The history of the universe -- from the Big Bang to the end of the year -- day by day
A followup to Talk Like a Neanderthal Day Thinking about how Neanderthals might have talked is one way to get at language evolution and how language works. Another way to do this is through science fiction. I’m not thinking so much of constructed languages like Quenya, Klingon, or Dothraki. There are whole communities of people out [ ]
47.5 – 45.0 thousand years ago Like “Talk Like a Pirate Day,” but more scientific! Human language is probably more than One Weird Trick. It’s multiple weird tricks. We’ve already posted about phonemes, and how they can be strung together to make words. That’s (at least) one trick. And then words are strung together to make phrases and [ ]
From 50 thousand years ago, Shanidar 1 is one of the most complete Neanderthal skeletons known, from the famous Shanidar site in Iraqi Kurdistan. He stood about 5’8” tall, on the tall side for a Neanderthal. He died around 40 years old. The poor guy was also a mess. His right arm had been useless [ ]
50.2 – 47.6 thousand years ago Darwin was a liberal but his theories had consequences in some degrees inimical to traditional liberalism. The doctrine that all men are born equal … was incompatible with his emphasis on congenital differences between members of the same species. There is a further consequence of the theory of evolution, [ ]
We’re around 15,000 years – almost a week on the Logarithmic History scale – away from the really sweeping expansion of Homo sapiens throughout Eurasia, the expansion that replaced Neanderthals and Denisovans. (Maybe it’s time to call the latter Homo longi.) But there are suggestions that by today’s date, a precursor Out Of Africa expansion is already underway. [ ]
74 thousand years ago, a big chunk of the island of Sumatra blew up. It was the biggest volcanic explosion in the past two million years, expelling 2800 times as much debris as the Mount Saint Helens eruption in Washington State in 1980. Ash from the super-eruption is found all the way from Lake Malawi [ ]
78.8 – 74.6 thousand years ago The period before the time when H. sapiens leaves Africa and spreads far and wide through Eurasia, replacing Neanderthals and others sees episodes of increasing cultural complexity in Africa. One of these occurs at Blombos cave, at the southern tip of South Africa. There, over tens of thousands of years, people [ ]
88.1 83.4 thousand years ago One of the Big Questions we run into on Logarithmic History is: To what extent do big changes result from internal causes versus external shocks? Sometimes external shocks are clearly the answer. With the extinction of the dinosaurs, for example, it was a big rock hurtling out of the sky that [ ]
171 – 162 thousand years ago. It’s fancy dress day on Logarithmic History. Between 170 and 80 thousand years ago, people started wearing clothes. We know this from recent genetic studies showing that sometime during that period, probably closer to 170 kya, pubic lice and body (=clothing) lice diverged into two separate species. This is [ ]
… that humans use, and now you can too! (Continued from the previous post.) 3) Recursion. What if you have one mirror facing a second mirror, so the first mirror shows what’s in the second mirror, which shows what’s in the first mirror …? What if you take a chameleon, which tries to take on [ ]