Many U.S. cities that once depended on manufacturing — cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Binghamton, N.Y. — experienced job loss and a decline in population years before the Great Recession began. John Hockenberry grew up outside of Binghamton and watched a great, vibrant city fall. IBM, once a major employer in the area, moved its factories overseas, and other businesses followed. Today, downtown Binghamton is filled with empty storefronts and houses.

Most of us think of the word “neandertal” as an insult. We use it to describe someone who’s backward or not so smart. And why wouldn’t we? After all, our ancestral caveman cousins lacked intelligence and managed to go extinct while we, the modern humans, survived and thrived.

At least, that’s what we’ve always told ourselves. But maybe we’ve been wrong.

A story published this week reports that Chinese archaeologists have found nearly-intact mummies of people who lived in a desolate desert in Northwestern China nearly 4,000 years ago. But they were not Chinese. DNA evidence from these long dead people shows that they were in fact of European descent. Also this week, geneticists announced that man's best friend split from the wolves about 15,000 years ago in the Middle East.

Biologists have discovered that mosquitoes on the Galapagos have evolved to pierce the skin of reptiles, including iguanas and endangered tortoises. The mosquitoes daily reptilian snack brings a threat of transferring vector-borne disease to the animals. Leaving scientists to ask the question: how can we keep the Galapagos as pristine as when Darwin first found them? Evolutionary biologist Simon J. Goodman joins The Takeaway with more.

Goodman is co-author of the research article, "Natural colonization and adaptation of a mosquito species in Galapagos and its implications for disease threats to endemic wildlife," which was published in this week's issue of the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Here's a view of Galapagos Wildlife:

To answer what makes us human has long been a scientific quest. It’s one that Dr. Richard Wrangham has been wrestling with since the 1970’s, when he started his career, observing chimps with Dr. Jane Goodall. Then about 10 years ago, while sitting in front of his own fireplace, a theory of human evolution came to him. It’s one that he lays out in his new book: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Richard Wrangham is the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He joins The Takeaway with his take on human evolution.

Just look how far we have come since our humble beginnings.

There's a polar bear meeting in Norway this week, where politicians are considering how to handle the dire predictions surrounding the fate of our arctic friend. And this meeting got us thinking: in the face of a warming globe, is extinction the only option? Are organisms, along with a little thing called natural selection, finding a way to beat this formidable foe? We hope Warren Allmon, a paleontology professor at Cornell who specializes in macroevolution, can shed some light on our queries. Mr. Allmon is also the director of the Museum of the Earth.

Polar Bear S.O.S. has enlisted children to spread the word about the animal's plight. Hear their message below.