Cool Science

Confirmed: All Non-African Humans are Part Neanderthal

I don't know why exactly I think this is so cool. It might be because I've been fascinated by Neanderthals for well over three years, or because we've been talking around this subject in class for three weeks so to see it confirmed is really rewarding. Or because it explains why some of my family (not naming names <3 ) looks so darn paleolithic.

Anyways, stop using Neanderthal as an insult, because it's demeaning to the real Neanderthals, who as it turns out are some of your distant ancestors. Not the majority of your ancestors - we still did all our evolving in Africa - but you've got a drop of ancient eurasian hominin in you.

I've always felt that colonial rape culture is the best evidence for Human-Neanderthal interbreeding. It's clearly ingrained in the human mind that the one of, if not the first thing you do when you meet an unfamiliar group is you have sex with it. If they don't want to have sex with you, you make them have sex with you. And that's that. Who's not to say this wasn't as true 60 kya as it is now? Or that it wasn't working in the opposite direction? Or that humans and neanderthals weren't involved in some big raping-and-pillaging circle of life?

(Additionally, there are weird little anecdotes in Genesis about human women mating with giants. This is about 25 thousand years after the last recorded Neanderthals in the mideast, but could it be cultural memory? Weird folklore?)

Anyways,  I'm starting to put together some play ideas for class next semester. One of them is definitely a family drama about a father and daughter who are incidentally superheroes, but the other one so far all I have is that there's an emaciated man in a cage center stage and all the other characters say he's locked up for his own good because he's a werewolf but we just have to take their word for it. But there's probably a plot that can go with this setup.

Anyways, that's all for now. :)

Except, wait, here's a grainy picture of Roma and I wearing 3D glasses waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 to start.

(An hour after this picture was taken, we were both wibbling, bawling puddles of fangirl.)

NO MORE NEGATIVITY

THERE HAS BEEN TOO MUCH NEGATIVITY ON MY BLOG LATELY AND IT IS INTOLERABLE. TO ALLOW THESE PEOPLE ANY MORE SPACE IN MY LIFE THAN THEY HAVE ALREADY TAKEN IS AN AFFRONT AGAINST MYSELF. IT IS TIME TO FOCUS ON SOMETHING MORE POSITIVE.

FOR EXAMPLE, THE ENTIRE TWO HOURS OF ARCHEOLOGY THIS MORNING WAS ABOUT NEANDERTHALS. IT WAS AMAZING. NEANDERTHALS ARE AWESOME. I NEED TO GIVE MY SCREENPLAY ANOTHER GO.

ALSO I AM GOING TO GO SEE HARRY POTTER AS PART OF A DOUBLE FEATURE (PARTS ONE AND TWO) ON THURSDAY NIGHT. IN NEW JERSEY. WITH ROMA. AND IT WILL BE AWESOME. AND WE WILL BE, LIKE, CRYING.

BECAUSE, MAN, THIS IS THE END OF OUR CHILDHOODS.

AND I WILL FEEL PITY FOR ALL THE FUTURE GENERATIONS THAT DON'T GET TO LITERALLY GROW UP WITH HARRY POTTER AND KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO WAIT FOR THE BOOKS.

BUT MOSTLY I WILL JUST CRY AND GRIN AND CRY AND GRIN AND THINK TO MYSELF,

MAN.

LIFE IS JUST AWESOME.

What to work on next?

I had two options for this month: Revise Dog in Space or do another draft of my screenplay from last semester.

Tonight I feel like working on the latter.

Also, saw X-Men First Class tonight and enjoyed it a lot! However, the Rise of the Planet of the Apes trailer?

...I'm glad they used entirely CGI animals, because it's the ethical choice and adult great apes are basically impossible to use in entertainment - they wind up using juveniles who are "retired" to research facilities when they become too much for their trainers to handle. But the CGI looks really uncanny valley. Not bad, just horrifying.

Also, those Orangutans were the wrong color. I went back and looked at the screencaps. Orangutans are orange, not black. Anyone who has ever seen any Orangutan could tell you - they're redheads. And anyone who has ever seen a chimpanzee can tell you that the alleged chimpanzees in the trailer... look nothing like chimpanzees, or even bonobos. They're just creepy.

I feel like I need to see it just to pick it apart.

I want to grab people by the shoulders

and shake them

and whisper in their faces

"Isn't this the coolest????"

This is a coat made of salmon skin:

A few weeks ago I saw a similar coat at the American Museum of Natural History.

They're even more impressive in person.

Got to page sixty on my screenplay.

Exhausted. Pondering how much better it would work as a stage play where I can have, like, a thesis or something.

Sometimes my majors interact in weird ways.

Good night.

Why I love learning the history of Anthropology

"If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present." -Franz Boas

Early Anthropology tends to get this bad rap of being a bunch of racist white guys touting White Man's Burden and Social Darwinism. And while that kind of nasty colonial thinking was partially the result of E. Tylor, Tylor himself was radically forward-thinking. He campaigned for a monogenic theory of human origins and what he called the "psychic unification of mankind." Which sounds really new agey, but doesn't actually mean what it sounds like.

Basically, Tylor/Evolutionism/Et all says that all humans are descended from one parent population and have the same mental capability. This was RADICAL at a time when most scientists were saying that the Chinese were descended directly from H. Erectus and therefore "less evolved" and "less intelligent."

Basically, the more you recognize the similarities between yourself and the bush tribe from Papua New Guinea, the closer you are to understanding the differences. And they're not, for the most part, going to be found in your DNA.

And if Boas, one of the founding fathers of anthropology, could say this around the start of the 20th century, then why are people still having trouble with the idea of all "races" (race being an inaccurate term to describe ethnicities and cultures, really) being, on some primary level, equal?

In other news the Anthropology Major Fox meme is my life and I am slowly evolving into a pretentiousosaurus.

Rewarding myself with movies...

So yesterday, after biting two pages out of my anthropology midterm paper (finished it today, thank you very much), and reconstructing most of my screenplay after the file corrupted itself (for really expensive software, Final Draft suicides surprisingly often), I decided I deserved a break. Now, when I'm writing I tend to be on Wikipedia and TVTropes researching facts and pop-culture, because I'm the kind of person who aspires to show her research and do it in a brilliant way. I'm not quite there, but who's counting?

Anyways, there are a bunch of tropes relating to cavemen/neanderthals and while skimming the pages, I became aware of a movie called The Man from Earth. It looked really interesting, so I looked it up on Netflix, and lo and behold, it was there and it was interesting! So I made a note to go back to it later and kept working on my paper.

Later came, I watched the movie, it was relevant to ALL of my interests.

Some things:

• In terms of film-style storytelling, this isn't really a film sort of film? To me it felt like a novel or a play that had been shot in order to reach the widest possible audience.
• ACTUALLY I think this would be an amazing play and I wonder if the screenwriter is aware of the fact?
• The trailer spoils one of the big twists, but it's such a part of the premise that it doesn't even matter. Like, I don't think the twist is so much that he's a caveman so much as what he's been doing for 14,000 years.
• IT GETS WEIRD.

I don't think that subtlety is really this movie's strong point, but that's not the point - it's good because it's a thought experiment and an exploration of a high-concept piece of Sci-Fi without any special effects, taking place entirely in more or less one location. And that's what's so interesting to me - it's a huge, epic science fiction story boiled down to like eight people in a room, reacting. And the story is as much about their reactions as it is to the story being told, so I don't even mind that you could say this is a major breach of "Show, don't tell." In fact, if there were flashbacks in John's story, I daresay they would have ruined the movie.

(Huge, epic science fiction stories boiled down to tight human dramas are one of my favorite things. It's part of what appeals to me so much about Makoto Shinkai's work.)

Anyways, have a trailer, and check this movie out, because it's really, really interesting.

Oh, and I made a tumblr.

And miles to go before I sleep

I got my cuts and revisions done and sent off my entries for Blank YPF '11. (Post for another day: Young Playwrights Competitions and You, a handbook.) So that's one massive thing off my to-do list for break, meaning... I still have to write a 6-page anthropology paper by next tuesday, and a 30-page screenplay by... when? I have no idea, seriously. Maybe I should look this up. Yeah? Yeah.

I feel like I should reward myself for finishing my Blank stuff, but so far all I've managed to do is play ten minutes of pokemon. :/ Maybe I'll play the Sims for the rest of the night before trying to start the screenplay tomorrow? Or not, because it's a full-screen game and I don't feel like locking myself out of the option for doing anything else. (Also it takes for-fucking-ever to load, and it runs kind of slow on my computer? It didn't use to. :|)

Alright. Going to go start my screenplay. Yeah? Yeah.

In other news:

AP credits are stupid and they're fucking up my graduation status and eating my elective slots and I'm going to have to drop like 90% of them for required courses for my double major. Seriously if I'd just taken AP Euro I'd be better off, it's the only one that I actually used towards getting out of anything useful. The rest are going to have to get flushed so I can take MORE ANTHROPOLOGY YAY. (I love Anthropology more than anything AP or IB courses I took in high school, the end.)

Also, I am going to get some of those cartoon valentines I hear other people used to give out in elementary school (I never did because I went to Jewish school) and put them in mailboxes on the DDW floor. If you don't get one it's probably because we're not really friends. Or because I forgot.

Also it was 15 degrees outside this morning WRYYYYYYYYYYY. :C

Study Hall Etiquette

I'm noticing that there's a specific way that people sit in a study hall. Isolated desks near power outlets are the most desirable, while central worktables are the least wanted. So if this is the study lounge:

Then the most desirable desks are the ones along the wall, furthest from the door which presents a constant source of distraction. Typically, however, this is divided by which desk is easiest to reach. The result is that the first desk occupied is usually one of the wall-side desks on the lower left hand side, and the second desk occupied is the desk directly across from it.

Once these two desks are occupied, a sorting algorithm is established. You cannot sit back-to-back or next to someone until a certain density is reached, otherwise it's regarded as rude. So the next person to enter takes the wall desk nearest the door, because seeing that there are others already in the study hall, they take the first desirable desk that they see. Once this desk is occupied, the fourth person to reach the lounge takes the top righthand desk against the wall, because it is intermediate between the easiest desk to reach and the most isolated desk, that fits all the requirements - ie, not back to back or next to another person, and not a table.

The desk back-to-back with the lefthand wall desk fills in fifth. Sixth is the desk across from the top lefthand desk.

Seventh is the table closer to the door, because the set of desks in the corner furthest from the door is awkward. It is only occupied once all other desks and one other table have been ruled out, and the bottom right desk is taken first.

From this point on, all desirable desks have been occupied and studiers must choose at their own risk. Back-to-back is always preferable to next to someone, and typically the remaining table will be unoccupied until a large, loud group of Stern students come in to work on their Econ. project. They'll probably be speaking Korean and you'll hate them because they are loud and don't seem to realize that there were other people in the study lounge before they took over.

Once all seats are occupied, anyone else attempting to use the study lounge will be subjected to bored glares until they get the hell out of dodge.

Yours truly avoiding studying for finals,

Leez

What makes a human a human?

"Mitochondrial Eve" is about 100-200 thousand years ago in Africa. This refers to not a single individual, but a single population of perhaps a thousand or fewer individuals from whom all modern humans are descended. While some of the adaptations we see in modern humans are certainly the result of evolving to be smarter, faster, and adaptable, the fact is that your ancestors were all horribly inbred. The skull of H. sapiens is fucking weird looking. Check it out:

H. Erectus:

H. Heidelbergensis:

H. Neanderthalensis:

H. Sapiens.

Do we actually look anything like our nearest relatives? No. Because, just like in West Virginia, it's all relative in Africa 100KYA. Our reduced palette and weird shaped skull? It's probably because your ancestors were making it with their first cousins. What's the fastest way to tell if something is an anatomically-modern Homo Sapiens or not?

Well, if you've got a mandible, the question to ask is... Does it have a chin?

That's right. The fastest way to identify if you've got H. Sapiens or H. Something Else is that little buildup of bone at the base of the mandible. And where does that come from? Well, you're reducing the size of your jaw, and the bone has to go somewhere. And if you decide to move up the face, what's the next defining feature?

Anatomically modern humans have no retromolar space. While in earlier forms the jaw extends past the base of the third molar, in humans the jaw is squashed in to reduce prognathism. What do we pay for our markedly reduced alveolar prognathism? Well, if you've ever had a wisdom tooth pulled, you know - Our jaws can't hold all our teeth. We're evolving out our M3.

You know who else didn't have an M3? H. Florensiensis. "The Hobbit." An island population that, over the course of a few hundred thousand years, managed to reduce everything about itself. You know what they wound up with? Smaller jaws, no M3s, and teeth more jacked up than a Liverpudlian. (No offense to the Liverpudlians.)

So, everything that makes us human? Founder effect. Genetic bottlenecks and inbreeding.

Lol poetry

I dwell in the esoteric.

They'll never find me here.

Three weeks ago

I held up my hands to my reflection

Showed it that

my knuckles were raw and cracked

"How can that be?" I asked it.

"I use lotion."

This morning,

my reflection shouted back:

IT'S BECAUSE YOU CHEW THEM.

And I could not tell if it was I

Or some character in a story

Who was relieved by this revelation

of oral fixation

and is it self-recognition

Or divine inspiration?

This compulsion to chew:

When people borrow my pens

I pre-empt their disgust

"I'm sorry, I chew,"

and I feel disgusted for them

Even as they take my ruined implements

and say "thank you"

and

"It's okay"

and

take notes on

the late cretaceous.

I feel connected to Paranthropus

That ancient relative

whose skull looks more

gorilla

than human

Thet call him

"hyper-robust"

and I memorize teeth sizes

jaw widths

sagittal crests

And I feel connected

because he got that way

through thousands of years

of being compelled

to chew.

Zoo day!

Today I went to the Bronx Zoo. It's kind of the wrong season for it, because it's cold and most of the animals are inside for the winter and it gets dark at like 4:30, but it was pretty fun. A lot of their exhibits (birds, primates, amphibians, reptiles....) are indoors, so we were still able to see them, and for $5 it's not really something to sniff at! Also they had tiger cubs and they were adorable. :) By the time we made it to the lions they'd already gone in for the day, though, and it seems like the zebras, wild dogs, and baboons were apparently never out at all today.

And it was cold and kind of an old, sad zoo with no sense to the layout and exhibits that were kind of prehistoric but it was fun and I met people and had a good time walking around talking to people.

Unrepentant dorkatude

My idea of a perfect day is getting up at nine AM, printing off an assignment, and hopping a C train uptown to the American Museum of Natural History, a place I am alarmed to say I am beginning to understand the floorplan of. To me, the AMNH is like Hogwarts. For one thing, it's basically a castle. For another thing, it seems like the layout is constantly changing. You take a twisting hallway and two staircases in search of the entrance, and you wind up in an exhibit hall you've never heard of or seen before.

I spent a whole day there today - an hour or so in the hall of human origins, followed by lunch (following a tip from my anthropology TA, I tried the brownies in the first floor cafe - delish!), followed by an IMAX documentary about the hubble space telescope (absolutely amazing), followed by something like four hours in the Hall of Vertibrate Origins, the Hall of Dinosaurs, and the Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives doing an assignment for Evolution of the Earth.

It was educational.

For example, did you know that reptiles aren't a scientific clade? A clade includes a common ancestor and all of its descended species. Since the reptile category excludes birds, who are descended from dinosaurs (and technically dinosaurs themselves, because the entire definition is based around a shared hip structure). This kind of thing makes me geek out unrepentantly.

I also really wanted to smash some heads together in the Hall of Human Origins.

Guy looking at an exhibit:

"So which one of these is the human arm, and which isn't?"

His friend, pointing to a chimpanzee's arm bones:

"That's the human one. It has an opposable thumb." (Pointing to the human arm) "That doesn't."

Me, interrupting because I think they're dumbasses:

"No, that's a human arm, and it does have an opposable thumb. All primates do."

The first guy:

"Thanks. Man, I told you so!"

The same guys, later:

"So, why didn't all the monkeys evolve into humans?"

And then I went over to the Space Center gift shop to see if they had any books that might be useful to me, but they didn't - I think I got the last copy of Two Sides of the Moon (book review is PFAD... when I finish it, but it's terrific so far) and they just never got more Astronaut Biographies in after that, or else they restock their book selection less often than every two weeks. I thought about getting some Astronaut Ice Cream because I haven't had any since I went to space camp in fifth grade, but then I decided that if I wanted to eat stale marshmallows I'd just eat stale marshmallows, and I didn't want to eat stale marshmallows just because it was nostalgic to me.

(Do real astronauts eat astronaut ice cream, or is it just a space center gift shop gimmick? I might need to investigate.

But all in all it was pretty awesome, and then later when I was waiting for the subway home I somehow managed to get into the same car as my roommate's boyfriend. Don't ask me how, but when the train stopped there was this white guy with dreadlocks sitting right in front of me and I was like, "...Bez?" and he was like, "Hi." New York is surprisingly small once you start to know and recognize people - you run into the same group of people everywhere, even when you least expect it.

Unclear on concept?

So I got home from class to be surprised by an email from my professor congratulating me on my "excellent performance on the midterm." Having been previously unaware that the grades were posted, I raced onto the blackboard site to see what I got - I was convinced I hadn't done as well as I was hoping, there were some terms that were completely alien to me and due to outside circumstances I'd only made it through half the material I meant to while studying.

So I got a 90%. Considering the class average was something like a 78% and the median was an 80%, this is pretty good. It's also an A. (He curves it, so anything in the 90-100 range is an A, with 86 to 89.9 being an A-.)

However, I was pulling a 92 average before. So despite my "excellent performance on the midterm," my grade actually went down, from a 92 to a 91.25.

Huh.