed in the direction of immigration. Subsequent studies, such as one concerning the Carpathian Basin, and a non-metrical analysis of skeletons in central-southern Germany, have also identified marked typological differences with the pre-Beaker inhabitants.

Jocelyne Desideri examined the teeth in skeletons from Bell Beaker sites in Northern Spain, Southern France, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Hungary for her thesis. Looking at inherited dental traits, she found that only in Northern Spain and the Czech Republic were there demonstrable genetic links between immediately previous populations and Bell Beaker populations. Elsewhere there was a genetic discontinuity.

These data points are suggestive of a possible identity in time and space between the Stele people and the proto-Bell Beaker people and with an Iberian origination of the Bell Beaker people. An Iberian origin Bell Beaker people also puts it in opposition to Corded Ware and aligned with the megalithic people, in accord with the alignment of the later Aternicians. From the same source: "A review of radiocarbon dates for Bell Beaker across Europe found that some of the earliest were found in Portugal, where the range from Zambujal and Cerro de la Virgen ran between 2900 BC and 2500 BC, in contrast to the rather later range for Andalusia (between 2500 BC to 2200 BC)."

My preliminary inclination is to see early megalithic culture (with separate Cardial Pottery and LBK branches), intermediate copper to bronze age Bell Beaker culture (recently found to have extended as far as the Baltics at its peak, which is the furthest extent of Old European topomyns) that was fusional with local neolithic cultures and has a meaningful demographic component, and Indo-European culture (which was culturally disruptive, but perhaps not as strongly disruptive demographically) as three separate migration waves, with Bell Beaker as a non-Indo-European copper age culture more prone to integrate with the megalithic culture, and the Urnfield culture as the first Indo-European culture that fully displaced the prior cultures of the region in Western Europe.

In the North, I am inclined to see Indo-European culture date not to the Funnelbeaker culture or the Bell Beaker, but to the Nordic Bronze Age (starting sometime 1700 BCE-1200 BCE) which is seen as synonymous with proto-Germanic in this frame, and the Urnfield Culture (as well as the Hallstat, La Tene, and Celtic cultures that grew out of it) would likewise have been an Indo-European one. This would also suggest that the Central European Tumulus culture that preceded the Urnfield Culture, and perhaps the Unetice culture before it, 2300-1600 BC, may also have been Indo-European, but casts doubt on the Unetice's culture's origins in the Bell Beaker culture. But, a Unetice culture source in the Southern Corded Ware culture seems like a better geographic fit and a more fitting to an Indo-European source culture.

But, this is problematic as well in a non-Indo-European read of Bell Beaker, because there is a good argument that the Stele people have roots in the Kemi oba culture very close to the kurgan proto-Indo-European urheimat.

On the other hand the Kemi oba culture had strong trade and cultural ties with, was contemporaneous with, and was adjacent to the Maykop culture, which eminent Indo-Europeanist Mallory identifies as probably non-Indo-European in unity with the Northwest Caucasus mountain region. In this view, the Kemi oba people would have had very little genetic contribution from the Northwest Caucasus but would have experienced language shift arising from cultural dominance arising from more advanced Northwest Caucasian technologies in areas like copper working.

In this scenario, then, we have Northwest Caucasian languages, with genetic and culture infusions from the Steppe, and ties to the some of the earliest centers of the copper industry. The Stele people migration was from about 3200 BCE to 3000 BCE, so the link that this would imply between Basque and Northwest Caucasian languages (influenced by existing substrates for a relatively fusional wave of migration), would be about as thin as the link between the most divergent branches of the Indo-European language family (e.g. Hindi and English) without the extant and documented intermediate branches to reveal the connections, particularly as the Basque people may have had origins from Southern Iberia to France and then back to Northern Iberia, rather than directly from Southern Iberia to Northern Iberia.

Rather than suggesting a common source of Indo-European and Basque languages, the two cultures might have represented similar technological complexes based on technological exchanges between two cultural and linguistic groups, the Indo-Europeans to the North, and the Caucasians to the South.

While it seems presumptuous, given that we know that there was a substantial demographic component to the Bell Beaker migration, it wouldn't be beyond plausibility to imagine that R1b, rather than being a Paleolithic or Indo-European marker (and how could R1b be predominant in the Basque if it was an Indo-European marker?), R1b might be a proto-Vasconic Bell Beaker marker, as its distribution fits the megalithic cultural region into which it integrated and spreads further at lower frequencies into areas were the Bell Beaker culture was in place for a shorter time period. This seems even less presumptuous when one digs down into accounts of just how primitive an existence pre-Bell Beaker Neolithic farmers in Western Europe endured. It wouldn't have taken much of an edge to become leading figures in this simple small villages.

It also provides a path for R1b with a likely origin around the Caspian Sea or Central Asia to make its way to Western Europe. This interpretation would leave, by process of elimination Y-DNA haplogroups I and T as the most plausible candidates for pre-Neolithic Y-DNA haplogroups, perhaps with T in place pre-LGM in Europe, and I in the Epipaleolithic or early Neolithic.

This could also help explain some of the cultural ambiguity of the Bell Beaker culture. Given that both Bell Beaker and Indo-Europeans are directly borrowing metallurgy and farming technologies and some other parts of the same cultural complex from each other before their respective expansions, it makes sense that artifacts found by archaeologists alone would have a hard time revealing an Indo-European or Vasconic affinity.

In this view, R1a really is an Indo-European marker and its relative absence from Western Europe is a direct consequence of the fact that the Vasconic R1b carrying Bell Beaker people beat them to it and delivered an equivalent technological package that allowed them to hold off the Indo-Europeans for a millenium. This scenario is also a good fit to the absence of early Neolithic R1b in Western Europe.

One down side of this interpretation of course, is that it suggests that the combined forces of the Indo-European and Vasconic expansions have utterly obliterated any distinguishable linguistic traces of either Upper Paleolithic Europeans or of early Neolithic Europeans from either the LBK or Cardial Pottery branches of that Neolithic expansion. Any trace of Upper Paleolithic languages would have become substrates of early Neolithic languages, which in turn would have become substrates in Vasconic and Indo-European languages.

In Basque, the lack of any way to parse substrate from superstate (except perhaps by remote comparisons to proto-Northwest Caucasian and purging Indo-European borrowings, that would still be highly conjectural) makes the task impossible. In Celtic and Germanic languages, the intervening Vasconic substrate would muddy the early Neolithic and hunter-gather substrates. In areas where Indo-European languages directly replaced early Neolithic and hunter-gatherer languages leaving perhaps identifiable substrates, subsequent Slavic language expansions would probably have obscured those substrates in the previous probably Indo-European languages of that region.

Basque, in this narrative, would be essentially equal in age to Indo-European, although it would have been the more ancient language in Western Europe and might be more directly descended from Northwest Caucasian than Indo-European is from its progenitors. My own inclination is to see Proto-Indo-European itself as a likely creole of an ancient variety of the Uralic language and the probably very different language of the LBK farmers.

This would also tend to place the origins of African R1b-V88, associated most strongly with the Chadic people, which is quite basal in the R1b clade, somewhat earlier in time than the Stele people migration of ca. 3200 BCE to 3000 BCE and to associate its likely place of origin as the Southern Steppe. Conveniently, this would put this migration before the invention of writing in Egypt and Sumeria, which would help to explain why there is no historical record of this migration.

It is also tempting to associate the G2a rich people of the Caucasus with the G2a rich source populations of early Cardial Potery and LBK Neolithic populations. Thus, the Bell Beaker people may have been linguistically separated linguistically from the older Neolithic populations of the region by only 1500-2500 years, little more than the separation of the Romance languages or the Sanskrit derived languages of India are from each other. Greater similarity in language and cultural roots between the Bell Beaker people and their Neolithic predecessors may have faciliated their greater fusion with the local people, as opposed to the far more complete lack of cultural continuity between Indo-European culture and its predecessor.

How Many Homo Erectus In Asia?

The best estimates of peak Neanderthal population are about 70,000 (census population, not effective population). This translates into roughly one Neanderthal for the entire duration of the species for each modern human alive in their former range today.

Homo erectus was undoubtedly less impressive than Neanderthals in almost every way. They had less advanced tools, particularly in Asia (although some speculate that the lack of stone tool evidence could be due to the development of bamboo tools that weren't preserved). They were smaller. They had less language ability. It isn't obvious that they were apex predators.

Given that more advanced modern humans appear to have had much higher population densities than Neanderthals, even at the hunter-gatherer stage. One recent estimate comparing Neanderthal and modern human strata at the same location in immediate succession put the modern human population density to the Neanderthal population density ratio at 9:1 or 10:1. Given all of this, it isn't unreasonable to guess tht Homo Erectus might have had lower population densities even than Neanderthals. The ratio might be a factor of two, or less, and probably wouldn't be more than the factor of 10:1 of modern humans to Neanderthals.

The size of the geographic range of Homo Erectus in Asia (and by Asia in this context I mean to the east of India) was on the same order of magnitude as the size of the geographic range of the Neanderthals.

So, the census population size of Homo Erectus may have been on the order of 7,000 to 35,000 over this rather vast territory, at any one time, broken up into perhaps 700 to 3,500 separate small bands, no larger than the modern human or Neanderthal bands, and quite possibly a bit smaller as weaker communication skills may have limited their group size.

Now, Homo Erectus was probably in this part of Asia about ten times as long as Neanderthals. But, from a genetics perspective, this may have caused them to be mutationally limited. The number of new mutations in the total population is a function of the number of births that take place. Smaller populations produce fewer mutations. Larger populations produce more mutations. There is no good reason to think that the number of selectively beneficial mutations isn't relatively fixed relative to the total number of mutations. So, Homo Erectus may have had a similar number of selectively beneficial mutations over their 2,000,000 years in Southeast and East Asia and the vicinity as the Neanderthals did in their 200,000 years or so in Europe and the vicinity.

Moreover, one might actually expect that balance to favor the Neanderthals. The likelihood that a new selectively beneficial mutation that has not reached fixation will be lost in a population slump is greater when the population is smaller than it is when the population is larger. And, the likelihood of new mutations having benefits for the Neanderthals, who were living in an environment quite different from that where hominins evolved in Africa, may have been greater than for Asian Homo Erectus who were living in an environment closer to the one that their African ancestors were already optimized to live in through millions of years of selection. The better a fit one is to one's environment, the less likely it is the a new mutation will provide selective benefit relative to the non-derived part of the genome.

Thus, we might expect that Homo Erectus in 2,000,000 years in Asia, with a lower population density in an environment closer to the one that they were adapted to in Africa might actually have evolved less than Neanderthals did in Europe in 200,000 years with a higher population and an environment quite different from their ancestors.

Now, none of this is definitive. It is a toy model of evolution. Perhaps Asia was a more welcoming environment than Europe and could support a larger population as a result. Perhaps smaller individuals allowed for greater population numbers. Perhaps at the biochemical and immune system level that most of the genome is devoted to (more of our genome goes towards providing instructions to building various subparts of our bodies like proteins and tissues than to the large scale morophology of our bodies), Africa and Asia aren't so similar.

But, the notion that hominin evolution may have been slower for archaic hominins because their small populations caused them to be mutationally limited, i.e. not able to give rise to many beneficial mutations to allow those mutations to be selected positively for, could be important to making sense of the pace of evolution.

Also, if one relies on the rule of thumb that it takes 75-100 individuals to support a sustainable population of a species without intentional outside intervention, and consider that the total population of Neanderthals or Homo Erectus at far less than their peak populations when modern humans come on the scene, it becomes easier to see how modern humans could fragment these archaic hominin populations to below a tipping point and wipe them out without embarking on a full scale, Nazi-like deliberate campaign of continent-wide genocide.

Maybe Neanderthals Were Less Bright Than Given Credit For Being

Two post-Mousterian stone industry complexes are sometimes associated with Neanderthals. But, improved analysis of remains in association with each of those kind of industries, has definitively shown that one is not Neanderthal linked and that the other might not be Neanderthal linked either. This would cast serious doubt on the ability of Neanderthals to innovate technologically at all upon encountered modern humans.

Most researchers accept that before the arrival of anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals had adopted several transitional technocomplexes. Two of these, the Uluzzian of southern Europe and the Châtelperronian of western Europe, are key to current interpretations regarding the timing of arrival of anatomically modern humans in the region and their potential interaction with Neanderthal populations. They are also central to current debates regarding the cognitive abilities of Neanderthals and the reasons behind their extinction.

However, the actual fossil evidence associated with these assemblages is scant and fragmentary, and recent work has questioned the attribution of the Châtelperronian to Neanderthals on the basis of taphonomic mixing and lithic analysis.

Here we reanalyse the deciduous molars from the Grotta del Cavallo (southern Italy), associated with the Uluzzian and originally classified as Neanderthal. Using two independent morphometric methods based on microtomographic data, we show that the Cavallo specimens can be attributed to anatomically modern humans. The secure context of the teeth provides crucial evidence that the makers of the Uluzzian technocomplex were therefore not Neanderthals.

Maju discussed some of the earlier literature referred to in the abstract excerpt quoted above (such as this 2005 article by Mellars) at his old blog, and discusses this article at his new blog.

Mellars argues in particular that transitional European industry stone tools look very similar to Middle Stone Age tools unambiguously associated with modern humans from Africa (from tens of thousands of years earlier), and that it was unambiguously clear that the transitional industries did not appear in Europe until modern humans arrived on the scene (as deduced from carbon dating of nearby European sites definitively associated with modern humans). Thus, it would be an "impossible coincidence" if modern humans didn't have some connection to the transitional industries which were themselves only associated by fairly thin evidence with Neanderthals.

Some of the older literature comes from Denver's resident expert on Neanderthals, Julien Riel-Salvatore, who cast doubt on the Neanderthal association with the Uluzzian with multiple lines of strong circumstantial evidence as opposed to the direct evidence of the most recent paper. Riel-Salvatore also noted in his 2010 paper the doubtfulness of prior associations of the teeth found with Neanderthals, which today's research bears out.

Riel-Salvatore also discussed at his blog the case against Neanderthal involvement in the Châtelperronian industry. The association of Neanderthals with the Châtelperronian is based on just two digs and the association of one of the two sites was seriously questioned by by Bar-Yosef, O., & Bordes, J.G. in their article "Who were the makers of the Châtelperronian culture?" Journal of Human Evolution (2010) DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.06.009, on the theory that there is strong evidence of muddling of the stratiography between an older clearly Neanderthal layers and the Châtelperronian that disfavors that associatioon.

Bar-Yosef and Bordes were less trenchant in their examination of the second site, however. He notes in that post that, "Ultimately, though, the revision proposed by Bar-Yosef and Bordes needs to be taken cautiously, especially as it concerns the St. Cesaire remains. One thing it doesn't do is associate the Chatelperronian with modern humans," as the latest research does for the Uluzzian. More particularly, he explains that:

At St. Césaire, where the the secondary burial of a Neanderhal was found in the Chatelperronian, Bar-Yosef and Bordes argue that the presence of distinct 'Mousterian' and 'Chatelperronian' components of the lithic industry and the fact that not all artifacts show a similar state of preservation suggest caution is needed before we can accept that it was not a mix of Mousterian and Chatelperronian levels. Because the burial is found in the upper (of two) Chatelperronian level, they argue that it was probably not deposited by occupants of the site anyway, implying that Neanderthals who did not make Chatelperronian tools might have buried one of their deceased at St. Césaire, perhaps in an effort to mark the site as theirs following the arrival of whoever made the Chatelperronian.

In my view, Bar-Yosef and Bordes' case is much stronger for Grotte du Renne than it is for St. Césaire, especially since bone refitting at St. Césaire has recently demonstrated that mixing between the Mousterian and the Chatelperronain was a negligible occurrence at the site (Morin et al. 2005). The need to invoke an explanation that doesn't depend strictly on stratigraphic of artifactual data also weakens their overall argument. I say this because if their argument is followed to its logical end, it would mean that, even if you found that unheard of goody that would be a site containing only Chatelperronian layers and thus could exclude stratigrpahic mixing as an explanation, the presence of Neanderthal remains (or at least of a secondary Neanderthal burial) could still be explained away as a result of self-affirming Neanderthals claiming a stake to a given bit of territory. That's not to say that it's impossible, of course, and I will concede that the St. Césaire burial is the only relatively undisputed case of a Neanderthal secondary burial, so the practice was never common and who knows what it really might have meant, as the authors concede. Given that this is the case, though, you wouldn't expect a very unusual behavior to be the preferred manner in which Neanderthals would have marked their territories in the context of encounters with new groups of hominins.

The debate now, is pretty much limited to whether the Châtelperronian was actually associated entirely with modern humans (a possibility discounted entirely until a couple of years ago), or simply involved efforts by Neanderthals (or hybrid Neanderthals perhaps) to copy contemporaneous modern human industries.

Alternately, a hybrid Neanderthal at the modern human-Neanderthal boundary might be a natural candidate for an unusual secondary burial at a possibly abandoned Châtelperronian site (don't forget that all modern humans were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers at the time), if that industry was a modern human one, that would be better motivated than a simple effort of the Neanderthals to mark their territory. The secondarily buried Neanderthal at that site might, for example, have had a modern human father who lived there when the buried individual was conceived (or the mother of a hybrid child from such a union). We know that some Neanderthals did bury their dead and that there was some symbolic element to this practice (as indicated, for example, by grave goods).

If no Neanderthals, or at least no non-hybrid Neanderthals, engaged in transitional industries, and they instead were unable to innovate beyond the 200,000 year old Mousterian stone industry even in the face of exposure to more advanced modern human tool making, the natural inference is that they really were significantly less intelligent than modern humans. In particular, they may have either lacked the ability to learn and innovate, instead acting more on instinct, or may have lacked the mental capacity to make more sophisticated tools in general because they involved some sort of evolutionary leap in ability (perhaps in mental ability, or perhaps in fine motor skills) that they couldn't handle.

Finally BSM physics at LHC?

The CMS experiment at the large Hadron Collider (LHC) is rolling out preliminary data (the money charts are on page 13 of the preprint) on a very early subset of its results showing a high sigma excess of events with two photons in the final state (i.e. it discusses an excess of diphoton events) that are not exactly opposite in direction from each other, relative to the Standard Model prediction.

If this is really an excess and not a QCD background miscalculation or a fluke from a small data set, or an experimental error, this could be a sign of a Higgs boson, although not necessarily of the plain vanilla Standard Model Higgs boson variety. It could be a result that looks significant in a small data set, but is muted in the vast amount of data that has been collected since the dataset that was first collected. It could be something else.

Some of the strongest hints of a Higgs boson in the 115-119 GeV range come from the diphoton channel of results, but so far, the data haven't been definitive enough to say that the significance of the results from the diphoton channel in that mass range amounts to a Higgs boson, because the expected signal is subtle relative to the experimental uncertainty at that mass range.

In answer to the headline question, the answer is, maybe but probably not.

The long delay from the collection of the data to the publication, without updating the data with new results, invites tea leaf reading about the implications that can be drawn about the new data and the quality of the data analysis, which Lubos Motl in the link above indulges at length.

The line of metanalysis that makes sense to me is that the strong Beyond the Standard Model result invited delay due to extensive searches for error to maintain the experiment's credibility, that new data (not necessarily so strongly) has not disproved this finding entirely, and that they are publishing the early result now, so that they can buy time for a similarly careful analysis of the new data by being first to announce the result so that they won't get scooped by the ATLAS experiment, which should be seeing something similar if CMS hasn't screwed up, but is probably likewise taking extra care to make sure that they've done their analysis correctly and ruled out experimental error. A leaked memo from the ATLAS experiment in April 2011 suggested a similar result but hasn't yet produced a published paper. The caution being shown is also emphasized by the fact that the very anomalous result is being reported in a paper that is very light on theoretical explanations or context, that instead simply focuses on raw experimental results, so that any wild eye'd inference from the experimental results can be plausibly denied by CMS.

Lubos also notes that if the mere trickle of data upon which this much delayed paper produces results as significant as they seem to predict, that the results with the data collected to date should have a result that is completely unmistakeable (ca. 48 standard deviations from the predicted value). On one hand, that makes a strategy of publishing a preliminary result in hope of crowd sourcing possible sources of error before publishing another paper that announces an unmistakeable discovery but overlooks something basic that should have come out in peer review plausible. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that anyone could prevent a 48 sigma excess in anything relative to a Standard Model result at LHC where thousands of physicists are chomping at the bit for any hint of beyond the standard model physics, for very long, and this intuition is supported by the observation far more trival bumps and excesses have already been leaked already.

My instinct is to think that the early result hasn't been supported at nearly the same level of significance in later results, but that since nobody can find anything actually wrong with the analysis, that it is getting published anyway.

Professor Matt Strassler observes at his blog that "my preliminary impression is that it’s most likely . . . either a problem with the theoretical calculation of what the Standard Model predicts, or a problem with the way this theoretical calculation was used by the experiments." He notes that the result is robust, as fairly similar data were found in four different experiments, suggesting that experimental error is not to blame, but the calculation is not.

His instincts have merit because the theoretical prediction is a "next to leading order" QCD prediction, but it is quite reasonable to think that something like odd angled diphotons in the background might arise mostly from beyond next to leading order QCD terms. In particular, he states:

ATLAS has accounted for this imprecision [in QCD theoretical predictions due to different calculation methods] by citing two theory predictions. They would claim no discrepancy: they would say that theory is rather imprecise here, and the data differs no more from the theoretical predictions than the theoretical predictions differ from each other.

CMS, for some reason — maybe a good one, but the reason is not stated in their paper — has instead has chosen only one of the two theoretical predictions shown by ATLAS. They say there is a discrepancy. But note they don’t say anything about this discrepancy being due to a new physical effect not predicted by the Standard Model.

When data deviates from a theoretical prediction, one can only claim observation of a new phenomenon if one has strong confidence in the precision and accuracy of that theoretical prediction. . . .

For both ATLAS and CMS the number of events at angles close to 3 radians (approaching 180 degrees) is significantly less than predicted by the theoretical calculations. Since the predictions overshoot here, where the majority of the data is located, one should not be surprised if the entire shape of the distribution comes out wrong. . . .

While we’re at it, the theory predictions also fail badly at CDF and DZero at the Tevatron, for a nearly identical measurement (with vastly more data, but with not that many more events, since the Tevatron ran at lower energy than the LHC). . . . the nature of the failure is vaguely similar to that shown in the CMS and ATLAS plots, but not exactly the same either.

Strassler's observations about just how hard it is to get the QCD backgrounds calculated properly also could provide an alternative explanation for why it has taken so long to publish a result based on just 1% of the data collected to date.

Thus, Strassler is inclined to think that the Standard Model QCD backgrounds are wrong in the CMS paper, while Motl is inclined to think that the equations from which the backgrounds were calculated are wrong. Strassler rather coyly implies that the off angle results may be recoils from jets produced in the events that are unaccounted for in the theoretical prediction.

Suppose Strassler is right that the QCD background underestimates the number of diphoton events because it is miscalculated. This implies that the strength of the apparent 115 GeV-119 GeV Higgs mass signal is probably also overestimated because some of the apparent signal is really background. This, in turn, would strengthen the likelihood that there simply isn't any Standard Model or light SUSY Higgs boson at all.

From my glass half-empty perspective, the possibility that the only beyond the Standard Model physics found at LHC will be an experimental exclusion of the Standard Model Higgs boson seems increasingly likely. However, I'm not very persuaded that walking technicolor advocates (the 2011 state of the art for these theories is discussed here) are on the right track either, despite the fact that it is arguably the leading Higgsless model and the differences between the Standard Model Higgs and technicolor composite Higgs should produce a measurable excess in the diphoton channel of decays. Other versions of technicolor have been ruled out experimentally. As a 2011 paper by one of the leading theorists in the field notes:

[The Tevatron experiment] strongly indicates that viable Technicolor models should feature colorless techniquarks as it is the case of Minimal Walking Technicolor or that a light composite Higgs made of colored techniquarks is excluded by the Tevatron experiment. These results are in perfect agreement with the LEP electroweak precision data which require a small S parameter.

He also has an interesting little paper on supersymmetric versions of walking technicolor involving maximal supersymmetry in four dimensions.

Well Motivated Particles By Intrinsic Spin, Particularly Glueballs

All known fundamental particles have intrinsic spins of 1/2 (fermions) or 1 (bosons), although a hypothetical graviton would have an intrinsic spin of 2 (making it a boson), and a hypothetical Higgs boson would have an intrinsic spin of 0.

All known hadrons (composite particles made of quarks) have two quarks (mesons) or three quarks (baryons). Mesons are bosons which come in pseudoscalar (spin 0), or vector (spin 1) varieties. Baryons come in spin 1/2 and spin 3/2 varieties. The only stable hadrons are protons and bound neutrons, both of which have spin 1/2.

There is some evidence of pairs of mesons bound into a "molecule" although it isn't entirely clear if the concept of intrinsic spin applies to this system. Unitary tetraquarks and pentaquarks (as opposed to "molecules" of two mesons, or of baryons and mesons) have been theorized but not observed.

There is also a theoretical variant on a hydrogen atom in which a antimatter version of a charged lepton takes the place of a proton, such as muonium. A number of other "exotic atoms" have been conceived.

This leaves some hypothetical loose ends.

I've discussed before the possibilty of a particle made of two neutrinos of different flavors and opposite matter/antimatter status bound by the Z boson mediated weak force into a "molecule". If this functioned as a composite particle, these would be pseudoscalar spin 0 particles (and like kind neutrinos would repel each other rather than bind, preventing the formation of the analog to spin 1 mesons), but it isn't clear that intrinsic spin would apply to this kind of bound system.

Another interesting possibility that is well motivated theoretically is the possibility of glueballs. These strong force bound particles should be capable of existing as free particles, like other hadrons, and should have well defined intrinsic spin, which could be either spin-0 (scalar or pseudoscalar), or spin-2 (tensor) (presumably each made of two gluons). Presumably, there could be either two gluon or three gluon states that would be color charge neutral. Conceptually, spin 1 (vector) and spin 3 glueballs (made of three gluons) are possible.

In particle physics, a glueball is a hypothetical composite particle. It consists solely of gluon particles, without valence quarks. Such a state is possible because gluons carry color charge and experience the strong interaction. Glueballs are extremely difficult to identify in particle accelerators, because they mix with ordinary meson states.

There have been hints of direct glueball detection as far back as 2005 (see also here), but even now, there is not a definitive detection.

As a 2008 review explained:

Many different experiments exploiting a large variety of production mechanisms have presented results in recent years on light mesons with J(PC) = 0(++), 0(-+), and 2(++) quantum numbers. This review looks at the experimental status of glueballs. Good evidence exists for a scalar glueball which is mixed with nearby mesons, but a full understanding is still missing. Evidence for tensor and pseudoscalar glueballs are weak at best.

Since some glueballs appear in lattice simulations to be massive (on the order of 1-2 GeV/c^2) and scalar, a scalar glueball would look very much like the hypothetical Higgs boson, but lighter.

As recently as 2011, published physics papers have contemplated what sort of experimental signature a pseudoscalar glueball would have and compared it to the high energy physics evidence.

While some particles of spin 0 (scalar and pseudoscalar mesons and perhaps glueballs and hypothetically Higgs bosons), 1/2 (fermions and some baryons), 1 (fundamental bosons and some mesons and hypothetically some three gluon glueballs) and 3/2 (some baryons) have been observed; no particles of spin 2 (hypothetically gravitons or two gluon tensor glueballs, some candidates for which has been identified, and also here) or 3 (hypothetically some three gluon glueballs) have been observed.

There are questions, however, about whether gluons are even a meaningful way to describe the low energy limits of QCD. For example, there are doubts about whether intrinsic gluon spin or gluon helicity is the proper concept to use to theoretically model glueballs. Theoretical challenges to even the existence of three gluon glueballs are particularly daunting, although some progress has been made in modeling them in lattice QCD models.

Then, there are gluelumps (also here) which are "one-gluon states, allowed because of the static colour octet source.", in more elaborate models such as SUSY ("These are another hypothetical type of gluonic hadrons, where a spinless, static, color-octet source is added to the gauge field. Gluelumps have actually been a first attempt to model gluino-gluon bound states.") Another of the references talks about a gluelump made of a charm-anti-charm and gluon triplet.

Given the fact that all of the fundamental bosons and at least one kind of meson act as force carriers phenomenologically, and the fact that all glueballs are bosons composed themselves entirely of bosons, the possibility that glueballs might act as force carriers of some type is fascinating. We know that it is conceptually possible for a spin-2 particle to reproduce gravity (and indeed that one can understand QCD through a correspondence between its gauge theory and five dimensional classical gravity in anti-deSitter space), but what kind of force might be carried by a spin-3 glueball if one existed?

Some consideration has been given to this question, and spin-3 bosons present fewer theoretical challenges than high spin bosons (see also here). This has some application in condensed matter physics and might matter in SUSY theories.

Seven Thousand Years Too Young Neanderthal Tools Found

The consensus had been that Neanderthals were beginning to experience a serious decline in range and numbers by 40,000 years ago, and went extinct around 29,000 years ago. I recited that "fact" in a post just yesterday.

But, today, I learn via Maju that carbon dates from new find "in the valley of Liébana (Cantabria, Spain)," shows evidence of Mousterian industries strongly associated with Neanderthals as recently as 22,000 years ago (after calibrating the date), give or take a century or two, in continuity with similar industries from tens of thousands of years before modern humans were present anywhere in Europe.

The dates are "contemporary with local Gravettian (c. 20,700 BP, uncalibrated, at Morín) and Solutrean cultures (c. 19,000 BP at Las Caldas), almost shoulder with shoulder geographically." Both of these tool industries are completely associated with modern humans, and modern humans tend to be very good at picking up superior technology from the next valley over eventually over a period of centuries.

While this may have been simply one more relict population in a region that has a long history of successful resistance to demographic change that has affected its neighbors, it has also drawn attention to other recent Neanderthal dates that were widely viewed as experimental error in that past that now have greater credibility.

Higgs Numerology And Other Unbounded Musings

Time for fun with fundamental constants, and in particular, potential Higgs boson mass and Higgs v.e.v. formulas. All of this, as the post title suggests, is nothing more than numerology with no real solid theoretical framework upon which is rests. But, it is interesting nonetheless.

A Higgs Boson Mass From Boson Mass Formula

It is interesting to note that within the range of Higgs boson masses not excluded by experiment is H^2=W+^2 + W-^2 + Z0^2 (i.e. a Higgs boson rest mass equal to the sum of the squares of the rest masses of the three weak force bosons). The Higgs mass under that formula would be 115.5 GeV about plus or minus 1%, just above the LEP exclusion range.

If one takes charge to come in units of plus or minus the imaginary number i, then this same equation also holds. Of course, color charge, baryon number and lepton number are zero for each term of these equations as well. This would also seem to imply some sort of special relationship between the Higgs boson the the triple W+ boson, W- boson and Z0 boson triple coupling which is indeed one of the permitted weak force couplings.

Indeed, all of this would also be true if the Higgs boson rest mass were taken to be the sum of the square of the rest masses of all four of the electroweak bosons (the W+, W-, Z0 and photon). Indeed, that relationship would suggest the square of the Higgs boson rest mass is the dot product of the electroweak boson rest mass matrix with itself, an interesting operation in and of itself, since the dot product of vectors (here we are taking the dot product of four vector boson rest masses) produces a scalar, which is notable because the Higgs boson is a scalar boson.

The dot product ansatz also has the curious suggestion that fundamental particle mass is deeply and fundamentally intertwined with the electroweak force, while continuing to set apart the gluon mediated strong force - whose massless bosons don't interact with any of the electroweak forces, which is not renormalizable while the electroweak forces are renormalizable, and whose color charge is seemingly totally independent of electroweak charges.

Higgs Boson Mass From Boson and Fermion Masses

Suppose you want to get even bigger picture and are worried that 115.5 GeV is bit too light to be a good bet. You can make H^2=(sum of squares of each of the spin 1/2 fermion masses)^1/2+(sum of squares of each of the spin-1 boson masses)^1, omitting only the top quark mass, which does not hadronize and is the only massive particle heavier than the Higgs boson, from the total. Voila! One gets a Higgs boson mass of 120.3 GeV, just perfect for a possible to detect value from the LHC. For extra cleverness, you can put the (H^2)^0 since it is a spin zero particle, which is equivalent to making the Higgs boson mass the fundamental unit of rest mass, and throw in a term for the graviton on the right hand size (or the left hand side, for that matter) of (G*2)^2, since gravitons have zero rest mass. The down side is that maybe you should be triple counting quarks as you do when you do weak force decay percentage calculations. Also, it would be wonderful to be able to relate the Higgs boson mass of 120.3 GeV (or perhaps 115.5 GeV) to the Higgs field vacuum expectation value of 246 GeV, which is not quite double the Higgs boson mass by this formula, by some trivial formula.

Higgs v.e.v. from fermion and boson masses counted correctly

There is an interesting formula for the Higgs v.e.v. from first principles that is even nicer than the 120.3 GeV Higgs boson mass formula above (the 115.5 GeV Higgs boson mass formula is prettier and more natural). In this formula the Higgs v.e.v. of 246 GeV is equal to, to within experimental measurement uncertainty, double: (the sum of squares of spin 1/2 fermion masses (except top quarks), counting each quark mass three times, one for each color)^1/2+(sum of squares of spin 1 boson masses)^1+(sum of squares of spin 2 boson masses)^2. One can justify leaving out the top quark mass, again, on all sorts of grounds, such as, for example, the fact that a top-antiquark mass pair is energetically prohibited at the Higgs v.e.v. (yes, I realize that this is somewhat circular, but the formula is also quite beautiful as formulas go, so the anomaly may be worth it if it can save the formula).

Since this Higgs v.e.v. has no dependence whatsoever on the Higgs boson mass, and three of the Higgs bosons are gobbled by the W and Z bosons that are included in the formula, maybe the Higgs boson mass doesn't even matter, and one can build a Higgsless model on that coincidence.

A Higgs Boson Mass From Hardon Interacting Particle Mass Formula

A Higgs boson mass of exactly half of the 246 GeV Higgs v.e.v. value (i.e. 123 GeV) isn't yet ruled out by LHC, but it isn't a favorite either. A few GeV less is more strongly suggested.

If we want a Higgs boson mass of above 115 GeV, the thing to do might be to take half of the Higgs v.e.v. calculated as above, and to find some legitimate reason to omit a term that accounts for about 4 GeV. For example, if you include non-top quarks, but not leptons in the calculation above, you get about 119 GeV, which is the sweet spot for Higgs boson mass if there is one.

Thus, in this bit of numerology, while all particle masses would contribute proportionate to their fermion or boson status to the Higgs v.e.v. up to the v.e.v. scale, only particles that are part of, or are emitted or absorbed directly by hadrons would contribute to the Higgs boson rest mass formula. After all, the Higgs field, like the strong force, would be a self-interacting one since Higgs bosons themselves have the mass that a Higgs field creates, so it might make sense that only self-interacting particles contribute to its mass. This would also ground the fundamental concept of mass in fundamental particles more closely to the concept of mass in hadrons that account for the vast majority of the non-dark mass in the universe. Thus, this distinction between the Higgs v.e.v. and the Higgs boson mass would have the added bonus of suggesting some mysterious connection between the strong force and the electroweak force that could point towards a way towards a GUT.

Phenomenological Formulas For The Lonely Top Quark Mass

It is also interesting to observe that there are a variety of formulas to which one can appeal as a special case to find the top quark mass, many of which, of course, have no real good theoretical motivation. For example, the square root of the top quark mass less the square root of the W boson mass equals the bottom quark mass, which suggests that formula t+W-2(tW)^1/2=b^2 is correct to within the limits of experimental accuracy. One can imagine this kind of equation popping out in some way as the leading order derived somehow from the Feynman diagram for a top quark decaying into a bottom quark, with the diagrams weighed somehow by their transition probabilities, since top to bottom quark decay via W boson emission from the top quark is the dominant mode of decay for top quarks to the near exclusion of all other terms (Only 0.02% of top quark decays are to charm or up rather than bottom quarks quarks, while 5.2% of bottom quarks transition to top or up quarks rather than charm quarks, energy permitting).

Incidentally, the natural next iterations of this equation (at least at the leading order term values) not true or even close for b+W-2(bW)^1/2=c^2, and for c+W-2(cW)^1/2=s^2, so this is special pleading to some extent.

What would the Higgs v.e.v. be if you did the sum of squares of masses of a type to the power of spin? You'd get a bit less than 600 GeV.

But, one can also imagine some sort of weighting of mass matrix values with CKM and PMNS matrix values, with top quark mass being virtually removed from the equation because its amplitude to remain as a top quark rather than a bottom quark is so trivally low, while the other particles far more regularly transition into each other.

The Weak Sector and Strong Sector Compared

If the Higgs v.e.v. and Higgs boson mass are in some sense superpositions of the masses of all of the fundamental particles using rules similar to those involved in weak force calculations, then this suggsts that quark-lepton complementarity is related in some deep way to the electroweak force from whose CKM and PMNS matrixes it is gleaned, while having little or nothing to do with the strong force (although the weak force does recognize different colored quarks as equal and distinct fundamental particles on a par with each other probability-wise, rather than mere versions of the same single thing).

Indeed, one way to think about quark-lepton complementarity is to see the four parameters of the CKM matrix whose three theta angles correspond to the three dimensions of space and whose CP violation phase corresponds to the dimension of time, which can be express as a four dimensional unit vector with a complentary PMNS unit vector to it. This notion has the happy feature of representing the relationship of the CKM matrix and PMNS matrix to each other in the background independent way preferred by general relativity, and since the CKM/PMNS matrixes appear to have some deep relationships to rest mass, and since rest mass is one of the core elements of general relativity (indeed, the Newtonian formulation of gravity that ignores all non-rest mass terms in the stress-energy matrix is an extremely good approximation of reality over a broad range of circumstances), this suggests an avenue of attack to linking the two.

It also heightens the intuition that the three generations of fermions are a weak force thing (as transitions between generations are mediated by the weak force), rather than a strong force thing - since the strong force treats all quarks of the same color essentially the same.

Less impressively, there are both four electroweak bosons (apart from the Higgs) and four kinds of fermions, each with a different electromagnetic charge. But, it would, again, provide a distinction between a correspondence that the electroweak force seems to play a part in, and one that doesn't obviously relate to the strong force.

And, of course, there are no demonstrated circumstances in which the strong force is observed to be CP violating, even though there are natural terms in the QCD equations to permit this to happen. The obliviousness of the strong force to electromagnetic charge could be at play here and it is worth remarking that hadrons and anti-hadrons appear to have the same masses, even though most of their masses arise from the strong force in the conventional account, rather than the rest mass of the component fermions.

Musings On Realistic Four Color QCD Models

Query if there is some sort of Color Charge-Parity near symmetry relationship analogous to the electroweak charge-parity relationship that is broken in a similar way in chiral strong force interactions. After all, there are, for example, red and anti-red colors for quarks and gluons that can be reversed with a reversal of parity.

It is also worth noting that one way to see the eight gluons is as a 2*2*2 toggle of three orthogonal unit vectors in space, but not time. Indeed, this heuristic is one of the better ways to understand why there are eight rather than nine (RGB*RGB) kinds of gluons. Viewed this way, the necessity that a hardron or gluon be color neutral is another way of saying that the vector sum of its color charges, which can be expressed in a space-like background independent way, must sum to zero. But, why in a general relativistic world are there not sixteen gluons with a color charge toggle forward and backward in time as well?

Indeed, it isn't obvious to me that color charge has to be anything other than polarization, because I'm not aware of any way yet devised to directly measure gluon polarization, since gluons are always confined and can't be measured directly so far, although experiments to measure gluon polarization have been proposed.

Given that the natural scale of time-like distances is so much greater than the natural scale of space-like distances for human beings, and that gluons like photons are massless, one can imagine that the time-like fourth component of color charge is suppressed in much the same way that the time-like polarity components of photons are suppressed even though QED equations consider 4-part rather than the day to day functional 2-part polarizations of photons, with two components cancelling out (see, e.g. Richard P. Feynnman, QED at pages 120-123), but might have some physical implications in extreme conditions or another class of interactions.

In the QED equation, the extra two components of polarization are particular relevant to virtual photons, for example, between electrons and protons in atoms), so one might imagine by crude analogy, that a missing fourth color charge might be mostly pertinent to the exchange of virtual gluons, for example, between quarks within hadrons, that we tweak by using an effective coupling constant of the strong force when we should be using a bare value perhaps.

It might be easier to reconile a four color strong force with the time-like color strongly suppressed with background invariant general relativity.

It also might very well be that if one used the running of the bare coupling constant of four color strong force with the timelike color suppressed, rather than the effective coupling constant of the three color strong force, that one might be able to achieve the holy grail of GUT theorists, a GUT scale energy level where the strong, weak and electroweak running coupling constants converge to exactly the same value, which, by hypothesis, would be precisely the same as the energy level where the electromagnetic and weak force running coupling constants coincide (without the nuisance of a menagerie of supersymmetric particles - we'd have the same old six quark (but in four colors each instead of three), the same old six leptons, the same old four electroweak bosons, and sixteen rather than eight kinds of gluons that are otherwise the same in all respects.

Anyway, it is a nifty idea that would be simply in principle to check out even if it might be harder to actually do once one got down to really cruncking equations and putting numbers into lattice models and beta functions for the strong force coupling constant.