October
27
/ 2014
We humans are such a clever species. Our spaceships have landed on the moon and Mars. We have discovered life forms ten kilometers underground and in deep-sea fumaroles. Our geneticists have sequenced over 200 genomes, while our astronomers have discovered earth-like planets on the edge of space-time. We’ve speculated on the extinction of the dinosaurs, and now physicists at the Large Hadron Collider are close to unraveling the secrets of quantum mechanics. And yet, when it comes to ourselves, there’s an awful lot we don’t understand. The brain for example. And how we became human. Science writer Carl Zimmer wrote in 2003 that, “what we don’t know about our evolution vastly outweighs what we do know.” Three main aspects of
