Civilization, we shall find, like Universalism and Christianity, is anti evolutionary in its effects; it works against the laws and conditions which regulated the earlier stages of man's ascent.
...the student of prehistoric man...cannot reject [the Castenedolo skull] as false without doing injury to his sense of truth, and he cannot accept it as fact without shattering his accepted beliefs.
Maybe it's wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people. [as quoted in "Brain Gain" by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 4/27/09 issue]
The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being YOU: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.
Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.
I was going to France to do my masters and my Ph.D., but I didn't know how to say, 'bonjour.' You really feel like a baby, starting everything from scratch.
As scientists, we keep an open mind, but we have to base our ideas about the past on archaeological evidence.
Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.
Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most p...
There's only one thing that regularly keeps me up at night. Working with the greatest people in the world and knowing that they are counting on me to build a company that endures - a company where they can grow professionally. A company where they ca...
In Egypt, I do survey work on the ground. That's really the most important part of using satellite images. You know, it helps us to find potential locations for sites, and then we get to go there on the ground and confirm what we've seen.
I read recently that 60% of all drugs on the black-market had been put there by the police. No sooner are drugs seized, it seems, than they are recycled onto the streets by the arresting officers! I know our Leader, Mrs Thatcher, is in favour of priv...
The common-sense notion that 'There is a time and place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.
... --an entire cohort with something new to offer to the world as years of experience combined with continuing health. [p. 52]
... most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.
If you happen to be one of the people who has a split zygomaticus major muscle, where the lower part of it is tethered to the overlying skin, this will create a dimple in your cheek when you smile.
She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.
I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
I am classified as a disabled veteran. The reason I'm disabled is because I have wounds and injuries that I got while on active duty... from parachute jumping to combat to gunshot wounds, all that stuff.
Whenever I've had to make a major decision as a doctor, cop or for a company I've worked for, I ask myself: What is the value proposition here? Will my decision bring added value to the population I have the privilege to serve?
I thought if I could understand why apes get mean and horrible and aggressive when they grow up, maybe I could understand why people get mean and horrible and aggressive and have wars.