Amazingly, Kanzi the bonobo chimp, who can speak sign language and innovate new "words", has learned to make flint tools of multiple varieties to get at food hidden inside a log.  His creativity in tool making and use rivals our early hominid ancestors.

Bonobo genius makes stone tools like early humans did   New Scientist

Mathematician Peter Turchin is putting his genius to work in a novel new area: history.  By studying population sizes in relation to collective violence in empires, he's managing to predict periods of civil unrest.  He calls his new science cliodynamics, after Clio, the muse of history.

There is much to be wary of in this; history is not easily ( Read more... )

New cave paintings in Spain with designs that have "no precedent" may have been created by Neanderthals, researchers say.

Hitherto, all prehistoric art discovered is thought to be created by homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans).  If the new art is the work of Neanderthals, it would suggest they had the same capacities for symbolic representation ( Read more... )

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Get the full experience at Humanistic Paganism.

Being human when surrounded by Greek gods, by M. J. Lee

17 07 2011

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This article recounts the history of attempts to understand the numeracy of early man.  Numerical feats that seem inherently simple to us, like counting past five or adding two plus two, may not be innate abilities.  Rather, they may be culturally learned abilities.  The evidence comes from ethnographic records of encounters with "primitive" ( Read more... )

Most scholars today laugh at the idea of figuring out the geographic origin of language.  It changes too quickly to reliably trace its history back very far.  Further, it may have originated in multiple places.  But Quentin D. Atkinson has discovered some evidence that may be the most plausible, if any can be plausible, so far.  He looked at the ( Read more... )

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Mystery surrounds a device that some historians consider the world's first computer.  It was created in tn the second century B.C.E., perhaps by famed mathematician Archimedes, and calculates the date and time of eclipses and other celestial phenomena with astonishing accuracy.  It is called the Antikythera mechanism, named for the island near ( Read more... )