More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
That’s why grammar is one of the most important things your mother ever helped you learn.
But the moment you learned grammar might well have built the most human part of your brain.
The arrival of human language left no fossils, no cache of sharpened stones, but we can assume that this Eve had a fully modern voice instrument, which lands her neatly among Neanderthal and sapiens.
But are we “human” at the very start of language? I don’t think so.
Our Eves, no doubt, had all sorts of complex, social communication before they had recursive grammar. How else could they have survived so long? How else could they have become competent midwives?
So I think there was one moment in the evolution of human language that marked a dividing line: before it we were not yet human, but after it we were. It was probably the smallest thing, neither heroic nor grand. More than likely, it was the intimate moment, probably late in the evening, in the low blue quiet before dreaming, when a single human being told the very first story.
But the timing makes Homo sapiens more likely. Somewhere between thirty thousand and fifty thousand years ago, human culture exploded. We went from using the same, relatively simple tools to a cultural revolution, not only advancing our tools, but massively increasing the amount of art we made, burial rituals, obvious jewelry…Symbolism was suddenly everywhere. Before this revolution, there was lots of the same for a very long time. After, there was Humanity everywhere you looked.
Ten or twenty thousand years, max. Boom, all of humanity adopted complex symbolic culture. All of us. Everywhere. Again, most think it’s the sort of speed that can happen only with language. Where genetic changes are slow, language-fueled behavioral changes can spread like wildfire.
And who else to tell the first story but a mother to her child?
that coupling of mother and child is the most common—she will talk more to her young child in its early life than nearly any other person.
Instead, maybe it would have been simpler. There is one abiding theme that’s stayed with humanity since the very beginning: hunger.
whereas singers don’t start until later. They don’t have the voice control, and they don’t have the lungs.
Babbling isn’t just something human infants do. Juvenile songbirds chirp and whistle in randomized, repeating patterns much as human babies do
What’s more, songbirds such as the Bewick’s wren share a regular set of fifty gene mutations with human beings
As with most genetic research, we’re not entirely sure what those fifty genes are doing, but they seem to be critical for vocal learning. They’re more active in language regions of the brain. Even more tellingly, birds that don’t need to learn complex...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
And she needs to be in the room with you. Babies who watch educational video programs don’t learn as well as babies who hear language spoken to them in person
Mammals are female heavy in caretaking largely because females are the ones who make milk; among non-mammals, there’s a wide range of models for caretaking.
But the state of knowledge is inching forward. For example, a mutation heralded as the “language gene”—FOXP2—seems to be more about pattern complexity and learning than language per se (Schreiweis et al., 2014). You can dump its analogue into a mouse, and he’ll make more complex, chirpy sounds—but more interestingly, in his juvenile period and throughout his life in the lab, he’ll also learn faster. Mice with this mutation are better at switching from step-by-step to repetitive learning (ibid.). For example, maybe when they go into mazes, turning right takes them to where the food is.
there’s a kind of three-way hotline between most women’s reproductive organs, her body fat, and the pituitary gland at the base of her brain, constantly regulating the shifting balance of her sex hormones.
Take hot flashes: More than 60 percent of menopausal women get them.
Estrogen and progesterone seem to protect women’s bones against the worst of it. Once menopause lowers those levels, a woman’s body can start to lose calcium, which is why older women, especially, are more prone to osteoporosis.
Once a middle-aged woman hasn’t had a period in more than twelve months, she’s not called menopausal anymore, but postmenopausal—and that’s the phase she’s in for the rest of her life.
If the child’s father or grandfathers couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do it, maybe the grandmothers could—but only if they weren’t busy with babies of their own.
woman is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have. Or rather, all the egg follicles.
the loss of egg follicles isn’t triggered by ovulation. Instead, ovulation saves about 20 follicles a month from early death, of which usually only 1 will go on to become a mature egg and find its way down the fallopian tube. But for those 20 that are saved, 980 die
For nearly half a century, the scientific community figured that mammalian eggs may have an expiration date.
most women get rid of every month, probably a result of the fact that eggs are just so much harder to make than sperm,
most of your mitochondria and cytoplasm came from your mother.
The longer a cell lives, the more chances it has to be damaged by accumulating waste and free radicals.
Since most mammals don’t live as long as we do, maybe they don’t have to deal with genetic damage to old eggs.
Scientists figure that when hominins began to walk on two legs, there wasn’t room in their upright pelvises for giant genital displays.
But, as opposed to human cultural norms, the older the chimp, the sexier the boys find her.
In fact, for female chimps, looking older can signal that she’s the bearer of high-quality DNA.
In other words, the deep structure of primate ovaries might be fundamentally geared for a life span of about fifty years.
Instead, women somehow delayed aging in the rest of their bodies, and human ovaries haven’t had a chance to catch up yet.
What grandmothers do, in other words, is remember.
Living a really long time as a social mammal is good for two things: reinforcing the social status of adult children, and ensuring the well-being of the group overall in a crisis
In other words, you are more likely to be poisoned when you eat plants than when you eat a diet of meat.[*16]
The shared social knowledge of hunter-gatherers helped our ancestors navigate that dangerous poison-filled plant world alongside their meat-eating habits.
Before we could write stuff down, it was especially important to have someone in the group who could remember earlier crises.
And in fact, whatever genetic shifts might have happened to help extend our life span probably happened long before the Eve of Old Women.
The reason agriculture matters for menopause is that it was a critical moment in human history: We were trying to do something really, really hard. It often made us sick. It required whole new ways of living.
Having elders who remembered what had worked and what hadn’t would have been really useful.
The real start of menopause is when enough women survived into old age that a girl could expect to become a grandmother herself one day.
Throughout the world, women are simply better at not dying than men are.
In the United States, the average woman will outlive the average man by only about five to seven years.
How and why that happens is a mystery, but the fact itself is no longer controversial. And it’s true among our ape cousins, too: among both wild and captive chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and even gibbons, females usually outlive the males.
So long as a human male makes it to adulthood, it takes him only two to three months to successfully pass on his genes, and the bulk of that time is spent making new sperm in his testicles. Once the sperm are built, it takes only sixty seconds to ejaculate them. Women, meanwhile, need a minimum of twenty-one months to pass on their DNA: twelve months for the egg follicle to fully mature and another nine months to gestate the baby. And then there’s breast-feeding. Most of the hard work of reproduction and early caretaking is done by female bodies. That’s why losing a female is usually a great
...more
Since there’s simply more pressure on the mammalian genome to preserve the life of the female, maybe, over time, certain mechanisms have evolved that protect against the bad stuff in the female body’s aging process.
Again, living longer than men is really a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
