re: #359 lostlakehiker

It’s part of the quote from Genghis Khan. The rest of it rejoices in taking the place of the now dead husbands. Some 3 percent of the Y chromosomes of men in a wide swath of what once was the Mongol Empire are near perfect copies of each other. The original bearer of that chromosome must have been Genghis Khan himself. His reproductive strategy wasn’t nice at all, but it, err, worked.

When we wonder why dictators act the way they do, there’s a clue.

there’s an interesting idea from the very dawn of the history of homo sapiens sapiens, about something that is deduced to have happened i think about 100 thousand BC, long before our ancestors even started to leave africa and populate the rest of the earth, which happened about 60 to 40 thousand BC

it seems that there was a severe drought about that time, which according to the dna record and other deductions reduced the human population to a few thousand individuals, and came very close to wiping us out completely. a narrow bottleneck in the evolution of anatomically modern humans due to severe climate conditions

i sometimes wonder about the action of natural selection on the nature of humans from that trying time. perhaps the results on human nature and morality were not entirely good…