Month: April 2008

Encephalon Past, Future, and Present

Encephalon is the always-stimulating blog carnival of neuroscience/brain related blogging. For those of you interested in exploring recent Encephalon round up’s, Sharp Brains has the on-going list of the hosting sites dating from February 2008.

For older editions, Neurophilosophy has the list of older Encephalon editions from the very first in July 2006 running through 2007.

Finally, we are truly honored that we will be hosting a forthcoming edition of Encephalon on June 8th, so look for more on that as we get closer to summer.

Red meat, Neandertals were meant to eat it

The Meat and Livestock Association (MLA) of Australia has these great television commercials featuring actor Sam Neill (and by ‘great,’ I don’t mean ‘scientifically accurate’). They’re all about how we humans were ‘meant’ to eat red meat. They’re obviously meant to counteract growing concern about red meat in our diet, in the environmental impact of livestock, and other issues, and they use evolutionary arguments to try to get Australians to ‘beef up’ the amount of red meat in their diet, because of course, Australians don’t eat enough meat (trust me if you’re not in Australia — that’s probably not the biggest health issue here, ‘lack’ of red meat in the Aussie diet). For more information on the campaign, check out the MLA’s webpage, ‘Red Meat. We were meant to eat it.’ (You can download the video of the ads from that site if, like me, you want to incorporate it into your lecture on human evolution and diet.)

Especially interesting is the third ad in the campaign, ‘Evolution.’ The text of that ad is:

‘Evolution’ set the scene for the story of red meat and its role in human evolution. It also highlights the bundle of nutrients in red meat making it a foundation food essential for brain development and function. Red meat. We were meant to eat it.

But an article by M. P. Richards and colleagues soon to appear in the Journal of Human Evolution suggests that the evolutionary prize for red meat-eating should have gone, not to Homo sapiens sapiens but to Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (or H. neanderthalensis). Richards and the research team examined carbon and nitrogen ratios in Neandertal bone collagen to figure out what the Neandertals were eating.

Continue reading “Red meat, Neandertals were meant to eat it”

Eat Hearthy

The new Four Stone Hearth carnival is up, covering some of the best in the four fields of anthropology, over at Hominin Dental Anthropology (say that five times fast, and you’re a real anthropologist). It has a nice chronological theme, starting with a discussion of meat eating among Neanderthals, some pseudo-science on our cousins the Hobbits, ritual and habitation in a Neolithic archaeology site, and other archaeological themes. Then some disease in the Renaissance, the general intelligence vs. social intelligence debate, and finally us.

All worth a look, but given the theme of this blog, the stand-out would be the general vs. social intelligence debate over what accounts for the evolutionary increase in human brain size. So check that out over at Professor Olsen’s.

You can lead a horse to water

I’m not sure what to file this thought under, but I figure I may as well share it. I was holding a couple of my wife’s horses today while our farrier, Chris, shoed them, and we got to talking about horses instincts. I think I was asking about horses hooves in the wild, how they responded to injury or heavy use. He joked that the only reason we really needed to clip their hooves was that we kept them in overly-soft paddocks, fed them high energy feed, and thus they didn’t cover the miles and miles that wild horses would have to in order to get enough to eat. In other words, the ecological niche we created for our horses was so unusual that the whole horse physiology was different.

He also pointed out that most domestic horses, unless they are trained to, will not drink from natural water sources. If they’re accustomed to drinking from troughs or buckets, some will die of thirst before drinking out of a creek or lake. They may recognize that it’s water on some level, but they don’t trust the source unless they’re used to encountering water in this way. Obviously, they might be socialized early in order to become acquainted with water in a wider variety of forms.

I don’t have any information on whether or not a horse has ever died from thirst in the presence of lakes or streams, so I can’t confirm this. (I’ll look it up and report back.) If it is true — and I have no reason to doubt Chris as he’s a deeply knowledgeable guy on the subject of horses — it would be a fascinating case of a very useful ‘instinct’ not being inevitable. It also explains the ‘You can lead a horse to water…’ proverb, which I didn’t really understand until today, in retrospect.

Wednesday Round Up #8

General

Robert Sapolsky, A Natural History of Peace
Foreign Affairs full-text article: humans, like most primates, make their own peace

Michael Gazzaniga, Are Human Brains Unique?
We’ve got big brains. So what?

Michael Wesch, Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance
Pdf article bringing together Wesch’s work with digital ethnography, blogging, and participatory research with students—highly recommended

Carl Zimmer, The More We Know about Genes, The Less We Understand
The power of robust regulation: gene networks take the day

Nikhil Swaminathan, Can the Brain Be Rebooted to Stop Drug Addiction?
Brain pathways, neural plasticity, and searching for a reset switch

Arthur Caplan, Intelligent Design Film Far Worse Than Stupid
“Ben Stein’s so-called documentary ‘Expelled’ isn’t just bad, it’s immoral”

Happiness

Sue Halpern, Are You Happy?
New York Review of Books piece on the recent batch of happiness pop sci books

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #8”