Archive for the ‘The Avian Mammal’ Category
The mammal that pair-bonds like a bird
Since our ancestors lived in the trees, we have undergone two adaptations, both of which were an understandable response to evolutionary pressures but whose combination is really quite a bad idea. These two adaptations are the upright posture and the big brain. The pelvic changes of the first adaptation have made it very difficult to [...]
Nostalgia for the longhouse
The evolutionary biologists and anthropologists reckon that we spent a million years or so as small groups of hunter-gatherers. Not isolated, for there was exchange of ideas, goods and sexual partners with other groups, but always in a community several score strong. Our brain seems to be wired to keep track of 120 known individuals [...]
Keep parents away from children
It is a basic assumption of our sentimentalised nuclear-family society that children should be brought up by their parents; which is not to say that this is inevitable, natural or sensible. Throughout the history of the world, vast numbers of children have been brought up by someone other than their parents. In some communities, children [...]
The invisibility of work
It is said that all teenagers pass through a stage in which they think their parents are idiots. Some of them are correct in this belief while others are not. Is this development, however, such a cosmic constant as we assume? Did the young hunter-gatherer always and necessarily think his pop was a doofus? I [...]
