This blog maintains that the emergence of humans six million years ago represented a rare biological “transition” to collective function similar to “eusocial” insects, mainly ants, bees and termites. For the first time, there has been a reliable estimate of how many ants are on earth. This paper illustrates that collective function has propelled both …
I have commented on this blog that doctors have been around longer than soldiers, and now there is proof. At a time when there is virtually no evidence of organized violence (war) there is new evidence of a sophisticated, and successful amputation 31,000 years ago in Bornio. From Science, 7 September, 2022 by Michael Price: …
This blog maintains that upright posture is the sine qua non human trait because: 1) humanity is defined by a shift to collective functioning; 2) collective function requires a “public” communication system to coordinate the behavior of individuals; and 3) upright posture enabled the face-and-upper-body to become the instruments of the simultaneous-and-continuous communication that is …
The similarity of ancestral humans and dolphins.
In the past several years, a series of books and studies by prominent scientists are quietly revolutionizing the human evolutionary narrative. Yuval Harari in his Sapiens (2014) makes no bones about his view: “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment …
Archaeological analysis suggests an arms race in ironworking and cavalry spurred bureaucracy and bigger populations From Science June 28, 2022 by Michael Price War is hell. It breaks apart families, destroys natural resources, and drives humans to commit unspeakable acts of violence. Yet according to a new analysis of human history, war may also prod …
a previously unknown period from 80 to 20 thousand years ago is shown to have diffuse interbreeding across the entire continent of Africa.
the authority of truth, which had reigned supreme over six million years of collaboration within the countless tribes of our ancestral species, all in passionate deliberation as to which path would be the most righteous and correct way forward for all as a single creature.
The same vanity that makes the peacock so vigorously shake its tail has not just drawn us together to seed culture, it has proceeded to become the motive engine driving our economies,
The species of our Genus Homo eventually became predominant hunters because they refined instincts for justice as an “immune system” against individual dominance, which is a pathology for organic teamwork. Modern hunter-gatherers are egalitarian (Pringle, 2014), and justice (punishing dominance) has been observed in far-flung hunter-gatherers,not influenced by wealth-creating agricultural practices (Boehm, 1999). There have been …
Best clips of Inspector Clouseau
Mind is the will to survive that emerges in the wake of natural selection.
Since the Big Bang, the cosmos has had a linear direction toward amalgamation and association such that matter has been transforming into mind. Mind resides within the relationship between objects. At the subatomic “particle” level, matter itself exists as a relational matrix in which everything alters everything else. On Earth, as amino acids amalgamated into …
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity in which David Graeber and David Wengrow assemble a vast array of archeological evidence from prehistory, much of it recently discovered, and interpret it in a wholly original way. The book, published in 2022, offers an alternative to the widely accepted Rousseauian narrative that, about …
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 …