The Fabulous Forager

I am pissed off at Adbusters right now. For a long, long time, I anticipated the glorious day when I’d get my brand-new, guilt-free pair of Blackspot sneakers in the mail. Every time I stepped in a puddle and felt the water seep through the many, many holes in my old sneakers, several of which were located directly below the balls of my feet, I would think fondly of the Blackspot sneakers that were coming in the mail.  Yes, they were $90, but they were vegetarian and made of organic material by fairly paid union workers! I hoped with all my heart that they would hold up better than my Converse All-Stars, which fall apart faster than that “leave Britney alone” kid. (Sorry, did that already jump the shark? Are we back onto cats that play musical instruments? I have trouble keeping track…)

This is neat: remember when you were a kid and you’d chew mint Lifesavers in the dark to watch them make sparks? Well, you can do the same trick by rubbing two quartz crystals together. It’s called triboluminescence and while it won’t exactly light up a room (that’s what fire is for), it’s still a fun trick.

Ah, the hairy caveman: primitive man in his natural form, unkempt, long-haired, long-bearded, and with unibrows galore. I think the idea is that early man (and, by extension, man without civilization, as modern primitive peoples live very much the way our Paleolithic ancestors did) was too stupid to properly groom himself, resulting in hair like an early 90’s grunge rocker and beards like ZZ Top. The only problem with this ubiquitous stereotype, aside from the question of how we ever managed to hunt anything with hair falling into our eyes all the time, is its complete lack of evidence.

Two awesome articles, care of Primitive Ways: How to Paint a Mammoth and Black Dye.

Remember all the way back to three days ago when I posted a news article about recent archaeological discoveries showing that humans have been eating seafood and putting on makeup for thousands of years longer than previously thought? Well, ditto chocolate.

Residents of Central America were enjoying chocolate drinks more than 3,000 years ago, a half millennium earlier than previously thought.

Not that this is particularly surprising. It doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to nibble a little on the plants in an ecosystem once you’ve moved into it. If good food is there, living creatures will find it. I don’t understand why we’d assume you’d need a particular level of intelligence–or complexity of culture–to figure out that, hey, chocolate is delicious.

This story is about a month old, so you may already have heard of it, but recent archaeological discoveries in South Africa show that humans were harvesting seafood and using makeup far earlier than previously thought. (Read the story here.) Specifically, 40,000 years earlier. Turns out that steady rise to Western perfection wasn’t quite so accurate. Who’da thunkit?

Marean also found 57 pieces of ground-up rock that would have been reddish- or pinkish-brown. That would be used for self-decoration and sending social signals to other people, much the way makeup is used now, he said.

It’s hard to tell the story of Christopher McCandless without implying that anyone who tries to leave mainstream society and go back to nature is a raving lunatic who will end up getting himself killed. After all, McCandless did get himself killed. Shortly after graduating from Emory University in the early 90’s, he donated all of his money to Oxfam, burned his Social Security card, rechristened himself Alexander Supertramp, and headed out onto the open road alone without so much as a good-bye to his family. A few years later, his body was found in a old run-down bus in Alaska. He had starved to death.