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.

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

Eastern cougars were killed off by European immigrants protecting both themselves and their livestock. States offered bounties to encourage killing them. The last official records of eastern cougars are believed to be in Maine in 1938 and New Brunswick in Canada in 1932.

It’s true that cougars are still sighted within the eastern cougar’s historic range, but the Fish and Wildlife Service has confirmed that all of them are either western cougars or cougars from South America kept as pets and released into the wild, says Meagan Racey, with the Service’s Hadley, Mass. office. It’s known that western cougars are migrating towards the Midwest, Racey says.

The Service published an eastern cougar recovery plan in 1982 but the Service now wants to delist the subspecies, because it no longer exists.

While some had claimed that ‘ghost cats’ still lived in the cougars’ historic range, extensive efforts by Fish and Wildlife found none left.

“Even small populations of cougars, such as those in Florida and North and South Dakota, leave substantial physical evidence (tracks, photographs, scat, hair, genetic samples, road mortalities, cougars shot or caught in traps),” the agency said in a Q&A on its web site. “Service biologists assembled 108 records dating from 1900 to 2010 with a high level of confirmation that the described animals were cougars. After careful examination, the biologists concluded all reported cougars were animals that escaped or were released from captivity or that dispersed from the western United States.”

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.

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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.

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by Clive Gamble

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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.

For modern man to leave Africa, an environ for which he was quintessentially suited with his lack of hair and omnivorous appetite, and go to areas that were colder and populated with unfamiliar foods was a leap. there are a few postulates that make sense:

• A shift toward meat eating. The animals available in Africa were familiar with the crafty humans, so might be adept at avoiding us or preying on us. Migrating to areas that had no knowledge of our thinking ways and our Acheulian tools might explain how humans managed to survive outside of Africa,
• They were following herds of animal north. Vrba also has shown that some six species of African bovids, a relatively large number for any period, dispersed to Eurasia during the Middle Pliocene (man dispersed in the Plio-Pleistocene first and several times after that. Modern man left over 100,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene). The dispersal of large bovids is especially interesting because their shift from the forest to the open resembles that hypothesized for the hominids. Moreover, since open-country bovids could have been hunted or scavenged by Homo, the two groups may have emerged and dispersed together.
• A biographic event in which a new niche for large carnivores induced hominids, along with the lion, leopard, wolf and hyena, to exploit a new abundance of grazing animals in Eurasia
• Wanderlust–a need to know what lay beyond that hill or river or tall savanna grass.
• A need for change
• We had become equipped for long-distance travel with our long rangy human-like body. This equipped us for long distance travel, such as the steady migration beyond Africa.
• The larger body size of each successive Homo species required:

• Greater home range
• More food requirements
• Lower population density
• Increased strength and speed, that made them more predator resistant and avoidant, gave them increased longevity with allowed increased reproductive span
• Marge body size allowed more flexibility with temperatures, able to adapt to a greater temperature range—maybe why they could leave Africa for colder climates
• Larger size made them less susceptible to predators—too big to be appealing to the typical predator that traveled alone

Gamble explores this migration in Timewalkers: the Prehistory of Global Colonization. He discusses not only the logistics of mankind’s ability to do what no other species ever did, but why we would. Why go to climates too cold to survive without fur, forcing us to invent clothing? Why go to the edge of land abutting not just a lake, but full-blown oceans (like what lay between Indonesia and Australia) when we didn’t know how to sail? We didn’t just follow one path out of Africa, but exploded throughout the world, crossing oceans, seas, lakes, deserts, mountains, valleys–whatever was in our way, in an effort to get to the horizon. Along the way, we developed civilization, religion, culture, the ability to specialize in our jobs and generalize in our survival.

Gamble covers these interesting questions with clarity and humor (at times). Some quotes I like from the book:

• I will show how prehistory contributes new knowledge about ourselves through the study of a shared past
• An alternative, as Stephen J. Gould and Elizabeth Vrba have argued, is to acknowledge that not all features are currently adaptive. They are instead the source for future change.
• But more important is the active role of climate for shaping our society
• subsequent improvements in genetic mapping of these sister species (of man) have shown that chimps and humans are considerably closer to each other than either is to the gorilla.
• since behavior rather than taxonomy is my main interest, I need an account of the fossil record which takes notice of space and time in the distribution of the earliest timewalkers. This will allow for investigation of how behavior developed and the contexts which selected for its change.
• A great deal has been written about the advances this large brained hominid is supposed to represent… For a long time technology (stone tool use) did not lead to any appreciable extension of range.
• due to a set of evolutionary opportunities…all timewalkers (what Gamble calls man’s migration from Africa) have the necessary elements, such as big feet, which make them fit for, rather than fitted to, expansion
• the body is an excellent medium for communication. It commands respect through size and condition and relates to the optimum use of resources. The foraging success of individuals as fusion of the group’s members occurred will be all too apparent.

A bit of background on Dr. Clive Gamble from his staff page at Royal Holloway University of London:

… He is Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and a member of the Centre for Quaternary Research and an archaeologist with a particular interest in our earliest origins and the evolution of human society. He has undertaken research in many parts of the world to answer the question; when and why did we become the only human species to achieve a global distribution? The answer combines quaternary science, and its insights into changing climates and resources, with an understanding from archaeological evidence of how our social lives developed over the past two million years. Clive has written three books exploring these questions.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

One point that became clear early on is that pygmies have no leaders. How can that be, you might ask? Doesn’t somehow just assume that mantle? Well, until I read this book, I would have agreed whole-heartedly, but that doesn’t seem to happen. A tribe member might demand everyone go hunting with him (it takes a large group to capture/kill the forest animals) and people may go, or they may not. Whatever they feel like. When they move to a new camp, houses and furniture must be built. People may start full of energy and ambition, promising to help neighbors and build big houses with multiple rooms. And then the builders dwindle away as some other adventure grabs their attention. They might finish, maybe not. Often, they’ll use some of their neighbor’s roof leaves, or even his house until their own house is built.

Most surprisingly, I have yet to discover if they have a belief in a god. They don’t pray for help, for food or safety, for anything. If life doesn’t seem quite right, the closest they get to wishing it was better is to return to the forest where life is always good, to a camp surrounded by the depths of the jungle, where outsiders are afraid to go. But the forest isn’t their god, it’s merely where life is always good.

Hmmm. I have to ponder this…

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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.

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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.

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.

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: