LINKS - December 22nd, 2021
Welcome to this week’s edition of 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.
Unearthing The Truth: A Zimbabwean archaeologist reimagines the story of a momentous African civilisation
“In its prime, from around 1200 to 1550, Great Zimbabwe was home to about 10,000 people. The state covered 1,779 acres, more than twice the area of New York’s Central Park. unesco, the un’s cultural body, declared it a world heritage site in 1986. At independence in 1980 Robert Mugabe renamed Rhodesia Zimbabwe (roughly “house of stone”) after the site. Yet it is far less visited, or understood, than Machu Picchu, say, or Egypt’s pyramids. One scholar has made it his life’s work to show how Great Zimbabwe was the foremost example of a precolonial sub-Saharan African state.”
Neandertals were the first hominids to turn forest into grassland 125,000 years ago
“Around 125,000 years ago, these close human relatives transformed a largely forested area bordering two central European lakes into a relatively open landscape, say archaeologist Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands, and his colleagues. Analyses of pollen, charcoal, animal fossils and other material previously unearthed at two ancient lake basins in Germany provide the oldest known evidence of hominids reshaping their environments, the scientists report December 15 in Science Advances.”
A New Theory of Emotions Enters the Scene
By Susan Krauss Whitbourne Ph.D., Psychology Today
“In a newly published theoretical paper, University of Waterloo’s Paul Thagard and colleagues (2021) provide a framework for understanding current emotion theories and then move on to outline a new approach, based on the idea of ‘semantic pointers.’”
The History of Humankind Just Got a Major Rewrite
“What if everything we think we know about the history of our species is wrong? That’s the provocative question at the heart of a new book by archaeologist David Wengrow. Hailed as “fascinating, brilliant, and potentially revolutionary,” The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity debuted at no. 2 on the New York Times Bestseller List. Drawing on the latest research in archaeology and anthropology, it suggests that the lives of our ancient ancestors were not nasty, brutish, and short. On the contrary, they were playful, collaborative, and improvisational.”
Debunking the Myth of Homo Sapiens Superiority
By Sara Novak, Discovery
“Calling someone a Neanderthal is supposed to be insulting — insinuating ignorance, simple-mindedness or a brutish sensibility. We’ve long thought that humans must have survived because we were intelligent enough to outsmart our own extinction; meanwhile the Neanderthals' demise must have been due, at least in part, to their intellectual inferiority. Although this might make us feel like we’re at the top of the food chain, a number of researchers say it doesn’t line up with the data. In fact, the story of our survival is much more complicated.”