The results were striking. Regardless of age, many infants flatly refused to touch the plants at all. When they did touch them, they waited substantially longer before doing so than they did with the artifacts. By contrast, even with the novel objects, infants showed none of this reluctance. This suggests that well before one year of age, infants

First, they grind and leach the flour with copious amounts of water, which increases digestibility and decreases concentrations of the vitamin B1-destroying thiaminase. Second, in making the cakes, the flour is directly exposed to ash during heating, which lowers its pH and may break down the thiaminase. Third, nardoo gruel is consumed using only

In fact, by age one, infants use their own early cultural knowledge to figure out who tends to know things, and then use this performance information to focus their learning, attention, and memory. Infants are well known to engage in what developmental psychologists call “social referencing.” When an infant, or young child, encounters something

for African-American students at a community college, being taught by an African-American instructor reduced class dropout rates by 6 percentage points and increased the fraction attaining a B or better by 13 percentage points. Similarly, using data from freshman (first-years) at the University of Toronto, Florian’s team has also shown that getting

While natural selection traded strength for fat, increasingly complex tools and techniques drove another key genetic change: the human neocortex sends corticospinal connections deeper into the motor neurons, spinal cord, and brain stem than in other mammals. It is the depth of these connections—in part—that facilitates our fine dexterity for

Let’s briefly consider just a few of the Inuit cultural adaptations that you would need to figure out to survive on King William Island. To hunt seals, you first have to find their breathing holes in the ice. It’s important that the area around the hole be snow covered—otherwise the seals will hear you and vanish. You then open the hole, smell it

humans survive neither by our instinctual abilities to find food and shelter, nor by our individual capacities to improvise solutions “on the fly” to local environmental challenges. We can survive because, across generations, the selective processes of cultural evolution have assembled packages of cultural adaptations—including tools, practices,

Compared to other primates, humans have an unusual digestive system. Starting at the top, our mouths, gapes, lips, and teeth are oddly small, and our lip muscles are weak. Our mouths are the size of a squirrel monkey’s, a species that weighs less than three pounds. Chimpanzees can open their mouths twice as wide as we can and hold substantial

cooking is probably the most important piece of cultural know-how that has shaped our digestive system. The primatologist Richard Wrangham has persuasively argued that cooking (and therefore fire) has played a crucial role in human evolution. Richard and his collaborators laid out how cooking, if done properly, does an immense amount of digestion