Zbigniew Herbert in the NYRB blog:

I THINK HE OFTEN repeated to himself the phrase “O Leonardo, why do you labor so?”—he who was able to look at himself from the perspective of “frozen time.”

*

It appears the whole restless labor of his life was overcome by a pure and controlled art. And yet his painting is filled with disquiet.

*

Leonardo’s disquiet—what do you mean? Haven’t his paintings been punctured with compasses, covered with networks of lines to prove the geometrical wisdom of his compositions, the balance of the spatial forms and the quietude of the isoceles triangles? Michelangelo is a different story, but Leonardo seems to dwell in the very self-enchanted and self-satisfied heart of the Renaissance. And yet his painting is filled with disquiet.

*

Leda, the Gioconda, Benci, angels and women, goddesses and Madonnas; do you understand their smiles and the look in their widely set eyes? And the rocks, plants, and trees, the cold green waters, streams, and air—(how strangely he painted the early evening air).

So many questions, so many mysteries, or if that term irritates your reason—so many problems. And though it is a wise and self-conscious art, his painting is filled with disquiet.

Richard Deming reviews Ann Lauterbach's Or To Begin Again, in The Boston Review:

The poems of Ann Lauterbach’s Or to Begin Again probe the difficult questions—ethical, emotional, political, and even spiritual—of accounting for despair while allowing for it to become something more than a mechanism pressing the death drive forward. How do any of us, Lauterbach’s poems ask, begin again without turning our backs on catastrophic events, events that, like a bad dream, seem to continue to shape and define the present and our sense of a possible—or impossible—future? How does one respond to the world, then, in the aftermath of the aftermath?

Lauterbach’s response provides neither solace nor an occasion to share righteous indignation. She has a sense of hope, but she wants it to be something more than sentimental naïveté—otherwise, from the hope we seek, we may get simply the despair we deserve. And this is where poetry comes in. In “After the Fall,” an essay from her The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience, which wrestles with the prospect of writing after September 11, Lauterbach insists, “Poetry continues to elucidate the vital topography between individual and historical accounting.” The fraught interrelation of despair and hope underwriting the attempts at such accounting has long been part of Lauterbach’s subject, and this statement of her poetics is crucial to understanding her latest work and the terrain of conflicting values and literary aspirations in which it locates itself.

The attacks on the Twin Towers continue to sit heavily on the poet, as they do on many of us. Still, Lauterbach’s task transcends any particular historical moment; it applies to them all, to the ever-present temptations to despair (and misconceived hope). “Or to begin again / in the miraculous scale of the small nouns, / their mischief and potential,” Lauterbach writes in the title poem, positioned near the end of the book. The “small nouns,” it seems, provide a way of locating oneself, and yet, as she also writes, “I had wanted a location but had become embattled / in a zone of supposition and indirection.” How one finds the way to voice history despite being caught between supposition and indirection, miracle and mischief, is the task both the title poem and the book set for themselves…

Randa Jarrar in Guernica:

This is a work of fiction. . .

In the spring of my twenty-fifth year, just after I got my first legit job as a photo archivist, my father died of a brain aneurysm. He was on the Metro-North train from White Plains to Grand Central; his fellow commuters noticed in Scarsdale. Some mornings, on my own commute into the city from Brooklyn, I’d picture him slumped forward in the red and blue fake-leather seat, a newspaper in his lap. If you’re a regular reader of the Sun, you may have seen my father’s “Tut is Back and He’s Still Black” series of articles, which he wrote in revolt against museums’ “color-neutral” depiction of King Tutankhamen. While my father was alive, he sometimes said he wanted to be buried with the old African kings, and when I’d pressed him, he’d said his ashes belonged near the great Pyramid of Khufu. I tried to dissuade him by saying that the pyramids were cheesy; that the ancient Egyptians would have never cremated anyone; that his family would fanatically object to the idea of his cremation, but he just waved his hand, squinted his eyes at me, and said he didn’t care.

When I bought my ticket to go to Cairo and scatter him, I wondered what his Egyptian ex-wife, my long-dead mother, would have thought of it.

My dad’s best friend is an Argentine named Astor, who was his long-time fact checker at the Sun. Their friendship was a tango and so consisted of very little verbal exchange. They played chess and drank coffee and maybe once or twice went fishing. Their dynamic was thus: my father would say something—he had a way of saying everything as though it were the truth of God—and Astor would raise his full eyebrows and shut his eyes once, then tilt his head, and say either: “Yes, I remember that,” “Not true,” or, “That never happened.” When I first met Astor, I was twelve and recently arrived in New York City. We went to meet him at a dive on the Lower East Side. “Meet Astor,” my father said, and I shook his hand. “He was named after Piazzolla.” Astor raised his full eyebrows, shut his eyes once, shook his head, and said, “Not true.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Can exercise influence how angry you become in certain situations? A study presented at the most recent annual conference of the American College of Sports Medicine provides some provocative if ambiguous answers. For the study, hundreds of undergraduates at the University of Georgia filled out questionnaires about their moods. From that group, researchers chose 16 young men with “high trait anger” or, in less technical terms, a very short fuse. They were, their questionnaires indicated, habitually touchy.

The researchers invited the men to a lab and had them fill out a survey about their moods at that moment. During the two days of the study, the men were each fitted with high-tech hairnets containing multiple sensors that could read electrical activity in the brain. Next, researchers flashed a series of slides across viewing screens set up in front of each young man. The slides, intended to induce anger, depicted upsetting events like Ku Klux Klan rallies and children under fire from soldiers, which were interspersed with more pleasant images. Electrical activity in the men’s brains indicated that they were growing angry during the display. For confirmation, they described to researchers how angry they felt, using a numerical scale from 0 to 9. On alternate days, after viewing the slides again (though always in a different order), the men either sat quietly or rode a stationary bike for 30 minutes at a moderate pace while their brain patterns and verbal estimations of anger were recorded. Afterward, the researchers examined how angry the volunteers became during each session. The results showed that when the volunteers hadn’t exercised, their second viewing of the slides aroused significantly more anger than the first. After exercise, conversely, the men’s anger reached a plateau. They still became upset during the slide show — exercise didn’t inure them to what they saw — but the exercise allowed them to end the session no angrier than they began it.

More here.

Carolyn Kellogg over at the LA Times Blog, Book Jacket:

David Rees, the man behind the popular political comic Get Your War On, wants to sharpen you a pencil. Slowly. Attentively. And with a carefully selected sharpener or blade that suits the pencil best. If there are movements for slow food and slow reading, why not for slow writing implements?

“With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat,” Rees said. “It's this thoughtless, Brutalist aesthetic. For me, it's almost a point of pride that I would be slower than an electric pencil sharpener.”

This is how Rees' artisanal pencil sharpening works: You might send him your favorite pencil, but Rees more often selects and sharpens a classic No. 2 pencil for his clients, he promises, “carefully and lovingly.” He slides the finished pencil's very sharp tip into a specially-sized segment of plastic tubing, then puts the whole pencil in a larger, firmer tube that looks like it belongs in a science experiment. Throw it at a wall, he says, and it won't break. The cost? $15.

Rees lives in New York's Hudson Valley, a region full of tiny vineyards and cheese makers and old-school butchers and bookbinders. It's a place where people take the time to create things by hand.

David Biello in Scientific American:

Outside a grocery store in Langdon, N.D., two ecologists spotted a yellow canola plant growing on the margins of a parking lot this summer. They plucked it, ground it up and, using a chemical stick similar to those in home pregnancy kits, identified proteins that were made by artificially introduced genes. The plant was GM—genetically modified.

That's not too surprising, given that North Dakota grows tens of thousands of hectares of conventional and genetically modified canola—a weedy plant, known scientifically as Brassica napus var oleifera, bred by Canadians to yield vegetable oil from its thousands of tiny seeds. What was more surprising was that nearly everywhere the two ecologists and their colleagues stopped during a trip across the state, they found GM canola growing in the wild. “We found transgenic plants growing in the middle of nowhere, far from fields,” says ecologist Cindy Sagers of the University of Arkansas (U.A.) in Fayetteville, who presented the findings August 6 at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh. Most intriguingly, two of the 288 tested plants showed man-made genes for resistance to multiple pesticides—so-called “stacked traits,” and a type of seed that biotechnology companies like Monsanto have long sought to develop and market. As it seems, Mother Nature beat biotech to it. “One of the ones with multiple traits was [in the middle of] nowhere, and believe me, there's a lot of nowhere in North Dakota—nowhere near a canola field,” she adds.

That likely means that transgenic canola plants are cross-pollinating in the wild—and swapping introduced genes. Although GM canola in the wild has been identified everywhere from Canada to Japan in previous research, this marks the first time such plants have been shown to be evolving in this way. “They had novel combinations of transgenic traits,” Sagers says. “The most parsimonious explanation is these traits are stable outside of cultivation and they are evolving.”

Escaped populations of such transgenic plants have generally died out quickly without continual replenishment from stray farm seeds in places such as Canada, but canola is capable of hybridizing with at least two—and possibly as many as eight—wild weed species in North America, including field mustard (Brassica rapa), which is a known agricultural pest.

Ryan Gilbey in The New Statesman:

Like a rebellious child lashing out at its parents, only to return to the fold in its hour of need, Joann Sfar's film Gainsbourg enjoys a fractious, push-and-pull relationship with the biopic genre. Despite sharing crucial DNA, the picture makes quite a song and dance about differentiating itself from biopics gone by. Fortunately, it's a song and dance worth watching.

Like Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Sfar has come to cinema from graphic novels. He brings to this adaptation of his book about France's grizzled and provocative singer-songwriter the visual conciseness demanded of a medium that has six or eight frames on a page, as opposed to 24 frames per second.

The film is live action, but its fragile reality keeps being overrun by cartoons and puppets, as though a fantasy world were plotting to overthrow the corporeal one. This may not be a new approach (it was used to moribund effect in Pink Floyd: the Wall), but it is undoubted ly dynamic. An animated credit sequence, in which Serge Gainsbourg soars over the rooftops of Paris and paddles past fish with Gitanes dangling from their mouths, serves notice that we are not about to watch The Great Caruso.

Should the message still not have got through, the portrayal of Gainsbourg's childhood in occupied France sets us straight. These early scenes are dominated by a yellow-eyed, four-armed, anti-Semitic caricature that tears itself free from a Nazi propaganda poster and confronts young Lucien Ginsburg (Kacey Mottet Klein). If the creature, which resembles a Weeble experimented on by a deranged scientist, is a parody of Lucien's Jewishness, it's one that the boy cheerfully rehabilitates. Discovering that the monster imitates his movements, he breaks into a jerky pantomime to see if it will follow his lead. When it lies in bed beside him, it represents nothing more threatening than a highly impractical teddy bear. In such ways do we see Lucien (later Serge) first neutralise the hostility of others and make a virtue of what the film refers to as his “ugly mug”.

From Salon:

In November of 2007, Jeff Deck encountered a sign that would change his life. He had just returned from his five-year college reunion at Dartmouth College, embarrassed by his lack of accomplishment in life, when, walking near his apartment in Somerville, Mass., he encountered a sign that had already stopped him in his tracks multiple times: “Private Property: No Tresspassing.” The extra “s” in the sign had, as he puts it, long been “a needle of irritation” — but now something had changed: He felt the urgent need to correct it.

In the days that followed, Deck decided to give his life some purpose (at least for a few months) and, several months later, set off on a road trip around the United States in order to document our country's many misspellings. He gave himself the mandate of correcting at least one spelling mistake every single day. Together with a rotating cast of friends, he traveled from the Northeast (“bread puding”) to Georgia (“pregnacy test”) to Wisconsin (“Milwuake Furniture”) while documenting each mistake and each correction on his blog — a mission that taught him about the breadth of America's language problem and its citizens strongly divergent attitudes toward the English language.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The research, published online, ends a 30-year search for the most efficient way to correctly align the 26 colored cubes that make up Erno Rubrik's 1974 invention. “It took fifteen years after the introduction of the Cube to find the first position that provably requires 20 moves to solve,” the team said. “It is appropriate that fifteen years after that, we prove that twenty moves suffice for all position.” Using computers lent to them by Google — the company won't disclose how many or how powerful they are — the team crunched through billions of Cube positions, solving each one over a period of “just a few weeks.”

The study builds on the work of a veritable pantheon of Rubik's researchers, starting with Morwen Thistlethwaite who in 1981 showed 52 moves were sufficient to reach the solution from any given Cube position. By May 1992, Michael Reid showed 39 moves was always sufficient, only to be undercut a mere day later by Dik Winter, who showed 37 moves would work. Rubik's enthusiasm extends not only to God's number, but the speed with which the tricky puzzle can be solved. The current world record holder is Dutch Erik Akkersdijk who successfully solved the puzzle in just 7.08 seconds.

More here.

The Book of Dreams

If you dream of scissors,
two women, one light, one dark,
are whispering your name.

If you sit on the front stairs
at the bottom of the sea,
you are going to spend your life
waiting for someone.

If you are on your knees in a closet,
digging through a pile of shoes
you are going to learn something
you do not want to know.

“Madre, dime, what if I dream of the moon?”

“The moon is a woman, Hijo,
she comes, she goes,
she changes her mind.
She has power over women.
This will give her power over you.”

The book of One Thousand and One Dreams Explained
is the only book in our house, and every word is true.
It's big, so big you have to climb a chair
and use both hands to lift the cover—
both hands turn the pages
that stretch out like wings.

by Richard Garcia
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998

Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times:

The protests, which have erupted for a third straight summer, have led India to one of its most serious internal crises in recent memory. Not just because of their ferocity and persistence, but because they signal the failure of decades of efforts to win the assent of Kashmiris using just about any tool available: money, elections and overwhelming force.

“We need a complete revisit of what our policies in Kashmir have been,” said Amitabh Mattoo, a professor of strategic affairs at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Kashmiri Hindu. “It is not about money — you have spent huge amounts of money. It is not about fair elections. It is about reaching out to a generation of Kashmiris who think India is a huge monster represented by bunkers and security forces.”

Indeed, Kashmir’s demand for self-determination is sharper today than it has been at perhaps any other time in the region’s troubled history.

More here.

During the Cold War, when communism physically enslaved half the world, it also morally enslaved the hearts and minds of Western intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who once said “an anti-Communist is a dog,” intending no compliment to dogs. Growing up in Europe at the time, subject to the same fads and fashions as my peers, I felt besieged by the likes of Sartre and his minions, most of whom had never set foot in a communist country (as I had, several times). In May 1968 I found myself in Paris, at the height of the Marxist-inspired student uprising against De Gaulle. It was a baptism of fire that yielded many a Marxist convert, romantics all. It was almost impossible, afterward, to find a coherent opposition to communism that wasn’t tinged with the monarchist or neo-fascist right. I opposed communism, of course, and thought of myself as a democrat, but who was I? A mere teenager, adrift. I longed to hear a mighty voice raised in defense of what I believed. On a friend’s advice, I turned to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, one of the great anti-totalitarian documents of all time. That, I felt, was all the vindication I needed. It still is.

more from Roger Boylan at Boston Review here.

Early this summer, while walking in the Alborz Mountains outside Tehran, I came across three members of Iran’s reformist Green Movement. It was a parching-hot afternoon, and they had taken shelter from the heat in a cherry orchard next to a stream, where fruit hung glistening from the branches. The Alborz Mountains have long provided refuge, clean air, and exercise for the residents of north Tehran. The northern districts are more prosperous than the rest of the city, and their residents are generally more educated and aware of foreign ideas and trends. North Tehran was not the only locus of the Green Movement, but support there was particularly intense last summer after the conservative hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the disputed Presidential elections. One of the most popular hiking trails begins just outside the walls of Evin Prison, where in recent decades thousands of dissidents have been tortured, killed, and buried in secrecy. A few hundred feet away, just across a wooden bridge over a narrow river canyon, the last paved streets of the city end. Along the river’s banks are open-air teahouses, where nostalgic music is played and people drink fresh cherry juice and smoke narghile waterpipes. Such places offer a respite from the restrictions of life in the Islamic Republic, away from the roving units of religious police and the paramilitary Basij, the plainclothes zealots who attacked Green Movement supporters in last year’s protests.

more from Jon Lee Anderson at The New Yorker here.

Mohsin Hamid in the Financial Times:

Pakistan’s airwaves and front pages, blogs and cafés are full of the debates of a rambunctious multi-party democracy, one of precious few in the region between India and Europe.

Yet the battle against despair is a constant one. I feel it after each deadly terrorist attack, of which this year there have been half a dozen in Lahore alone, killing some 200 people. I try to shut off my novelist’s imagination when I go to my barber, otherwise I might think that the glass of his window could make effective shrapnel and any of the motorcycles parked outside could be rigged with explosives. I also try not to think too much about the snipers on the rooftops of primary schools and the steel barricades at their gates, telling myself my daughter still has some years left before she has to enrol.

It is difficult, however, to ignore the fact that the electricity to my house is cut off for a third of the day, Pakistan having failed to plan for rapidly growing demand. It is also difficult to ignore a general sense of malaise, of steadily dropping official standards, brought home recently by a tragic aircraft crash and multiple aviation near-accidents in a single week.

And now there are the floods. The worst natural disaster in living memory, they have brought devastation to 14m Pakistanis, a number almost as large as the populations of New York and London combined. Pakistan normally ranks fourth in the world’s production of cotton and milk, and 10th in wheat – but this terrible year it will not.

Slowly and painfully, however, Pakistan should recover. And beyond that, its future need not be bleak.

More here.

Morgan Meis on Yves Saint Laurent, in The Smart Set:

Yves Saint Laurent killed himself in January of 2002. He died six years later. When you are as great as he was, you've earned the two deaths. The second death was bodily, cancer finally caught up with him. The first death was in the form of official retirement, the closing down of the Yves Saint Laurent name as it had existed for forty years. During that time, Laurent dominated fashion like no one else. It has been said that he created the modern woman.

There is a retrospective at the Petit Palais in Paris running through the end August where you can walk through those forty years, from his debut “Trapèze” collection with Dior in 1958 to the final collection of evening dresses in 2002. One wall of the exhibit is completely covered with mannequins wearing every version of “le smoking,” the men's tuxedo jacket that Laurent stole for the female wardrobe and re-imagined over the years. That smoking jacket changed women's fashion forever. It is black, sultry and dangerous. A man's smoking jacket made to look sleek and feminine, it says that women's high fashion can have everything it wants, that all the old divisions are nothing.

When Laurent killed off his name and ended his legacy in 2002, he was completing a process that he'd been engaged in all along. Even from that first Trapèze collection in 1958—which was inspired by the costumes trapeze performers used to wear—Laurent was breaking down the boundaries that defined haute couture (high dressmaking). He was actively completing a story of fashion begun in the previous century. And in completing it, he was slowly, over an entire life, laying it in its grave.

The 6th of Sarah Bakewell's 7 part series on Montaigne, in The Guardian:

In 1580, just after publishing the first edition of his Essays, Montaigne had an audience with Henri III in Paris. Henri said he liked the book very much, to which Montaigne reportedly replied, “Sir, then your majesty must like me”. For, as he always maintained, he and his essays were one. “I have no more made my book than my book has made me”, he wrote, “it is a book consubstantial with its author”.

And this was just the beginning. By the time of its publication, he and his text had been growing together for eight years; now he would add material for 12 more, probably until the year of his death, 1592. More editions came out, and he left annotated copies for a vast posthumous one. He seems to have amazed even himself: “Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?”

All this writing and tinkering rarely took the form of changing anything, or crossing out old versions. When Montaigne thought of some new angle on a question, he usually inserted it without further adjustment, even if this produced contradictions. He preferred not to repent of choices he had made either in literature or in life. His past selves each had their own voice, even if the new Montaigne no longer understood them. Thus, within a paragraph or two of the Essays, we may meet Montaigne as a young man, then as an old man with one foot in the grave, and then again as a middle-aged mayor bowed down by responsibilities. We may listen to him complaining of impotence; a moment later we see him young and lusty and bent on seduction. “I do not portray being”, he wrote; “I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute.” His let his thoughts lie where they fell.

Why did he do it? What, really, was he trying to achieve by “essaying” his life for so long? His love of communication had something to do with it. But writing also helped him to live a better life: to become more truly, and more thoughtfully, himself.

John Fitzgerald over at Chris Marker:

Walking over to Peter Blum Gallery in Chelsea to see the new Chris Marker exhibition, I happened to pass by a section of the newly completed High Line, a pedestrian greenspace retrofitted onto an old elevated train track on the West Side. I stopped to look at a curious feature of the renovation: a glass panel cut into the side of the wall overlooking Tenth Avenue. Behind the glass was tiered seating where people sat and watched the traffic beneath them and the pedestrians walking by. The whole image reminded me of a movie theater—tiered seating all facing a rectangular screen—except instead of a screen, there was glass, and instead of a film, there was The Street. Turning onto 29th Street to go to the gallery, I couldn’t think of a better prelude to Marker’s exhibition about watching people on the trains in Paris.

“Chris Marker: ‘Quelle heure est-elle?’” is a meditation on spectacle. Comprised of pieces selected from the early and latter periods of his career as an artist, filmmaker, and photographer, all are united by Marker’s fierce attention to the world around him, be they images of war or faces in the Métro, pictures in magazines or movie posters of imaginary films. The images that make up the exhibition’s title consist of a series of thirty-six black and white photographs of people riding the Métro in Paris between 2004 – 2008. In order to capture his subjects “truer to their inner selves,” he explains, he used a digital wristwatch camera—thereby coming a long way from the 16mm silent film camera that he boldly employed in the crowded trains of Tokyo for Sans Soleil in 1983. “Here I caught them innocent like animals, in the beauty of the jungle,” he notes.1 And while the people he captures—predominantly women—are certainly less aware of his gaze than in much of his previous work, some of the images, while very beautiful, still seem to fall short of being entirely natural. Perhaps the innocence that Marker has sought in images throughout his career is not necessarily more attainable merely with a new technology. As he acknowledges, in this age of the cellphone camera, we are more cognizant of being watched than ever before, and the subway, with its absence of anything interesting in the windows except mirror-like reflections, only heightens this sense. But Marker, for me, is a writer more than he is anything else, and while these photographs are ponderous to look at, I miss the breathless, evocative commentary that accompanies such images in his films. Commentary, in this instance, may be unnecessary though. Why articulate in prose something already so perfectly expressed by Ezra Pound in his poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet black bough”? This was to be Marker’s epigraph in his previous exhibition, “Staring Back,” in 2007. He dropped it at the time, but was struck by how a reviewer, seeing the photographs, began his review by quoting this poem. “So it was true, after all,” Marker writes, “there existed such a thing as poetry, whose ways are by nature different from the ways of the world, that makes one see what was kept hidden, and hear what was kept silent.”

[H/t: J. M. Tyree]

Natan Dvir in Guernica:

Although I grew up and spent most of my photographic career in Israel, I felt I did not truly know or understand its Arab society—over a fifth of the population consisting of hundreds of thousands of families who stayed within Israel’s borders after it was established in 1948. This large minority, which is currently experiencing a challenging identity crisis, has been somewhat forgotten amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a highly political environment I became interested in the stories of these people living as a minority in a country defined by its majority’s religion. I aim to confront and dispute the widespread misconceptions and stereotypes of the people within my own country who I was brought up to consider more as foes rather than as allies. I decided to focus on Arab men and women at the age of eighteen, a crucial turning point in their lives, when they complete school, become legal adults, and earn the right to vote. Yet unlike their Jewish peers, most do not join the military. By photographing and portraying my so-called “enemy,” I hope to highlight the impact that cultural and internal conflict have had on these young people, personally and collectively.

I chose to photograph my subjects in their close surroundings wishing to present the pictures with a sense of place and attempting to reveal the social context within which they live. The essence of the intimate environmental portraits does not lie in their aesthetics, but rather in their complex dynamics—unwelcoming expressions and body language testifying to the tense nature of our engagement. The portraits are combined with personal testimonies and candid images describing the transformation of my interaction with my subjects and illuminating their lives. Eighteen is an artistic point of contact serving as an invitation to get closer. A project aimed at reconciliation through understanding and respect. An inside view by one who is typically regarded as an outsider. If I, a Jewish Israeli man, have been accepted and was allowed into my subjects’ personal lives, so can others.

More here.

From Nature:

Early hominins were using stone tools to butcher meat as long ago as 3.4 million years, about 800,000 years earlier than previous evidence dates to, scientists report in this week's issue of Nature.¹ The finding comes from an examination of animal bones found last year in the Lower Awash Valley of Ethiopia. This site is not far from the spot where the same research team, led by palaeoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Science, San Francisco, had previously discovered a 3.3-million-year-old juvenile Australopithecus afarensis fossil dubbed 'Lucy's Baby'. That find is one of the most complete skeletons of an ancient human ancestor to be discovered so far². The animal bones — one from an impala-sized creature, the other from one closer in size to a buffalo — bear cut marks that indicate butchering, says their finder, Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a member of Alemseged's team.

This, he says, means that early hominins — presumably Australopithecus afarensis — were not only using tools, but also venturing out of the safety of the forests and onto the plains in search of meat. However, they probably weren't hunting, McPherron says; it is more likely that they were scavenging predator kills. Still, the search for large-animal meat is an important step in human development. “We've put this important, fundamental behaviour back into Lucy's time,” says McPherron, who is lead author of the new study. The same is true for tool usage. Previously, the earliest known date for tool usage was about 2.5 million years ago — right about the time that humanity's own genus, Homo, was first emerging. Now, it seems that tool usage pre-dates our genus. “We're pushing much deeper into our evolutionary past,” McPherron says.

More here.