Book Review: Singing Neanderthals

The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body

by Steven Mithen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have avoided this book in the past because my personal interest extends to an earlier time than Neanderthals, but I shouldn’t have. The title is misleading in that he extends to man’s earliest Homo habilis days, not those relatively-modern Homo neanderthalensis times. He explains the importance of music to man’s ability to use symbols, to express ideas without the vast lexicon we currently possess. He shares his definition of music as ‘human sound communication outside the scope of language’ (borrowed from Bruno Nettl) and describes a believable scenario for the co-evolution of music and language. All in all, a well thought-out book with lots of factually-based opinions.

View all my reviews

Follow Me

Is The Earth Warmer or Cooler? Some Evidence

Despite that Al Gore declared this topic closed, there is much information that can be debated, with proof of global warming or cooling based on facts and science. Consider:

• We are living in an abnormally cool period since the earth’s average surface temperature for most of its history averaged 22 Celsius compared to the present 14 C.
• Ice ages occur at approximately 250-million-year intervals.
• Fossil evidence suggest that during the Mesozoic Era (230 to 50 million years ago) the earth was 10 C to 15 C warmer than today.
• One million years ago the current ice-age (Pleistocene) began.
• Glacial stages last more than 100,000 years and are interrupted by interglacial stages that last about 10,000 years.
• We are now living in an abnormally warm period compared to the earth’s average temperature for the last one million years (during which glaciation has prevailed).
• The current interglacial period has been subject to climatic changes on a smaller scale than the change from glacial to interglacial but still large enough to disrupt civilizations.

---

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is webmaster for six blogs, CSG Master Teacher, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, a columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, IMS tech expert, and a monthly contributor to TeachHUB. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Follow me

Did You Know: Early Man Was Pretty Smart

“…Homo erectus of 700,000 years ago had a geometrically accurate sense of proportion and could impose this on stone in the external world. In effect, without paper or ruler, mathematical transformations were being performed.” Mental Abilities of Early Man: A L0ok at Some Hard Evidence John A. J. Gowlett 1984, Academic Press, London

---

Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blog,Technology in Education featured blogger, IMS tech expert, and a bi-monthly contributor to Today’s Author. In her free time, she is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. Currently, she’s editing a thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Follow me.

Extinctions are Part of Life

I read this article about the Eastern Cougar, now declared extinct, with sadness. It’s part of being human that we want to protect those in need, those weaker than us. The fact that we hunted this animal to extinction almost 300 years ago–as we did the American buffalo–doesn’t make it any more palatable.

The truth is, this happens all the time. Species are only viable when they can survive and thrive in their environ. When they no longer can, they die. The lifespan of the average species is only about 2 million years. Man tweaked that model by changing his environment, emigrating until we reached every corner of the world. Few species do that. Notably, insects do this with impunity, evolving a new species that fits the changed environment.

Most extinct species, we don’t notice. They were here and then gone and we move on. Some (buffalo, gorillas, apes), we try to stop the inevitable. The most notable to me are the Great Apes. They have been hunted and stalked until they now only survive in limited portions of the the planet, in limited numbers. They are as close to human as we can get without the technologic advances that allowed man to survive against greater odds. Tools, problem-solving skills, specialization. Yes, primates accomplish those traits thought to be unique to man and are evolving to do them better, but will they make it before they, too, become extinct.

Here’s the story on the Eastern Cougar. It’s sad, so don’t read it before you’re making an upbeat presentation.

Eastern cougar officially declared extinct

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

An eastern cougar pouncing.

CAPTION

By Robert Savannah

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has officially declared the eastern cougar extinct, 79 years after the last one was reported in the wild in the United States.

The eastern cougar is a subspecies of the cougar, which includes the Florida panther and the western cougar. There are multiple subspecies, though exactly how many is debated among biologists. All are called by several names depending on the area, including puma, panther, mountain lion, catamount, cougar and painter.

The eastern cougar’s historic range extended from Maine south to Georgia, west into eastern Missouri and eastern Illinois, and north to Michigan and Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick, Canada.

Numbers in Nature–the Movie

I’m not the only one crazy about numbers. These people made whole movies about them. This first is inspired by numbers, geometry and nature, created by Cristóbal Vila.:

This second one is about the Fibonacci Sequence (see this on codes and Fibonacci Number and this visual on Fibonacci Number):

This third one addresses the Golden Ratio (i.e., the Fibonacci sequence):

Enjoy!

---

---

Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blog,Technology in Education featured blogger, IMS tech expert, and a bi-monthly contributor to Today’s Author. In her free time, she is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. Currently, she’s editing a thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Follow me.

Book Review: Timewalkers

Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization

by Clive Gamble

View all my reviews

It’s a difficult question. Why did earliest man leave Africa and migrate to new areas. Mostly, animals evolve suited to their environment and they don’t stray far. They may have several areas they frequent, but they return to each, not leave them entirely.We had already accommodated ourselves to ravel more than 12 kilometers for raw materials, which is less than modern hunter-gatherers, but more than other primates.

Book Review: The Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya’Aqov, Israel: The Wood Assemblage

The Acheulian Site of Gesher Benot Ya’Aqov, Israel: The Wood Assemblage

by Naama Goren Inbar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A readable monograph, which sounds like an oxymoron but is actually a rarity. Lots of scientific detail. I read it to get better insight into this part of Israel during the middle Pleistocene, the time Homo erectus was emigrating from Africa to the world. Yes, I got some of that, though the author refused to draw conclusions from her collected data. This was my personal disappointment, but gave me respect for the type of scientist Dr. Inbar is. I’ve looked for the other books in the series (this one only covers the wood detritus collected at the site), but they either were never written or are unpublished.

View all my reviews

Book Review: The Forest People

The Forest People

by Colin Turnbull

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just finished a wonderful book, Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People. Turnbull lived ‘a while’ (pygmies don’t measure time with a watch or a calendar) with African pygmies to understand their life, culture, and beliefs. As he relays events of his visit, he doesn’t lecture, or present the material as an ethnography. It’s more like a biography of a tribe. As such, I get to wander through their lives, see what they do, how they do it, what’s important to them, without any judgment or conclusions other than my own.

How to Kindle your Child’s Interest in Science

It’s simple: Read about it. Science is more fascinating than fiction or fantasy games or cartoons. Here are five articles in the last Scientific American:

1. Chess. Back in 1859, chess was considered bad for people because it was physical exercise. Imagine that! Do your kids love chess?
2. The first night game in baseball. 1909–log before the first Major League Baseball played at night.
3. the legalities of virtual reality. Can you sue an avatar?
4. Ever hear of Deep Blue? The IBM computer that beat the chess champ? Now they have Watson, programmed to beat us at Jeopardy. (He sounds like Otto–accesses vast amounts of data instantaneously.)
5. Why don’t people have eyes in the back of their head.

Should You Worry About Asteroids?

During Lyta‘s time (the Plio-Pleistocene, around 1.8 mya), Nature was more violent than today. Africa’s volcanics were more common and more violent. Mt. Ngorongoro was still alive and belching smoke, as were its many neighbors, possibly due to the growing Great African Rift (the same one we predict will eventually tear the continent in two). Thanks to the triptych of faults (East Africa sits at a rare intersection of three tectonic plates), Earthquakes shook her terrain. The land was cooling, shedding the rainforests her ancestors enjoyed and adopting the grassy savannas still prevalent today.

And, unfortunately for Lyta, an asteroid hit Earth at the same moment a monstrous volcano erupted. Modern

Is this the asteroid that will hit earth?

scientists agree there is no imminent threat of Earth being bombarded by an asteroid like the one they suspect killed the dinosaurs 65 mya. They also agree we will eventually be hit. The average: about every 100,000 years, we get a bad one. Scientists also agree we have no reliable method of stopping them. Lasers. Nuclear weapons. Nudging them out of the way. They all have their problems.

Lyta lived 1.8 mya. It was her bad luck it was during that once-in-a-hundred thousand years year, and more bad luck–during a volcanic eruption. This confluence of bad luck challenged her nascient human problem-solving skills: She was separated from her infant son, her mate and on the run from that vicious future human, Homo erectus. You can see why I kept Otto focused on her life. Did mankind have the skills as the earliest of the Homo species to solve this sort of multi-problem?

As background for you, I copied this from NASA, to give you an idea how seriously we take potential asteroid impacts:

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.

Secret Codes and Music

Morse Code dashes and dots

It combines music and Morse Code. Sounds geeky, but it wasn’t started by my son Sean. Sean plays base, obsessively. He is almost never with his six-foot friend and when he can’t carry it, he practices by using his arm or chest as a fingerboard.

Sean and I are both very private. I don’t have a lot of friends because I’m too busy working and trying to make the financial ends of life meet. Sean doesn’t like most people. He’s pretty smart and most people don’t understand his interests, so maybe that’s why.

The result is we have developed codes for private communication. Written ones use palindromes and mathematical equations. Visual ones–when we’re in a group and need to say something to just each other–usually revolve around music. Why? Because no one would suspect it. It’s what Sean always does and they always figure, like mother like son. If he pads out music, his mom must too.

We didn’t think this up. Some famous musicians used music to send messages to their in crowd.John Lennon for example. It ‘s rumored he hid his initials in Strawberry Fields Forever. Look at programmers. They always hide Easter Eggs (hidden games, etc.) in their programming  for just those in-the-know to find.

What is musical Morse Code? It goes like this: An eighth note is a dot and a quarter note a dash with an eighth rest between each letter. When Sean fingers his string bass (using his chest as the finger board), I watch the taps and breaks and I can always get his message.

Next time you see someone tapping out a tune silently on their arm or chest, watch more closely.

---

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-8 technology for 15 years. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. She is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, presentation reviewer for CSTA, Cisco guest blogger, a monthly contributor to TeachHUB, columnist for Examiner.com, featured blogger for Technology in Education, and IMS tech expert. Currently, she’s editing a techno-thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

The Uncontrollable AI

Lucy: Her Story of Survival

Otto is not listening–again. The first time this happened was with Lyta.

Now, he has found a beautiful female Homo erectus. She’s a warrior, strong powerful. She lives in Africa so wears no animal skin clothing to protect her from the cold.

Here are a few more pictures of Lucy, her clan, her habitat:

DNA Computers and DNA Viruses

Cat’s the one who started me on DNA computers (we share a grad student office). My AI Otto is struggling with my need for speed in his computations and his need for energy to complete the work. When I ask him a question, he sorts through a datasphere the size of the digital Library of Congress (all public sources on the internet. Imagine if you searched ‘Homo erectus’ on the internet and then read and absorbed the one million hits–that’s what Otto does just to get started) to create the simulated reality required for his movies. You can see the importance of speed.

Here’s what I know about DNA computers. They weigh almost nothing, carry their own energy pack, can perform ten trillion operations at once and store an amazing amount of information–all in a drop of water with room to spare. The mechanics are deceptively simple. A high school senior won a scholarship by programming the Declaration of Independence into a DNA molecule. Here’s a link to How Stuff Works if you’d like more information.

The problem, from what Cat’s explained, is the amount of error in DNA computing. In our human genome, we call them mutations and they’re considered part of our uniqueness. The average child has around 6.3 billion base pairs of DNA with around 277 mutational differences from his/her parents. Many are noninvasive because 1) cells have built-in redundancies, 2) parts of our genetic make-up are inactive. Maybe they used to be active, but with H. sapiens sapiens, they aren’t. 3) some have nothing to do with how we get along in the world.

But, for traditional computing needs, we need more accuracy than that. The theorists believe that within highly-structured uses, they can be controlled. Taiwan has already created a chip out of DNA.

EPA Vs. Volcanoes. The winner is…

One more thing on volcanoes. This ‘news alert’ was too good to pass up:

EPA to Mandate Reductions in Emissions from Volcanoes

Emission from volcanoes in the future could be greatly restricted under new rules that are part of the Clean Air Planning Act.

Under new rules that are part of the Clean Air Planning Act, volcanoes, long responsible for more particulate and sulfur dioxide pollution than all human-caused emissions, might not get a pass any longer.

The volcanic emissions portions of the legislation was finally agreed upon by congressional negotiators after congress decided to allow states in which eruptions occur to come up with their own enforcement mechanisms.

“We realize that it might be difficult for the states to come up with efficient and cost-effective measures for achieving volcanic emission reductions”, said EPA Assistant Administrator Dr. Susan Vulcan. “That is why the reduction requirements are implemented gradually over time…only 5% each year”.

Dr. Vulcan said that state officials will have a much easier time than some countries will have if the United Nations Volcanic Emissions Negation Treaty (UN-VENT) is ratified. She explained that volcanoes in the United States are not nearly as explosive as volcanoes in other countries. For instance, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillipines in June of 1991 emitted millions of tons of sulfur, a pollution event that is well beyond what can be cleansed by scrubber technology now widely used at coal-fired power plants.

Because of the recent reawakening of the Mt. St. Helens volcano, Washington is likely the first state that will have to abide by the new emission reduction targets if they become law. Several companies have already submitted bids to Washington State to build and install massive “mountain scrubbers” that are expected to remove hundreds of tons of emissions per day during a major eruption.

While the new mountain scrubber technology is expensive, most states with volcanic hazards have indicated that they will increase the state sales tax rate on tobacco products in order to raise the additional revenue necessary to pay for the mountain scrubbers.

Volcanic Power

I know from observing Lyta’s life in the Plio-Pleistocene, volcanoes exercised enormous power over the lives of ancient animals. It’s hard to believe that they could globally blot out warmth and light, cause starvation, kill indigenous animal life. I watched Lyta’s life change dramatically after a combination of volcanic eruption and asteroid implosion destroyed her homeland.

Massive volcanic eruption

“NASA caught the eruption of Russia’s Sarychev Peak. “It exploded with such force, the plume actually punched through the atmosphere. Note (in attached picture) how clouds around the volcano parted in a circular ring–that is a result of a shock wave produced by the upward blast.  The plume is a mixture of brown ash and white steam. A ‘dirty thunderstorm’ complete with lightning could be in progress within the roiling cloud.  The smooth white bubble on top of the plume is probably a mass of water condensing from air shoved upward by the rising ash column. If so, it is akin to the iridescent pileus clouds sometimes featured on spaceweather.com.”

Here’s a picture of the eruption caught from a jet high above the Earth. Can you ever doubt the effect multiple eruptions, over and over, could have on life below?

Volcanic Eruption During the Pleistocene

Untapped power, deadly and beautiful

If you read my last post, you experienced the power of volcanoes. Because Lyta and her kin had no understanding of these geologic forces during the Plio-Pleistocene, how long they would last, how they as primates could survive their daunting power, they might well have considered eruptions as the end of their world.

If they understood life and death…

If they had a concept of  ‘me’ (studies are varied on this concept).

Think about this:

Volcanic activity dominated Pliocene Africa. Earliest man, until Thinking Man arrived, had no written or oral history, and retained no concept of the impact these tectonic forces played in their lives. But the rocks and the soil remembered and wrote the history into the land itself. It described the absolute dominance of Nature over all creatures, and man’s steps to mitigate this control.

Although frequent volcanic eruptions shook this unique African triple junction rift, one particular flare-up (the one Otto showed me which tore Lyta from her child and lover) ranked as the most violent in hundreds of thousands of years. Gelatinous rock found in the mantle was heated to temperatures in excess of 1600 degrees Fahrenheit and rushed up the volcano’s pipe at the speed of a freight train. It broke through Earth’s crust (a weak layer of sand and crushed rock and feldspar about five miles thick) and exploded with the force of ten thousand atomic bombs, blowing the top off the mountain and leaving behind the largest caldera in the world atop the tallest volcano of the Pliocene. The smoke, ash, and tephra shot forty miles through the troposphere, surpassing the level of the clouds.

The volcanic debris migrated on the high-speed stratospheric winds around the world three times. It passed over the ancient North American landscape, crossed the sunken land bridge to Asia, and moved on to what would be called Europe, greeted only by confused mammals. It returned to the African continent where the earliest of the genus Homo pondered the disappearance of Sun, and Cousin Chimp wondered why evening came so early.

And it started its circumnavigation again. A residual band of volcanic particles encircled Earth for months afterward and lowered the mean temperature one degree Centigrade. The sun reappeared to a fiery red sunset complemented by an unusual blue moon, an atmospheric reaction to the abnormal amount of sulfuric particles suspended in the troposphere. It would be several years before Earth’s substratosphere recovered.

The sound emitted from the explosion ranked as the greatest ever picked up by a hominid ear. So loud, it caused Boah (an Australopithecine) to cover his ears with his furred hands, and forced the sabertooth cat to fling his head side to side as he tried to rid itself of the abysmal din. The resultant tsunamis rose as high as today’s tallest skyscrapers and sped along at a speed in excess of the fastest cheetah. They crashed into the East African coastline, as well as the beaches of what would be India.

Two million years ago, one of the modern world’s greatest rifts could be characterized as a common geologic gorge, without the breadth and depth for which it is now famous. It responded to the constant destructive pressure of buried hotspots, fed by the frequent volcanic eruptions and bigger-than-life earthquakes, until it became hundreds of feet wide and high by Lyta’s time. What would become known as the Great Rift Valley changed from a simple fracture in the landscape to a geographic formation that transformed the adaptive radiation of man.

Great Dog Quotes

I have few friends. I work too hard, spend all my time on Otto, my son Sean and myself. I made mistakes early in my life, which is why now, if I don’t focus on a plan, I won’t make it.

With my son on his way to college, the only break I take in my day is with my dog Sandy. We go for walks, chat, eat together. No better friend could I have. I’m not a writer, so I’ll copy the words of people much more eloquent than I. The goal is to explain why everyone should love dogs.

“Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit,
you would stay out and your dog would go in.”

- Mark Twain

---

“Man is a dog’s idea of what God should be.”

- Holbrook Jackson

---

“The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.”

- Andrew A. Rooney

---

“To his dog, every man is King;
hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

- Aldous Huxley

---

“If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.”

- James Thurber

---

“Reverence: the spiritual attitude of a man to a god
and a dog to a man.”

- Ambrose Bierce

---

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend:
and inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

- Groucho Marx

---

“A dog is not “almost human,” and I know of no greater insult to the canine race than to describe it as such.”

- John Holmes

---

“If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.”

- Woodrow Wilson

---

“The disposition of noble dogs is to be gentle with people they know and the opposite with those they don’t know…How, then, can the dog be anything other than a lover of learning since it defines what’s its own and what’s alien.”

- Plato

---

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make
a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you,
but he will make a fool of himself too.”

- Samuel Butler

---

“If you take a dog which is starving and feed him and make him prosperous, that dog will not bite you. This is the primary difference between a dog and a man.”

- Mark Twain

---

“Liberals are like dogs:

The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man’s invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog’s way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.”

- E. B. White

---

“Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies,
quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love
and always have to mix love and hate.”

- Sigmund Freud

---

“No man can be condemed for owning a dog.
As long as he has a dog, he has a friend;
and the poorer he gets, the better friend he has.”

- Will Rogers

---

“Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit.”

- Sir Walter Scott

---

“The dog is man’s best friend.
He has a tail on one end.
Up in front he has teeth.
And four legs underneath.”

- Ogden Nash – An Introduction to Dogs

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, Today’s Author and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, Technology in Education featured blogger, IMS tech expert, and monthly contributor to Today’s Author. She is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, creator of technology training books for middle school and ebooks on technology in education. Currently, she’s editing a thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Ump–Dog of the Pleistocene

Conventional wisdom says dogs weren’t domesticated until the time of Egypt. Think Cleopatra and her cat. But, I’m convinced from the day man became smart enough to realize other animals didn’t always wish him well and survival was more than eating, sleeping and living, he has sought out a companion he could trust without doubt, who believed in him without question and followed him through good and bad.

Ump

Lyta might not have called it ‘dog’, but she found that in Ump. She met him after she became separated from her group by a massive earthquake, precipitated by an asteroid’s collision with her habitat and followed by seering fires that destroyed her homeland. Here’s how Otto showed their first meeting:

Below her lay a Canis, tail flopped to his side, pinned under a tree limb. A gash cut his heaving chest. Lyta dropped to the ground and approached with caution. Never had she been so close to this animal. Even supine, his muscles rippled as though prepared to flee. His great jaw sprouted sharp canines and massive grinding teeth. His fur stuck out from his trapped body in tufts like coarse wild grass. The one exposed eye—dark and small, like Snarling-dog (a coyote-like creature from the Pleistocene)—latched onto hers. The great pink tongue hung loose from his mouth, bobbing up and down in rhythm with his labored pant. The dirty tail gave a tired whomp.

Lyta studied the blood caked into his fur and dried over his ribcage like a big red leaf. Why was he here?  She had seen him as he fled the fires, well ahead of the panicked herds of animals.

“Why, animal?”  She asked, “What brought you back?”

As though he understood, his black lidded eye focused up and over to the side. There, a dead female lay with her pup, both crushed beneath a fallen limb. The canis refused to leave his mate, not understanding she would never again run with him through the fragrant grasslands. His loyalty benefited neither, but common sense had nothing to do with his decision.

Lyta pulled an herb from neck sack and chewed it to a pulp. “You’re going to be OK,” she soothed as she gently removed the branch from Canis’ wounded ribs and pasted a layer of mulched herbs over the wound, followed by long-fibered leaves. She worked slowly and with care, watching his face for pain or discomfort.

Tool Use and Chimpanzees

Tool use used to be what separated man from monkey. Then it was using a tool to make a tool. Now, that all has changed.

Tool Use and Man

I had to post this. It’s not that the impact of tool use on the brain surprises me, it’s the extent:

Tool use alters brain’s map of body

Posted by Elie Dolgin

Researchers claim to have the first direct evidence of a century-old idea that using tools changes the way the human brain perceives the size and configuration of our body parts, according to a study published in the June 23 issue of Current Biology. Holding the tool at an elongated arm’s length Image: Lucilla Cardinali “To be accurate in doing an action with a tool, you need to make the tool become a part of your body,” the study’s first author Lucilla Cardinali of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Bron and Claude Bernard University in Lyon told The Scientist. “Your brain needs to take into account that the action is performed with something added to your body part.” In 1911, British neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes introduced the theory that body image is mutable. Our brains are constantly processing visual and tactile feedback about the position of our bodies to work out where our limbs are at any given moment, they argued. The brain sifts through all this information to create a unified representation of body position and shape called the “body schema.” Although the concept has been widely accepted in the hundred years since it was first proposed, and many researchers have demonstrated adjustments to how we sense our body’s position in space after using a tool, no one had ever shown empirically that the body’s self-framing itself can be directly manipulated. “This is the first time it has been shown in humans that the use of tools can change the pattern of movement because the body schema has changed,” said Angelo Maravita, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy who was not involved in the study. Cardinali, a graduate student with INSERM’s Alessandro Farnè, gave people a mechanical grabber that extended their reach and found that people with the arm-elongating tool took longer to grasp and point to an object after the gizmo was taken away compared to before they held the tool. They then showed that this delayed reaction time is a normal response of people with naturally longer arms, thus indicating that tool users judge their arms to be longer than they truly are. The researchers also asked blindfolded participants to touch specific landmarks on their arm — the elbow, wrist and middle fingertip — and showed that people perceived these spots as further along the limb after having played with the gadget arm. “It’s really suggestive of the fact that your arm is coded as longer,” said Maravita. All these subtle and dynamic mental move-arounds occur at a subconscious level to help us function with our workaday widgets, the authors say. “[Tool users] don’t think, ‘Oh my god, my arm is longer,’” said Cardinali. “They act as if the arm was longer.” In fact, Cardinali added, the long arm of the mind is something we experience every day — for example, when you grasp a toothbrush. “You don’t need to look at yourself in the mirror,” she said. “You are able to do this without bumping into your teeth or hurting yourself, and you don’t need to pay attention because the toothbrush is incorporated” into the body’s perception of the arm. Michael Arbib, a University of Southern California neurobiologist and computer scientist who did not contribute to the research findings, said that the study “has an interesting result, but it doesn’t justify their claim.” He argued that the slowness experienced by tool users could arise because they had just completed an awkward task that involved not just a greater reach but also different angles of rotation of the arm muscles. After ditching the tool, “it’s a less confident motion,” Arbib said, “and the less confident you are the slower you go.” Cardinali, however, said that the movement was fairly straightforward. Participants were pros at it right off the bat without any learning involved, she said. Maravita noted that the study subjects were quite precise and that only the key parameters linked to arm size changed after tool use. “I think it’s quite a robust result,” he said. Arbib also said that the authors’ “bold claim” was unfounded because they might have mistaken cause for effect. For example, in the arm touching experiment, tool users could have pointed to a modified space rather than an altered body representation if they mentally positioned themselves relative to the extended tool and then worked backwards, instead of directly perceiving an elongated body part. These two interpretations are “functionally equivalent,” Arbib said, and so the authors’ findings might only confirm the previous results of the last hundred years. Cardinali disagreed. She argued against a mental frameshift in space because the arm pointing test was performed with bent arms — a posture that had never been encountered before. Thus, tool users could not be orienting themselves relative to any physical object in space, she said.