From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Thu Jun 19 2003 - 08:32:19 MDT
Did color vision end human pheromone use?
Now, that is interesting. There is an article in New Scientist where a research team says it did.
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Colour vision ended human pheromone use
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993835
The development of colour vision may have lead to Old World primates, and hence their human descendants, to lose their ability to detect pheromones, suggests a new genetic study.
Pheromones are highly specific scent molecules that many animals rely upon to find and assess a potential mate. But humans appear to make little, if any, use of pheromone signals, says Jianzhi George Zhang, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Researchers have suggested before that the primates' pheromonal abilities may have fallen by the wayside because they developed colour vision, a better way of selecting mates. "But we establish the timing for when the pheromone signal transduction pathway was shut off," Zhang told New Scientist.
It occurred about 23 million years ago, just before the hominoid superfamily that eventually produced humans branched off. Crucially, the timing approximately coincides with the development of full colour vision in Old World primates, thereby giving a major boost to the theory.
<snip>
[rhinoceros] Full article posted in the BBS here:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=28721
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