Link Banana

While explaining that “motherfucker” is a popular insult worldwide, Nina Shen Rastogi says that:

Anthropologists note that, across cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic themes: your opponent’s family, your opponent’s religion, sex, and scatology.

No part of that really surprises me, but I’d just like to congratulate anyone who gets paid to discover stuff like this.

That’s the theory being offered by Harvard’s Richard Wrangham.

And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

(via The Meaningfulness of Little Things)

This is a bit old, but I enjoyed perusing Rob Beschizza’s attempt to highlight the hardware preferences of certain types of people.

This has been going around for some time, and I never found an hour with which to watch it. Today I finally did, and I’m glad for that. It’s well done, and brings new weight to Robin’s question: “How is YouTube not the greatest art project ever?”

Ronald Hutton’s summary of some recent book on the monument is rather good. I was rather struck by his beginning:

Why is Stonehenge the most famous prehistoric monument in the world? A large part of the answer lies in the domination of modernity by Western nations, and the supremacy of Britain among them, both in military and economic terms, as that modernity was being developed. In that sense Stonehenge was simply the top antiquity of the top nation at a critical moment in history.

At least on the Peruvian side of the border, the plan is being changed to leave them alone.

In what seems a fitting follow-on to the previous story, I finally read a few-week-old story by Jared Diamond in The New Yorker.

My conversations with Daniel made me understand what we have given up by leaving justice to the state. In order to induce us to do so, state societies and their associated religions and moral codes teach us that seeking revenge is bad. But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful. Many state governments do attempt to grant the relatives of crime victims some personal satisfaction, by allowing them to be present at the trial of the accused, and, in some cases, to address the judge or jury, or even to watch the execution of their loved one’s murderer.

(via kottke)

I tried my best to write an absurd headline for this. In any case, this should probably be filed as “strange but true.” It turns out recently analyzed fossilized feces

…push back the date when humanity arrived in the Americas. Traditionalists have long believed that the first Americans belonged to what is known as the Clovis culture, after a style of arrowhead found first at Clovis, New Mexico, but which has turned up at several other locations. Clovis sites are 13,000 years old at most.

…Their data support the idea that there were people in America before Clovis. They also suggest that at least some of those people were the ancestors of modern Amerindians. That is because the Oregonian coprolites contain DNA that has characteristics which match that of living Amerindians.