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I had my face mashed into a fat, squishy bunch of tissue by the collective hand of all the listeners who called me out for saying a number of episodes back that humanity had never been so laid to waste as it was under the scourge of the Black Death. Uh huh, it has so, went the general line of the emails I received after the Black Death episode came out. When the Europeans came to the Americas, almost a hundred million people were wiped out, maybe more.
Once You’re Dead Long Enough You Belong to the World
by Josh Clark | March 21, 2011
In museums, research facilities and universities throughout the world, there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of human remains held in collection. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History alone has more than 18,500 human remains in its collection. Most of these tend to be the remains of indigenous peoples (read: non-European) whose remains were often come by through illegal digs (read: grave robbing).
Did you know there’s still a Bureau of Indian Affairs in the United States and that it’s active and it’s still called the Bureau of Indian Affairs? It’s true. The BIA is currently led by a member of the Pawnee tribe named Larry Echo Hawk, who serves as the Assistant Secretary, reporting directly to Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar. Mr. Echo Hawk is the former Attorney General of Idaho, a former Brigham Young law professor, Marine and a respectable safety who led his BYU team in interceptions during the 1968 season.
All of this may be helpful information. If you’ve always wanted a full or partially-complete human skeleton of unknown origin, then you should contact Mr. Echo Hawk and let him know you’re a BYU fan.
A New Theory of Human Evolution: Come and Get It
by Josh Clark | December 28, 2009
Who exactly was the first person to realize that one could pluck an unfertilized egg from beneath a hen, crack it and spill its contents into a hot pan and eat it? What was the context where the event took place? It wouldn’t appear to be starvation, as one might imagine the person would have just eaten the chicken, unless of course it was a starving person with such tremendous foresight as to first test his curiosity before proceeding with the chicken slaughter.
Here’s a really good reason why you should think for yourself: if you don’t, civilization as we know it will crumble and the streets will run red with the blood of the innocent. So that second part was fabricated, yes. The first part, about civilization crumbling, appears to be for real.
The anthropologist named Jared Diamond has gotten loads of press over the past few years for a couple of great books he’s written, “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse.” It was an essay he wrote back in the 1980s that really got to me, though. Called “The worst mistake in the history of the human race,” Diamond comes up with the radical but thoroughly plausible hypothesis that the introduction of agriculture was the worst choice humankind ever made.
After the advent of agriculture, humans became sedentary. Our lives centered around our cropland, and with an abundance of food, a lot of people could live in one place. Cities arose, and so too did all manner of problems we humans didn’t have before we started raising crops and livestock.
Living in close quarters allowed epidemic disease to spread. Crop failures led to famine. Crop surpluses led to the rise of currency…
Anybody familiar with me can tell you that I love me some cannibalism. I’m fascinated by the concept of eating another person and the psychological fortitude that consumption must entail.
I’m also intrigued by the possibility that cannibalism ever existed in ritual form; that the idea that Amazonian or New Guinean tribes feasting on hapless missionaries bound by rope and dropped in a huge metal kettle over a fire is as patently ridiculous as the cartoon portrayal of cannibals with bones through their noses.
Back in 1980, anthropologist William Arens made waves in the academic community when he suggested in his book, “The Man-Eating Myth,” that all accounts of ritual cannibalism were fabrications by outsiders who sought to subjugate a foreign culture. (What better way to make a culture appear less than human?)…
Back in the day, about 3.2 million years ago, an upright hominid of the Australopithecus afarensis variety, wandered around Ethiopia. Who knows what she did — pick berries and wrestle gazelles and the like is probably a pretty good bet. She was just trying to make her way in the big, wide, comparatively empty world…
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