Exploring why our most distant ancestors stood up on two feet is the human creation story. It’s among the greatest mysteries left to solve. New evidence suggests birds may have played a role. For decades scholars believed what lit the fuse on human development was bigger brains, but the current consensus is that walking upright was the crucial turning point. Recent studies found several primate species stood up on two feet more than two million years before the brain started... Read more
The Sumerians engraved the myth of the Garden of Eden on clay tablets about 5,000 years ago to establish their cultural identity as the first farming civilization in the world. A genetic study from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research suggests the myth is an accurate rendering of history. The Sumerian myth begins when the vegetative gardens of the world were maintained by lesser gods under the authority of the supreme executive twin brothers Enlil and Enki, sometimes... Read more
Hunter-gatherers lived in extremely busy bird migration corridors in Panama 13,000 years ago and in Israel 23,000 years ago because they understood something that science only recently found to be true. Migratory birds substantially increase floral diversity on their seasonal grounds by carrying exotic seeds over hundreds of miles. By introducing new vegetation over hundreds of thousands of years, birds gradually redefined the landscape of their seasonal homes while feeding the soil with droppings. A diversity of vegetation ultimately leads... Read more
The ancient and cross-cultural belief that birds contained the souls of ancestors may have played a key role in one of the greatest adventures in human history – crossing the Pacific Ocean and populating the Americas. At least 14,000 years ago the closest known genetic relatives of Native Americans were living in Ust-Kyakhta, on the Russian side of the border with Mongolia, according to a 2020 genetic study by the Max Planck Institute. Ust-Kyakhta is located where three global bird... Read more
The fossil record and genetic evidence paints a clear picture of where our mysterious road-tripping cousins the Denisovans traveled, from Africa to Central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau and possibly Australia. Overlaying modern bird migration maps on the fossil record suggests the Denisovans followed avian migration routes around the world. Since 2010, when fossil evidence was first discovered in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, Denisovans have emerged as a fascinating and very accomplished human-like species that may... Read more
It was the day before Thanksgiving 27 years ago and I was the only reporter at The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel without family in western Colorado, so I got the airport assignment. “Go to Walker Field and find a coming-home story, people hugging at the airport,” the city editor told me. “Bring Brad (the photographer), he’ll know what to do.” “Right,” I said. “The spirit of Thanksgiving.” Twenty minutes later Brad and I were sitting in the terminal at Walker... Read more
It was a Tuesday morning in October 2012 when the IT guy said my e-mail was no longer on the server in the basement but was now “in the cloud.” I was a bit confused and sort of uneasy. “This cloud,” I asked. “Where is it exactly?” “You need a new password to get in.” In May 1997, a company called NetCentric applied for a trademark on “cloud computing” to describe Internet subscription services for data and software applications. The... Read more
Reenacting the moment of creation inside the body and mind has long been a cross-cultural shamanic practice. The majority of creation myths begin with a source of heat evaporating dormant waters into the first clouds and storms – the birth of weather and the perpetual water cycle (see previous column for more on this). Across numerous cultures, shamanic figures have recreated the moment of creation internally by generating a spiritual heat that produces a divine vapor, empowering the shaman to... Read more
It’s hard to find a more important moment in Earth’s history than the very first thunderstorm. For 700 million years after the planet formed, the volcanic landscape was too hot for water to exist in any form until finally the crust began to cool and high in the atmosphere the temperature dropped below 100 degrees Celsius for the first time. At that moment – about 3.8 billion years ago – water vapor condensed into clouds for the first time and... Read more
Naturalists of the ancient world once believed the whooper swan was the original ancestor of all birds. It was the first avian species to receive a Latin name, Cygnus. In Siberia and northern Japan, shamanic cultures identified the whooper as their ancestral mother. Whoopers were also believed to be an all-female species that propagated by immaculate conception. In parts of northern Russia the birth of the Virgin Mary is celebrated on September 21 by releasing two swans. The bright white... Read more
Adventures in Eco-Mythology
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