Why Forever 21 Is More Human Than Upright Walking--My Thesis of Life, Backed By Science

The preview for Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams has had me thinking a lot about Lascaux.

Humans have been anatomically modern--i.e., normal-looking--for 200,000 years. That is a reeeeaalllly long time.

5,000 years ago, the oldest known pyramids were just a twinkle in some pharaoh's eye. People didn't even know how to domesticate plants until 10,000 years ago. 200,000 years is enough time for life as we know it to come and go twenty times over.

For some reason, humans existed for nearly their whole evolutionary lifespan as anatomically modern without being what we call behaviorally modern. Until around 40,000 years ago, there was no drawing, there was no painting. There was no jewelry. There were no tiny antelopes carved into the handles of hunting tools. There was no material representation of imaginary things. As far as we can tell, there was no form of abstract thought whatsoever.

The latest theory about why humans started doing stuff like having funerals, making elaborate necklaces, and getting tattoos has a lot to do with what happened when a group of H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe, and encountered the H. neanderthalensis populations who had already been there for a hella long time. Science had no clue until recently what these two populations did when they met--did they fight each other, did they eat each other, what?

Now, it's genetically evident that they made babies together (if you're not African, you're part Neanderthal--sorry, white supremacists!), and archaeologically evident that they engaged in a whole lot of trade together, too. Neanderthal remains start showing up BEDECKED with H. sapiens-style gewgaws. Both populations' material technology--their stuff--starts to get way more complex, at a way more rapid pace. There's even evidence that this is when spoken language starts to really blow up. In other words, when these two populations encounter each other, they quickly become far more human.

It's here that we start to see places like Lascaux. Cave paintings. Symbolic expressions of human thoughts. A dog can't look at a bunch of lines on a flat surface and see a cow. A human can. A chimpanzee won't bury its mother facing east. A human will. Because of the continuously belittled human abilities of socialization and material attachment, humans became more human than they had been for 160,000 years.

Humans will glorify anatomical details which are not particularly exclusive to us, such as the thumb. But we will marginalize our human obsession with adornment and symbolic materials, even though the presence of these obsessions is actually how we define modern humans as different from humans who were merely anatomically modern.

My conclusion: Forever 21 is more human than upright walking.

Secondary conclusion: I'm going shopping.

Slapstick in Swiss Cheese: This Month's "There Comes A Time" Time; or, Mr. Donuthead, Who's Trying To Kill You?

I got up at 4:30 this morning. Not because I wanted to, or even because I had to. I did it for one reason. One mean old reason, the reason for the season, a reasonless reason, the reason to end all reasons: my back hurt. My goddamn back hurt.

That old waitress war wound, like every fake smile I ever gave turned on its side and stabbing me in the spleen. My back hurt. Like a cracked rib, like a dead dog, like an ice sculpture, like a fishing creel reeling me in. My back hurt. That old lady refrain pressing me tight as an iron maiden. My goddamn back hurt, so I woke up at 4:30. And I went to work.

Christ, you must be saying. Author. Jacqui. Is this going to be one of those complaining blogs? Like the cameraman in that pivotal moment in Wayne's World, you are walking away. Wait! Okay, okay, come on back, I say. Come on back. Things aren't as bad as they seem! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to dump on you. I'll figure something out. Okay? I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.


Some days the end of the world is burning a swiss cheese sandwich. This is one of those days. One of those "There Comes A Time" times. There comes a time, I'll say, when your rotten teeth and waitress wound and poor-me-Sally-ness and inability to make grilled cheese all catches up with you. These days you feel melancholy as a bear at the blind edge of winter and you want to dig a hole in the snow because the days are short and dark and full of hunger and it seems about that time. But you're not a bear. You're a human. A gol-darned lily-livered spume of a human, and singing in the shower, although fun, fails to change that peculiar predicament which you find yourself affixed to like a patch on the ass of a bum. You try to find the thread of where things went wrong, but it isn't there. It's all wrong. It's just you.

These are the days for harelip prayers.

I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.

Come on back.

Completely Unprepared for Jaguars and Gorillas, Our Intrepid Traveler Forges On; or, Not Enough Bell Peppers To Go Around; or, Eek Ik! An Anthropologist's Nightmares Explained.

There are many fives in my life. Five a.m. alarm clock. Five hours of sleep. Five bus trips daily. Teacher, grade five. At approximately Ray Bradbury's death hour this morning I scrawled five hieroglyphic phrases on the lined paper next to my bed. Kegan. Jaguar. Tried to warn. Didn't listen. Got me. Later, there was a gorilla I couldn't feed: I tried to scrounge for tossed-out vegetables, as one would give a rabbit, but this rabbit was a thousand pound living bludgeon and all I could find was one tray of discarded red and green bell peppers--hardly enough for a jungle animal that, in dire straits, will eat young gazelle. As if bloodthirsty silverbacks were not enough to drive the psychic message home, for some reason the gorilla attracted to him a throng of uncommonly loyal, dumb and adorable dogs who were depending on me utmostly to also sate their carnivore's diet of ground beef and kibble. Awoke in a sweat--five sweats, to be precise.

Spent all day yesterday reading about the Ik. Colin Turnbull's other ethnography that I've read was about the BaMbuti, a Congolese pygmy tribe who act and look like tiny, dark-skinned Groucho Marxes. It was called The Forest People. In it, the tribe sings songs about the goodness of the forest, likes to laugh, and has a taste for the hilarious and slapstick. The Ik are not the BaMbuti. Their book is called The Mountain People. An excerpt:

When the mother finds a spot in which to gather, she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground....Then she goes about her business, leaving the child there, almost hoping that some predator will come along and carry it off. This happened once while I was there--once that I know of, anyway--and the mother was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it, and still further this meant that a leopard was in the vicinity and would be sleeping the child off and thus be an easy kill. The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull; they killed the leopard and cooked it and ate it, child and all.

It's like some bizarre Lewis Carroll rabbit-hole where everything is reversed. The Ik are starving. Uganda and Kenya have made them settle in what used to be their spring lands, and forbidden them from hunting in the surrounding "state parks". Their familial allegiances used to be dictated by traveling groups and gathering groups, rather than by biological nuclear families. Now there's no traveling, and there's no gathering. So there are no allegiances. Since there's not enough food to go around, either, there's absolutely no incentive to do something like nurse your infant, or shelter your elderly mother. The most depressing thing is Turnbull's anthropological conclusion that biological family ties are not part of human nature, since the Ik are human and family seems to mean zilch to them. I might argue that analogs of this same behavior can be seen in any situation of acute stress to the survival of the group, like war. Regardless of theory, I'm dreaming of jaguars eating my skull, starving bloodthirsty gorillas, and generally of being put into situations of great responsibility without the resources to handle them.

There's no suitable pun on which to end this post. Pray for me, readers: the jungle approacheth. And it's five a.m., and time to wake up.