LINKS - April 5th, 2023
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Why Primates (Including Humans) Love to Spin Ourselves around until We All Fall Down
By Shayla Love, Scientific American
“Spinning and consuming fermented fruit both relate to larger questions about how animals amuse themselves and what their pastimes might say about the experience of being a gorilla or chimp. In a 2015 Current Biology paper entitled ‘The What as well as the Why of Animal Fun,’ Richard Byrne, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of St. Andrews, wrote that in the past, ‘suggesting that animals might enjoy themselves was seen as anathema to science.’ Chimpanzees are seen playing with objects. But when we pay more attention to what they’re actually doing when immersed in play, more about their cognition could be revealed, Byrne wrote. Similarly, Lameira hopes that studying spinning might be one way to investigate if ancestors in the primate evolutionary line were regulating their mood by deviating from their normal awake states just for the thrill of it.”
Peru’s Lost Temple
By Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology Magazine
“By 2018, when Ghavami decided that he wanted to excavate Huaca Pintada, Brüning’s original photos had been lost, nothing had been written about the site in 40 years, and the murals were believed to have been completely destroyed. Over the last four years, Ghavami, now at the University of Fribourg, and his codirector, archaeologist Christian Cancho Ruiz of the University of Virginia, have found this belief to be mistaken. They have discovered that beneath the overgrown vegetation and abandoned objects are sections of the mural that even Brüning had not seen and that will add to archaeologists’ understanding of the complexity of the culture that created the vibrant paintings more than 1,000 years ago.”
A surprising food may have been a staple of the real Paleo diet: rotten meat
But such accounts provide a valuable window into a way of life that existed long before Western industrialization and the war against germs went global, says anthropological archaeologist John Speth of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Intriguingly, no reports of botulism and other potentially fatal reactions to microorganisms festering in rotting meat appear in writings about Indigenous groups before the early 1900s. Instead, decayed flesh and fat represented valued and tasty parts of a healthy diet.
Why These Hong Kong Urbanites Are Farming
By Kootyin Chow, Sapiens
“PEACE is part of a global movement. According to the online platform Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), an ecovillage is ‘an intentional, traditional, or urban community that is consciously designed through locally owned participatory processes in all four dimensions of sustainability (social, culture, ecology, and economy) to regenerate social and natural environments.’ There are currently more than 600 ecovillages and eco-communities around the world registered on the GEN database.”
The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough.
By Penelope Colston, Photographs by Jake Michaelsm The New York Times
“It turns out even the happiest people in the world aren’t that happy. But they are something more like content.
“Finns derive satisfaction from leading sustainable lives and perceive financial success as being able to identify and meet basic needs, Arto O. Salonen, a professor at the University of Eastern Finland who has researched well-being in Finnish society, explained. ‘In other words,’ he wrote in an email, ‘when you know what is enough, you are happy.”