Science, June 25 by Ann Gibbons Almost 90 years ago, Japanese soldiers occupying northern China forced a Chinese man to help build a bridge across the Songhua River in Harbin. While his supervisors weren’t looking, he found a treasure: a remarkably complete human skull buried in the riverbank. He wrapped up the heavy cranium and …
The thesis of this blog is that pre-Homo sapiens hominins existed within a collective mentality as a single creature and were fundamentally not war-like because the advantages of their divisions of labor were so predominant; similarly, for 100 million years after the initial formation of organisms in the Cambrian a half-billion years ago, early species, …
From Science, June 18, 2121 By Ann Gibbons More than 49,000 years ago, a family of Neanderthals set up camp in a cave high in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, overlooking a river valley where bison, red deer, and wild horses roamed. In the cave’s main gallery, a teenage girl lost a tooth, perhaps while gnawing on …
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
When Science places a finding on their cover, it usually means that it is significant, which is indeed the case with the article by D.L. Hoffmann, et al. Entitled “U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art.” A relatively new method of dating utilizing the carbonate drip-precipitated coating overlying the art …
by Pamela J. Hines (Science 23 Apr 2021:Vol. 372, Issue 6540, pp. 357) Hand bones of australopithecine hominid fossils dated to over 2 million years ago have a long, slender thumb that may have added dexterity. Karakostis et al. add muscle to the story of hand evolution with their analysis of torque at the thumb …
Numbers indicate Brodmann’s areas BC: Brodmann’s cap LA: lambdoid suture In humans, evolutionary expansion of the inferior prefrontal cortex (IPF) resulted in a shift of the pci toward the posterior side of CO (red arrowheads). Concomitant expansion of the parietal bone resulted in anterior shift (blue arrowheads) of the apical portion of CO. In humans, …
Trees of life
Feb. 19th Science: “A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago” Do terrestrial geomagnetic field reversals have an effect on Earth’s climate? Cooper et al. created a precisely dated radiocarbon record around the time of the Laschamps geomagnetic reversal about 41,000 years ago from the rings of New Zealand swamp kauri trees. This record reveals a …
Or are we undergoing a progressive awakening to our tribe’s ancient mission to transform the power of aggression into the bounty of communion
They maintain that dreams, rather than merely repeating the events of the day to cement them into long-term storage, allow our brains to freely explore memories that have been filed away over time, extracting information and developing a narrative based on associations.
Love at first bite.
Presidential Laughs
The Last Reality Show Jan. 19th 2021: Sun sets on a bruised America
Election 2020 Roots of American Dynamism European Enlightenment∞Stone Age America American Dreaming
How parties view each other . . . —————– . . . and themselves