1) Jeanne Suk Gersen is so good on issues of academic freedom:
Sometime in the twenty-tens, it became common for students to speak of feeling unsafe when they heard things that offended them. I’ve been a law professor at Harvard since 2006. The first piece I wrote for The New Yorker, in 2014, was about students’ suggestions (then shocking to me) that rape law should not be taught in the criminal-law course, because debates involving arguments for defendants, in addition to the prosecution, caused distress. At the very least, some students said, nobody should be asked in class to argue a side with which they disagree. Since then, students have asked me to excuse them from discussing or being examined on guns, gang violence, domestic violence, the death penalty, L.G.B.T.Q. issues, police brutality, kidnapping, suicide, and abortion. I have declined, because I believe the most important skill I teach is the ability to have rigorous exchanges on difficult topics, but professors across the country have agreed to similar requests.
Over the years, I learned that students had repeatedly attempted to file complaints about my classes, saying that my requiring students to articulate, or to hear classmates make, arguments they might abhor—for example, Justice Antonin Scalia saying there is no constitutional right to same-sex intimacy—was unacceptable. The administration at my law school would not allow such complaints to move forward to investigations because of its firm view that academic freedom protects reasonable pedagogical choices. But colleagues at other schools within Harvard and elsewhere feared that their administrators were using concepts of discrimination or harassment to cover classroom discussions that make someone uncomfortable. These colleagues become more and more unwilling to facilitate conversations on controversial topics, believing that university administrators might not distinguish between challenging discussions and discrimination or harassment. Even an investigation that ended with no finding of wrongdoing could eat up a year of one’s professional life and cost thousands of dollars in legal bills. (A spokesperson for Harvard University declined to comment for this story.)
The seeping of D.E.I. programs into many aspects of university life in the past decade would seem a ready-made explanation for how we got to such a point. Danielle Allen, a political philosopher and my Harvard colleague, co-chaired the university’s Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which produced a report, in 2018, that aimed to counter the idea that principles of D.E.I. and of academic freedom are in opposition, and put forward a vision in which both are “necessary to the pursuit of truth.” Like Allen, I consider the diversity of thought that derives from the inclusion of people of different experiences, backgrounds, and identities to be vital to an intellectual community and to democracy. But, as she observed last month in the Washington Post, “across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense.” Allen continued, “Somehow the racial reckoning of 2020 lost sight of that core goal of a culture of mutual respect with human dignity at the center. A shaming culture was embraced instead.”
Last year, students at Harvard’s public-health school discovered that Tyler VanderWeele, an epidemiology professor and a Catholic, had signed on to an amicus brief in the Supreme Court in 2015, arguing that the Constitution does not contain a federal right to same-sex marriage and that the issue should be decided by the states—a view similar to that of President Barack Obama until 2012. After some students called for VanderWeele’s firing or removal from teaching a required course, administrative leaders at the school e-mailed parts of the community explaining that it seeks “to nurture a culture of inclusion, equity, and belonging,” that everyone has a right to express their views, even though free expression “can cause deep hurt, undermine the culture of belonging, and make other members of the community feel less free and less safe.” In light of the harm and betrayal students reported because of VanderWeele’s views, the school hosted more than a dozen restorative “circle dialogue” sessions, “for people to process, share, and collectively move forward from the current place of pain.” (A spokesperson for the School of Public Health pointed out that students exercised free-speech rights when they demanded VanderWeele’s firing and said that the administration never considered disciplinary action against him.)
In 2021, Carole Hooven, a longtime Harvard lecturer on human evolutionary biology who wrote a well-reviewed book about testosterone, stated in a Fox News interview, “The facts are that there are in fact two sexes . . . male and female, and those sexes are designated by the kind of gametes we produce.” She added that “understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect,” and that we can “respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns.” The director of her department’s Diversity and Inclusion task force, a graduate student, denounced Hooven’s remarks, in a tweet, as “transphobic and harmful.” A cascade of shunning and condemnation ensued, including a petition, authored by graduate students, which implied that Hooven was a threat to student safety. Graduate students also refused to serve as teaching assistants for her previously popular course on hormones, making it difficult for her to keep teaching it. Hooven found it untenable to remain in her job, and she retired from the department.
Students across the political spectrum, but largely liberals, have told me that they felt it would be foolish to volunteer their opinions in class discussions, or even that they routinely lied about their views when asked.
2) This Niki Haley story is crazy!
Back when Nikki Haley, the last woman standing in the race for the Republican nomination, began dating her now-husband, she took a look at him and asked him what his name was.
Puzzled, he told her it was Bill, which she already knew.
“You just don’t look like a Bill. What’s your whole name?” she replied, to which he answered, “William Michael.”
“From that point on, I started calling him Michael, and all my friends did the same,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir, “Can’t Is Not an Option.”
“Before we knew it, he was universally known as Michael,” she continued. “Everyone who knew him before I did knows him as Bill, and everyone who met him after I did knows him as Michael. He looks like a Michael.”
3) Somehow, I was three days ago years old when I learned about the Stanley tumbler craze. Though I’ve long known that this obsession with hydration is way overblown. NYT:
The closest thing the United States has to a water consumption recommendation comes from the National Academy of Medicine, which, in 2004, reported that healthy men usually stay adequately hydrated when they drink at least three liters (nearly 13 cups) of water per day, and that women are typically hydrated when they drink at least 2.2 liters (just over nine cups) per day, not including the water they consume via food.
But these guidelines should not be taken as gospel, experts said.
“Most people, even if they stay below that recommendation, will be just fine,” said Dr. Siddharth P. Shah, a nephrologist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in hydration and electrolyte balance.
4) Great piece from Brian Beutler, “The Material Stakes Of The GOP Assault On Democracy Become Obvious”
I wrote recently about the center-right’s reconsolidation behind Donald Trump, and how revisionist praise from influential people like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon could have a dangerous normalizing effect that cascades through the business community, into wealthy suburbs, where Trump has been an object of revulsion.
This is a real thing that’s happening and (viewed in a vacuum at least) a cause for genuine concern. Absent the suburban realignment, Democrats would be toast. But it’s also an extra-tidy manifestation of the Big Picture democracy appeal.
I’d bet a large sum of money that Dimon knows Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. I’d bet almost as much that Dimon knows Trump has promised to establish a dictatorship on “day one”; that he has demanded immunity for any crimes he committed from 2017-2020, and any that he might commit from 2025 onward.
And yet to hasten another round of tax cuts and reduced bank regulation, Dimon will tell the world he thinks Trump is a populist everyman who gets a bad rap. It’s hard to think of a cleaner distillation of the idea that Trump’s assault on democracy is about more than his personal thirst for power. It’s so people like Jamie Dimon can get richer at the expense of the people who will suffer next time unregulated financial capitalism wrecks the country.
The submission of Trump’s intraparty skeptics reveals a similar cynicism, and a similar calculation: To them, democracy is more of a nuisance than it’s worth if it doesn’t yield right-wing outcomes.
It’s hard to say anything definitive about the moral values and ideological priorities of someone as cynical as Mitch McConnell. But as near as I can tell McConnell genuinely despises Trump. Not like how some Republicans will claim to know that Trump is a cretin in off-the-record conversations with reporters, but only to burnish their Beltway reputations. No, on top of the usual insults and the racist mockery of McConnell’s wife, Trump has tried to end McConnell’s career, and cost Republicans control of the Senate in sequential elections. After January 6, McConnell told Jonathan Martin, then of the New York Times, “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself.” Oops.
McConnell also earnestly wants to fund Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. I doubt McConnell has deep ideological views about border security or the ethnic composition of the United States, but I do think he was hoping he could wring unilateral immigration-policy concessions from Democrats, and that doing so would convince Republicans in the House to allow a vote on Ukraine aid.
But now we see he’ll jettison all of that, including his dignity, at Donald Trump’s request. The two of them are of one mind that leaving problems in America to fester will help Trump get elected, which will facilitate more tax cuts and deregulation. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine [Trump],” he told Republicans this week.
Republicans like Dimon and McConnell have ultimately decided to join Trump’s slow-burn insurrection not because they worship Trump on a cult-like level, but because the world confronted them with a choice between things they care about and preserving a free society and they’ve decided to sacrifice the latter. It’s not quite the same coarse narcissism that animates Trump, who wants wealth and power for personal aggrandizement and to stay out of prison. They radicalized against democracy because they’re greedy for other things that they’ve reasoned won’t materialize through democratic processes. And in a way it’s worse. Trump is like a dog who will shit on your living room floor if you don’t give him a treat; Dimon and McConnell are like houseguests who will shit on your living-room floor if the toilets are occupied.
5) From 2019, but new to me, “Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche”
Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.
6) How can the barcode be on it’s way out? Apparently, because it will be replaced by QR codes, which can contain way more information. What’s wild, though, is to learn about the alternate proposals for bar codes:
7) And from way back in the past, I was intrigued to learn that it’s possible for quarterbacks to throw too few interceptions. It means you are playing too conservatively and leaving too many potential good outcomes on the table.
8) “Obscene” is a little strong, but the main thrust of Brett Stephens argument here is not wrong:
In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.
But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.
It’s obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?
Words that come to mean much more than originally intended eventually come to mean almost nothing at all — a victory for future génocidaires who’d like the world to think there’s no moral or legal difference between one kind of killing and another.
It’s obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which is precise: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Notice two key features of this definition: It speaks of acts whereas part of the genocide case against Israel involves the misinterpretation of quotes from Israeli officials who have vowed Hamas’s elimination, not the elimination of Palestinians. And it uses the term as such — meaning the acts are genocidal only if they are directed at Palestinians as Palestinians, not as members of Hamas or, heartbreakingly, as collateral deaths in attempts to destroy Hamas.
If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.
9) Fascinating, “The Biggest Ape That Ever Lived Was Not Too Big to Fail: Fossil teeth reveal Gigantopithecus was doomed by a changing environment and an inflexible diet.”
Standing nearly as tall as a basketball hoop and weighing as much as a grizzly bear, Gigantopithecus blacki was the greatest ape to ever live. For more than a million years during the Pleistocene, Gigantopithecus roamed southern China. But by the time ancient humans reached the region, Gigantopithecus had vanished.
To determine why these prodigious primates died out, a team of scientists recently analyzed clues preserved in Gigantopithecus teeth and cave sediment. Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveal that these nearly 10-foot-tall apes were most likely doomed by their specialized diet and an inability to adapt to a changing environment.
Paleontologists first discovered Gigantopithecus in the mid-1930s in a Hong Kong apothecary where the ape’s unusually large molars were being hawked as “dragon teeth.” The animal was named to honor Davidson Black, the Canadian scientist who studied the early human ancestor known as Peking man. In the decades since, scientists have unearthed about 2,000 Gigantopithecus teeth and a handful of fossil jawbones from caves throughout southern China.
The dearth of fossilized bones makes reconstructing Gigantopithecus difficult; paleoartists depict the ancient ape as looking like an orangutan (its closest living relative) crossed with a silverback gorilla, but bigger. Nevertheless, the very great ape’s teeth, which are encased in a thick layer of enamel, preserve a wealth of clues to how these enigmatic primates lived and potentially why they died out…
Beginning around 600,000 years ago, the region’s climate began to change with the seasons as dense forests gave way to a patchwork of open forests and grasslands. That led to “dry periods when fruits were difficult to find,” Dr. Westaway said. As opposed to ancient orangutans, which adapted by eating a diverse diet of shoots, nuts, seeds and even insects, Gigantopithecus switched to less nutritious alternatives like bark and twigs. Their teeth from this period show signs of chronic stress.
As the environment became unfavorable, Gigantopithecus’s size began to work against it. Unlike spry orangutans, who could travel greater distances through the canopy and into open environments to forage, ground-bound Gigantopithecus were most likely restricted to shrinking patches of forest.
According to Sergio Almécija, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the new research, the demise of Gigantopithecus reveals that even the largest animals are vulnerable to becoming too specialized.
“These apes became so specialized to living in a specific environment that once that environment changes, they’re gone,” he said.
10) Sadly, it only takes two books a year to be in the top half of all Americans for reading. To be in the top 1%, it’s more like a book a week:
So what did Montgomery find? Of 1,500 Americans surveyed, a less-than-ideal 46 percent finished zero books last year and 5 percent read just one. So, if you read more than two books in 2023, congratulations! You’re in the top half of U.S. adults.
Reading five books put you in the top 33 percent, while reading 10 books put you in the top 21 percent. Those of us who read more than 50 books are the true one-percenters: people who read more books than 99 percent of their fellow Americans.
11) I think there’s so much reason for techno-optimism, “New battery material that uses less lithium found in AI-powered search”
Microsoft announced Tuesday that a team of scientists used artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to plow through 32.6 million possible battery materials ― many not found in nature ― in 80 hours, a task the team estimates previously would have taken 20 years. The results kick off an ambitious effort to create a new generation of batteries less dependent on toxic and environmentally damaging lithium.
The company shared some of the best candidates with the government’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., which investigated the most promising ones and built a prototype battery using a brand-new material.
While the dime-size prototype is not yet ready for a prime-time role powering the watches and car keys of today, it functions using less lithium than commercially available options and has the ability to recharge power. Moreover, the feat demonstrates the potential of new technologies to revolutionize the underappreciated but fast-evolving fieldof materials science.
12) The answer to this is, no. “Are Right-Wingers More Prone to Believe Conspiracy Theories than Left-Wingers?” But, is it dam clear that right-wingers with conspiracy beliefs have way more influence within the Republican party than left-wingers with conspiracy beliefs do within the Democratic party? Hell yes.
The authors find that conservatives and Republicans are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that fit their predispositions and biases. For example, they are far more likely than liberals and Democrats to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. But, by the same token, left-wingers are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that fit their biases, such as 9/11 “trutherism” (claims that George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance and deliberately allowed them to happen). The authors also find that “[t]here are also many conspiracy theories finding equal support among the left and right, including theories involving “chem-trails”, the moon landing, fluoridated water, Freemasons, lizard people, and television mind control, to name a few.” When a conspiracy theory doesn’t have a strong political valence, left and right are usually about equally prone to believe it.
13) As for any doubt as to the utter insanity of the Republican Party at the highest organizational levels, this is a depressing as hell must-listen from This American Life.
14) I’m really looking forward to reading Brian Klaas’s new book. This is a really good substack piece, “We are different from all other humans in history: Countless experiences that have become routine for us are unprecedented in the history of our species. Here’s why that matters.”
We, the modern humans who are alive today, are unique.
Modern humanity has produced astonishing shifts in historic blinks. Here, for example, is one of the most fascinating maps ever produced—known as an isochronic map—which shows how far from London a human being could plausibly travel in a given time period in 1914, just over a century ago.
The red shaded areas show a journey of five days or less; the pink five to ten days; the yellow ten to twenty days; the green thirty to forty days; all the way up to the darker teal shades which showcase the most remote regions—reachable only after a trek of at least forty days, nearly a month and a half.
Here’s an updated version of that map, from 2016, using data of travel time estimates from the website Rome2Rio. Suddenly, the range goes from days to hours, shades from zero to twelve hours (dark red) to the most isolated places on Earth in teal (more than 36 hours). The furthest reaches of inaccessible terrain on our planet are now far easier to reach from London than were most places in Western Europe a century ago.
It’s mind boggling.
This got me thinking: what else is unique about our crop of modern humans (the people alive today) that was literally impossible for every other fine specimen of Homo sapiens who came before us? And the answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.
15) I’ve seen Clear at airports for a while now, but, my most recent flight was the first time people who had paid for Clear were escorted to literally cut in front of me in my TSA pre-check line. Paying to cut– so wrong!
Such distortions might be acceptable if CLEAR enhanced the efficiency or safety of airport security, but neither is the case. TSA Pre is a federal program that already capitalizes on the opportunity to identify frequent, low-risk flyers and offer them expedited security screening. Clear Secure offers no such advantages; customers must separately purchase TSA Pre if they want to keep wearing their loafers once they reach the scanner. CLEAR is simply a way to pay extra to jump the queue accessing a federally mandated process.
Now that Clear Secure is embedded within airports, the company has every reason to ensure that Congress and TSA let it keep profiting from airport line-cutting. And, like airports themselves, the company has little cause for concern if the security experience of non-CLEAR members grows more irritating.
Skewed incentives like these are predictable when a profit-seeking company acts as a gatekeeper for a public service. It couldn’t be clearer
16) I loved Happy Days when I was a kid. And I loved this conversation with the stars looking back on it 50 years later.
17) Yglesias, “Climate is the problem: Voters don’t care that much about the Democrats’ top priority”
Conversely, I think center-left intellectuals tend to downplay the potentially negative electoral impact of the increasing importance of climate change to the Democratic Party’s agenda precisely because it’s a cause that we genuinely care about.
If you read the New York Times regularly (which you should), I think you see clearly that the management, staff, and readership of the Times have significant concerns and internal disagreement about “wokeness,” left-wing campus politics, etc. all while maintaining a broad consensus that climate change is an extremely important problem.
This is a big deal electorally because the Democratic Party actually does act like a political party that believes climate change is an extremely important problem, elevating it to the top of the priority hierarchy for the Biden administration. So it’s completely reasonable for voters to base their voting behavior in part on whether they agree with Democrats’ climate-related policies. And it’s electorally damaging because, frankly, most voters don’t agree with the party’s assessment. They’re not climate denialists who think the problem is fake or that scientists are lying about it. But they just aren’t as interested in it as Joe Biden or the average New York Times reader. And unlike cancel culture, climate and energy policy does impact everyone’s daily life — including the lives of people who don’t pay that much attention to politics…
If you ask people whether they care about climate change, they generally say yes. If you’re a climate advocacy group that wants to make it look like people are deeply concerned about this, you can certainly hire pollsters who will craft questions that get you the answers that you’re after.
But if you probe public opinion even slightly, it’s clear that public support for climate action is a mile wide and an inch deep. For example, IPSOS found that just 25 percent of Americans said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to address climate change. A 2019 Reuters poll asked specifically whether respondents would pay $100 to fight climate change and only a third said yes. Would you be willing to pay $10/month more in electricity bills to fight climate change? Most people say no.
Democrats are, I think, aware of these facts on some level.
They know not to propose a carbon tax or a gasoline tax increase as part of their climate agenda, even though these are good ideas on the merits. And in their messaging, they certainly never mention the idea of sacrifice or that it might be good for Americans to constrain their lifestyles or reduce their energy consumption.
But I think they still don’t take them seriously enough, because when people tell you they don’t want to pay $100 to fight climate change, you can’t just take that as a narrow point about the $100. It means that if you put together a huge climate-focused legislative package and make that the centerpiece of your agenda, your agenda would be centered around solving a problem that most people don’t think is very important. That’s just inherently a kind of danger zone. Not a unique danger zone, of course. Republicans think that cutting rich people’s taxes is very important and the American people — including lots of rank-and-file GOP voters — disagree. But the Republican Party as a whole seems to be aware that this is an embarrassing priority gap and tries really hard to conceal from the public how focused their party is on low taxes for the rich.
Contemporary Democrats, by contrast, tend to be loud and proud about their climate focus, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given what we know about the public’s indifference to this issue.
18) More techno-optimism, “A Key to Detecting Brain Disease Earlier Than Ever: Treatment of Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, ALS, and other brain diseases depends on reliable detection—especially in those who don’t even know they’re at risk. An innovative scratch-and-sniff test can help.”
Earlier this year, Parkinson’s disease (PD) research entered a new era when the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced a momentous scientific breakthrough—the discovery of a biomarker for PD. It meant that, for the first time ever, we can now pinpoint the earliest known signs of the disease in Parkinson’s patients.
This long-awaited new procedure is called the “alpha-synuclein seeding amplification assay” (SAA), and it’s capable of detecting the misfolded alpha-synuclein in spinal fluid—the wayward protein clearly linked to Parkinson’s. It separates, with a stunning 90 percent specificity, those who have evidence of PD pathology in their cells from those who do not. It does so even before the emergence of symptoms, much like the way high blood pressure or cholesterol levels are used to detect cardiovascular risk long before a heart attack lands someone in the ER.
It would be hard to overstate the implications of this development for people living with dysfunction in their alpha-synuclein. For one thing, we’ve never had a way to know who these people are—that is, until the moment of diagnosis, by which point ongoing damage to brain cells is already well underway. As for the diagnosis itself, which for most people comes as a bolt from the blue, it has always been frustratingly subjective and essentially based on a physician’s opinion following a brief once-over in the doctor’s office—not very useful for medical care provision, let alone biomedical drug development.
The new SAA test is already being integrated into drug trials as the first measure that can objectively identify people with the biology we’re targeting—offering drugmakers increased assurance that they are testing experimental treatments in the right populations. For biopharma firms weighing a decision to enter or stay in the high-risk neurological disease space, this changes the value proposition of investment on its face. In 2024, we will see a ramp-up of potential new drugs entering the pipeline and progressing along their path toward pharmacy shelves.
What’s just as remarkable is how the SAA breakthrough was arrived at. The search for the biomarker required finding and studying “needles in a haystack”: people without any traditional symptoms of PD and unwittingly living with increased risk for the disease. It was critical to figure out what biology set them apart from those who don’t get Parkinson’s. But how do you find someone who doesn’t know they’re being looked for?
As it turns out, your sense of smell is a surprisingly good predictor of brain disease. (We’re talking here not about the short-term smell loss associated with Covid-19, but significant and enduring smell loss that persists over years.) For a while now, researchers have known about the link between smell loss and neurodegeneration, especially in the presence of certain other risk factors, such as a diagnosis with REM behavior disorder (RBD), a sleep disorder. Research shows that half of those over age 60 are living with some degree of smell loss, yet the majority don’t realize it until they’re tested. If you couple this with the fact that all major brain diseases—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, Huntington’s—are associated with some amount of smell loss, this is astounding.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s large-scale observational study of Parkinson’s set out to use poor smell as one of its criteria for finding and enrolling at-risk individuals. (We should note that, for this risk group, it’s still unclear if or when the disease may eventually show up.) The highly sophisticated screening device used? A humble scratch-and-sniff test, albeit the scientifically validated variety.
19) Ancient history:
Many researchers assume that until 10–12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” suffuses the social sciences. It informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and articulate an alternative, the diverse histories model, to replace it. We review the limitations of using recent foragers as models of Late Pleistocene societies and the considerable social variation among foragers commonly considered small-scale, mobile, and egalitarian. We review ethnographic and archaeological findings covering 34 world regions showing that non-agricultural peoples often live in groups that are more sedentary, unequal, large, politically stratified, and capable of large-scale cooperation and resource management than is normally assumed. These characteristics are not restricted to extant Holocene hunter-gatherers but, as suggested by archaeological findings from 27 Middle Stone Age sites, likely characterized societies throughout the Late Pleistocene (until c. 130 ka), if not earlier. These findings have implications for how we understand human psychological adaptations and the broad trajectory of human history.
Fully Myelinated 
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