When I Was Young

Homo sapiens sapiens - Deliberate deformity of the skull, "Toulouse deformity ". Français: Homo sapiens sapiens – Déformation volontaire du crâne : « déformation toulousaine ». « Crâne déformé - Vieille femme –mars 1905" MHNT.ANT.2003.85 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Flint stone tools, bronze age South Hungary - Tisza culture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Always something to learn from the past, from our ancestors... do we, really?
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By ISABEL KERSHNER


ROSH HAAYIN, Israel – for years, archaeologists have been digging their way through prehistoric layers of time, unearthing the secrets of Qesem Cave. Located 12 kilometers outside Tel Aviv and discovered by accident during a road project in 2000, the cave most recently offered up insights into life hundreds of thousands of years ago that provide a counterpoint to at least one aspect of modern life. It seems early inhabitants cared about recycling.

“Recycling was a way of life,” said Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University. “It was part of human evolution and human nature.”

Archaeologists have found thousands of recycled tools in the cave, including bone hammers and reworked flint stones. With aged, glossy surfaces broken by newer, rougher razor edges, the flint tools were part of a vast collection of knives apparently used for butchering, cleaning animal hides and cutting vegetables. Some of the blades are as sharp as a scalpel and as small as a thumbnail.

At the cave site, there is evidence that prehistoric humans were not always so thrifty, but that the behavior evolved. Life in the region dates back at least 1.5 million years, but professor Barkai said that a dramatic change had occurred here 400,000 years ago. He said that for some unknown reason the elephants that had served as a main food source apparently disappeared, prompting a change of menu and lifestyle.

In the quest for survival, Israeli archaeologists say, the cave dwellers here began hunting fallow deer instead of elephants. At the same time, they discovered the delights of a hot, home-cooked meal – and apparently invented the barbecue.

These early humans had the intelligence to squeeze the maximum out of every product. After cooking the meat, then smashing the bones to extract the marrow, Professor Barkai said, “they used the bone fragments to create tools with which to butcher the next deer.”

The cave was exposed by chance when road builders widening the highway to the West Bank settlement of Ariel blasted a hillside, collapsing the cave’s ceiling. Another archaeologist who happened to be nearby, guarding his own cave, spotted chunks of rocks packed with bones and flint and immediately realized that the site was prehistoric.

The cave caused a bit of a stir in 2010, when it was reported that several teeth found there had provided evidence for the existence of Homo sapiens, or modern humans, 200,000 years earlier than in Africa, and earlier than in anywhere else in the world.

By now, 13 early human teeth have been found, and Professor Barkai said the inhabitants might have been a kind of missing link – more advanced than Homo erectus and precursors of Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. The Stone Age innovators lived here on and off from about 400,000 to 200,000 years ago.

The early humans had to adapt to their changing environment – perhaps another lesson for the modern world.

They developed an independent, local culture, Professor Barkai said, that stretched across the territory that now includes Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The hunters needed to become discerning, agile and efficient. On average, 80 deer were needed to make up the food provided by one elephant. The cave dwellers gathered fruit and nuts and collected wood for fires. This area was a kind of Eden, with natural springs and flint in abundance.

They began crafting their sharp tools from flint, according to experts, racing ahead of their time and their human contemporaries in Europe and Africa.

“This was the high technology of the ancient man,” Professor Barkai said.

In a patch that once serve as a hearth, layers of hardened ash date back 300,000 years. Here the earth is packed with bone fragments, including a horse’s jaw.

Though sporadic use of fire existed much earlier, Qesem Cave has been established as the site with the earliest evidence of the systematic use of fire for roasting meat on a daily, domestic basis – “like when we turn on the gas stove,” as Professor Barkai put it. The cave dwellers’ ancestors probably ate their elephants raw.

The cave was organized like a house, he said, with different areas serving as a kitchen, a workshop and an area where children appeared to have practiced making flint tools of their own. The hearth also appears to have served as a kind of central campfire.

Professor Barkai said that evidence of some of the same behavior, technologies and methods had been found as far away as Syria and that there must have been some kind of communication between the early humans in the region.

“I don’t know how,” the professor says. “There was no Wi-Fi, but they knew each other.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, December 13, 2014

BY ALAN FEUER


TULSA, Oklahoma – Disasters happen. It is a fact as certain as income taxes. And when a solar flare erupts or a flu pandemic hits, there is only one question that will matter: Are you, or are you not, prepared?

One could have found an answer – actually, many answers – here recently at the third annual National Preppers and Survivalists Expo. A trade show catering to those with an apocalyptic bent, the two-day exposition was an opportunity for vendors of calamity swag to meet their clientele.

“We tried to gear our event this year to the ordinary person who wants to be ready for any situation,” said Ray McCreary, who organized the conference for the trade show company Expo Inc.

Ever since Isaiah, someone somewhere has been talking about the imminent demise of civilized society. Still, one could argue that today’s connected world of globalized supply chains and multinational banks is especially susceptible to a catastrophic failure. Just last month, a study financed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration found that, because of financial inequality and environmental problems, the industrial world could suffer “a precipitous collapse “within decades.

Alvin Jackson, a jazz musician from New Orleans, wants to be ready. Mr. Jackson, 66, was at the exposition checking out the Ark 290: a month’s supply of freeze-dried food.

“People think that preppers, and I use that term with caution, are guys in beards who live in bunkers and bury ammunition in their yards,” said Mr. Jackson, who had come to the conference with his wife, Marlane. “But I went through Katrina, and I’m not crazy. I know from experience that things go south, and it can happen just like that.”

Mr. Jackson’s cautions inspired by a hurricane notwithstanding, it would be easy to assume that a prepper convention would be peopled with right-wing zealots with a taste for guns and gold, or what survivalists like to call “the bullet-and-bullion set.” But while there was one man standing at a booth handing out business cards for Operation American Spring, a movement to impeach President Obama, there was also a countervailing element of organic gardeners, homeopathic healers and publishers selling books on the commercial uses of hemp.

The exposition seemed to be less about politics than consumer economics and was, if anything, an exercise in modern-day capitalism.

Apparently, there are endless ways to commodify catastrophe. There were tactical knives ($135), mass casualty bags ($ 250), solar-powered generators ($ 4,299), automated defibrillators ($695), gravity-fed water filters ($150) and vacuum-sealed packs of alligator jerky ($15).

Amy Alton, a co-founder of the survival-medicine company Doom and Bloom, feels that fear-mongering is less effective at persuading people to prepare than building a community.

Ms. Alton, a former Army nurse, is a purveyor of medical kits like the Stomp Supreme Trauma Survival Bag ($649) and the author, with her husband, Dr. Joseph Alton, of “The Survival Medicine Handbook.” Her latest project is a survival board game, which she is financing through Kickstarter donations and envisions as a way to introduce the subject of prepping to children.

“Being prepared is only possible if families and communities take part in it,” she said. “The idea of the lone survivalists living underground in a bunker with his guns – it’s absolutely crazy.”

The way Ms. Alton sees it, living in a tight-knit community where you know and trust your neighbors is the surest way to survive a disaster.

“We have to get back to a time when someone had the cow and someone made the quilt and everyone worked together,” she said. “That’s how America was founded.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 12, 2014

BY TEDDY WAYNE


Justin Bieber’s rap sheet over the past year would have been an afternoon’s work for Keith Richards.

Yet we excoriate Mr. Bieber for his misdeeds while glorifying Mr. Richards for his. And musicians are far from the only ones expected to be on their best behavior.

“If there was an arrest for drunk driving,” Robert J. Wagner writes of old Hollywood in his new memoir, “You Must Remember This,” “there would be a nod, a wink, perhaps some modest amount of money changing hands, and that would be the end of it.”

He added, “If an actor behaved the way that, say, Tiger Woods did – and believe me, it was not unusual – it was covered up.”

The days of our celebrating the rowdy, libidinous, self-destructive artist may be drawing to a close. What’s more, celebrities are no longer behaving all that badly.

Blame the Internet’s power to shame and memorialize. It certainly had an effect on Alec Baldwin, who quit Twitter multiple times and bade a recent long goodbye to public life in New York magazine.

Those chronicling the famous also have to mind their manners. A reporter who parties like Hunter S. Thompson did in the 1970s is unlikely to be published regularly by Rolling Stone in the 2010s.

Cat Marnell, 31, is the rare journalist who seems to be written about more than she writes. The news media in New York, where she lives, have broadly covered her exploits with drugs. Ms. Marnell has written for a number of publications but has not stayed too long at any of them: she told The New York Post, “I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book.”

Ms. Marnell has sold a memoir for a reported $550,000. She is ambivalent about her subject matter. “As somebody who’s overdosed and nearly died in September, I struggle with what kind of tone I want,” she said of her writing. Yet she acknowledged that “people do like me because I’m bad,” adding: “I didn’t go out there showing off. When I relapsed, I started writing about it. And it got me super-popular. Drugs are bad, but they’re still fun.”

Our cultural image of the writer has historically been of a thrice-divorced, whiskey-swilling chain smoker who brawls with his rival in a dimly lit speakeasy. Now it’s a married yogi who tweets from the kale section. Smokers, who once had an aura of sophistication, now huddle outside bars, resembling addicts who need a fix.

Coming of age, the writer Jay McInerney idolized Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, all with a noted fondness for alcohol – along with what he called “the silver generation” of hard drinkers like Norman Mailer, John Cheever and William Styron.

By the time Mr. McInerney published his debut novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,” in 1984, followed a year later by Bret Easton Ellis’s “Less Than Zero” – which depicted Reagan-era Manhattan and Los Angeles, respectively – “drugs were part of a rite of passage” for young writers, he said. Glamorizing hedonism, they failed to see the drawbacks, even of cocaine.

Mr. McInerney, at 59, now writes a column for The Wall Street Journal about a less lethal inebriant: wine. “I’m glad I survived my excesses,” he said. “I feel like an extinct species.”

Another species on the brink: the Casanova. With better education about sexually transmitted infections and apps like Lulu that crowd-source ratings of men (often flagging the cads), large numbers of people now deem sleeping around unhealthy.

Adelle Waldman, the author of the novel “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” has found it amusing how many readers dislike her character, a narcissistic young writer who is less than attentive to the women in his life.

Compared with the misogynistic protagonists in the works of the silver generation, his actions do seem tame. “They were able to prioritize their sexual experience and pleasure and find a way to dismiss any unhappiness that women might feel,” Ms. Waldman said. “They behaved in ways that Nate feels one can’t today – it violates our common beliefs of how civilized people behave.”

Ms. Waldman has felt “nostalgic for the more decadent past,” she said. “I sometimes crave a little more drunkenness and people saying the unwise thing, especially among creative types.”

Reached the morning after a night out, though, her views had changed – at least for the moment – as she was “a little hung over,” she confessed.

“Now I am anti-bad behavior,” she said, “and in favor of strict two drink limits.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, March 29, 2014