Long before human ancestors began hunting large mammals for meat, a fatty diet provided them with the nutrition to develop bigger brains, a new paper argues.
The paper suggests that our early ancestors acquired a taste for fat by eating marrow scavenged from the skeletal remains of large animals that other predators killed and ate. The argument challenges the widely held view among anthropologists that eating meat was the critical factor in setting the stage for the evolution of humans.
Recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Assistant Professor Christoph Riedl’s latest research examines a model that might explain how humans resolve conflict, and what these actions say about biological and social behavior, both now and into the future.
Stress causes us to do a lot of weird things, like scratching somewhere on our body that isn’t itchy. But scientists may have solved the mystery of this one stress-induced behavior, after watching a bunch of monkeys.
When you hear about the theory of evolution, English scientist Charles Darwin is probably the first person who comes to mind. ‘Muslim scholar’, on the other hand, is the last thing to be associated with the theory.
Hayatın gayesi insan şuurunun tekamülüdür – Dr. Kilisli Rıfat
(The purpose of life is the evolution of human consciousness.)
Evan Thompson of the University of British Columbia has verified the Buddhist belief of anatta, or not-self.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you are a giraffe.
You live on the grasslands of the African savannah. You have a neck that is 7 feet long (2.1 meters). Every now and then, you spot a group of humans driving around on a safari taking pictures of you.
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But it’s not just your neck and their cameras that separate you from the humans. Perhaps the biggest difference between you and your giraffe friends and the humans taking your picture is that nearly every decision you make provides an immediate benefit to your life.
On any given day, most of your choices as a giraffe—like what to eat or where to sleep or when to avoid a predator—make an immediate impact on your life. You live in what researchers call an “immediate-return environment,” because your actions deliver immediate benefits. Your life is strongly oriented toward the present moment.
Bill Nye the Science Guy returned to Big Think to discuss canine evolution and, by way of man’s best friend, various lessons he learned while writing his new book, Undeniable:
ere it was, sitting on the mantelpiece, staring at her with hollow eyes and a naked grin. She could not stop staring back. It looked distinctly like the fossilized skull of an extinct baboon. That was the sort of thing Josephine Salmons was likely to know. At the time — 1924 — she was one of the only female students of anatomy attending the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. On this particular day she was visiting her friend Pat Izod, whose father managed a quarry company that had been excavating limestone near the town of Taung. Workers had unearthed numerous fossils during the excavation, and the Izods had kept this one as a memento. Salmons brought news of the skull to her professor, Raymond Dart, an anthropologist with a particular interest in the brain. He was incredulous. Very few primate fossils had been uncovered this far south in Africa. If the Taung site really housed such fossils, it would be an invaluable treasure trove. The next morning Salmons brought Dart the skull, and he could see that she was right: The skull was undeniably simian. Leer Más
