Never forget: Moose are legit Ice Age megafauna that never died out.
He just….just….pet the wild moose…the bravery, the hutzpah
The forbidden snoot!
If I could pet a moose
I would be very happy
Normally I would say you shouldn’t pet a wild animal, but the moose is already right there. If you’re that close to a moose’s snout you might as well pet it. If the moose wants to kill you, you’re going to die, so you might as well.
My uncle legit punched a moose once.
He was very, very drunk.
According to bystanders, the moose gave him the kind of look usually reserved for, like, a squirrel that is trying to steal a chip from you.
I had a dream last night that I kept running into people from high school that I’m no longer in touch with. They all wanted to get back in touch via a new social media platform called Barrel, so they’d ask me what my Barrel was, and then be shocked when I told them I didn’t have one.
One of them got out their phone to show me Barrel, and it was essentially an aggregator – it would go to your friends’ social media and pull in all their posts on a single feed. There are probably apps that do this, I couldn’t say, but I was about to pronounce on what a terrible experience reading that app would be when they showed me the reason Barrel was awesome:
Barrel somehow was able to discern what the person who made a post was actually thinking or feeling when they said it.
Beneath every post in the app was a little grey box with what was basically a mood tag: “Lying” “Insecure” and “Sincere” were three that I saw. You couldn’t designate or change your Barrel tag because it was assigned by the app, so it made posting to social media a real existential crisis. Because you could, say, post something nasty to Facebook, like a mean vagueblog, and people could show up in your comments with screengrabs from Barrel proving you were lying for clout or insecure or passive aggressive. They showed me a whole thread of comments on a Tweet that were just a bunch of people sharing the different Barrel adjectives they’d seen assigned to it.
Apparently all the big tech companies, national news organizations, and major politicians were terrified Barrel would start captioning them next and the hot debate of the moment was whether Barrel should finance itself by charging fees not to “barrel roll” new targets. Also, people were posting Eurovision videos to Barrel hoping to find out what the song was actually about but it just tagged them “Eurovision”.
I’m sorry it’s not an executable idea because I’d get a Barrel account in a heartbeat.
Gordon Tootoosis, Aboriginal Canadian actor, activist, and band chief of Cree and Iyarhe Nakoda descent, as Cecil Delaronde in Canadian TV series Blackstone.
[image description: two stills of Gordon Tootoosis, captioned, “Leadership is about submission to duty, not elevation to power.” end description.]
This is one of the most profound statements on leadership I’ve encountered in a long time, and it really landed a hit on me. It’s difficult to discuss without getting a little weird about it, but for a long time I’ve been of the mind that the privilege of having a large readership implies the duty of giving back in specific ways – I just never thought of it in terms of leadership as submission to duty.
look: our neanderthal ancestors took care of the sick and disabled so if ur post-apocalyptic scenario is an excuse for eugenics, u are a bad person and literally have less compassion than a caveman
Yes but they also when extinct which implies whatever they were doing at the time wasn’t fit for their environment.
So, it’s been awhile since I took a human evolution course, so some of this might be a little out of date, but
1) Whether or not Neanderthals went extinct is still kind of up for debate, and seems to hinge largely on whether you think that Neanderthals are a H. Sapiens subspecies or not, which often seems like a mildly pointless argument to me since it’s largely a fight about which definition of “species” to use
2) Even if we argue that Neanderthals are our direct ancestors and never went extinct, several Neanderthal *traits* (like their noses and their forheads) *have* left the population. Care for the disabled is not one of them.
Saying “Neanderthals cared for their sick and injured and are now extinct, therefore care for the disabled is maladaptive” is like saying “Dodos are extinct therefore beaks are a terrible idea”
Statements about “less compassion than a caveman” still stand.
–Peter
Iteach human evolution to college students, so in addition to that, here’s what we know. There’s some citations (and footnotes) behind the cut, if you’re interested.
So Neanderthals aren’t our direct ancestor- more like a branch of the family tree that didn’t lead to us. Close cousins- close enough to breed- but they evolved outside of Africa about 400kya, while our species evolved in Africa about 200kya*. This is important because it means that altruism can’t possibly be a Neanderthal trait that left the population during the evolution into modern humans; we didn’t evolve from them, so it’s not like we can say “well, this was maladaptive in our ancestors.” This is a behavior you see in two temporally coexisting species (or subspecies), and I do mean two, because it wasn’t just Neanderthals practicing altruism. We did it too.
We have really good evidence that early Homo sapiens sapiens (i.e.,us, just old) also took care of their injured, elderly, and disabled. At Cro-Magnon in France, a few individuals clearly suffered from traumatic injury and illness during their lives. Cro-Magnon 1 had a nasty infection in his face; his bones are pitted from it. Cro-Magnon 2, a female, had a partially healed skull fracture, and several of the others had fused neck vertebrae that had fused as a result of healed trauma; this kind of injury would make it impossible to hunt and uncomfortable to move. This kind of injury can be hard to survive today, even with modern medical care; the fact that the individuals at Cro-Magnon survived long enough for the bones to remodel and heal indicate that somebody was taking care of them. At Xujiayao, in northern China, there’s evidence of healed skull fractures (which would have had a rather long recovery time and needed care);
This evidence of altruism extends past injured adults, as well. One of the most compelling cases is at Qafzeh, which is in Israel. Here we see evidence of long-term care for a developmentally disabled child (as well as a child who had hydrocephaly and survived). Qafzeh 11, a 12-13 year old at time of death, suffered severe brain damage as a child. Endocasts (basically making a model of the inside of the skull, where the brain would be) show that the volume of the brain was much smaller than expected; likely the result of a growth delay due to traumatic brain injury. The patterns of development suggest that this injury occurred between the ages of 4 and 6. They very likely suffered from serious neurological problems; the areas of the brain that were injured are known to control psychomotricity. This means that the kid may have had a hard time controlling their eye movements, general body movement, keeping visual attention, performing specific tasks, and managing uncertainty; in addition, Broca’s area might also have been damaged, which likely would have affected the kid’s ability to speak. Long and short of it, without help, this kid wouldn’t have survived to age 12-13.
But they did. They lived, and they were loved. When they died, they were given a funeral- we know this based on body position and funeral offerings. Mortuary behavior was common among both Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens, and this burial was particularly interesting. The body was placed on its back, its legs extended and the arms crossed over the chest. Deer antlers were laid on the upper part of the chest; in the archaeological context, they were in close contact with the palmar side of the hand bones, meaning it’s likely that they were placed in the hands before burial. This points to Qafzeh 11 being valued by the community- why go to the effort for somebody you don’t care about? Compassion is a very human trait, and to call it maladaptive is to ignore hundreds of thousands of years of human experience.
