jtotheizzoe:

Humanity’s Best Friend: How Dogs May Have Helped Humans Beat the Neanderthals

Neanderthals lived and thrived in Europe for 250,000 years. Then humans showed up. Within 10,000 years, they were extinct. How did humans crowd them out, evolutionarily?

A new theory says that the beginnings of paleolithic dog domestication could have given early humans an edge:

Dogs would help humans to identify their prey; but they would also work, the theory goes, as beasts of burden — like the Blackfeet and Hidatsa of the American West, who bred large, strong dogs specifically for hauling strapped-on packs. (Paleolithic dogs were large: They had, their skeletons suggest, a body mass of at least 70 pounds and a shoulder height of at least 2 feet — which would make them, at minimum, the size of a modern-day German shepherd.) Since transporting animal carcasses is an energy-intensive task, getting dogs to do that work would mean that humans could concentrate their energy on more productive endeavors: hunting, gathering, reproducing.

(↬ The Atlantic)

Dogs are the reason your forehead doesn’t look more jacked up than it does. Take that, cat people.

jtotheizzoe:

Mother’s Day: Always a Part of Us, Always a Part of Them

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms everywhere. There’s a million jokes about mothers never letting go of their babies, no matter how old they get. But it’s true … we never leave them, and they never leave us.

When you’re in the womb, cells from your growing body entered your mother’s bloodstream. Just before you were born, one out of a thousand cells in mom’s blood was yours. Many persist for decades, and your cells may help to attack inflammation or maybe even morph into new neurons in your mother’s brain. Often, too, those fetal cells may harm the mother, tripping the alarms of the immune system. We help, and we hurt.

Her cells also took refuge in your body, with as many as one in a hundred thousand of your cells not being yours. Scientists aren’t really sure what they do, if anything. Perhaps they help train our immune system, perhaps they can lead to autoimmune disease. Whatever the answer, she is in us.

Some of those maternal cells may have come from brothers and sisters that were present in her body, themselves deposited years before you were conceived. We may carry more than thoughts and memories of our families. Perhaps we carry their cells as well.

Near or far from your mom today, you’ll always be there with each other. 

For more: Check out Radiolab’s episode “Fetal Attraction”, or read more on Boing Boing.

(↬ Krulwich Wonders…, art by Spec-ta-cles on Flickr)

— Bill Watterson  (via myquotelibrary)

— Gordon B. Hinckley (via myquotelibrary)

— Hiromu Arakawa (via myquotelibrary)

rhamphotheca:

A view of Black Tusk in Garibaldi Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada. It is the core of an extinct stratovolcano, formed about 1.2 million years ago when the loose cinder around it eroded, leaving only the hard lava core. At 2,319 m (7,608 ft) above sea level, it is particularly noticeable from the Sea-to-Sky Highway just south of Whistler, B.C.

(via: Wikipedia)       (photo: Andysonic777)