It’s that time of year when my wife’s garden bears fruit and it’s my turn to get to work in the kitchen. I get to spend my day rendering tomatoes and peppers and onions and garlic into sauce.
Then I have to prepare a lecture that tries to answer the question, “where did prehistoric people think humans came from.” Fortunately, we have a prehistoric historical document.
It looks like heaven on earth.
Have you given it a name?
@fishy #1:
The saucy gazpacho police.
AFAIK, foraging cultures generally either thought that some god-like spirit, entity, or animating force had created the world and the people in it, typically many generations prior without specifying an exact number, or admitted that they didn’t actually know, beyond that it was enough generations that nobody recalled anyone not having had a previous generation. “Young earth creationism” or any other beliefs giving an exact date for the creation doesn’t really seem to have been a thing until maybe the Bronze Age or so, or at least the Neolithic. Perhaps not coincidentally, such beliefs tended to arise after a culture had invented some kind of civil calendar and formal methods of timekeeping.
Obviously, we now know that nobody remembers a first generation because the organisms that emerged from abiogenesis were not complex enough to store, let alone transmit, episodic memories as we would understand them. For similar reasons no one remembers a particular generation as having been the first humans, with non-human ape parents: there was no sharp dividing line, just a fuzzy gradual transition to more and more not-non-human in characteristics over some span of tens of thousands of years or more, and fully expressive general-purpose language with which to pass on such stories is a capability that itself emerged during that transition period.
Um….. Why?
Because the topic of the course is the history of evolutionary thought, that’s why.
My daughter in law regularly prepares a large batch of very potent chili and garlic oil and sauce as a side business when she is cooking the kitchen is off limits, the air filter in the lounge room is working overtime and she wears a gas mask.
Don’t forget to mention the late Thag Simmons, for whom the thagomizer is named.
Photo and description of your culinary marvel looks/sounds delicious! Every few weeks I do something similar (but unfortunately not with ingredients readily to hand as we lack a garden), cooking up about 10 or 12 meals; immediately have two serves together with my partner, and freeze the rest for four or five subsequent dinners. Bon appetit!
What’s the Scoville Units (SU) on that concoction given the peppers? I’ve ruined many a dish by going too hot or at least regretted it the next morning.
Given family tree stuff are Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey half-brothers?
No they would be full brothers if Woody’s assertion is true:
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/woody-harrelson-matthew-mcconaughey-dna-test-biological-brothers-1235588537/
Bekenstein Bound @3: Mesopotamian cultures believed in ancient kings that lived way longer than their Biblical ante-diluvian counterparts, placing creation very long back in time. However the time between the creation of the earth and the appearance of the first humans was still pretty short.
The culture in India was open to very long time periods. As for the specifics of a creation, there were a lot of gods spread across a lot of ethnic groups. Maybe there was never a ‘standardised’ narrative, even if Vishnu et al dominated the pantheon in historical times?
The Golgafrinchans of Viltvodle IV have a very distinct creation myth.
That pot of sauce looks like the surface of the sun.
Shit, that sounds like an amazing course and I’d love to teach something like that one day.
The tomato sauce, I’m already working on that. ‘Tis the season.