Congirl vs Cavegirl

Archaeologists have it pretty rough. They can spend months or years looking for an important historic site.  Then months or years excavating that site. Then months or years studying what they have dug up and STILL never know the true historical or social relevance of what they so painstakingly unearthed. But what they do is unbelievably important. As humans, we seem to be strangely obsessed with our own species. Where did we come from? What is our purpose on the Earth? Why did a certain species like us die out? All questions we ask thinking the answers will help us sleep better at night. We can try to predict the future if we study the past. We can uncover patterns. As humans, we have become especially good at detecting patterns...but we also have a habit of creating or completing patterns when they don't exist. We want things to be predictable. We want to feel safe. So I imagine being an archaeologist would be terribly frustrating if, after a lifetime of work classifying and docum...

For the last couple of years, I have been studying leadership qualities, fandoms, and most recently, the Bible. One well known biblical idea I have been considering is if the meek really will inherit the Earth. My first question is where are the people who will be identified as "meek"? As Western society advances, it seems there are fewer and fewer individuals who could be considered humble. New social technologies allow anyone with certain resources to write a book, promote themselves on a website, and post formally meaningless details about one's life on the internet for the world to see. Who are these meek people who shall inherit the Earth? In terms of leadership studies, it's followers who shall; people who put certain other people up on a pedestal and say they are better than the average person, or fans of people who are famous. Now even though modern media makes it really easy for many of us to feel like leaders in our online universes, I think followers have a...

Only people who were royal used to get everything they wanted.  English king "Henry the VIII" is an obvious example. Paintings depict him as seriously overweight, so he probably ate way more than he needed to. He left the ruling church so he could marry more than one wife. Then there are the stories that he knocked off every wife who could not provide him with a male heir so he could try a different one. Royals like King Henry VIII had a lot of control over how they lived because they had an overabundance of stored resources (like land, riches, and other people) at their disposal. But this did not mean “Bronze Age” leaders were inherently evil. Royals who cared about their subjects distributed resources fairly, while royals who didn’t care, did not. But most royal subjects didn’t mind having such strong centralized leadership, even if their king or queen was greedy, because it took strong centralized power and coordination to move the food and supplies that everyone needed. T...

Billy Morris was my first boyfriend. We were 12, and while it seems ridiculous to me now that I felt he deserved the lofty title of "boyfriend" way back when, turns out I learned more about life from Billy than I was consciously aware of at the time. In fact, my strangely clear memories of him have been helping me dismantle some pretty big social and biological constructs in recent months. Just what do I think I know? Well, before I answer that, I need to highlight the most important part of my story about Billy — The year it happened. It was 1982, which means I was born into the generational age-group known as "X-er"...and that means I barely give a bleep about what you think I know. X-er is one of the generational catch-phrases that attempt to describe massive swaths of the American public like Baby-Boomer, Millennial and iGen. Japan, Australia and many other countries have their own descriptive names for these groups, but it all boils down to how each generatio...

Have you seen the movie "Inside Out?" It's a Disney/Pixar production about a girl named Riley who moves to a new town. The story focuses on how her five strongest emotions -- joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear -- help her cope with all the changes she experiences with the move. The five are housed in a sort of control tower inside her head. However, if this setting were more biologically accurate, disgust and fear would be located in a separate control tower closer to the older "center" of Riley's brain. That is because disgust and fear have helped curtail human behavior for many thousands of years longer than our "newer" emotions and essentially have the power to override how we react to things. I find this revelation fascinating. In fact, I have created some characters of my own which I use to investigate what life might have been like many thousands of years ago. In this chapter of their story, cave dwellers Jerome and Claire follow their emo...