Inneresting

Babbling bonobos and the origins of human speech

Bonobo "Baby Talk" Reveals Roots of Human Language

Bonobos Can Communicate,Babble Hints At Origins of Human Speech

 

 

Little Known Facts About History

A Short History of Conservatives and Liberals

"Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals; and
2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That’s how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q’s and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement."

Related: New Study shows Liberals have a lower average IQ than Conservatives

What can I say? Makes sense to me.

From Evolution To Devolution

UNESCO Condemns “The Systematic Destruction of Humanity’s Ancient Heritage”

ISIS destroy another ancient site in Iraq

More Interesting Stuff

Jawbone Fossil Fills a Gap in Early Human Evolution

"Mr. Seyoum, a graduate student in paleoanthropology at Arizona State University, had made a discovery that vaulted evolutionary science over a barren stretch of fossil record between two million and three million years ago. This was a time when the human genus, Homo, was getting underway. The 2.8-million-year-old jawbone of a Homo habilis predates by at least 400,000 years any previously known Homo fossils."

Kinda Scary, If You Ask Me

Hunting for Germs in an Ancient Graveyard

Researchers scour Italian cemetery for DNA of ancient strains of cholera

"An Italian church graveyard could preserve more than bodies: Researchers are searching the cemetery for the DNA of ancient strains of cholera.

Cholera is a deadly diarrheal disease caused by a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae. In the 1850s, an epidemic swept the world. In 1854, during this epidemic, London doctor John Snow famously traced one outbreak to a contaminated water pump in the Soho district of the city. The case is still cited today as a triumph of epidemiology.

Cholera still kills today. According to the World Health Organization, there were more than 100,000 cases in 2013, and periodic epidemics send that number soaring. In 2011, for example, there were nearly 600,000 cholera cases worldwide, driven largely by an outbreak that occurred after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti."

And in other "science" news:

Evolution theory confirmed: Big is better, Stanford researchers say

Fascinating...

...history of planet earth. Kinda drives home the real possibility that some day we will be extinct.

Cool!

Three hours worth. It`s pouring rain outside and has been all month. Nothing else to do but watch cool stuff like this.

Doom And Gloom Is Not New - Just Boring

Predictions from Earth Day, 1970:

1. "CIVILIZATION WILL END within 15 to 30 years, unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind."
— Harvard biologist George Wald

2. "Most of the people who are going to die in THE GREATEST CATACLYSM IN THE HISTORY OF MAN have already been born… [BY 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into FAMINES OF UNBELIEVABLE PROPORTIONS. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s."
— Paul Ehrlich

3. "IT IS ALREADY TOO LATE TO AVOID MASS STARVATION."
— Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day

4. "Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975, widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. BY THE YEAR 2000 -- thirty years from now -- THE ENTIRE WORLD, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, WILL BE IN FAMINE."
— North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

5. "In a decade, URBAN DWELLERS WILL HAVE TO WEAR GAS MASKS to survive air pollution… By 1985, air pollution will have REDUCED THE AMOUNT OF SUNLIGHT REACHING EARTH BY ONE HALF."
— Life magazine

6. "At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and NONE OF OUR LAND WILL BE USABLE."
— Ecologist Kenneth Watt

7. "Air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone."
— Paul Ehrlich

8. "BY THE YEAR 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that THERE WON'T BE ANY MORE CRUDE OIL. You'll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill 'er up, buddy,' and he'll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn't any.'"
— Ecologist Kenneth Watt

9. "[One] theory assumes that the earth's cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the
sun's heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and A NEW ICE AGE WILL BE BORN."
— Newsweek magazine

10. "The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."
— Kenneth Watt

More Stuff About...

...human evolution and Neanderthals:


Method Confirms Humans, Neanderthals Interbred


New method confirms humans and Neandertals interbred

My beliefs have been confirmed. I know too many people who look Neanderthalish to believe otherwise.

Previously.

Also previously.

Hmmmmm.

DNA from a 50,000 year old toe shows Neanderthals were highly inbred

"The DNA studies have now proved that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, a question that scientists have disagreed over for years. In fact, it is currently estimated that between 1.5 per cent and 2.1 per cent of the genomes of modern non-African people can be traced to Neanderthals."

I've known people who were Neanderthal-like. This could explain some of my observations.

Oh Dear

It's getting harder and harder for "the creator put us here" crowd to stand their ground. Not only that, but they're related to the evil Whiteman:

Surprise’ DNA profile linking 24,000-year-old Siberian skeleton to modern Native Americans could rewrite First Nations’ story, experts say

"The surprise discovery of traces of European ancestry in the 24,000-year-old bones of a boy unearthed in the heart of Siberia has caught the attention of Canadian experts, who say the find could rewrite the story of the people who first populated ancient Canada and the rest of the Americas."

[---]

"The ancient boy’s DNA profile may help explain why a “European” strain of genetic material can be found among today’s New World indigenous communities, a mystery that many scientists had assumed was the result of contact in recent centuries with successive waves of colonizers from Europe."

The Real Story Of...

...of Adam:



And Eve.

What I Do With My Spare Time

of which, I have plenty.

I watch tres interesting videos like these ones:





Hope he's right.

'Nother Round Up

But, but, but...


I thought pipelines were bad things:

Derailed Saskatchewan train spills more than 91,000 litres of oil

The Illustrated and Explained Caber Toss, right here in Knuckledraggerland, too.

The Scottish are coming. Hurrah! Hurrah!

This is, well, sad and a bit funny.

Man kills himself inside Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris

So, does that increase his chances of going to heaven or diminish them? (I know. I know. I'm bad, and that's a sick joke. Poor man.)

Speaking of freshly departed Frenchmen: Depardieu, Newly a Russian, Will Play Frenchman in Chechnya

"Mr. Depardieu made it clear that his strident antitax sentiments had not eased, despite his qualification as a Russian tax resident for a flat 13 percent income tax levy. Speaking in English, he used an expletive to describe taxes in Britain, which he said had prompted film directors to leave that country."

And, Australia gets it's own L'Anse aux Meadows?

1000-year-old coins found in Northern Territory may rewrite Australian history

"Australian scientist Ian McIntosh, currently Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University in the US, is planning an expedition in July that has stirred up the archaeological community.

The scientist wants to revisit the location where five coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944 that have proven to be 1000 years old, opening up the possibility that seafarers from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is currently believed."

Trust a Democrat:

Boxer uses Okla. tornado to push carbon tax

Yup. I'd let him have his way:

Prehistoric crocodiles ruled the roost in South America, study finds

Tres Cool

UK archaeologists in Iraq find ancient complex near Ur, home of biblical Abraham

"Decades of war and violence have kept international archaeologists away from Iraq, where significant archaeological sites as yet unexplored are located. Still, the dig showed that such collaborative missions could be possible in parts of Iraq that are relatively stable, like its Shiite-dominated south."

Except for this part:

"Iraq faces a broader problem of protecting its archaeological heritage. Its 12,000 registered archaeological sites are poorly guarded."

My Favourite Subject In University...

...was paleoanthropology, so this naturally piqued my curiosity:

China human fossil discovery gets name

More about Homo erectus.

I know some people who look like and perhaps act like Homo erectus (ie. becoming extinct), but we won't go into that now.

What Does It Mater?

Or Madre? Or Matka? Or Madar?

Human History...

...that the Indian Industry will be sure to find fault with:

Old American theory is 'speared'

We're talking here of dating techniques that are accurate to within 40 to 50 years. We're also talking about the rapid disappearance of large North American animals, such as the mastodons and mammoths, at the hands of human predators.

"The timing of humanity's presence in North America is important because it plays into the debate over why so many great beasts from the end of the last Ice Age in that quarter of the globe went extinct.

Not just mastodons, but woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels, and teratorns (predatory birds with a nearly four-metre wingspan) - all disappeared in short order a little over 12,700 years ago.

A rapidly changing climate in North America is assumed to have played a key role - as is the sophisticated stone-tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters. But the fact that there are also humans with effective bone and antler killing technologies present in North America deeper in time suggests the hunting pressure on these animals may have been even greater than previously thought.

"Humans clearly had a role in these extinctions and by the time the Clovis technology turns up at 13,000 years ago - that's the end. They finished them off," said Prof Waters."

Some people are not gonna be happy. Hell. They haven't even accepted the Clovis model. The "creator" put them here, you know. And what's this about "rapidly changing climate"?

And then there's this:

Americas 'settled in three waves'

""The Asian lineage leading to First Americans is the most anciently diverged, whereas the Asian lineages that contributed some of the DNA to Eskimo-Aleut speakers and the Na-Dene-speaking Chipewyan from Canada are more closely related to present-day East Asian populations.""

That's very interesting. In a previous life, I lived and worked on three different Indian communities in Saskatchewan. Two of them were Cree and one was a mixture of Cree, Dene and Metis. The Metis, obviously, were relative newcomers. (I guess we could expand that a wee bit, and say four waves.) But the Dene people in that community had what I could only describe as a north-western orientation in their day-to-day outlook on things, whereas the Cree seemed to look south and east when talking about the past or about closely related people. With the Dene, they had relatives and economic connections with communities in Northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. They knew very little about the south. The same was not true of either the Cree or the Metis. It used to be that academics thought people like the Dene had migrated from the south and settled in the north. Looks like that just ain't so. The modern day Dene could be part of the second wave.

Ever Thought...

...that the world is just like one giant soap opera? When the same people start doing the same things to the same other people (different actors playing the same old role, though) for the umpteenth time, all I can say is YAWN!

I started this blog years and years ago as a place where I could vent in response to a blogger (Catty Catnip) who had banned me. Then the Iraq war began and I focused on it. Now it's just the insanity of politics, whether local, national or international.

In my lifetime, only one earth shattering, history changing event has occurred, that I can tell, anyway. And that was the collapse of communism. Except useful idiots are still with us. To date, there's no sign that they're going anywhere soon. So it's just blah, blah, blah.

Can you forgive me for not wanting to believe we (Canada) have turned a corner? I'll have to live at least two more election cycles and see Conservatives or a reasonable facsimile elected before I'll believe our resident useful idiots are down for the count, but even then, that may not be long enough. History normally unfolds over longer periods of time than that. Think of the reformation and the counter-reformation; the era of European empire building; the industrial revolution; the scientific and enlightenment revolutions.  Did anyone living through those eras know it would lead to what we see all around us today?  Every once in a while, some major event happens that sends us off in a different direction, and none of us knows where that direction will lead or if, perhaps, it might even be stillborn.

Oh well. We older folks are supposed to leave a mess for the younger ones to clean up. It's always been like that. They'll do the same thing.

We all do the best we can with what we're given and hope against hope that when we're gone, the mess we made isn't any worse than the one we inherited.

Wouldn't it be nice if we all had crystal balls?  Or, for that matter, if we could learn the right lessons from the past.  Maybe George Santayana wasn't right. Maybe it doesn't matter whether we remember the past. We're condemned to repeat it, no matter what we do or what we think we know.

And remember. Never trust anyone under thirty.

Still, I'm glad I came of age when I did, even though coming of age in the 60's and early 70's meant I still had a lot of growing up to do when it became evident that we weren't gonna change the world. Or maybe we did? How the hell am I supposed to know.

Latest ICCC in Chicago

Lots of links and videos of this year's (the 7th) conference sessions as well as the past six.