Australopithecus may have spent time in trees, but a more likely explanation for why short legs persisted is that Lucy and her ilk were particularly prone to fighting.
Tag: anthropology
1 ma west Europe tooth
Scientists in Spain have found a tooth from a distant human ancestor that is more than 1 ma old.
DNA Heritage
I submitted my DNA anonymously to IBM for a research project, and from the mutations in my Y-chromosome alone, they identified me as haplotype N LLY22G, which pegs the Uralic language of my family and the locale of northern Scandinavia / Eastern Europe. With only my DNA, they identified my family origin on the map above to within a few km, and traced it back to the veritable “Adam” in Africa, from whom we are all descendants.
I wonder how granular these will get eventually. The beginning of the tree is well-known and comparatively easy. Still, welcome to total history beta 1.
2022-03-04:
8 ka BP, 17 women reproduced for every 1 man. An analysis of modern DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture. A member of the research team hypothesizes that only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others. These men could then pass their wealth on to their sons, perpetuating this pattern of elitist reproductive success. Then the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again. “Maybe more and more people started being successful.”. In more recent history, as a global average, 5 women reproduced for every 1 man.
Brown’s human universals
By winnowing the literature of anthropology, Donald E Brown collected a list of some 200 ‘human universals’. I think trying to re-sort it in ‘evolutionary‘ order should be more instructive
82 ka Adornments
very similar shells, with the same type of adornment have been found in south africa and morocco. what this article calls “symbolic uses” may well have been a currency.
Towards Async
quoting my hero jan chipchase and also this gem:
Users are showing a growing preference for semi-synchronous writing over synchronous voice.
welcome to my post-phone world.
Ambient Intimacy
Ambient Intimacy is a term to describe that sense of connectedness that you get from participating in social tools online that allow you to feel as though you are maintaining and, perhaps in fact, increasing your closeness with people in your social network through the messages and content that you share online – be it photographs or text or information about upcoming travel.
all this social grooming may help us to raise dunbars number. and once we do, expect huge payoffs as previously zero-sum games become win-win. (for background, read nonzero by robert wright.)
13 ka Comet cataclysm?
a wayward comet hurtled into Earth’s atmosphere 13 ka ago, where it fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs. Not only did this scatter nanodiamonds across the northern hemisphere, it led to immense wildfires that scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals and bringing an abrupt end to early human culture. A scientist behind the theory states quite bluntly that the entire continent was on fire.
2021-03-30: Not conclusive, but interesting to ponder.
Did impacts and airbursts from multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet cause the onset of the Younger Dryas global cataclysm 13 ka ago? After 10 years of acrimonious scientific controversy around the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), an important new book by eminent geologist Dr James L. Powell answers this question in great depth and sets the record straight with a resounding YES.
Titled “Deadly Voyager: The Ancient Comet Strike That Changed Earth and Human History”, this thoroughly researched and eminently readable study systematically demolishes all the criticisms of the YDIH that have been made over the years by scientific opponents.
Of particular note is Powell’s careful dismembering of several studies which claimed that the evidence on which the YDIH is built is “irreproducible” – a damning criticism in science and one that opponents of the YDIH often gleefully repeat as though the claim is an established and unquestionable fact that “debunks” the hypothesis.
Homo Floresiensis
say hi to homo floresiensis
Before The Dawn
Using genetic anthropology to reconstruct the 90% of modern human history that is unrecorded. The discoveries are coming in fast; no doubt we’ll have a revival of alternative history books soon 🙂 We are beginning to uncover all the near-extinction events in our history that left marks in our mitochondria and Y-chromosomes. more vast and scary than any foundation myth.
2023-04-06: The 0-sum games that held humanity back for 300k years
The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females. In humans, in apes, in deer, in insects. Despite apes being more intelligent than insects, they live in the same stability. And the same can be said about the human default: Despite being more intelligent than apes, humans are just as stuck in their ecological niches until the powerful among them get incentives to develop.
We are used to seeing human development as a line of progression. Step by step, generation after generation, humans are commonly thought to have added one small invention and observation after another, culminating in big breakthroughs and discoveries. I think it could be more useful to see human history as episodic. On some occasions, humans focused on the things that are possible to develop, that is, technology and teamwork. During most of the time, human males focused on a pursuit with little development potential: How to snatch as many females as possible from other males. However intelligent a species is, it will not develop as long as all its intelligence is used to play a 0-sum game.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 