I wonder how aliens will react to our communal grooming instinct? Like when you see something stuck to your homie’s clothes/skin/hair and it’s driving you nuts and you just gotta be like “hold still, lemme get that for you real quick.”
One time when I was a kid, I had a science teacher with a snake as a class pet, and said snake was almost done shedding. There was one little bit of dried skin stuck to its face and I was like, “would it hurt him if I pulled that off?” And the teacher said, “yes it actually could, it’s probably still attached to living skin if it hasn’t come off yet” and I was like “oh, sorry,” and he said, “that’s okay, you were just wanting to do the primate thing.” And damn, that’s such an accurate descriptor.
Anyways I hope aliens don’t mind me/my descendants having the urge to pluck stuff off of them. If they ask, we’ll have to tell them it’s a trait we evolved to survive ticks.
Finally got my hands on a copy of Platform Decay and one thing I really appreciate that I haven't seen mentioned is that Murderbot is studying human evolution to understand humans better.
Maybe it's because I'm mid-Star Trek rewatch but I do get tired of the weird outsider character always being like "wow humans are so weird and illogical and make no sense" and the humans always being like "yup! aren't we quirky and weird (in a positive way)!" and just. As someone who has taken exactly one (1) class in human evolution, no?? Once you account for social signaling and the incredibly complex layers of cultural evolution we've built up, it all makes very reasonable sense actually.
Why do we small talk? Social bonding. What is the point of celebrating this holiday/event? Social bonding. Why is courtship so emotionally fraught? Because picking an appropriate partner is a big deal, both socially and like, evolutionarily, and social rejection is bad, which our brain signals to us via emotional responses. But don't your people understand that you're no longer living in a survival context? Sure, we no longer have to worry about starving to death because we have no friends to share food with during the famine, but have you considered: have you provided adequate "true" signaling to prove that you are willing to risk your life to save me from the Borg? Because if not, I'm probably not risking my life for yours. Get your ass over to that birthday party and appreciate it.
And of course, we're getting it from Murderbot's perspective, so its response is "sounds fake but okay." XD
Clay stained mother and child — Neanderthals sheltering from the winter outside
I’ve been wanting to draw Neanderthals for a while as I, quite frankly, love them and find them unbelievably fascinating… that being said I noticed that nearly every depiction is a static standing pose or some kind of hunting or aggressive scene. I think it is important to remember the Neanderthal made jewelry, made art, had music and medicine and culture. They had caves they would generationally return to. They were, in nearly every way, human. If not for genetics, I truly think they should be considered as human as we are, for all the considerations of what makes us human, can be applied to them in some way.
Anyways, hope you like this piece and my little rant…
Fossils, stone tools and seashells in Turkey show that Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens who moved in later had the same hunting strategies
Fossils, stone tools and seashells in Turkey show that Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens who moved in later had the same hunting strategies and symbolic traditions even without overlapping at the site, suggesting they may have shared information.
[...]
Sites like these are forcing a rethink of how these two types of human were culturally related to each other, April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email. "By demonstrating cultural continuity and elevated levels of interaction, sites such as Tinshemet and Üçağızlı II are changing what we thought we knew about Neandertals, Homo sapiens and other contemporary Homo groups … a fascinating region just got even more so!" she said.
But that cultural continuity only heightens the mystery of how modern humans and Neanderthals interacted, with Neanderthals eventually going extinct around 40,000 years ago. Two types of human can't occupy the same ecological niche indefinitely, Nowell noted, and some research into Neanderthal cognition suggests Neanderthals were less-flexible thinkers than modern humans, with more limited capacity for language and less of the kind of self-awareness and creativity that may have given H. sapiens an edge. (However, there is pushback against the idea that Neanderthals weren't as cognitively complex as H. sapiens.)
If the archaeological record at sites like Üçağızlı II shows this much overlap in behavior, Nowell said, the real differences between the two may be ones the fossil record simply hasn't revealed yet.
The authors noted that many big questions remain, including when and where these shared cultural practices took place and whether these cultural similarities happened because modern humans mated with Neanderthals.
Research suggests a DNA switch originally responsible for forming the cloaca (a waste/reproduction exit) in ancient fish was repurposed to develop fingers and toes in humans.
Researchers from Switzerland and the United States found that DNA elements active in the cloaca of fish were later recycled during evolution
Giants, seafood, fruit and sunny beaches... this really might be heaven.
Introducing another creature to the setting of Encounters in the Frontier: the giants.
For their redesign I adapted the concept of insular gigantism to a close ancestor of humans.
Giants live in an island close to the southwestern coast of Alwaysummer. They inhabit a giant dormant volcano whose crater now delimits a shallow lagoon.
Giants are adapted to catch mollusks, sea urchins, octopusses and sea cumbers by striding over the lagoon to locate them and then catching them with their dexterous hands. They also complement their diet with fruits they can easily access from the tallest trees.
Giants live slow and long lives and show very little tool usage besides smashing rocks to open shells and coconuts. Still, they have complex social structured, usually consisting of a dominant male and many females and their children. Males engage in screaming singing competitions for dominance and younger males might do this playfully.
Males grow long beards and braid it and poke branches or sea urchin spikes into it as decoration.
They also smell pretty bad.
The discovery of the isle of Titans took place during an expedition sent by the Sun Empire to discover if Alwaysummer had an end to the south and to set and man trading outposts in this region.
This expedition was manned mainly with people from the plateau. In the creation myth of these people, earth used to be a warm and fertile heaven and all people were colossal and child like, but humanity was punnished with a great flood and made small and vulnerable.
When the crew members discovered this islands and the giants, they started to believe that it was the mythical last remnant of paradise and that the giants were the spirits of their legendary heroes and ancestors. (I'm sure this won't eventually turn into a rebellious cult...)
Giants are generally gentle to humans, since to them, they are child like (it's not that they think that adult humans are baby giants, but they find humans cute like we would find a small dog cute). Even though giants are sacred of fire, they did enjoy the taste of cooked food, so it started being common for them to bring food to the humans so that they could cook it (and keep some for themselves).
Male giants started doing favors to the crew members such as reaching fruits and helping them build by moving heavy objects in exchange for getting their long beards groom and braided into intricate styles by the small and precise hands of the humans.
Giants also found the songs and instruments these humans played to be soothing and would stand in the sea at night next to were the humans were playing to hear their music.
Still, most of the times both species stuck to themselves, with the humans building the outpost and having an epiphany and the giants fishing as usual and watching their new neighbours from a distance.
Even though their interactions have been peaceful and even wholesome at the moments, some abandoned shipwrecks and pirate hideouts scattered in the island with no signs of their inhabitants remind the crew members of the island's potential hostility.
Here is a quick evolutionary tree I did of the spec-evo primates of the setting:
So, you know how there are ants that farm fungi, and people sometimes say stuff like "humans and ants are the only species with agriculture"? It, um, turns out there's several more (McGhee 2022):
In contrast to some other agriculturalist animals, humans and their crops have a generally facultative relationship with one another rather than an obligate one, and humans do not use (as yet) microbial pest-control methods... Human agriculture is itself convergent, in that several populations of humans made the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists independently... Of the other agriculturalist animals only the clades of the ambrosia beetles and damselfishes have exhibited numerous independent convergences in agricultural evolution: 11 independent lineages of ambrosia beetles have arisen in the past 50 million years, and, in the damselfishes, “multiple independent transitions to algaculture have occurred”...
In contrast to humans, the damselfishes have simpler agricultures... Hata and Kato have observed that species of the damselfishes maintain “dense stands of filamentous algae as algal farms.” In particular, the “territorial damselfish, Stegastes nigricans, maintains algal farms by excluding invading herbivores and weeding unpalatable algae from its territories”; it also carefully grazes its crops to stimulate the algae to remain in the rapid-growth, early-succession phase... Hata, Watanabe, and Kato, however, have noted that “this fish neither sows nor transplants the algae.” Further, Stegastes nigricans has not been observed to fertilize its crops or to use any type of pest control against crop parasites or diseases, and the damselfish does not use artificial selection or genetic engineering to improve its crops, unlike humans.
Of these [Lophotrochozoan agriculturalists], the limpet snails have the most complex agricultures, consisting of five of the 12 agricultural traits... Species of the scutellastrid limpets cultivate Ralfsia verrucosa algae in two types of gardens: periphery gardens
(Scutellastra cochlear, S. flexuosa, S. mexicana, and others) and patch gardens (Scutellastra longicosta, S. laticostra, S. chapmani, and others). Periphery-gardening limpets cultivate algae in a zone around the periphery of a permanent home base... by rasping
the coral surface, “and the alga within the garden area is restricted to the interstices of the rasped surface”. The more mobile patch-gardening limpets cultivate algae in larger patches over which the snails graze.
Both types of gardening limpets fertilize their gardens, but in a different manner: by the release of nitrogenous excretions (ammonium and urea in their urine and feces) in the
periphery gardeners, and by the spreading of nutrient-rich mucus in mucus trails from their feet by the patch gardeners... The patch-gardening snail Scutellastra longicosta has been demonstrated to weed its gardens... . The scutellastrid limpets also defend their crops from raiding herbivores
The nereidid polychaete annelid Platynereis dumerilii uses its own self-grown mucus-tube habitat as the substratum for its algal garden, according to Levinton, who has noted that some species of nereidids “attach pieces of sea lettuce (Ulva) to their tubes and maintain algal gardens”... The worms “live inside semi-permanent mucous tubes, that are generally attached to macroalgal thalli. . . . P. dumerilii generally feeds close to the tube entrance, to which worms attach small pieces of algae”. At the tube entrance, these pieces of algae are also in close proximity to the nitrogenous urine and feces of the polychaete and thus may be fertilized, even if inadvertently.
Woodin has argued that the gardening behavior of Platynereis dumerilii is an adaptation to reduce the risk of predation... “searching for food, the worms are more vulnerable to potential predators.”
The nassariid whelk snail Bullia digitalis also has an agricultural technique that uses only three of the 12 agricultural traits, but they are not the same three... Bullia digitalis uses its own, self-grown calcareous-shell habitat as the substratum for its algal garden... the snail “frequently has an algal growth on the upper surface of its shell and especially on the last whorl”... Harris et al. further note that the garden consists of chlorophyte algae that bore into the shell material of the snail, that the snail periodically grazes on filamentous strands of the algae that protrude from its shell, and that the most commonly seen alga appears to be Eugomontia sacculata... the presence of “only a single species of alga”... argues for weeding behavior by the snail... and obviously the snail does not allow other species to graze its shell, thus defending its crop. Because the snail is mobile in high-energy sandy beaches it is unlikely that it fertilizes its crop with nitrogenous excretions... since these excretions would be quickly washed away...
The littorinid periwinkle snail Littoraria irrorata also has a simpler agricultural technique consisting of only four agricultural traits, but of overwhelming interest is that this periwinkle snail farms saprophytic fungi rather than photosynthetic algae. Thus, in its crop choice this agriculturalist marine species is convergent with
the land-dwelling insect agriculturalists...
Littoraria irrorata prepares the substrate for its garden by actively producing longitudinal wounds with its radula on the leaves of the salt marsh cordgrass Spartina alternifora; these wounds are then colonized by species of the ascomycete fungi Phaerosphaeria and Mycosphaerella... they have also been seen engaging in “selectively depositing hyphae-laden feces within wounded plant tissues to facilitate fungal establishment and growth”... The farmer is obligately dependent upon the presence of the fungal crop, but the fungal crop, although benefiting from the activities of the farmer species, is not obligately dependent upon it.
All three ecdysozoan [and terrestrial] agriculturalist animals farm fungi rather than plants, and all three have a two-way obligate relationship between the farming animals and their crops.
The macrotermitine termites have an agricultural technique that uses eight of the 12... the relationship between the macrotermi-
tine termites and their crops, species of Termitomyces fungi, is one of obligate mutualism...
In addition to substrate preparation, crop planting, crop fertilization with organics, and protection and weeding of crops, Aanen also observed that “the termites ‘artificially’ select for high nodule production” to improve their Termitomyces crops and that “genetic screening of Termitomyces strain diversity happens in at least some
of the genera either directly through active selection of symbionts or indirectly through interstrain competition for comb space.”
The leaf-cutter ants have an agricultural technique that uses ten of the 12 agricultural traits— an agriculture that is more complex than human agriculture in this analysis. Like humans, the ants use “chemical herbicides to combat pests,” but, unlike humans (as yet), the ants also use “disease-suppressant microbes for biological pest control”, in particular an “antibiotic produced by the Pseudonocardia bacterial symbiont” that is used against fungal parasites... whereas the fungal cultivars of the non-leaf-cutting “lower” attine ants are facultative symbionts, ants in the leaf-cutter
genera Atta and Acromyrmex cultivate “higher attine” fungi (principally Leucoagaricus gongylophorus) that are incapable of living separately from their ant farmers.
Like termites, ants practice artificial selection through the selection of variant fungal symbionts. Thus leaf-cutter ants are known to utilize all of the agricultural techniques used by humans in this analysis except two: the usage of artificially produced chemical fertilizers and genetic engineering to improve their crops. However, it is possible that the ants may even use genetic engineering—through the introduction of viruses and horizontal-gene transfer into their crops—but this remains to be proved.
Last, of the 11 independently evolved, fungus-farming lineages of ambrosia beetles, the Ambrosiodmus/Ambrosiophilus-clade ambrosia beetles utilize the most complex agricultural techniques. Their agricultures use seven of the 12 agricultural traits... the Ambrosiodmus/Ambrosiophilus-clade ambrosia beetles are obligate mutualists with their fungal crop species Flavodon ambrosius. [They] possess the general agricultural traits of substrate preparation, crop planting, crop protection, and crop weeding. Like the ants, they use microbes for biological pest control, but they are
not known to fertilize their crops... “Several Asian species within the genus Ambriosiophilus engage in another inter-specific interaction—fungus stealing (mycocleptism). Instead of making their galleries in uninhabited wood, these parasitic Ambrosiophilus species search
for galleries established by the much larger ambrosia beetles in the genus Beaverium and excavate their galleries immediately next to the existing tunnels. The fungus established by Beaverium spp. therefore immediately grows in the gallery of Ambriosiophilus spp.”
(Kasson et al. 2016, 94).
(pics from wikipedia, see linked paper for references)
It's so crazy to me when conspiracy theorists try to explain the uncanny valley by saying there was a secret "human predator" or aliens or some shit because bro. OTHER HUMAN SPECIES (and dead bodies)
there was a time on earth where at least 6!!! (SIX) species of hominids existed along side each other and occasionally overlapped territories. we weren't always alone!
