Some Recommended Reading Material
And an initial miscellaneous observation
Regarding US Politics
First off, the picture below conveys my summary impression of the current state of the Democrat political party in the US. Becalmed in the political horse latitudes, their ship is now surrounded by a turgid cloud of self-generated brown and fetid water. This image comes under the conceptual category of ‘fouling one’s own nest’. (Note that such a feature actually used to develop around sailing ships becalmed in the horse latitudes -- because the crew’s head emptied directly into the seawater below the bow.)1
Major Reading Reports
1) People, Plants, and Genes by the polymath, Denis J. Murphy, 2007.
Murphy is an agricultural plant geneticist by profession, but clearly has considerable working knowledge of the separate but related scientific fields of geology, anthropology, archeology, and climatology. Among other things, his book explains how humanity arrived at grain-based agriculture as its dominant way of life: it’s been chiefly a matter of a dancing co-evolution with plants and other animals, while all adjust to changes in their physical environment.
Interestingly, the eventual adoption of an agriculture focused on grain husbandry during the Neolithic is ultimately derived from the cold, arid growing conditions associated with the periodic glacial periods taking place during much of man’s evolution (and still periodically taking place). Archeological evidence shows that the spread and growth of wild grains was especially benefited by the cold and dry glacial periods of earth’s history. Ever-opportunistic humans, accordingly, came to utilize these wild grains as a significant component of their omnivorous hunter-gatherer diet.
Up until the Neolithic and episodically through most of the Pleistocene/Paleolithic/Mesolithic, however, wild grains became dietarily less important to our ancestors whenever interglacial warmth and moisture returned again, and woodlands and various woodland biota were able to – literally -- regain lost ground. Oddly, though, in the most recent and ongoing interglacial warming period, humanity did not return to its longest enduring, more woodlands-based mode of living but instead remained stuck on grain utilization. One possible explanation for this very odd Neolithic choice is discussed by Bressan and Kramer, 2016:
Arguably, foodstuffs whose digestion releases exorphins are preferred exactly because of their drug-like properties. It has been speculated, in fact, that this chemical reward might have been one incentive for the initial adoption of agriculture (Wadley and Martin, 1993). Why cereals rapidly and extensively replaced traditional foods even though they were less nutritious and required more labor has been widely regarded as a puzzle. Also, cultivation of cereals continued even when the abundance of more easily processed foodstuffs — such as meat, tubers, and fruit — rendered it unnecessary (see Murphy, 2007). A clue could be the fact that all major civilizations, in every inhabited continent, arose in groups that practiced cereal agriculture and not in groups that only cultivated tubers and vegetables or had no agriculture at all. According to Wadley and Martin’s rather audacious hypothesis, daily opioid self-administration [through the ingestion of opioid-rich grain glutens] could have increased people’s tolerance of crowded sedentary conditions, of regular work, of subjugation by rulers. If so, cereals might have ultimately helped the development of civilization.
2) Who We Are and How We Got Here – Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich, 2019.
Reich’s book is a fairly up-to-date summary of the necessary re-interpretations of human history forced upon science by recent advances and improvements in whole genome DNA analysis of both archeological hominid remains and genetic material obtained from more modern peoples. Gist of Reich’s story is that what we have traditionally seen as the geographic distribution of apparent discrete varieties of homo sapiens more or less grown in place is a surface illusion. Local modern human cultures and ethnicities, according to the recent genetic findings recounted by Reich, are not discrete and largely independent systems that arose over time in single place like a single tree above its root. Instead, they are only narrow and brief glimpses of an ever-migrating and ever-interbreeding human macro-organism. Global humanity, according to the reinterpretations and findings related and explained by Reich, is not something like a relatively immobile and slow-changing forest of trees, but more like an energetic and always shifting braided stream.2
Selected Short Subjects
Since last writing, I ran into two more areas of science research having particular bearing on increasing and maintaining the physical and mental functionality of homo sapiens – especially modern homo sapiens.
1). Boron, much like zinc, is a trace element that is very often lacking in soils. Consequently, people are quite prone to developing boron deficiencies. This is especially true in these modern times because organic-poor soils like those that develop from repeated farming and gardening tend to be boron-deficient.
Demonstrated benefits to humans of avoiding such deficiencies are thoroughly reviewed by Pizzorno 2015. Pizzorno’s own summary introduction of boron’s most important effects on humans states:
The trace mineral [sic] boron is a micronutrient with diverse and vitally important roles in metabolism that render it necessary for plant, animal, and human health, and, possibly, as recent research suggests, for the evolution of life on Earth. The current review focuses primarily on boron’s most salient effects on human health, including its impact on bone development and regeneration, wound healing, the production and metabolism of sex steroids and vitamin D, and the absorption and use of calcium and magnesium. In addition, boron has anti-inflammatory effects that can help alleviate arthritis and improve brain function and has demonstrated such significant anticancer effects that boronated compounds are now being used in the treatment of several types of cancer. A summary of the evidence suggesting that boron should be given consideration as an essential micronutrient is provided, together with leading dietary sources and intake recommendations.
It appears likely that the central mechanism behind boron’s multiple positive effects is its control of sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG). In middle-aged and older people, adequate dietary boron reduces age-heightened SHBG activity and therefore helpfully increases free testosterone and estrogen levels in both sexes, thereby addressing such downstream health problems as osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, general inflammation, and erectile dysfunction.
2). It has been established that short bouts of high intensity interval training exercise – like those that were an ordinary part of our ancestral hunter-gatherer lives – serve to directly increase and then maintain healthy brain functions in humans. This true not only for aging adults, but also younger adults and children. The demonstration of the benefit to older humans is quite striking ( it’s a very cheap form of what my father used to call “drool [dementia] insurance”).
This image can also be used to generally represent the negative effects of a large city on the city itself and its immediate surroundings. Given the long term and especially close association of members of the Democrat party with large urban areas, the double duty of this image is not surprising.
This is not an original image. It’s occurred independently to a number of people. See, for example, https://ktwop.com/2014/01/04/human-evolution-as-a-braided-stream-rather-than-a-branching-tree/.
> "According to Wadley and Martin’s rather audacious hypothesis, daily opioid self-administration [through the ingestion of opioid-rich grain glutens] could have increased people’s tolerance of crowded sedentary conditions, of regular work, of subjugation by rulers. If so, cereals might have ultimately helped the development of civilization."
Lmao.