Human Supremacy
This is the twelfth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life…
Evolution
Can Teething Predict How Fast You Will Grow?
We know that humans live relatively long lives, and we certainly know that we spend a larger proportion of those lives as children than other species. The question remains: how…
What Happened to Our Ape Ancestors?
Millions of years ago, in the Miocene Epoch (23 to 5.3 million years ago), about 100 species of apes roamed Europe, Asia, and Africa. Just a few million years later,…
How Prehistoric Humans Discovered Fire Making
Of all the pivotal technologies discovered by humans, fire making was the one that gifted our species with power beyond all others. An ancient Greek myth tells the story of Prometheus,…
Some Myths Regarding the Genesis of Enterprise
Not only were “modern” elements of enterprise present and even dominant already in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, but the institutional context was conducive to long-term growth. If a…
Seven Features of Ancient Enterprise
The changing context for enterprise through the centuries reminds us that business activities are not universal but fluid and alter according to society’s practical priorities and ethics. There are multiple…
Seeing Red: Our Ancient Relationship With Ocher and the Color of Cognition
Extensive ocher use reflects the culture and cognitive abilities of early humans, who inherited an affinity for red from primate ancestors. Twenty-three million years ago, our distant ancestors gained trichromatic…
What Does Play Tell Us About Human Evolution?
Our species devotes a singular amount of time to an utterly unserious aspect of life: play. This begs the question: what is the adaptive value of horsing around? What possible…
Raising Hairless Primates
I remember the first time I observed my daughter pointing. We were at a neighborhood playgroup, a daily gathering of toddlers and their parents, and 12-month-old Tessa pointed at a…
Perceptions of Social Dominance and How to Change Them
It’s surprising that human infants as young as 10 months may be able to identify social rank. Research suggests that infants learn to distinguish who around them is dominant, using relative body…
Why Culture Is Not the Only Tool for Defining Homo sapiens in Relation to Other Hominins
We need a broad comparative lens to produce useful explanations and narratives of our origins across time. While the circumstances that led to the emergence of anatomically modern humans (AMH)…
Co-Evolution
Evolutionary theory or the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection explains how biological life has developed and evolved to its present state on our planet. Darwin’s theory proposes that Individuals of…
Discarding Old Theories on the Path to Finding the First Humans Outside Africa
Spectacular archeological finds reveal the true past of the first Europeans. When I began studying human prehistory in the mid-1990s, little did I know that I would witness a paradigm…
The Adaptive Value of Teenagers: How Peer Learning Contributes to Primate Success
Anthropological science is our species’ attempt to address our most fundamental questions about who we are and how we got here. It asks for evidence of the evolutionary path we…
Growing Clues That India’s Central Narmada Valley Was a Key Hub in the Human Story
In December 1982, a geologist digging in India’s Central Narmada Valley found something he did not expect. Arun Sonakia, who at the time worked for the Geological Survey of India,…
The Evolution of the Human Pair Bond
Our species stands out from the animal kingdom in many ways. Some of them are obvious: we are big-brained primates who use tools and language, a social species with symbols,…
How Three New Museums Are Teaching the World About a Paradigm Shift in Our Understanding of Human Origins
New findings and significant advances in research have scientists rethinking our origins, and museums around the world are working to catch the public up. Breakthrough anthropological and scientific findings have…
Sperm Whales Have Culture Too: Strong Evidence That Clans, Culture, and Dialects Are Not Unique to Humans
The sperm whale is extreme. They have the largest brains and the largest noses on Earth. The sperm whale’s nose is a huge and sophisticated sonar device that produces the…
Prepared Learning: What Are Humans Hard-Wired for at Birth?
Do living beings learn and pass on to future generations some behaviors or predispositions more easily than others––and if so, how? So-called prepared learning is a question psychologists and other…
Where Do Living Creatures Get Their Sense of Rhythm?
The science of rhythm across species is a new and growing research field, as yet without agreement on the question of whether the phenomenon of rhythm exists for every species.…
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