A great calm, making a beast of oneself... the art of forgetting is divine!

If Homo floresiensis did not descend from Homo erectus then our current model for early human evolution could be very wrong? The final comment in the conclusion of this paper is also 🤌

Yevardiaղ Stone Age Herbalist The tribes who lived in Arnhem Land had dark skin and curly hair (L). But many southeast Riverine people were a bit paler, had wavy hair (and more of it) and big bones (R). Sadly, the heavy colonization of southeast Australia means this phenotype is rarely seen today

I have retitled my s*bs**ck, you can read a short update below.

The Herbalist

Had a terrific conversation w/Stone Age Herbalist about Australia's deep past.

youtube.com/watch?v=1FqY9b…

Two pieces of Mayan art - Lintel 24 and 25 from the Yaxchilán structure. The first depicts a royal bloodletting ceremony, where the queen passes a thorn or obsidian studded cord through her tongue, reproducing the divine sacrificial act which created the human world and offering…

Coobool Creek 76 is longer than any Neanderthal skull and only 1 cm shorter than Dragon Man (the largest-known human skull). Like many archaic humans it has a true, unbroken supraorbital torus (brow ridge). #FossilFriday

Found at Coobool Creek in southeast Australia, CC 76 was…

A friend suggested to me that the Aboriginal Dreamtime and reincarnation is a remnant of syncretic Buddhism in Australia, having been brought by an intrepid Javanese bodhisattva many centuries earlier.

So like us! Attn.: Stone Age Herbalist

In a first, an orangutan was seen treating his wound with a medicinal plant
nbcnews.com/science/scienc…

New on Berbers:

Understanding the genomic heterogeneity of North African Imazighen: from broad to microgeographical perspectives

nature.com/articles/s4159…

TOOOOOOOOOT!!!

10% of ppl on the island of Pingelap can only see shades of black, white, and grey (3,300 times higher than in the U.S.), traced back to a population bottleneck in 1775 when a catastrophic typhoon left only about 20 survivors. Some report other unique visual abilities.

New facial reconstruction of the Neanderthal Shanidar Z. Dating to around 75,000 years old, her skull had been flattened by a rockfall and had to be painstakingly reassembled by researchers.

I've started reading this book, which covers interactions, trade and exploration of the East by the West from ancient Greece to today. Opening chapters on Herodotus, Alexander and Greco-Buddhism are solid but short, lots of rabbitholes to follow up on...