The Sweetness of Human Evolution

By: | September 20, 2012

Quite by accident last week, I came across something, an ethnographic detail really, that captured my imagination, and that has clearly delighted and puzzled anthropologists and even contributed to a new theory of human evolution. The detail concerned the Hadza, 1000 or so modern hunter-gatherers who speak an ancient click language and who live in the woodlands around Lake Eyasi, Tanzania, not far from Olduvai Gorge.

The Hadza, as I discovered, prize honey above all else in their diet. Hadza mothers wean their young on liquid honey, and during the wet season, particularly the months of February and April, Hadza families gorge for weeks on its sticky sweetness.  The men possess an expert knowledge of bees and bee behavior, giving the honeys produced by different species different names. Those who forage for honey figure prominently in Hadza mythology.

And there is indeed something almost magical about the way that Hadza collect honey.

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Redux: Let Sleeping Neanderthals Lie

By: | September 18, 2012
Neanderthals were partial to sleeping near blazing hearths

This post was originally posted on 8/12/2010, so probably not everybody’s already read it and it’s  really nice.   I (Ann speaking) love Heather’s first story here, and I love her second one.  I love the idea of people saying, “Come warm yourself by our fire.”

Last summer, while roaming around Ecuador on a magazine assignment, I had a rather strange experience at an old Spanish hacienda that doubled as a country inn. The owners took in paying guests to help finance the upkeep of the 16th century architecture, and an archaeologist-acquaintance had made a reservation for me there, knowing my love of old places. But when I arrived after sunset, dropped off by a local farm truck, the place was dark and deserted looking. The door was locked. I knocked, then pounded to no avail.

Just as I was beginning to think I’d have to hike out to the road and flag down a lift to the nearest town, a young woman appeared at the door. She eventually let me in and led me down a long, dark corridor. I was the only guest that night: she was the only person on duty.  And the entire place seemed almost haunted to me.  But the room she led me to had a big stone fireplace opposite the bed, and someone had left a generous supply of dried eucalyptus.

I built a fire and settled in for the evening, cozy, warm and suddenly very happy.  And as I drifted off to sleep, watching the flames dart back and forth, I marveled once again at this intimate connection we have to fire. Quite apart from its life-giving warmth, fire, it seems to me, has an almost uncanny power to comfort and relax.

As it turns out, our Neanderthal kin were also very fond of watching a flickering fire as they drifted off to sleep. Continue reading →

The Theorist, the Tundra, & the Forbidden Crystal

By: | September 17, 2012

Paul Steinhardt looks like a tidy and successful lawyer, though a touch geeky.  He’s a physicist whose fields include the gritty physics of matter, the first instants of the universe, and the possibility that the universe won’t end, it’ll just cycle.  He’s a theorist, that is, he uses computers, math, and his brains to make sense of data that the more hands-on experimentalists collect.  So how odd to hear that he’s just back from an expedition to the Koryak mountains in far east Russia, farther east than Siberia, on what he thought was a 1 percent chance that he’d find a rock from outer space containing a forbidden crystal.  “My wife was quite calm until we left Anadyr,” he said, and then she texted him, “this is absolutely crazy why are you doing this,” but the tundra doesn’t have wireless so he couldn’t answer.  “My sanity was questioned,” he said.  But he found the rock, and in it was the forbidden crystal. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 15, 2012

September 10 – 14

Virginia says drinking to forget doesn’t work.  What does work is pot.

Maybe good cooks are really, sneakily good scientists, says Cameron.

Whether city living makes you itchy and cranky, Science is not sure.   Cassandra is.

Autumn is so lovely, says Christie, but what with global warming you might not want to get used to it.

And for our TGIPFriday, Guests Florence Williams and Jesse Bering discuss among themselves the difficulty of taking the p**** and the b***** seriously.  The title of the post is quietly hilarious.

 

TGIPF Guest Post: Upstairs, Downstairs

By: | September 14, 2012

This week on LWON’s occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday, we bring you wisdom from not one but two authors of newly released books about private parts. (Count your blessings, people.) Florence Williams is the author of BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History; Jesse Bering is the author of Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human. Here they discuss breasts, smegma, and how to engage readers of science writing with the right measure of humor. — TGIPF from The People of LWON

Florence Williams:  So with Naomi Wolf’s Vagina book just out, there’s yet another addition to the body-part genre. What’s up with this recent spate of books? Do you think it’s true what The New York Observer wrote — that we’re entering the Genital Age?

Jesse Bering: Well, as the Observer also mentioned, maybe it’s just about sales. It was a strategic decision to title my book that way, but honestly, I also wanted a fun title that plays with the audience a little bit. Because really, when have we ever not been interested in these body parts?

FW: One reason all these body parts might be so interesting is that they’re where culture meets biology. They are all subject to mutilation and ritualistic alteration. Breast augmentation is more popular than ever. And male circumcision is in the news a lot lately. These body parts are symbolic of so much more than just their functions. We’ve loaded them with all sorts of significance having to do with beauty and sexual control and oppression, at least with female circumcision. Why do you think we’re so interested in surgically altering these body parts?

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Ahhhh…autumn

By: | September 13, 2012

Autumn. It’s perhaps my favorite time of year. Ski season is just around the corner and the tomatoes in the garden have reached their peak. A few late peaches remain, and our pears and apples are perfectly ripening. The sun’s angle in the sky intensifies the light and makes the landscape appear especially vivid and colorful. The evening air feels crisp and cool, and I find myself looking forward to the morning when I’ll build the season’s first fire in the wood stove.

Almost two weeks of summer remain as I write this, but like everything else this year, it seems that autumn has arrived early. Temperatures remain plenty warm, but out hiking at the beginning of this month, I spotted the year’s first yellow and orange aspen leaves. Colorado’s fall colors have arrived weeks earlier than usual, and the forecast calls for snow in the high country.

Scientists blame the drought for the early colors. Prolonged dry weather can force our aspens and shrub oaks into an early dormancy, but the upshot is that a dry autumn may increase the length of the fall color display. Continue reading →

The Ill Effects of Urban Living

By: | September 12, 2012

A week ago, I flew from the wide open spaces of Grand Junction, Colorado, to New York, the city I now call home. Air traffic at LaGuardia airport had delayed my flight two hours and still the pilot had to circle several times before we received clearance to land. I was late, I was crabby, and I just wanted to be home. So you can imagine my frustration when I stepped out of the airport and into the muggy night to behold the scene on the left. Yes, folks, that’s the taxi line. It snaked down the sidewalk and then doubled back on itself. The queue was so long I couldn’t see the turnaround point. I snapped a photo and posted it to Facebook. “Welcome back to the big apple, Cassie! Here’s your taxi line,” I wrote. I was being sarcastic. Five [expletive] minutes in New York and already I was cursing and scowling.

LaGuardia is notorious for delays and lines, but there’s a deeper, more basic problem — New York has too many people in too small a space.* It’s super dense. Fun fact: If you could convince the entire world to live like New Yorkers, you could pack all 6.9 billion of us into the state of Texas. That might be good for the environment, but what about our mental health? Continue reading →

Kitchen Catalysts

By: | September 11, 2012

The other day I was sitting in the bathroom, lamenting the decline of my bathroom reading material. At its zenith, the back of my toilet was heavy with Nature. (I inadvertently impressed one of my grad school classmates, who didn’t know that I thought I was subscribing to a magazine with lots of photos of penguins and manatees.)

Now the can is crammed with lighter reading: fashion magazines left behind by traveling visitors, Highlights, and the cooking magazines we’ve been getting as gift subscriptions. Continue reading →