My neighborhood, as I’ve mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money’s on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a stone-balancing celebration in Flagstaff, Arizona. Was this a competition, we asked? No. Just a bunch of people stacking stones? Well, yes, but it’s more fun than it sounds. Do you leave the stacks for other people to find? Yup.
“Just Google it,” he finally said, giving us a beatific smile.
The forbidden crystal sounds like an Indiana Jones sequel, but it’s real. Ann tells you about an expedition “to find something nature made that we didn’t know it could make.”
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.
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 →
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 →
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.
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?
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.
My neighborhood, as I’ve mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money’s on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a stone-balancing celebration in Flagstaff, Arizona. Was this a competition, we asked? No. Just a bunch of people stacking stones? Well, yes, but it’s more fun than it sounds. Do you leave the stacks for other people to find? Yup.
