Cool news! So every weekday morning during the academic year, Harvard e-mails a briefing called the Harvard Gazette to all students and faculty at the College. The daily Harvard Gazette always appears in the same format, with three featured articles appearing under 'Today's Headlines'.
Unrelated, but I almost always receive this e-mail at 7:01 in the morning, never earlier, but sometimes a couple of minutes later.
Anyhow, the very first feature under 'Today's Headlines' in the issue dated 11/16/20 is titled Teeth Marks!
"An examination of teeth from 11 Neanderthal and early human fossils shows that modern humans are slower than our ancestors to reach full maturity. The finding suggests that our slow development and long childhood are recent and unique to our own species, and may have given early humans an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals."
Apparently, a longer childhood is a recent evolutionary development, as indicated by the fact that a young Neanderthal's rate of teeth growth and development was significantly faster than of the closest-to-modern humans that lived almost one hundred thousand years ago.
Ultimately, this (and I'm sure a number of other related indicators including proportional cranial size relative to the body) led to an evolutionary advantage of our human ancestors over Neanderthals. From my understanding, longer childhoods essentially prolong a number of crucial behavioral and cognitive developmental periods.
Interesting!
Also ... my post title = the subject of the Gazette e-mail -- strange, I know! To my knowledge, Neanderthal teeth, anemia risk, and China's history are largely unrelated.
Here's the full link to the article!
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/neanderthal-teeth/
Eric
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
Tooth and nail (idioms #3)
Tooth and nail usually follows the word fight or some similar verb.
To fight tooth and nail is to fight with all your might, almost viciously. This comes from the idea of fighting with all your teeth and all of your nails, which I guess would be a fair idea if you had sharp fangs or piercing claws.
i.e. She valiantly fought tooth and nail at CVS for that last box of Crest Whitestrips, but her recently manicured claws and braces-decorated-teeth prevented her success.
My thinking is that fighting tooth and nail implies someone really duking it out without restraint (and manners, duh), invoking something rather primal and beast-like. Thus tooth and nail would bode quite well if you had foot-long tusks or the fangs of a sabertooth tiger.
Alas we're humans and should probably only fight tooth and nail with other humans.
An intelligent individual realizing that fighting tooth and nail with this creature would probably be a bad idea.
Photo cred to the movie, 10,000 BC! (An interesting movie to say the least!)
Eric
To fight tooth and nail is to fight with all your might, almost viciously. This comes from the idea of fighting with all your teeth and all of your nails, which I guess would be a fair idea if you had sharp fangs or piercing claws.
i.e. She valiantly fought tooth and nail at CVS for that last box of Crest Whitestrips, but her recently manicured claws and braces-decorated-teeth prevented her success.
My thinking is that fighting tooth and nail implies someone really duking it out without restraint (and manners, duh), invoking something rather primal and beast-like. Thus tooth and nail would bode quite well if you had foot-long tusks or the fangs of a sabertooth tiger.
Alas we're humans and should probably only fight tooth and nail with other humans.
Photo cred to the movie, 10,000 BC! (An interesting movie to say the least!)
Eric
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