Because someone reminded me today through his comments on one of my social posts how poorly we Americans are being taught our own history and our history as a species upon this planet …
Thought One – whether we like this or not, accept it or not, or want to believe it or not, we are a human primate species upon the land of this earth. Not believing it to be true, does not make it somehow not a simple fact of human life upon this planet.
Given our ancient-to-very-present history as a human primate species upon this planet Earth, self-named Homo Sapiens – and, specifically, to how we are given to warring violently and given to dividing ourselves into different “races” and discriminating against one another – it is very likely that we killed off our close cousins of human species – the human Neanderthals (Eurasia) and the human Denisovans (Asian) after meeting and mingling with them. Sure we may have started off with some inter-species mating and successful copulations, but history sheds a poignant light upon our nature with how the human Neanderthals and human Denisovans when extinct so quickly after human Sapiens enter their lands. The same thing happened to so many other animal species around this world – and is still happening to this day – once Homo Sapiens primates entered and inhabited the area. Oh Earth, beware the Sapiens primate!
Why am I a Neanderthal?
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/neanderthal/
Why am I a Denisovan?
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/denisovan/
With our CRISPR technology, wouldn’t it be so nice to bring our cousin species back to life from extinction? It would teach us so much about ourselves as modern human primates!
#DNA #Sapiens #Neanderthals #Denisovans #Humans
Thought Two – no matter how much historical untruths are repeated time and time again, this does not somehow make them the historical truth. No matter how many people may choose to believe it, it still remains revisionist history none-the-less.
To the belief that the phrase “hireling and slave” in the United States Star Spangled Banner is Francis Scott Key’s “expressing the superiority Americans felt compared to the downtrodden masses of Europe, for England was probably not unique in impressing their own citizens into the military” – that is the white-washed re-envisioned history of this time period.
There is more than enough historical records to demonstrate that the British deliberately attempted to “unofficially” start a race riot (more like war) in slave-owning America during this war of 1812, by encouraging slaves to join their British military and fight directly against their American slave owners. What was the British promise made to black slaves, if they would flee to the British? “Freedom from slavery” for all who come to the British. Who do you think were the British’s Colonial Marines of this (almost lost by America) war?
#StarSpangledBanner #NationalAnthem #TakeAKnee for social justice. #RestorativeJustice #TruthandReconciliation
Hominid (Human) evolutionary progression over time. At one time, not too long ago in Earth planetary history, there were six human species living upon this planet. By the time of the migration of Homo Sapiens (self-named “wise humans”) from out of Africa, these modern humans cohabited briefly with Homo Neanderthalensis (human Neanderthals in Eurasia) and Homo Denisova (human Denisovans in Asia) before (most likely) wiping these cousin human species into extinction soon after the cohabitation began.
[The above post was first posted on December 4, 2016. It has been reposted to December 20, 2016, to allow continuity between the election 2016 posts. Now, just in time for the American New Year, a new post for you below!]
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What Does It Mean To Be Human In The Scientific Age?
We humans live in an imagined reality of networked fictions that we, by our genetically established nature, superimpose upon the objective physical world that we daily experience around us. Social fictions that are nothing more than words, but exert an imagined power in the collective social consciousness and behavior of humans. Some of our most notable human fictions are religious theological fictions, our fictions about the reality of nationalities, money, and different “races” of human Sapiens (regardless our skin color and physical features, all modern humans are the same human primate species), and our fictions about the reality of corporations as living entities on par with living humans. None of these fictions are a reality outside the individually and socially imagined world of humans. It is because we believe that gods and demigods exist, that nations exist, that a piece of paper represents a promised valued amount, and that humans are definably different in their whole based upon limitedly defined surface characteristics, these things exist for us as a reality. But, the moment that we stop believing in our human fictions is the very moment they cease to exist within this objectively real world around us.
This is how we human primates are able to so quickly adapt and socially change, as quick as within a single generation of years, into a totally new way of viewing and experiencing, living and reacting, with the world around us. By a simple genetic mutation a mere 70,000 years ago that granted us Sapiens, among all the six to seven distinctly different human species that once not too long ago in history did cohabit the world together, allowed us to develop a fictive language. To imagine and see things that are only real in our own minds through this imaginative language ability of ours, and to share these imagined realities and have other humans Sapiens believe in them, too. This amazing ability has since spurred us into working together in large numbers, in ways no other primate species on the planet could or can do, and this has literally elevated our human primate position to the very top of the food chain. We like to look upon ourselves as if this is our gift to the world, our “god given” ability to conquer the planet and master it. Yet, the reality is, we have done so most clearly throughout human Sapiens history in greatly violent ways and in self-glorifying indifference to the long-term effects of our human progress.
The extinction of all the other human species of the planet, each very shortly after our tribal expansion into their part of the world (the last one going extinct only a mere 14,000 years ago, human Floresiensis, of the island of Flores in Indonesia), is just one of many historical examples. And it tells us a lot about the beauty and the dangers of our human evolution – we are an animal species of this planet that is out of place in the ecological balance of nature, gifted with the magical power of reasoning and imagination. But, at the very same time, equally as given to our fears and intolerance towards others over our newfound place in nature. How would we have developed culturally and religiously if we had taken more time to evolve and progress as a species, and if we had not driven to extinction every other human primate species of the planet that was not our Sapiens own? I really do wonder about this. Would we have been more modest and environmentally conscious of our ascension as the dominant species of this planet? Would we not have made the mistakes of the last 10,000 years of seeing ourselves as separate from nature around us, somehow special and unique among life, thus disrupting the very balance of ecosystems and the future life of other species with our unrelenting and greatly intolerant of others pursuit of progress? I do wonder. Do you?
What Does It Mean To Be Human?
http://humanorigins.si.edu/
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Human Evolution: Religious Perspectives
http://humanorigins.si.edu/about/broader-social-impacts-committee
The Hall of Human Origins offers a welcoming place to explore one of the most exciting areas of science, the study of human evolution. Despite strong public interest in the science, however, many people find this topic troubling when viewed from a religious perspective. Representatives of diverse religious communities encourage a larger, more respectful understanding of both the scientific evidence and religious belief.
In the photo below: Faces of our human brothers and sisters species that we once shared this planet Earth with. That is, shared with them until our Sapiens cognitive revolution. Pictured are human Erectus, human Floresiensis, and human Neanderthalensis. It is confirmed in genetic studies that human Sapiens, we modern humans, briefly mated with human Neanderthals and human Denisovans before driving them to extinction, and every other human species we came across went extinct directly after our arrival into their areas of settled residence around the world. What does this tell us about human Sapiens, especially when taking a look at our relations around the world in more present times?
Faces of our human brothers and sisters species that we once shared this planet Earth with. Very recently in planetary and human history, human Sapiens species – us, we “modern” humans – cohabited this earth with human Neanderthals, human Denisovans, human Erectus, human Soloensis, and with the “hobbit-sized” human Flores brothers and sisters species. At least two of them we know for a genetic fact we interbred with, that of the Neanderthal and Denisovan humans. Above: Left – Homo erectus, female. Reconstruction based on ER 3733 by John Gurche. Middle – Homo floresiensis, female. Reconstruction based on LB-1 by John Gurche. Right – Homo neanderthalensis, adult male. Reconstruction based on Shanidar 1 by John Gurche
Interesting side note: The study of genetics has revealed that some Neanderthalensis humans were light skinned and haired with blue eyes, and these human Neanderthals lived in the Middle East. It is in the Middle East that human Sapiens and human Neanderthalensis interbred about 40,000 years ago, before human Sapiens drove them into extinction. There are traces of Neanderthal DNA in European and Asian human populations today because of this. But, how did this Middle Eastern interbreeding affect Europeans? Now, get ready, this is where it gets interesting. There is genetic evidence that European human Sapiens of 10,000 years ago were dark skinned and haired with blue eyes. It was not long after this period that Middle Eastern human Sapiens migrated into Europe. There is genetic evidence that the Middle Easterners who settled in Europe were light skinned and haired, and this intermixing of Middle Eastern and Europe human Sapiens is a factor in how European human Sapiens lost their melanin and turned lighter in color (Europeans would say “whiter,” of course).
#HomoSapiens #HomoDenisova #HomoNeanderthalensis #HomoFloresiensis #HomoErectus #HomoSoloensis
#Humans #HumanOrigins #HumanFiction
3 Comments
Joseph T Farkasdi · December 8, 2016 at 5:14 pm
Someone asked a very intriguing question today on their social media page that went like this:
“One day scientists will have enough support to study the correlation between race and intelligence without fear of punishment. Why is it so taboo in scientific circles to acknowledge genetic differences between racial groups?”
There were a lot of replies! Some denying that there is more than one race, some saying because it is dangerous to ask such questions, and some saying science has already done the studies on this. It was (and is) a question that begged for a real and historically honest answer. So my reply to this online poster was:
The question lacks relevance (“Why is it so taboo in scientific circles to acknowledge genetic differences between racial groups?”), and I’ll explain why. The human Sapiens, in all our colorful and feature-ful varieties, killed off the human Neanderthals and the human Denisovans, that for a very brief time in human history we cohabited with. So, we will never be able to study the differences in intelligence between human races, with having only our own human Sapiens race as a test base.
Even if some were to try to make the case that there is an intelligence difference between Africans, Europeans, and Asians, like there is noticeable surface feature differences between the three, because of Sapiens and Neanderthal (Eurasian) brief mixing and Sapiens and Denisovan (Asian) brief mixing – even this is problematic.
The reason it is problematic is because, though the genetic influence of our extinct other human races obviously contributed to the variety in human Sapiens looks (ex., Europeans 10,000 years ago were Caucasoid-featured but with dark-brown skin, black hair, and blue eyes – in contrast today with their very light pigment-less skin), the ability to test what difference in intelligence such lingering DNA influences have in an affect upon us is much more difficult. The reason being, we don’t have any living Neanderthal and Denisovan humans to perform scientific psychological testing on, so we have no base line data by which to properly make comparisons.
Further, we have the issue in modern times of heavy intermixing of humans world-wide between communities, which renders concepts such as “white” people and “black” people and so forth as social “constructs” only. Because, there is only a small number of humans in this world, all living in Africa and living separated from the rest of humankind, that are truly strictly human Sapiens – without any other genetic influences in their DNA. Meaning, they are the “pure bred” human Sapiens who never left Africa, and all the rest of us human Sapiens around the planet are the human “muggles” of the planet.
Then, add to this the simple fact that in much of the world, DNA testing of … say “black” people and “white” people, for example … reveals that they are surprisingly related ancestrally to each others’ families (especially, here in America), and this goes to demonstrate that there really is little difference between “socially constructed” races of people despite the physically visible characteristics. The same remains true for intelligence with any member of the human Sapiens family.
#racialintelligence #humans #Sapiens #Neanderthal #Denisovan #race
Joseph T Farkasdi · January 25, 2017 at 12:57 pm
“It’s humbling to understand that humans, in the end, are just another species of primate,” said Marcus Perlman, who led the Koko study in 2015.
The sooner we human Sapiens come to accept this, the sooner we will begin to respect the land, respect each other, and respect our fellow nefesh chayah, “living beings/creatures” upon this planet. How would our perspective, our ideological and theological perspectives, about our human selves be, if we had not driven into extinction shortly after discovering them every brother and sister human species* we came across in our unprecedented expansion around the globe? Would we have been more in touch with our inherent relationship with the earth and the life living on it, and less delusional about our uniqueness and an indifferently violent in our dominion of this planet?
“That would mean that what we now call language has been baking in the genetic code since the days of our last common ancestor with baboons — some 25 million years ago — if not longer.” But, of course. Only in human imagined myths are humans alone blessed with the gift of speech. Reality does not support this imagined view of ourselves.
Think your dog talks like people? Scientists say you might just be right.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/19/think-your-dog-talks-like-people-scientists-say-you-might-just-be-right/?utm_term=.018dcb685652
The footage showed that the animals’ vocal tracts were not so ill-suited for speech after all. The macaques appeared capable of making nearly every human vowel sound.
Enter a team led by French researchers — Sawallis the lone American among them — who published their own study in Plos One this month after recording audio of monkeys.
“We found the actual vowel qualities that are used in human language,” Sawallis said.
They listened in on baboons, not macaques. But they picked up five vowel sounds that fit neatly into the same phonetic alphabet you can find in a classroom dictionary: A as in an American apple, O as in the British “bought.”
“Monkeys are capable of talking,” Sawallis said. At least, physically.
#monkeys #speech #Psycholinguistics #Koko
Joseph T Farkasdi · February 2, 2017 at 12:58 pm
When you know science is cool!
Bill Nye the Science Guy and Buzz Aldrin just walked the runway at Men’s Fashion Week
http://metro.co.uk/2017/02/02/bill-nye-the-science-guy-and-buzz-aldrin-just-walked-the-runway-at-mens-fashion-week-6422254/
So here you go: Bill Nye the Science Guy just walked the runway at New York Fashion Week: Men’s, along with Buzz Aldrin.
Men’s Fashion Week is cool. Bill Nye and Buzz Aldrin represent the world of science. Therefore, science is cool.
#BillNye #BuzzAldrin #MensFashionWeek