Category Archives: Transhuman News

Scientists know that our ancient human cousins ate one another, at least on occasion. At a handful of European sites scattered across some 250,000 years, researchers have dug up hominin bones that bear telltale markings: blade scratches, teeth marks, burns.

What they can't be sure of is why. Modern humans have long practiced cannibalism for avarietyof ritual reasons to frighten enemies, cure illness, honor the dead but anthropologists have no evidence that Neanderthals or other hominin specieshad a cultural motivation for consuming their kin.So, for the most part, researchers assumed ancient cannibalism was nutritional, or purely for the purpose of survival.

Which got University of Brighton archaeologist James Cole wondering: If hominins ate each other for nutrition, then how nutritious were they?

For a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, Cole calculated the number of caloriesthat could be gotten from one adult human male. Compared to other creatures our ancient cousins ate mammoths, steppe bison, deer it turned out that hominins were a pretty low-calorie snack.A 150-pound person provides about32,376 calories, enough for a troop of 25 adult Neanderthals for about a third of a day. A mammoth, on the other hand, could feed the group for a month.

[Could cannibalism be 'perfectly natural? This scientist thinks so.]

Doing research into the subject, I found that no one had ever defined a calorie value for the human body, and if they did, they were kind of throwaway numbers with no indication of how they arrived there, Cole said.

Cole's calculations, on the other hand, are unnervingly specific. His paper contains a chart listing the estimated weight and calorie value for every component of the human body. Head and torso: 5,418.67 calories. Upper arms: 7,4571.16 calories. Thighs: 13,354.88 calories. Skin: 10,278 calories. Teeth: 36 calories.

When you stack up muscle values in terms of weigh, we actually fall right where we should rightbetween saiga and roe deer, which are animals roughly about our same size, Cole said, impressively matter-of-fact for someone essentially writing anFDA nutritional facts label for members of hisown species.

Neanderthals and other ancient hominin species, he noted, were far bulkierthan modern humans, with big muscles and sturdy builds. They might have been a bit more filling than a Homo sapiens meal, but not by much.

It's interesting because if youre labeling these acts as nutritional cannibalism and you compare how nutritional we are compared to game, we actually arent a very good return, Cole said.

Of course, the Neanderthals weren't calorie counters. But they would have been able to tell that a person didn't provide as much sustenance as a boar or a horse. And unlike a boar or a horse, a hominin would be exactly as cunning and skillful as the person who'd like to eathim meaning he's much more difficult to kill.

To Cole, this suggests that ancient hominins could have had ritual motivations for consuming members of their own species, just as modern humans did. This shouldn't be surprising he said Neanderthals are already known to have made art, worn jewelry, and developed sophisticated communication.

Clearly these are complex and diverse human species and their attitude to cannibalism I would suggest is going to be as complex and diverse as our own, he said.

Paola Villa, a Neanderthal expert and researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said that Cole's calculations offer some interesting information, but should not change our understanding of ancient hominin cannibalism. A person may not have offered the same caloric return as a deer, she said, but hominins weren't hunting each other the way they hunted deer anyway.

There never was a suggestion that humans were hunted as food animals, she wrote in an email. Eaten as food, yes, but the cause has always been described as either aggressive cannibalism (well-documented in mammals including primates) or starvation or as a ceremonial mortuary practice.

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See the original post here:
Another problem with cannibalism: Humans actually aren't very filling - Washington Post

Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture

Back in the early years of the new millennium, Scarlett Johansson seemed to have a lane: She starred with Thora Birch in Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowess teen-angst classic Ghost World, with Bill Murray in Sofia Coppolas ennui-soaked classic Lost in Translation, and in the ensemble cast of Paul Weitzs In Good Company. She was a character actor whose existential angst seemed to be in constant combat with the way men saw her, a lead who never overshadowed or overwhelmed the film. And she did not appear to be the kind of actor who would, ten years later, be playing a killer cyborg, right on the heels of playing a drug mule turned superhuman, right on the heels of playing a killer alien.

Johansson has had one of the stranger career shifts of any major female actor in recent memory. Shes gone from indie darling to mainstream action star, and in relatively little time; at just 32, shes already had more phases than some performers double her age. But if you go through her filmography, the transition actually begins to make sense and if you subtly shift the focus of how were considering her, you discover that it isnt that unusual at all.

After debuting, at the age of 9, in North, Johansson steadily picked up steam until she blew up in her late teens, becoming a go-to ingnue for directors like Robert Redford, the Coen brothers, Coppola, Brian De Palma, Christopher Nolan, and Woody Allen, who cast her three times between 2005 and 2008. In the bulk of these films (excepting Redfords The Horse Whisperer), Johansson plays an attractive young woman who motivates the male lead in some way, and though her performances received plenty of critical praise, they tended to blur together in retrospect. Of all her work from this period, Lost in Translation truly stands out not coincidentally, the product of a female director as does Match Point, the peak example of the type of role she was being given in those days.

Aside from the period pieces that most young female actors find themselves in at some point in their early careers, Johanssons first major step in a different direction came with Michael Bays sci-fi flop The Island in 2005. Along with Nolans The Prestige in 2006, The Island indicated a glossier direction, away from the more human intrigues of the films that shed been known for up to that point. That period also coincided with her Allen collaborations, and the contrast between the two worlds, though not uncommon for a marketable actor, indicated that Johansson hadnt yet quite settled on the direction she would go in. However, they did suggest that she had an interest in physicality and spectacle that hadnt been shown before.

The shift began in earnest in 2008, when Johansson starred in the now-forgotten Frank Miller adaptation The Spirit, an attempt to capitalize on the success of Sin City. While that movie turned out to be a disaster, it functioned as a sort of dry run for the role that would change her career: Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, whom she first played in 2010s Iron Man 2. The part was Johanssons decisive leap into the blockbuster world: Unlike other tentpole action films, the Marvel movies tend to transform their actors, due both to the number of times they reprise those roles and the enormous visibility of the films. But the strangest thing about Johanssons experience is that the roles that came next would offer an indirect commentary on those that came before.

Since Iron Man 2, Johansson has played the Black Widow in four more movies. And aside from Marvel, shes made ten other films. Only two of these, Don Jon and Chef, feel like roles that she wouldve played before Iron Man 2. Two more Hitchcock and Hail, Caesar! saw her appear only briefly, and another two were voice roles. Excluding Ghost in the Shell, which just had a ghastly opening weekend, the trio of films that remain makes up her most successful work to date, and the most effective exploration of Johanssons singularity as an actor: Under the Skin, Her, and Lucy.

All three of these movies are very different, but they have a shared gene that makes Johansson feel so natural in them. Jonathan Glazers Under the Skin is an enigmatic exploration of identity and human desire, with Johansson playing an alien who seduces, kidnaps, and then kills men. In Spike Jonzes Her, Johansson never actually appears onscreen, voicing the operating system that Joaquin Phoenixs Theodore Twombly falls in love with. And in Lucy, Johansson turns the typical story of an American woman abroad who runs afoul of a criminal element into a strange riff on the action hero, in which Johanssons character essentially becomes God.

In none of these films does Johansson play a regular person. Instead, with a savvy awareness of her own distinct physicality, Johansson and her directors riff on the nature of personhood, taking advantage of her power as a screen presence to isolate certain elements and call attention to their removal. In Under the Skin, its humanity; in Her, its the body; and in Lucy, its the limitations of natural law. These films explore and subvert the concept of what a woman on film can be, and especially how a beautiful woman appears to a male viewer; in that sense, they can almost be read as a direct response not a refutation, necessarily, but a reaction to or progression from the work of her earlier career. And it doesnt seem like a coincidence that, while Johanssons more conventional performances in Don Jon and Chef were well-received, neither came to define her career like these other films did.

With these films, Johansson has become our leading avatar for characters exploring the line between human and nonhuman. Although far less effective than Under the Skin, Her, and Lucy, Ghost in the Shell is no different, placing Johansson in the place of a robot with a human mind a metaphor for an actor inhabiting a role. While the evolution of her career appears to be unique in comparison to most other major female actors the closest analogues might be Angelina Jolie and Keira Knightley, who also successfully turned themselves from ingnues into action heroines it actually feels quite common when you consider her next to men, who often make this kind of transition. (See: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling.)

Of course, most men arent given the same imperative to explore the way the world interacts with their bodies and selves nor do they tend to do it with the kind of ingenuity and experimentalism that Johansson has. And with her next film, Rough Night, being a comedy, we could soon get a reminder that there isnt any one lane Johansson wants to work in. If her characters tend to explore the edges of what it means to be human, than she seems interested in exploring the edges of what it means to be a movie star.

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An investigation is underway after two human thigh bones were found displayed prominently on the pavement outside a north London pub.

Dan Gardner told the Islington Gazette he had noticed the bones as he headed back from his local The Crown in Cloudesley Square, Barnsbury on Sunday afternoon.

The 44-year-old said: I tried to ignore it, telling myself they were animal bones.

Eventually, Gardner called the police.

They reckoned the bones were femurs. It certainly made for an interesting Sunday.

Its just odd, as whoever laid the bones there clearly wanted them to be found. The bag was open and it was in broad daylight with people walking about.

A Met Police spokesman said the force had been advised by a specialist that the bones appeared to be human and are not believed to be ancient.

He added: It is also too early at this stage of enquiries to confirm if the discovery is suspicious or not. No arrests have been made.

Femur bones are both the longest and strongest bones in the human body, extending from the hip to the knee.

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