Here’s a post a friend linked me to detailing the writer’s experience of discovering that the true background of two famous photos of the Vietnam War was very different from the background they had been taught:

As I read the article about the photos, I felt a sense of disbelief. I wasn’t quite sure what I was reading was correct. Surely, if this information about both photos were true, I’d have heard about it before this. After all, thirty years had passed. I spent the next few hours searching the subject online and found quite a bit more information, but no serious or credible refutation of the stories I’d just learned. … Then the strangest feeling came over me. I don’t even have a word for it, although I usually can come up with words for emotions. This was a new feeling. The best description I can come up with is that it was a regret so intense it morphed seamlessly into guilt, as though I were responsible for something terrible, though I didn’t know exactly what. Regret and guilt, and also a rage that I’d been so stupid, that I’d let myself be duped or misled or kept ignorant about something so important, and that I’d remained ignorant all these years. I sat in front of my computer and put my face down on the keyboard. I stayed in that position for a few minutes, energyless and drained. When I lifted my head I was surprised to find a few tears on my cheeks.

This is the emotion more blasely referred to as “red pilling;” the moment you realize that many of the things you had been taught to believe are, in fact, a lie.

It’s a very interesting article and I encourage you to read it.

Denisovan Jawbone in Tibet?

But now, an international team of scientists has announced the identification of another Denisovan fossil, from a site 1,500 miles away. It’s the right half of a jawbone, found some 10,700 feet above sea level in a cave in China’s Xiahe County, on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. The Xiahe mandible, as it is now known, is not only the first Denisovan fossil to be found outside Denisova Cave, but also the very first Denisovan fossil to be found at all. It just took four decades for anyone to realize that.

So there may be a lot of old bits of bone or pieces of skulls lying unidentified in various old collections, especially in Asia, that we’ll be able to identify and piece together into various homo species as we fill in more of the information about our human family tree

To be honest, I am a little annoyed about how every article about the Denisovans expresses a form of supposed confusion at how a group whose only fossils (until now) were found in a cave in Siberia could have DNA in Tibetans and Melanesians. Obviously we just haven’t figured out the full ancestral ranges of these groups, and they used to overlap. If Tibetans have high-altitude adaptations that look like they came from Denisovans, then obviously Denisovans lived in Tibet, and old Tibetan bones are a great place to look for Denisovans.

Indeed, the Xiahe mandible, which is 160,000 years old, is by far the earliest hominin fossil from the Tibetan plateau. Researchers used to think that Homo sapiens was unique in adapting to the Himalayas, but the Denisovans were successfully living on the roof of the world at least 120,000 years earlier. They must also have adapted to extremely thin air—after all, the mandible was found in a cave that’s some 8,000 feet higher above sea level than Denisova itself. “Their presence that high up is truly astonishing,” Douka says.

Fascinating article about the genetics of circadian rhythms and their relationship to health matters:

Perhaps the most ubiquitous and persistent environmental factor present throughout the evolution of modern species is the revolution of the earth about its own axis, creating a 24 h solar day. The consequent recurrent pattern of light and darkness endows a sense of time to organisms that live on this planet. The importance of this sense of time is accentuated by an internal clock that functions on a 24 h scale, inherent in the genetic framework of living organisms ranging from cyanobacteria (Johnson et al., 1996) to human mammals (Herzog and Tosini, 2001). An internal, molecular program drives circadian oscillations within the organism that manifest at the molecular, biochemical, physiological and behavioral levels (Mazzoccoli et al., 2012). Importantly, these oscillations allow anticipatory responses to changes in the environment and promote survival. The term “circadian” comes from the Latin “circa,” meaning “around” and “diem,” meaning “day.” Circadian events recur during the subjective day or the lighted portion of the 24 h period and the subjective night or the dark part of the 24 h period allowing physiological synchrony with the light/dark environment (Reddy and O’Neill, 2010). The circadian clock has been demonstrated in almost all living organisms (Johnson et al., 1996; Herzog and Tosini, 2001; Mazzoccoli et al., 2012). The two defining characteristics of the circadian timing system are perseverance of oscillation under constant environmental conditions, which define these rhythms as self-sustained and endogenously generated, and the ability to adapt to environmental change, particularly to changes in the environmental light/dark cycle (Tischkau and Gillette, 2005).

The fascinating thing about sleep is that it exists; you would think that, given how vulnerable we are during sleep, animals that sleep would have long ago been eaten by animals that don’t, and the entire kingdom would have evolved to be constantly awake. And yet it hasn’t, suggesting that whatever sleep does, it is vitally important.

Modern Shamans: Financial Managers, Political Pundits, and others who help tame life’s uncertainties:

Like all magical specialists, [shamans] rely on spells and occult gizmos, but what makes shamans special is that they use trance. … But these advantages are offset by the ordeals involved. In many societies, a wannabe initiate lacks credibility until he (and it’s usually a he) undergoes a near-death experience or a long bout of asceticism. One aboriginal Australian shaman told ethnographers that, as a novice, he was killed by an older shaman who then replaced his organs with a new, magical set. … Manifesting as mediums, channelers, witch doctors and the prophets of religious movements, shamans have appeared in most human societies, including nearly all documented hunter-gatherers. They characterized the religious lives of ancestral humans and are often said to be the “first profession.” … … Like people everywhere, contemporary Westerners look to experts to achieve the impossible – to heal incurable illnesses, to forecast unknowable futures – and the experts, in turn, compete among themselves, performing to convince people of their special abilities. So who are these modern shamans? According to the cognitive scientist Samuel Johnson, financial money managers are likely candidates. Money managers fail to outperform the market – in fact, they even fail to systematically outperform each other – yet customers continue to pay them to divine future stock prices. …

Very interesting insight. It might explain why we stuck with doctors for so many centuries even when they were totally useless (or even negatively useful,) and why we trusted psychiatry throughout most of the 20th century, despite it being obvious bullshit.

There are a lot of unknowns out there, and we feel more comfortable trusting someone than just leaving it unknown–which introduces a lot of room for people to take advantage of us.

Finally, on a similar note, Is Dogma Eugenic?

As he explains, belief in the supernatural can be attributed to the above heuristics. If belief in the supernatural became a problem, we would have to evolve to loose those heuristics. Heuristics can be good. But, insofar as heuristics have us create harmful dogmas that can perpetuate themselves socially, we will have to replace them with pure logic, or at least lessen their impact. So, insofar as humans have the capacity to believe harmful dogmas, we will lose heuristics and become more logical. Heuristics can be “gamed;” logic cannot. In this manner, humans evolve to act less on instinct. The logical part of our brain becomes more pronounced.

You might have to RTWT to really get the argument, but it’s fun.