"Isn’t it odd that the true enemy of society turns out to be that guy in the office down the hall?"

John Hawks extracts a juicy bit from that NYT article about the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon.

Hawks (who's a paleoathropologist) also has nice closeup of a museum reconstruction of Homo erectus (who seems to be an unusually nice person with lovely skin).

And: A story about a monkey midwife:

I think this is cool not because it shows that monkeys need midwives (they don't) but because it shows that the behavioral flexibility that may have enabled midwifery in early humans is very extensive among primates. A delicious placental incentive may seem inventive, but humans are mystifyingly strange in being among the few mammals who don't regularly consume the placenta after birth.

Note: don't regularly. Not: don't ever. I have Googled it. I know what people do.

Harvard prof isn't advocating gestating a Neanderthal.

He's just saying it's "technically possible someday" and "we need to start talking about it today."

[George M.] Church said he has done perhaps 500 interviews about his research during more than two decades and this is the first one to spiral out of control quite like this.

But he said, “I’m not going to run away. … I want to use it as an educational moment to talk about journalism and technology.”

I bet Neanderthals would be better journalists. Let's get some, pronto, to help us with our endless fuckups.

"Wanted: Harvard seeks 'adventurous woman' to give birth to cloned Neanderthal baby..."

Second photo down in the right-hand column at Drudge right now:



Link goes to the Daily Mail:

Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School... said: ‘Now I need an adventurous female human. It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done.’

So Drudge changed the quote, substituting "female human" for "woman," actually making the scientist seem less creepy.

He told German magazine Der Spiegel: ‘Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us.'

Clue to creepy scientists: When you've got a proposal for an edgy medical experiment on human beings — especially when it implies a dream of an improved species — don't use Germans to get your message out.

In fairness to Church... I'm going to assume he's just horsing around, cogitating about what is possible, and that he's certainly not currently seeking that adventurous female human.

"The cave of Azykh in the territory of the Fizuli district in the Republic of Azerbaijan..."

"...is considered to be the site of one of the most ancient proto-human habitations in Eurasia."



"The influence of ancient peoples and civilizations including the Sumerians and Elamites came to a crossroads in the territory of Azerbaijan.... In the 8th century BCE, the semi-nomadic Cimmerians and Scythians settled in the territory.... The Assyrians also had a civilization that flourished to the west of Lake Urmia in the centuries prior to creation of Media and Albania."

Today's "History of" country is Azerbaijan.