Anthropology - Tumblr Posts
@paperandpencilsandskips eye contact is not a naturally friendly gesture! it’s well-documented that eye contact is actually a threat in primate behavior, so you’re actually in the right if you hate eye contact. humans, especially “western” civilization, have warped this part of facial language (as well as smiling, also ancestrally hostile) for some reason into expectations of respect and attentiveness.
Pros of having ADHD:
Can track prey for hours without losing focus
Special interest: basket weaving
Always fidgeting - banging rocks together and discovers flint-knabbing
Distracted by berries
Stimming by making noises, discovers the sksksk that lures out squirrels
Can't sleep at night, great at guarding the cave while family sleeps
Sensitive senses means discovering and refusing to eat rotten/poisonous food
Sees bird eat nut - impulsively tries it too and discovers that nuts taste good
Cons of having ADHD:
Can't do homework
Impulse buys
Can't use a calendar
Can't sit still in classroom
Specifically because of this reblog on this post, I decided to listen to the greetings and sounds on the golden record that the Voyager probes are carrying. And as the speaking progressed, I was reminded what the record truly is. This isn’t a first contact greeting. This is a monument.
This is the final and true monument.
These disks and the sounds they carried are a testament to the existence of a species that looked up and dared to fathom what the sky meant. This is our essence. This is our prologue and our epilogue. The small, boxy spacecraft and its five golden disks are the eternal physicality of our call out to the endless night, not the cry of “who is there?” but the shout of “I am here!”
And then I got to the brain wave recording, and read Ann Druyan’s explanation of what she thought of while this section was being recorded, and I broke down in tears.
“I began by thinking about the history of Earth and the life it sustains. To the best of my abilities I tried to think something of the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.”
That section is the last one out of the five.
The closing note of our longest, greatest, most complex message to alien intelligence –and quite possibly our cosmic epitaph– is the most intimate possible description of the most human experience of all. It is the very thought of love.
Now to me, the greetings in the opening ring in my ears not as “hello,” but as if they are reaching across time to say, “We are alive! In this time and place, we are alive! We existed, and we mattered, and whoever else may be out there please know that we love you!”
crying about cave paintings at 7:51 pm is a good exercise that i recommend
I should also point out that humans are incredibly resistant to impact damage and able to naturally heal from injuries that would kill most other mammals, broken limbs in particular. part of this is, of course, because of our elevated sense of community, which drives us to care for other humans (and organisms in general) that can’t care for themselves, but the other part of it is just that we’re freakishly good at fixing ourselves.
Human vs Animals
The world's oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about 'seven sisters' stars may reach back 100,000 years https://phys.org/news/2020-12-world-oldest-story-astronomers-global.html
Holy shit, this is cool!
So many cultures call the Pleiades some variation of the "seven sisters" despite only having six visible stars. There only appear to be six because two of the stars are so close together as to appear as one.
The myths also mention one sister leaving or hiding to explain why there's only six. And based off observations and measurements, those two that are so close together used to be visibly separate. One literally has moved to hide.
And based off the similarities between the more commonly known Greek myth and the Aboriginal Australian myth, plus some other stuff, this myth could possibly even date back to when humanity still all resided in Africa!
Corvids are one of about five extant groups of animals that clearly demonstrate the emergence of proper sapience (the others being apes, elephants, cetaceans, and cephalopods). They use tools and language, form complex social structures, have self-awareness, and can reason abstractly. In another few thousand years, given the right evolutionary encouragement, it's completely conceivable that they will develop a civilization as we would recognize it. Personally I'm of the opinion that we should be their cool older sibling civilization and help them out, because it's elating to consider that one day we may not have to be alone in the universe anymore.
You ever think about how crows are acting not unlike how early humans probably did and you're just like. Oh ok
You ever think about how crows are acting not unlike how early humans probably did and you're just like. Oh ok
A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.
Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.
VIDEO
oh that's really cool!! I don't know of any other culture in the world that has a naming convention quite like this! thank you for explaining woxie!!
I have a question about Mixtec culture, I hope it's not a rude one: why do Mixtec names almost always include numbers?
I've drawn up a cool lil guide!!!
I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.
It's right-handed
I am right-handed
There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly
I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.
There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.
I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.
A homo erectus made it
Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.
Who were you
A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?
Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?
Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?
Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?
Who were you?
What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?
What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.
Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?
Or has it always been divine?
Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?
Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.
The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.
Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?
I'm not religious.
But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine
I don't know what is.
This (from Wiki) is a graph of Earth’s temperature over the last 450,000 years. We are, in fact, in the middle of an ice age, the Quaternary Ice Age, defined by the year-round presence of ice at the poles (for now, *cough*). (For Earth’s history as a whole, permanent polar ice is in fact not the norm.)
The Quaternary Ice Age consists in a series of glacial periods, each about 50 to 100 thousand years long, in which glaciers may come down as far south as Paris and New York, separated by brief interglacials, each less than 20 thousand years, in which the polar ice withdraws behind the Polar Circles. That peak in temperature at the right edge of the graph is our own Holocene interglacial, which began 11,700 years ago. The whole of recorded history, everything from the development of agriculture onward, happened inside it, on the trail of a glacial period ten times longer. We could expect it to end, with the onset of another glacial period, some 10 or 20 thousand years from now, but the effects of anthropogenic climate change on this cycle are not yet predictable.
The last interglacial before ours is known as Eemian (in the European nomenclature) or Sangamon (in the American one). It was a very similar period of warming – in fact, significantly hotter than our own times, with hippopotami wallowing in the Thames – lasting from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Fifteen thousand years of mild weather, well long enough to fit a story as long and complex as the one from the first Levantine wheat farmers to us (and half again).
In that time, Homo sapiens was still a strictly African species, just making short-lived forays into the Near East; Eurasia belonged to our close cousins, Neandertals and Denisovans, and possibly to the last smatterings of Homo erectus in the southeastern jungles. Our dear brothers Neandertals, whose behavior is revealed ever more complex and imaginative, until their sudden disappearence in the middle of the next glacial period.
What were they up to, in the ice-free Europe of the long Eemian greenhouse, long enough for civilizations to rise and fall a dozen times, long enough to go from the stone sickle to the Mars rover? Most traces on the ground would have been erased when the glaciers came down again, the glaciers whose stupendous weight would carve giant lakes from Erie to Ladoga. What if they had already had better places to go to, when our conspecifics showed up in a land that was already depauperated by frost?
Why would anyone think the “little grey people” in UFOs are aliens? Have you any idea how many specific contingent events made up our evolutionary history, how vanishingly unlikely it would be for the human form to arise on another planet? Those are Neandertals, homesick after thirty thousand years of exile, and they’re coming home.
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Thinking about how much of a full circle moment the Blue Marble photograph was/is.
This image was taken in 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17 on their way to the Moon - the last humans to ever visit Luna, to date.
And it just so happens that the approximate center of the image is the southeastern region of Africa, under bright noonday sun.
And it just so happens that the southeastern region of Africa, from the Cape to the Horn, is where our most ancient prehuman ancestors, the australopithecines, originally evolved.
Dinkʼinesh ("Lucy"), the holotype of Australopithecus and the genesis of our modern understanding of our species' origins, was not discovered until two years after this photo was taken. In this image, the bones of our most treasured ancestor still lie beneath the earth of Qadaqar, Ethiopia.
This is not just an image of our home planet. This is an image of our cradle. This is where the humanity was born, four million years ago.
What a marvelous coincidence, no?
i think the thing that bugs me most about the "earth is a deathworld" genre as a whole, from a narrative structure sense, is that they almost always combine it with human exceptionalism. like humans are the dominant species on earth yes but that's because being a tool user is like going at evolution with console commands enabled.
even if all the aliens are super physically frail for whatever contrived reason, that's basically irrelevant to "your materials science must be this good to build spacecraft", and materials science trumps physicality for tool users.
aliens encountering earth for the first time wouldn't be like "whoa a planet of ubermenschen to save us from insert-evil-imperialist-species-here i'm glad someone found a way to make the noble savage narrative about white people" it would be "why are so many of their signals celebrating the eradication of another species shouldn't that be a traged-holy fuck I'm glad this variola thing is dead. what do you mean they sequenced its entire genome"
What is the purpose of the human species?
Think about it: what are the two things that have defined our entire genus for two million years?
Learn everything and care for each other.
It's been twelve thousand years since the beginning of civilization on Earth. In that time, humankind has invented dogs, the wheel, economics, the steam engine, capitalism, and the nuclear bomb. We're as much of a mess as we've always been; probably even more so. It can be kind of hard to see us for what we really are these days. But whenever someone mentions Sputnik, or Vostok 1, or the Apollo program, or the ISS, you know what they say?
"We did that."
That's why space exploration is important. That's why it's important to me. Not just because it instills hope, but… because it's the root of us, all over again.
Cooperation and curiosity are the bedrock of space exploration. You just can't go out there without the intersection of both. And lucky for us, they're the same two traits that got us from flint to fission over the past two million years. Another sophont species of different ancestry would balk at the unbelievable array of challenges inherent in spaceflight and probably decide it's not worthwhile. We do it anyways, because two million years of wanderlust sing in the bones of every one of us from the day we're born to the day we die.
We have to KNOW, you see? We have to KNOW, we have to EXPERIENCE, and we have to do it TOGETHER! When we go, we are becoming ourselves again. We are wandering together. That's what we were made to do.
"Drink this water of the spring, and rest here a while. We have a long way yet to go, and I can't go without you."
The spider's web: She finds an innocuous corner in which to spin her web. The longer the web takes, the more fabulous its construction. She has no need to chase. She sits quietly, her patience a consummate force; she waits for her prey to come to her on their own, and then she ensnares them, injects them with venom, rendering them unable to escape. Spiders – so needed and yet so misunderstood.
—Donna Lynn Hope
welcome to my art blog!!!
my name's cj, i'm 21yo, and i use they/he pronouns!!
some things that i like to draw include:
ponies
furries
dnd characters
ocs
fanart
you can find my art on instagram and artfight!!
get to know me!!
i have been very happily dating the wonderful @eadekki for 4 years! check out their art if you have not already, they inspire me in so many ways :)
i really love cutesy stuff and bright colors if you could not tell already!!! i usually try to incorporate that into my art, but i also like and draw darker aesthetics too!
i am autistic and some of my special interests/hyperfixations are:
lord of the rings
star wars
marvel
rwby
bbc merlin
the witcher
nbc hannibal
and more!
and some of my non-fandom interests:
animatronics
anthropology
bears
cowboys
ethnomusicology
mushrooms
swords
art requests: open! i'd love to hear your ideas!
asks: open! come say hi!
commissions: open! i'm working on getting some prices and info written up for them!
thanks for dropping by and i hope you enjoy your stay!!!! ❤️
Humanity
What makes humans special? It's a very complicated question, but I think it's an evolution of mimicry. The ability to analyse another and act in a way that results in the desired reaction. Be it learning how to scare a predator, approach prey, or win the trust of another. In order to do this, you need to be able to simulate the other, figuring out how they work. That of course requires complicated calculations, even more so when confronted with something that has similar or higher ability. We might call a part of this ability "Empathy", but it's all the same, just mirror neurons and calculations. This ability naturally gets into a feedback loop, because you need to be better at it than the other, but the other is just like you. Repeat this and add to that the increasing need to be able to simulate more and more different people with larger population densities, we eventually reach an efficiency like no other species. Replicating each other constantly, every time a little more advanced, a perfect feedback loop for rapid advancement.
motivating myself to write my paper about fungi by talking about fungi:
in Tokyo in 2010, scientists wanted to test the limits of 'brainless' organisms, especially their decision making skills, so they made a little obstacle course in a Petri dish and sent a slime mold to navigate it. they set it up with light and oats, the oats acting as goals and the lights acting as deterrents. the oats were placed in such a way that represented the major train stations in Tokyo. in LESS THAN TWO DAYS, the slime mold had perfectly navigated the obstacle course and hit all the oat stations. when the scientists compared the Petri dish patterns to the city, they noticed that the slime mold had perfectly replicated the train lines of Tokyo. in the most efficient way possible. a task which took humans FIVE YEARS to plan, design and build. slime molds do not have nervous systems, brains, or (as it was previously believed) the ability to form complex thoughts. however, these molds were able to design this system quicker and more efficiently than humans ver have. they were even able to create a path for the shortest route through an IKEA.
the whole concept that organisms other than humans are unable to make decisions or solve complex problems is incredibly outdated and should have been disproven years ago when the Great Chain of Being was first challenged, but these ideas have stuck around for hundreds of years and are only now beginning to be opposed. for years, people thought that organisms like octopi could be tested on in labs because they were unable to feel pain or form thoughts, but only now is it being discovered that octopi have huge brains and are capable of numerous skills, they can recognize people and miss them, and they have the same or even better understanding of the world around them than humans. every other organisms' intelligence has been measured against humans for so long, that the idea that other creatures may have a different way of processing information is something completely unheard of.
in conclusion: brainless fungi and molds are redefining what humans believe to be 'intelligence' by exhibiting amazing navigation of obstacle courses, problem-solving and decision-making skills.
Sketchy character concept! I’ve been thinking about magical curses lately, specifically of stories where witches curse people to teach them morals or little lessons. There are so many angles to approach that situation from, but for this concept I was imagining a hunter/gatherer that got too greedy and paid the price 🪄🌳