In Case You Were Wondering, We are All the Same

As many of you know, I am interested in a wide variety of subjects besides law.

One of those subjects is the development of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens. According to current thinking, our earliest ancestors emerged in South Africa approximately 200,000 years ago and nearly died out due to severe climate change. A small group managed to survive quite well in a temperate climate living in caves along the coast of South Africa with easy access to the sea to harvest fish and shellfish and just short distances inland to dig up various nutritious roots and gourds. Kind of a Garden of Eden, if you will.

In an article just published in Nature, we find out that by approximately 71,000 years ago, modern man had developed a technology to produce thin sharp stone blades by heating a certain type of rock to a certain temperature and sustaining that temperature for a definite period of time. This process changed the character of the rock so that it could be struck at an angle producing the thin sharp blades that they used to create arrow points and spear points that they could launch long distances accurately with a sling called an atlatl.

Until this recent find, scientists believed the earliest appearance of this technology was approximately 60-65,000 years ago.

Here is a link to the article which contains additional information that I think you will find interesting.

In case you were wondering, the answer is “Yes.” Every human alive today is descended from that small group of early humans.

Therefore, there is no basis and there never was any to believe that one race is superior to another. We are all genetically the same with only minor, mostly cosmetic differences.

The human love affair with psychedelic substances probably was well underway when this discovery was made and who knows — maybe the idea to heat and treat that particular type of rock came to one of our ancestors during a psychedelic experience. Certainly psychedelic experiences with psilocybin mushrooms must have played a role in the human development of cosmology and religion.

Is there a reason why our brains have chemical receptor sites for psychotropic substances?

57 Responses to In Case You Were Wondering, We are All the Same

  1. gblock says:

    Last week, a commenter to an LA Times article claimed something that I have not seen before. She said that the curved mark on the back of George’s head was definitely caused by the butt of his gun, and the small wounds on the back of his head were probably also caused by contact with this gun. She said that she works in a hospital and has seen many similar injuries.

    I’ve been turning this over in my mind to come up with possible scenarios consistent with this claim:

    – Least interesting scenario: the mark was caused by something that happened before the encounter with Trayvon, and the wounds by something other than the gun.

    – George dropped the gun on the ground and the back of his head landed on it when he fell.

    – Trayvon managed to grab the gun and hit George on the head with it. (The lack of his DNA on the gun could be a problem for this scenario.)

    – Trayvon grabbed George’s arm and pulled it up when George was holding the gun, and George ended up hitting himself on the head with the gun.

    – George abruptly pulled his arm back (maybe he thought that Trayvon was trying to grab his gun) and hit himself on the head with the gun.

    – George was facing down, probably on top of Trayvon. Trayvon grabbed the gun, or grabbed George’s arm and pulled it back, or George abruptly pulled his arm back, and the gun was dropped and landed on the back of George’s head.

    As you can see, several of these scenarios introduce new elements to the picture, especially when the gun was first drawn, possibly more of a struggle over the gun (or an attempt by Trayvon to prevent the gun from being aimed at him), and the possibility that the gun may have been briefly out of George’s hands.

    Any comments on the likelihood of the claim, the likelihood of any or all of the scenarios, further implications for the sequence of events that evening, or any other possible scenarios?

    • Malisha says:

      None of the above. Because someone saw cuts like that on the back of someone else’s head, from someone else’s gun, so what? Any small metal object (the screws on the back of a sign, for instance) could cause the same. Or something else could cause the same (edge of a flashlight, somebody’s class ring). Osterman’s gun could cause the same. Taaffe’s gun could cause the same. Tim Smith’s gun could cause the same. Irrelevant.

      Somebody please give me some scenarios for how:

      George’s head is bloody a few seconds after he killed Trayvon Martin and a bystander photographs it for him while he speaks on the cell phone with someone; and

      EMTs clean up his head; and

      He is videotaped at police HQ with no blood rivulets; and

      THEN he is photographed with similar (but not exactly the same) blood rivulets while he stands up facing and background in front of a greyish-beige wall.

      That one throws me.

    • Patricia says:

      Any last-minute action/interaction by Trayvon would have interrupted the stead flow and volume of his final scream, which lasted over 40 seconds.

      Close all your windows and doors, set a clock with a second hand in front of you, start screaming “no” as loud as you can for 40 seconds, and then start doing some strenuous lurching and grabbing during your last 40 seconds.

      Better yet, try doing this while lying on the floor with a heavy weight on you, (say, a chair tipped over with 100 lbs. of “stuff” loaded on it), and have a friend standing next to you with clock or watch – so you don’t know when your 40 seconds will be up.

      Then you’ll know …

  2. bm says:

    [comment deleted as a duplicate]

    • Malisha says:

      “I felt like he saw the gun.” Imagine, your head’s being bashed on the sidewalk, you can’t see because of all the blood in your eyes, your nose hurts like bloody hell, this thug’s got “one hand” on your mouth and the “other hand” on your injured nose and he’s pushing down with all his weight “to smother” you and he’s screaming at you “Shut the Fuck UP” and you’re screaming “help help” and because your jacket moves you think you can see what you think he SEES? You “feel” like he “sees” your holstered gun? Oh excuse me — I meant you “feel” like he “sees” THE gun? You feel his hand on your chest and you think you feel like you think you know what HE SEES?


    • bm says:

      The defense claims to currently have between 50-70 witnesses according to the Huffington Post. Zimmerman’s legal team submitted a request to delay the trial, which is been set for June 10. O’Mara states that the defense needs additional time to prepare for the case
      Read more at http://www.lawyerherald.com/articles/2387/20121107/george-zimmerman-presents-witness-defense-keep-names.htm#OD2WXQpCXTgXReLD.99

      How many people saw and heard what happen
      How many law officers was there that night

      • Jun says:

        The state pretty much has everything single officer and EMT and fire on their list so I do not know

      • Malisha says:

        Oh no, they’ve got witnesses to the following:

        1. 2 witnesses who were there that night (there were really more than two but they do not want THOSE to get on the stand, by the way, because THOSE were all just racists who wanted to railroad George and rush to judgment);

        2. 4 witnesses who knew that George loved Black people;

        3. 8 witnesses who knew that George mentored in disadvantaged communities and advocated for Sherman Ware;

        4. 16 witnesses who can say that the police did not want to charge George with a crime;

        5. 32 witnesses who will testify that they heard Trayvon Martin once claimed that white people didn’t like him, and that paranoia drove him to attack George and try to kill him;

        6. 64 witnesses who will testify that DeeDee really didn’t look too broken up about Trayvon’s death in the weeks after 2/26/2012;

        7. 128 witnesses that Al Sharpton is gay;

        8. 256 witnesses that Sybrina Fulton once took a 12-minute bathroom break at her job when you’re only allowed 10 minutes;

        9. 512 witnesses that one of Tracy Martin’s ex-girlfriends’ ex-husband had a child out of wedlock with another woman in 1999 and the state made him take a paternity test;

        10. 1,024 witnesses that the world is round; and, my personal favorite…

        11. 2,048 witnesses that have nothing to do with the case.

    • Xena says:

      It’s called gag withdrawal. MOM just had to have something to say after being quiet for about 2 wks. Donations much have come to a standstill.

    • Malisha says:

      This is just silliness. O’Mara just wants to pretend that he HAS something that the prosecution can’t figure out and that he will get to trial with a “trump card” that the public can’t figure out and won’t be able to attack. He’s got nothing. Zilch. Don’t worry about it.

  3. Malisha says:

    Yes, and I cannot remember who it was, but one of these “adventurors” brought an Eskimo woman to be displayed, same idea, never got prosecuted for kidnapping or anything else.

    As long as crimes come in bundles, they are “denatured” by our society and accepted as “peculiar institutions.” They really are criminal conspiracies: slavery was a criminal conspiracy, for example. I call the present extremist Republican policies toward women the “Republican Rape Culture.” These are not “policies” or “institutions”; they are crimes.

  4. grahase says:

    His ebony skin stood out in sharp contrast to the white crowd pressing to get a better view.
    The young African boy bared his teeth at the men and women staring at him through the bars. They were sharpened into dagger-like points, making him appear all the more barbaric to the ignorant hordes.
    Above the cage hung a sign proclaiming: ‘The Missing Link.’ A baby chimp sat disconsolately at the bottom of the enclosure, a single companion to the boy.

    The year was 1906. This was a pygmy, brought to America as a novelty to be put on display in the monkey house.
    The New York Times reported: ‘There were 40,000 visitors to the park on Sunday. Nearly every man, woman and child of this crowd made for the monkey house to see the star attraction in the park – the wild man from Africa.
    ‘They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering, and yelling. Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.’
    Suddenly, the boy turned. Taking the bow and arrow given to him as an ethnic accessory, he shot at the gawpers. His arrow did no harm, but he did scare the life out of the onlookers.
    This was Ota Benga, a pygmy, brought from the Congo and put on display in a zoo as an example of what scientists at the time proclaimed to be an evolutionary inferior race.
    His story would divide a nation, and is now told for the first time in a new documentary, The Human Zoo.
    The programme lifts the lid on a dark period in history, where ‘natives’ were paraded as exhibits, fuelling the spread of white supremacism and even contributing to the rise of Nazism.

    Tragically, Benga became the victim of one of the most awful acts of exploitation ever seen and died a shadow of the proud young tribesman who arrived in America.
    So just who was he, and how did this grotesque experiment help shape the 20th century view of race?
    A hundred years ago, before television and mass tourism, a handful of enterprising adventurers, anthropologists and businessman decided to bring the far-flung glories of the world to life in one place.

    Huge fairs were held in Paris, London and America, exhibiting everything from Italian gondolas to African elephants.
    Having promised the world, there was pressure to deliver: people were the next quarry.
    In 1904, the showman anthropologist William McGee conceived the idea of a human zoo, to be held in St Louis in the U.S. state of Missouri.
    It was designed to be one of the largest scientific experiments ever undertaken and would be spectacular public entertainment.
    McGee wanted the tallest people in the world, veritable giants from Patagonia, at the tip of South America. He wanted the Ainu, who lived on an island north of Japan and were supposedly the hairiest humans. He placed an order for 300 Filipinos – there is no record of why he wanted so many.
    His grandson, Phillips Verner Bradford, says: ‘If you told him that a place was dangerous, he’d say: “I want to go there!” He was that sort of guy.’
    Verner took a boat from New York to London, down the European coast and around Africa to the Congo River.
    Bradford says: ‘He made his way up the Congo River with steamers as far as they would go. Once he arrived at the great waterfalls, he had to hire a crew of natives.’
    They encountered crocodiles and hippopotamuses, and deadly whirlpools that could sink a boat.

    Eventually, Verner made it into the jungle. He blithely walked into a village of cannibals, and found that they had captured a rival tribe who were being held in cages, ready to be eaten.

    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1224189/Caged-human-zoo-The-shocking-story-young-pygmy-warrior-monkey-house–fuelled-Hitlers-twisted-beliefs.html#ixzz2Bb1ju439

  5. grahase says:

    I think that DNA sequencing is the greatest discovery of our time.

  6. Tzar says:

    there is a neat little documentary available on PBS, called “What Darwin Never Knew” it’s 2 hours long. in it they talk about the relative amount of DNA it takes to make human beings look different (race, appearance etc…), it’s so insignificant that it boggles the mind that external appearances dominate the human condition to such an incommensurate degree.

    • gblock says:

      Probably most of our DNA controls things that have nothing to do with external appearance.

      • Malisha says:

        Fabulous National Geographic article in February 2012, “What Dogs Tell Us: the ABCs of DNA” — one GENE makes the difference between a dachshundt and some other dog with regular -length legs. Fascinating! Also, nice pictures of dogs!

  7. grahase says:

    Going back to the cave dwelling hunter-gatherers, individuals whose brains had a heightened response to emotion-linked neurotransmitters (such as dopamine and serotonin) were better suited to survival.

    This meant that as the generations passed, heightened response became the norm. OUR ANCESTORS may have relied on them to fend off stress, hunger, fatigue, low mood, or craziness.

    Archaeologists have found evidence of kola nut (caffeine), tobacco (nicotine), khat (an amphetamine-like plant), betel nut, and coca, at various sites dating back at least 13,000 years, indicating that humans have, in fact, been drug users for a very long time.

    For humans, whose large brains were dependent on high levels of neurotransmitters, ingesting these compounds might have been ‘good’ not ‘bad’. In the forests and savannahs of our evolutionary past, using these compounds may actually have been a ticket to survival, not an escape from reality.

    But these days, the power of psychoactive compounds can be amplified many times over, and large quantities are available on demand – putting many humans at risk of becoming addicts. What may have helped us survive as a species long ago may, it seems, have done us no favours.

  8. grahase says:

    Professor — DNA evidence is now discovering that homo sapiens met up with the Neanderthals and that it is the Neanderthals that had the red and blonde hair with blue eyes. In essence, there is no pure race. What it boils down to is dominant and recessive genes. As recessive as though blonde and red haired genes with the recessive blue eyes genes are, they continue to pop up to this day. You may be lucky enough to see a blue-eyed Native American or a blonde Asian and many other combinations. Not one race superior to the other. We are all just Heinz 57 mutts and should all be proud of it.

    • Jun says:

      I think more important is culture than race, as I believe it defines them more. For example, black people are way different than people from Africa culturally, just like Asian Americans are vastly different than Asians. Or if say a Chinese kid is adopted by a black family, the Chinese kid is more likely to be culturally black than Chinese.

      There are rare occasions of mixed racial looking people in each race. In Asia, there are some Asians that have African characteristics, in there darker skin tone, and afro-hair. However they are considered Asians. Samoans, Chinese, Philipinos, etc all have some groups of Asians that are like this. I have also seen a couple Chinese with green and blue eyes but I am not sue if they are mixed or rare.

    • Xena says:

      Hey! I saw that in the movie “Quest for Fire.” 🙂

  9. rachael says:

    There is only one race, the human race. And as hard as it may be for the conservative thumpers at the outhouse to believe, even their Bible tells them that (though I am not a believer, just saying).

  10. Jun says:

    I heard a potential theory is that Omara may try to introduce testimony George made to assert the truth of the matter by introducing it through the cops by cross

    Bernie and Corey gotta get ready to object their hearsay submissions

  11. nancybenefiel says:

    I knew an anthropologist who insisted his opthalmologist do his cataract surgery usingobsidian blades he prepared in just such a manner. They can only be used once but they are the sharpest blade there is

  12. Digger says:

    Yeah, but I want to know what was going on before the mutations started. I love this stuff! It’s so easy to slip into a cave and has anybody here ever seen Big Foot? George looks like he is quietly swatting bugs. As his nose grows, grows grows, he stumbles stumbles stumbles on it.

    • Jun says:

      I actually have a theory that man was more advanced than historians have made man out to be. There are still old cities with stone buildings and they still have no idea how they cut the stones and made the buildings. I believe there was some lost technology we are unaware of from the past and perhaps humans figured out things we are unaware of today but was lost to time.

      I also believe that some dinosaurs actually survived and lived from the prehistoric eras and it would account for some of the creatures written in history books, such as dragons and such, if those stories were not fiction and it is what they saw.

      As for bigfoot, I believe it is an undiscovered creature

  13. Jun says:

    I agree. There is only mutation differences amongst the different races and cultures of humans that give us the different genetic differences.

  14. LLMPapa says:

    Professor, it’s my understanding paleontologists have recently discovered another speci of humanoid erectus originating in the South American jungles of Peru called “Wannabe sapiens”.

    Oddly enough, they lack to cognitive desire to tell the truth……

  15. Digger says:

    Uhhhh, Professor, right now you have got me in a purple haze!
    I’m trying to think k k k k k k. Back later if you are still in sight!

  16. Two sides to a story says:

    I love how the archeological and anthropological paradigms keep changing and the dates keep getting pushed back.

    That we’re all closely related speaks to the adage about six degrees of separation.

    What we do to our brothers we do to ourselves.

    • Bill Taylor says:

      i have always said we ALL are incredibly alike sharing almost identical dna, YET we each are even more incredibly different and unique at the same type, we each are unique individuals that still share so many common traits…..the concept of “race” always seemed very strange to me since my observation has been skin color says almost NOTHING about the individual.

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