Gallup's Mirror

Egalitarian society is an ideal that never lasts because humans participate in maintaining it. What I would call “social entropy” is always at play. Much like energy must be input into a physical system to maintain order, maintaining egalitarian norms requires constant work. Someone must reinforce the values of fairness and shared res…[Read more]

A bunch of hippies are smoking weed and chilling out….very calm and egalitarian. One of them opens a box of chocolate cookies. He becomes the leader. Humans just cannot cope without having a leader. And if he (or she) can do the thinking for them too, then the happier they all will be.

It is remarkable that a flourishing and sophisticated human civilization existed at Gesher Benot Yaʽaqov some 780,000 years ago. They had a controlled use of fire, the ability to organize and hunt and gather a broad spectrum of food types.

What is most remarkable is that ‘only’ 120,000 years earlier, our human lineage had undergone a severe gene…[Read more]

It looks like we Homo sapiens may be much older species that previously understood to be.

Please, nobody mention Graham Hancock or his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse where he misrepresents archaeology and undermines Indigenous heritage.  He tends to creep into these conversations.

I took a junior college level course four or five years ago in Cultural Anthropology. I don’t remember any sites in this topic mentioned in the text book, although (apparently) we started discovering these sites in the 1990s.

From ChatGPT, my query:
in what areas of the world are we finding new evidence of human, neolithic (or earlier)…[Read more]

@JakeLafort

Yo —
I ain’t forget, nah, I etched it in graphite,
That afternoon light, like fate in a fistfight.
Street was a stage, collision was script—
Didn’t see it then, but the ink don’t slip.

Heart got jacked like a beat in the mix,
Love scribbled sharp in a moment that sticks.
Organs strung out, nerves all twisted,
Lines got blurred,…[Read more]