You’ve heard of your IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and your EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient) but what about your NQ (Neanderthal Quotient)? A new study from the State University of New York analysed 200 Homo sapiens to see which personality traits they shared with our distant cousins Homo neanderthalensis. So, what about you? How often (never/occasionally/often) do you…
(a) Fantasise about sex with someone other than your partner? (b) Avoid talking to people you don’t know very well? (c) Feel so nervous that nothing could calm you down? (d) Show a lack of imaginativeness in new situations?
If you mostly answered never/occasionally, then you have a low NQ. If you mostly answered often, you have a relatively high NQ. At a glance, this looks crude: we Homo sapiens are monogamous, sociable, calm and imaginative, while Neanderthals were promiscuous and brutish. But when the researchers took DNA samples from the participants and looked for correlations between their personalities and their genetic overlap with Neanderthal DNA, the correlations were small but statistically significant. Since generally the evidence for heritable personality traits is strong, it is not so far-fetched to imagine a future in which our personalities are measured not with questionnaires, but by sequencing our DNA.
Order Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee? by Ben Ambridge (Profile Books, a£12.99) for £11.04 at bookshop.theguardian.com
