Morality Across Cultures Part 3

I have noticed something rather interesting in my exploration of morality across cultures. Namely that in more collectivist cultures (and subcultures) morality seems more strongly idealized, moral frames are more uniform and outwardly seems held to more stringently than in more individualistic cultures. This makes a lot of sense, given the nature of collectivist societies and I imagine is probably even documented.

Unfortunately it is exceedingly difficult to wade through the literature on moral decision making processes, because the vast majority of research in this area is in the context of business and law. This means that researchers are generally looking at very narrow ethical issues that may or may not translate to life outside the context of workplace. Or they are looking at narrow ethical issues in the context of how members of another culture treat outsiders - again, issues that may or may not - likely do not translate into how members of that culture treat each other.

I have found a few nuggets of research that would imply my observation is correct, but they do not leave room for generalization. This is definitely something that I think is worth exploring, because I think the answer is probably a very important piece of the puzzle that is the formation of our moral frames. The reason I think this could be very important is due to some observations of the largely hunter/gatherer aboriginal cultures I have learned something about. I will admit that this is pure speculation and that based on the accounts of westerners who have visited these cultures.

Egalitarian social structures are pretty much collectivist by nature. While there are certainly individuals with their individual traits, at a certain level of interdependence collectivism is the default. What I think it very interesting about this, is the expression of what westerners call morality in these egalitarian cultures. There isn't a list of rules to follow. Rather, there are the things that one must do to ensure the survival of the group. There are ways that one should treat others. But these are not issues that really need speaking of - rather they are integral to the culture to the extent that they become defined through observation and in some cases (probably most or all) they are part of the language.

In these aboriginal cultures divergence from the "moral" framework of the society is exceedingly rare. When it does pop up, the resulting gossiping and shaming usually cuts it off quickly. Failing that, there is discussion with elders to bring one in line making the final option, banishment, virtually nonexistent. There is not so much as idealization of this framework, as there is the understanding that life exists within this framework. There is not so much rigid adherence to this frame as there is a lack of anything else with which the group can function. In essence, daily life embodies the "moral" frame of hunter/gatherer societies. And within a group of (usually) thirty or less people, adherence isn't just an outward appearance.

With hierarchy and division of labors, comes room for that adherence to become affectation. The more complex the hierarchy, the more complex the division of labors, the more room is created for deviation - even if that deviance must be secret.

What I think is so very interesting about this, is that if I am correct, it potentially has a lot to tell us about the nature of our moral frames and how they are developed. It may also teach us a great deal about what morality really is at it's core and what can be generalized about morality. I also suspect that if it is true, this will have a lot to teach us about cognitive processes. At the very least it is rather interesting...

Morality Across Cultures Part 1

My semester project in my language and culture class is on the meaning of morality across cultural groups. This projects includes a presentation in class with a handout and a five to seven page paper. I am also writing another paper that will explore the impact of language on culture change. But the one I am rather geeked on is the morality paper. The following is the handout for my presentation.

U.S. American Society	Morality in U.S. society tends to be very relativistic. There is no set standard moral frame for U.S. Americans. Even on the individual level, moral frames tend to be ever changing, ever evolving with the experience of the individual. And public figures in the U.S. are often hypocritical about their morality, so much of the language surrounding morality is very cynical.
Christianity	While there is a great deal of variety across the many sects of Christianity, with very few exceptions those sects tend to have a dogmatic approach to morality. Morality is generally pretty clearly defined and is nothing short of divine law. While there is a little room for relativist interpretations, that is minimal. The congregation and often to a stronger degree, the leadership of the church has a role in policing moral behavior. The language of most Christian and indeed most religious moral framing is couched in absolutes.
Atheism	With the single unifying factor being a lack of belief in gods and the supernatural, atheists do not have a unified view of morality. Indeed some atheists believe that morality is nothing more than a religious construct. Others might believe that their are objective moral truths - some of whom also believing science can lead us to those truths. And there are atheists, myself included, who believe that morality is entirely relative to time, space, culture and the individual. It should be noted that within these three overarching viewpoints, there is a great deal of variety.
Korean Society	Korean society tends towards a very strict, dogmatic moral idealism. The language that Koreans use to discuss moral issues carries a firm reverence for tradition. Instead of being religiously driven, it carries the weight of history - of "the way it has always been done." While it doesn't carry the force of law, deviation from the moral dogma carries very serious social consequences. And Korean moral dogma also tends to speak to the rules of all the aspects of Korean social interactions.

When it comes to most any aboriginal peoples, the language of morality deviates rather drastically from that of developed, state based cultures. To whit, unlike state based cultures aboriginal cultures rarely even have a word to describe morality or even a system of rules or laws. There is no need for such defined sets of rules, because ultimately there are few rules and what rules there are are often times contextually dependent.

Efe pygmies (Ituri Forest, Congo)

The Efe people are quite reminiscent of the early Russians who lived in Mirs. They do not own property, implements used for day to day life being communally owned and used. The idea of "right" and "wrong" is entirely bound in what needs to be done to ensure the survival of the group. When the group perceives an individual acting outside the best interest of the group, the first line of "enforcement" is shame and gossip. Failing that, an elder or several elders may take the person aside. Ultimately, if the problems persist, the person will be banished. But problems rarely make it past shaming.

iKung! people (Northern Kalahari)

Really, the only difference between the Efe people and the iKung! people (or Bushmen), is that the iKung! people are not quite as communal. People in the hunter/gatherer bands of the iKung! people actually own their tools and adornments. This does not mean that tools aren't loaned to others on occasion, it just means that they are only used by others at the sufferance of the owner.

I would just like to leave you with an important understanding of moral relativism. Understanding that different people have different moral frames, doesn't mean that we must accept the moral frames of others as valid. Each of us have our own beliefs about what is right and wrong and respond to moral dilemmas in our own ways. The very nature of a belief in right and wrong, in what is moral versus what is immoral, is what we believe. When others act in a way that I believe is immoral, it doesn't matter what they believe about the morality of their actions - I believe that they are committing an immoral act.

I would like to thank Greg Laden PhD for his willingness to be interviewed about the Efe Pygmies. And I would like to thank Michael Murphy PhD for his willingness to be interviewed about the iKung! people. I will post the full bibliography when I post the actual paper. I would also note that my interviews with Greg and Mike will also be used as references for my other paper.

Neurobiology, Language and Culture: Help DuWayne Again

I am moving right along with my exploration of cognitive function, language and culture. I am really enjoying my quest into human consciousness, social development and their intersect with language. Honestly, I spend a lot of time wavering between reading (and listening to audiobooks) about human cognition, evolution, language and culture - and sitting in a daze, trying to pick apart tendrils of thoughts and ideas. It often reminds me very much of being really stoned, without the accompanying debilitation. Indeed, due to the stimulant therapy and the Welbutrin, I am actually able to pick at the minutiae and consider it in and out of context - assessing the implications.

Given another year or so, I should be able to develop a reasonable hypothesis. That is, a hypothesis that will drive the research I conduct early in my career. I have developed some interesting questions that I really hope will lead me to that question that will take up much of my time in a few years. That is the investigation into the questions, not the answers. While it is theoretically possible to answer these questions, doing so would be exceedingly difficult - if not impossible, given the tools we have to work with right now. And that assumes the questions themselves are correct.

One of the big questions - or series of questions I am rather keen on right now, is the correlation between language and culture, language and cognition and culture and cognition. I have been spending much of my spare time, such as it is, exploring the co-evolution of language and the brain. I have also read some interesting stuff about the early evolution of culture. And studying psychology and linguistics, I note correlations of culture, psychology, psychopathology and language on a regular basis. The exact nature of these correlations are the most fascinating questions I have ever had. There are not many questions I have found more pleasure in exploring.

At the moment I am exploring the evolution of language and the evolution of culture for one of my papers. I am also working on a paper that explores the impact of language and culture on the expression and treatment of mood disorders.

So here is the help that I need. I have most of the source material I need, but at least one of my sources for both papers needs to be an interaction with another person. Because of the nature of what I am writing about, I am really hoping to find some folks who have some background in some aspect or another, of the topics I am writing about. I am especially interested in talking to someone with experience in cross cultural mental health services. I do actually have some people I could potentially harass for the first paper (though I would love to meet new people), I am mostly looking for someone to talk to about the second.

When I am done with my papers and they have been graded, I will go ahead and post them. I have one that I should be able to post sometime this next week. These two papers however, aren't due for another four weeks, so I doubt I am going to be able to post them for at least that long.

Bloody Hells, Am I Glad That's Over...

The fucking semester from hell, which officially ended last Thursday, is now finally over. I took my psych final this morning (it only posted this morning) and sold the book they would buy...

Unfortunately, I take the boys back to TN tomorrow. There is other sad news too, but I am loathe to talk about it quite yet - though it will all be fine in the end.

On the upside, I am going to have a little time to write more and get some more of my anthro papers posted, as well as a couple other papers that will actually get expanded a bit.

The first is a summary and opinion on a Community Mental Health board meeting I attended - something I will be doing for the foreseeable future. I will be highlighting in detail, just how fucked this great state of Michigan really is. County CMH's will be seeing anywhere from dramatic, to catastrophic funding cuts, at a time when we are going to be releasing a rather large number of felons who would continue to be in state correctional facilities, were it not for the fact that those facilities are being closed. So they will be ending up the responsibility of the counties and many of them will end up getting priority over people in the community who have lost jobs and who have no way to cover mental health care costs. Stay tuned - because I am more than a little fucking pissed about how this is all working out.

The second is a discussion of the film Out of the Shadows. This was possibly the greatest movie that I will NEVER watch again (not the greatest mind, just the greatest I really can't handle seeing again). It is a very hard film to watch, especially when you can sit there and relate to a great deal of what Millie is going through and what her daughters have and are going through. When you realize the difference is degrees and expressions...

I am becoming one morose motherfucker, but I am also pretty fucking angry, as there have been several well reasoned discussions about atheism and some less than reasoned responses from "moderate" theists and some very unmoderate, lying sacks of shit for Jesus...Stephanie has the roundup and I will be getting on that motherfucker on my way back from TN. That would be a ten hour drive - I can express a lot of irritation in ten motherfucking hours...Though I will probably be filling some of that with light entertainment.

And I will probably fill some of that with a write up about how Greg is yet again, wrong.

Library Unit Four: Fun With Menstruation

“A Women's Curse?”
Meredith F. Small
The Sciences, Jan/Feb, 1999 p. 24-29

The bulk of Small's article discusses the work of UofM anthropologist Beverly Strassmann's study of menstruation among the Dogon of West Africa. What she was seeking was the possible roles that menstrual taboos could play into “natural fertility” populations. Strassmann believed that there were important biological roles being generally ignored, in regards to menstruation and reproduction.

The Dogon worked out to be a very good choice for study. The Dogon women spend their menstrual cycle segregated to the menstrual huts. Through urinalysis Strassmann determined that this segregation was closely adhered, in spite of most of the women finding the experience extremely unpleasant. This made it very easy to follow the cycles of the women in the villages Strassmann was studying. And with nearly two years of data on 477 complete cycles, studying ninety-three women, there was a great deal to work with.

One of the reasons for the taboo, she discovered, was to help determine paternity. In a culture where the father is responsible for his children and where property is passed along to male heirs, it is critically important to keep track of who the father of a given child is. And when it is everyone can see who is going to the menstrual huts, and who isn't – it becomes easier to determine who impregnated a given women. This is also important because the Dogon people are polygonous and there is no taboo against sexual intercourse for those who are unmarried.

This taboo also managed to make it clear if a woman happens to be infertile or menopausal. When a women in prime reproductive age is always visiting the hut, it becomes apparent that she is obviously not likely to reproduce. On the other hand, when I women stops visiting the hut altogether, is it obvious she is no longer fertile.

Strassmann also hypothesized that menstruation may have evolved as a method for conserving resources – keeping the body from using too much energy on reproduction, during a cycle that renders women infertile for a period of time. Instead of producing the excess that usually goes into creating a fertile place for a potential zygote to begin gestation, during the period of flushing things slow down entirely.

What I found most interesting however, is the possibility that women in Western society are at a distinct biological advantage to women who live within a natural fertility paradigm. The data shows that women in Dogon society, for example, only have an average of 110 menstrual cycles in their lifetimes, compared to the average of 350 to 400 for Westerners. Between reproducing at a significantly higher rate than Westerners, and breast feeding vigorously for longer periods than most Western women, they don't menstruate nearly as often.

I also found the discussion of the way that Dogon culture utilizes menstruation as a multitool for determining a great many issues within their society. While the underlying reasoning is significantly different, it turns out that this is a very useful tool for their culture, for a whole lot of reasons.

Finally, I find the interconnection of anthropological study, biology and sociology extremely interesting. Beyond the subject matter, the cross discipline integration is of particular interest to me – especially as I am seeing that there are a lot of other disciplines and even very different fields of study, that have a great deal of relevance to the direction I am going with my studies and where I want to go with my career. It is terribly exciting to discover new directions, new areas that have are potentially critical components of the places I wish to go – the ideas that I am keen on fostering and developing.

Library Unit 3: Culturist Propensities

I would just like to add from the getgo, that when I am talking about the arrogance of the West, I am most certainly not excluding myself. And I also think that it is important to make a distinction that is not made in this paper. Included in that arrogance is all of Western culture, not just those of us with pasty beige skin. Because this is really less about race, than it is about culture and our arrogant assumption that because we have digital watches, we are the sum of civilization. It is about people who live in different subsistence paradigms. It is about people who live in different social constructs. It is about recognizing - All of Us recognizing, that different, does not mean inferior. I don't care what color your skin, or your place on the economic spectrum. I don't even care about your education or intelligence.

We are, all of us, guilty to some degree or another.

“Rangers By Birth”
Will Hurd
Cultural Survival Quarterly 30.2 Summer, 2006

Will describes an awfully untenable situation, that I was happy to read has subsequently been resolved – at least in part by his work. The tribal peoples who live in and around the Omo National Park, by Will's account, have managed a wonderful balance of man and nature. This is evidenced by the belief of many that this is a wilderness, when it is actually the home of an estimated 50,000 people. And there is evidence of people much like these, living on these lands and with a similar balance for about 5,000 years.

Yet Westerners believed that there was some need to interfere withthese peoples and “manage” the lands of the Omo National Parkmore carefully. The African Parks Foundation, funded in part by theWalton Family Foundation – the same Walton family that owns WalMartand Sam's Club and other wealthy individuals, signed a 25 year leaseon the park in 2005 – threatening to displace the estimated 50,000Mursi, Suri, Nyangatom, Dizi and Me'en tribesmen who reside in thepark.

Yet these are people who understand the land, understand the ecology and their garden. They are horticulturists who practice eco friendly slash and burn gardening. They are herdsmen, who are careful not to allow their cattle to interfere with the ecosystem. They are also remarkably adept trackers and sometime (though rarely) hunters. They know where and how to travel this land safely and with very little risk from some of their less “polite” neighbors, such as crocodiles and water buffalo.

To be perfectly honest, this article made me bloody damned angry. I am sick of this idiotic notion that Westerners have, that when something is actually functional, we should stick our noses in and try to “fix” it. Yet where there are egregious human rights violations taking place, or even genocides, we can't seem to do anything, except maybe to protect our “interests” in the area. Which is always the exploitation of local natural resources, the proceeds from which do little or nothing for the local indigenous populations, instead usually lining the pockets of a few.

So to make ourselves feel good, we try to kick functional populations who are living in harmony with their environment, off the lands that they and people like them have inhabited for thousands of years. Because somehow we know better than these people who have lived here for so very long. Somehow we have the answers for “protecting” the diverse animal populations and vast array of plant life that is in parts simply an aspect of the ecosystem, a source of food, a source of building materials, fibers for ropes and clothing, a pollen source for domestic bees, food for cattle and also the pharmacy of the people who live there. And that is just a simplified list - I am quite certain that volumes could be written about the balance these people have achieved with their environment.

And this is not just the story of these peoples. This is the story of indigenous populations the world over. Populations that Westerners too often believe that we need to “help,” when they need nothing of the sort. We assume that because a people lives differently than we do, more primitively than we do, that they are somehow inferior – lacking some critical component of Civilization.

I have recently been told by someone that dark skinned people are somehow less moral than us white Westerners, because it takes cooperation and a certain moral fiber to live in our colder climates, than it does to live in these tropical and subtropical climes. That is the fundamental underpinning of Western thinking, though the more diversity oriented among us would cringe at the racism and culturalism stated so boldly – so openly. Yet that thinking is what drives many of the very Westerners who would cringe at hearing it stated so succinctly.

It is that thinking that causes supposed conservationists to decide that they, as “enlightened” Westerners can do it better than these people who have lived on those lands for centuries, if not Millenia. We don't like to put it in those blatant terms, but what else can we call this absolute height of arrogance and hubris? We. We who have managed to cause more damage to this planet, in the last 150 years, than was ever caused this planet since the mass extinction of the dinosaurs millions of years ago. We Westerners deciding that we can somehow do it better? We have a word for that – the same word that would be used to describe that bald statement I ran into the other day; Racism.

Autism, Racism, Menstruation and More!!!!

You may have noticed the last couple of posts happen to be rather innocuously and generically titled "Library Unit X: Cultural Anthropology. As I was going through and finishing these short papers, it occurred to me that the assignment as given, produces short papers that are not unlike blog posts - in fact they are a lot like blog posts. Or at least they are like blog posts that I would produce if I didn't say fuck with some regularity...

The assignment was to read seven articles and write a two page paper about each, summarizing the article, tying it to something we discussed in class and providing our response to it. It was not meant to be formal, instead being more about how each article made us feel - what we gleaned from it, how it changed our perspective or if it did. As it occurred to me that I was writing papers that would make decent blog posts, it also occurred to me that I am exceedingly busy and unable to write much. So I have a total of seven of these papers and wanted to throw this post in there to make sure that there was something to reference them, that has a less generic title - especially before I post the next one, which happens to delve into a rather more important issue.

I didn't make the next one the first one I posted, because I wanted to have a moment to draw some attention to it and the fact that this anthropology class has done rather a lot to further alter my attitude about certain aspects of primitive cultures and the West. I have long held the understanding that primitive does not equal savage and uncivilized. But that attitude has evolved considerably over the course of this cultural anthropology class. Because I am learning that one, these primitives are in many ways far more "civilized" than those of us in the West and two, I am not nearly as "enlightened" and close to free of bigotry as I thought I was. This is not to say that I didn't accept that I had some underlying bigoted undertones - it is a rare person in the West who doesn't. But I thought I was pretty good about that sort of thing.

In the next post, which will probably go up later this morning or sometime this afternoon, I will delve into the systemic bigotry of Western society. In the paper, I was not terribly clear and wanted to clear it up here, just as I intend to clear it with my instructor. When I describe the arrogant culturalist tendencies of Westerners - I am absolutely not trying to exclude myself from that picture. Because even though this class has sent me a little bit further in the right direction, I am a product of my culture and all that entails - the good, the bad and the exceedingly arrogant.

Library Unit Two: Cultural Anthropology

“Remapping the World of Autism”
Roy Richard Grinker
AnthroNotes, Fall 2006, 27:3

In this article, Grinker describes how autism is dealt with in India and Hindu culture. In India, most autistic children are not diagnosed specifically with autism. Rather they are given a generic diagnosis of mentally retarded (MR) or paagol, the Hindi word for mad. This is slowly changing, but the traditions of such a richly tradition driven culture such as India's, make that progress seem infinitesimally slow at times. And an autistic child, at least the boys (which is better than 3/4's of all autistic people), are often a major source of conflict with those traditions.

A consistent theme through the article, is that autism often causes familial conflicts that are serious enough to break up families. There is a great deal of blame thrown around, often couched in terms of something that one or both parents must have done to anger the gods. Sometimes that blame is extended to the child's grandparents, who in Indian culture bear no small responsibility for the spiritual and by extension of that, the physical well being of the families of their children. Divorces are very common in the families Grinker describes in this article as well.

An autistic child also interferes with the normal process of the mother pushing her child away at about age five, into the fathers world and that of the extended family. In India, rather than
children developing their individuality, it is important for them to develop their familial identity first and foremost, with personal development coming behind. The extended family therefore often takes great exception when the mother of an autistic child refuses to send him (or her) to be embraced by the influence of the rest of the family. Or worse, the extended family simply refuses to deal with the autistic child. Whichever direction it goes, this is never very good for familial relationships, relationships that form the cornerstone of Indian society – though this too is slowly changing across Indian society.

Though the families described in the article have dealt with their child's autism in strikingly different ways, there is a great deal of similarity. And those similarities are not unique to India and Indian culture. Because while the motivations or the names of the gods may change, the Indian parents of autistic children experience is much the same as it is here in the United States.

Families in both India and the U.S. face many of the very same challenges, something I suspect is the case in many cultures. Caring for and raising a child with special needs takes a great deal of
special care – care that is going to be required for that child, no matter what culture is being discussed. About the only difference that might be found, is in cultures that may believe that it is
imperative for family and friends to make a significant contribution to the care of the child and to ensure that the parents engage in a reasonable level of self-care, thus making it possible for them to provide quality care for their child. But I again suspect that rather than being a cultural difference, most every culture has families that get this kind of help from friends and family, but like the cultures of India and the U.S., such families are also probably a rarity.

Something that really hit home for me, was the notion that even in such a tradition driven culture as India's, there are parents of special needs children who fall into a familiar pattern – becoming rather Bohemian as one mother described her and her late husband. This is another very common theme amongst the American families of children with special needs. Some of us may have started out rather “different,” but there are plenty of parents who naturally learn to live life to a very different beat, as they learn to accept, embrace and love their child for everything they are. I suspect that it is virtually impossible for most parents to even try to fit in and accept their child's neurological differences – there just isn't enough energy in any one person to make it all come together. But there is also a great deal of joy to be found in being part of a family that while different, is also honest and open about who they are.

Library Unit One: Cultural Anthropology

“The World of the Little People”
Morwood, Sutikna and Roberts
National Geographic, April, 2005, 207:4 p3

On the Indonesian Island of Flores, Morwood et al set out to find more evidence of whoever had left tools that were more than 800, 000 years old, in a cave. This is not very different than what a lot of archeologists do – nothing particularly exceptional about this dig, except that the island of Flores was separated from the mainland of Asia, by about fifteen miles of ocean in the lowest of seas of that period. This doesn't seem like a very long distance to modern humans who have traversed the oceans of our planet earth for thousands of years now. But the notion that there might have been protohumans this far from the Asian mainland, even ten thousand years ago, flies in the face of everything we thought we knew before.


What they eventually found, in late 2003, was an even bigger surprise than they were expecting. Because rather than finding fossils of Homo erectus, who existed on the Asian mainland, around the time that the tools found by priest and amateur archeologist, Theodor Verhoven in the 1950's and 60's were made – they found the fossils of what was later named Homo floresiensis. First thought to be the fossil remains of a child, it was soon realized that Hominids weren't immune to natural selection. Assumed to be the ancestors of Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis fell prey to the same thing that island populations of many species undergo – they shrank.


But while their brains had shrunk with the rest of their body, they were certainly intelligent. Found amongst the remains of their living spaces, was evidence of fire, spears and the bones of stegodonts – some with clear signs that they had been hunted by these spears. What makes that so remarkable, is that the stegodonts of Flores, were the dwarfed cousins of their ancestral line from the mainland – at only 800lbs on average, these early cousins of modern elephants were still quite a match for a hominid species whose adults were about the size of an average preschool child. Presumably, H. floresiensis didn't need to kill very many of these stegodons, to fill their small bellies for a good while.


But most breathtaking of all, is the short time ago, that the latest remains found date from. There is strong evidence to indicate that Homus florensiensis was alive on Flores, a mere thirteen thousand years ago, with the oldest remains dating from ninety-five thousand years ago. Keeping in mind that the first tools discovered by Verhoven, were about 850,000 years old. It would seem apparent, that hominid life flourished on Flores, for hundreds of thousands of years, without modern humans stepping foot on this island, until about four thousand years ago. While the modern human race was spreading it's tendrils of population around the globe, Homus florensiensis was flourishing still, on Flores.


This fits well with discussions about evolution and homids, really making for a very exciting read for someone who has a strong interest in primate and hominid evolution. Being especially fond of clearing up the common misconceptions that many people have, as to the nature of evolution and especially human evolution, it is very useful to have examples such as this to draw on. Showing that rather than being a drive towards a particular pinnacle of achievement – a ladder up to who and what we are now, evolution is about adaptation and mutations that are not always functional and can sometimes be harmful in the long run.


The other thing that is so very exciting about this, is the discovery of very similar remains at Dmanisi in western Asia, more than six thousand miles and separated by roughly 1.8 million years, from Homus florensiensis. This leads us to more questions than answers and is evidence that there are probably more isolated hominid populations, just waiting to be discovered. And it leads to some very interesting questions about how two populations, separated by nearly two million years and thousands of miles, could be so very similar.


Millions of years after our early hominid ancestors took to walking upright, it has become an exciting time for discovering more and more interesting things about these, our ancient ancestors and other protohuman species that diverged at various point along the way, but who didn't survive all those millenia.

Exciting times indeed...