We are always telling stories about the world, the universe, ourselves. It helps to make sense of things. But sometimes, through familiarity or neglect, we get lost. We forget where a story really starts, losing sight of where it’s headed. What is biodiversity? Are electric cars new? Even the well-worn tale of human origins is missing a key chapter: how a small band of hunter-gatherers survived a climate disaster, becoming ancestors of us all. Here we provide the surprising origins of some strange and familiar things.

All In The Family

This article was originally published with the title Origins.

9 Comments

1. 1. sks23cu 01:57 PM 7/24/10

   Re: Zero ... "funky sexagesimal, or base 60, number system". "Useful still", not "funky". Time: minutes, seconds. Degrees, minutes, seconds of a circle; incl., latitude, longitude. A proper subset of sexagesimal is duodecimal, or base 12; as in dozen, 1 foot = 12 inches. And the Babylonians designed and they and the Romans used the oldest computer known to man to run their empires; see http://bit.ly/af6J9t.

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2. 2. hearst 06:31 PM 7/26/10

   This article is a compendium of superficial trivia. If you persist in publishing this sort of thing I shall cancel my subscriptio9n.

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3. 3. ekeyme 08:54 PM 7/28/10

   RE: hearst , so... maybe everyone has right to earn money & to un-subscription

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4. 4. hearst 09:15 PM 7/28/10

   True, but the article is way below the standard I've been seeing for the last 20 years

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5. 5. Andr� Hurst 04:00 PM 7/29/10

   Mike May must have misunderstood what Francine Segan said about noodles and the ancient Greeks. There was no Greek writing in 3000 B.C. The oldest form of Greek writing, the so called linear B writing is dated in the second part of the second millenium B.C. And I still wait to see lasagna mentionned in these texts....

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6. 6. KCToon 03:49 PM 8/10/10

   Brendan Borrell may have been misguided to state that Chinese physicists are making something that mimics black holes. The printed circuit board microwave traps made of metamaterials devised by the Chinese team absorbs microwaves into the its core, and the lossey core emits heat. I do the same thing every night at dinner - when I put a potato in my microwave oven. Perhaps Idaho is missing a bet by not marketing "Black Hole Spuds from Idaho".

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7. 7. Orion 03:18 PM 8/30/10

   The First Humvee
   Brendan Borrell refers to the wheeled vehicles on the Ur Standard as being drawn by horses. These animals are generally regrded as Onagers, a variety of ass, and are depicted as such on the Standard.
   Jeff Clarke.

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8. 8. rsbiasi 08:08 PM 9/9/10

   This kind of superficial trivia has no place in a magazine like Scientific American. Please don't to it again.

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9. 9. JT Andrews 06:44 AM 9/11/11

   You indeed have spoken well. Yes how could a small group of hunter geithers survive. Lets just assume there were full grown bodies. And empty brains. Because knowedge is learned or experenced. So how did they survive the globle freeze. They did't.
   First off nothing really did that walked on land. Only some sea life survived. But what really should get people attention is why are not apes building cars. And why do chimps not ware cloths. And how come no other intellegent race that is able to work and creat has shown up on the earth. What was so different about man that he became ruler over the earth.
   Also as complex as the cell structure is in the human eye alone. How could it evolve in the first place. All the cells have to be present of it does not work. And that did not come over millions of years. it had to come about in one single event. Many problems to solve. So how did anyone servive the ice age. No one did.

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