Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Surplus Killing
"The human body reached its present, sprocket-hipped form 2 million years ago. As far back as 400,000 years ago he had hearth and hut. At least one hominid besides us--Neanderthal man, who also shared our brain size--folded its dead into graves, nurtured its weak, and played flute....
Nonetheless they're gone and we--Homo sapiens sapiens or Man Wise Wise--are left, the lone animal genus on the planet to have one species representative, one face, walking or crawling around....All the fossil record tells us is that our ancestors, Homo sapiens, wandered out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, and about 50,000 years ago developed the symbolic consciousness we know as fully human....
Scientists call this the Big Bang of the human mind.
After the Bang comes masterful and balletic and even senseless hunting. Art. Jewelry. Ritual. The images of horses and reindeer and bulls molder on the walls of caves. The art shows a mind not just reactive but reflective, able to plan....Our kill sites show we sometimes kill far more than we can eat and just leave the carcasses on the ground, an unusual mammal behavior called surplus killing."
--from A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World by Susanne Antonetta
Nonetheless they're gone and we--Homo sapiens sapiens or Man Wise Wise--are left, the lone animal genus on the planet to have one species representative, one face, walking or crawling around....All the fossil record tells us is that our ancestors, Homo sapiens, wandered out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, and about 50,000 years ago developed the symbolic consciousness we know as fully human....
Scientists call this the Big Bang of the human mind.
After the Bang comes masterful and balletic and even senseless hunting. Art. Jewelry. Ritual. The images of horses and reindeer and bulls molder on the walls of caves. The art shows a mind not just reactive but reflective, able to plan....Our kill sites show we sometimes kill far more than we can eat and just leave the carcasses on the ground, an unusual mammal behavior called surplus killing."
--from A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World by Susanne Antonetta
