One minute history of conservative anti-rationalism “Conservatives of this temperament love nothing more than a story about how some well- meaning attempt to improve the human conditions backfired (through the “law of unintended consequences”) leaving the supposed beneficiaries much worse off than they were before (and egg on the face of the chastened liberals, who […]

Flying halfway around the world for dinner A meal at Fäviken Magasinet

Oldest stone tools raise questions about their creators “Early homo, (not H. ergaster/erectus, but habilis) has long been seen by many palaeanthropologists as another form of australopith, and the relative brain size distributions of early Homo and Australopiths overlap and are not very different. The big shift is with erectus/ergaster, and some of us have […]

Raw Food Not Enough to Feed Big Brains “After adjusting for body mass, they calculated how many hours per day it would take for various primates to eat enough calories of raw food to fuel their brains. They found that it would take 8.8 hours for gorillas; 7.8 hours for orangutans; 7.3 hours for chimps; […]

Pennisi: Did Cooked Tubers Spur the Evolution of Big Brains? “But the real revolution came once human ancestors tasted a tuber baked in a lightning-sparked grass fire and realized the value of cooking, Wrangham asserts. Heat turns hard-to-digest carbohydrates into sweet, easy-to-absorb calories. Using the protein, fat, and carbohydrate makeup of modern fruits, seeds, meats, […]

Were Neanderthals Doomed by Lack of Fire Mastery?