Yes, I AM beating you over the head with this. As (I think) Trotsky said of war, you may not be interested in the California coursing controversy, but if you are a hunter or a champion of or user of working animals, it is interested in you. An op- ed by one Eileen Mitchell in …
Month: March 2006
“The New World” and Reconstructed Languages
This article in the New York Times is an interesting read on efforts made to reconstruct the extinct Algonquian language spoken by the Indians who interacted with the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. This work was funded to support the filming of Terrence Malick’s movie, “The New World”, that portrays the John Smith …
Banned in Britain
What will Britain ban next? Yes, I know there are some serious issues, but I still think it’s incremental frog- boiling– or has that metaphor been debunked? And– camels? They’re DOMESTIC.
More Pleistocene Hunting
I am in the midst of reading what I am coming to believe is an extraordinary book, The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie. It is not just an “art” book – it uses art as a window to look back into the Pleistocene to learn about extinct animals, human social systems, religion, …
Menu
It’s almost too easy to make fun of English language menus in foreign countries. From Ken Tynan in Bull Fever (“Anahogs in a Seamanlike Manner” in Spain in the fifties*) to, well, my own Eagle Dreams ( “fillet of beer” and “chicken FANTASY” in Ulaan Bataar in the nineties), these felicities have been one of …
Modern Primitives
In an email exchange with Steve and me, Reid mentioned an essay he plans to write expanding on some of the themes from his good posts below. He may draw some comparisons between traditional hunting & gathering bands and today’s street gangs. It will be a good essay and we’ve already put in for an …
Volcanic Disruptions
Most of us know the story of Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed but astonishingly preserved by the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in AD 79. A new study now documents similar astonishing finds resulting from an earlier eruption of Vesuvius in 1780 BC. The damage caused by this eruption was less than in AD 79 …
Why Blokes Barbecue
This article from The Sydney Morning Herald (in its Aussie way) echoes the theme I expressed in my previous post. Archaeologist Mark Horton believes men enjoy cooking outdoors over open fires as an evolutionary holdover from our hunter-gatherer past.
Our Minds are in the Pleistocene
This article by Max Borders is a good reminder of a maxim I always use in evaluating human behavior – the bodies and minds of our species evolved under the conditions of the Pleistocene, conditions very different from today. A quote Borders captures says it: “The environment that humans — and, therefore, human minds — …
Evidence..
.. that humans have not stopped evolving since “Out of Africa”, in this story by Nicholas Wade in the NYT. He is the best science reporter in the mainstream. But Sailer was on the paper weeks ago, which I missed.