Yet another thing that made us human: Dancing

Chimps eating shellfish helps explain human evolution? Hey, here’s another one, from a philosopher, dancer, and scholar of religion:

What if humans are the primates whose capacity to dance (shared by some birds and mammals) was the signature strategy enabling the evolution of a distinctively large and interconnected brain, empathic heart and ecological adaptability? And what if dancing plays this role for humans not just in prehistoric times, but continuing into the present? What if humans are creatures who evolved to dance as the enabling condition of their own bodily becoming? Kimerer LaMothe, “ The dancing species: how moving together in time helps make us human” at Aeon

Birds generally dance in courtship. Only humans dance in order to express personal ideas. Lamothe’s observations are on target but we are left with the question: “Who told you you had ideas?”

Strange, how much scholarship needs to deny the obvious difference between humans and animals.

Some other human evolution claims: Eating fat, not meat, led to bigger human type brains, say researchers.

Earlier discussion of the fat theory.

Starchy food may have aided human brain development

Do big brains matter to human intelligence?

Human evolution: The war of trivial explanations

and

What Taragana