Quotes from Christine Kenneally

Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," said Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound making instrument-the vocal tract. This explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: we like the sounds that are familiar to us-specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.

The history of the world may be writ in your cells, all of it personal to your lineage and some of it part of the broader context, but though you have been shaped by history, you have only been shaped by some of it. Fundamentally,

The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.

When you talk, your face has more moves than Lebron James.

In the meantime, the works of Gordon, Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices.

Language has to be partly innate, simply because human babies are born with the ability to learn the language of their parents. While this can justifiably be called a language instinct, there is no one gene compelling us to produce language. Instead, a set of genetic settings gives rise to a set of behaviors and perceptual and cognitive biases, some of which may be more general and others of which are more language specific.

Language is unique in that there are no other animals with which we converse, no matter what language we are speaking. And yet the miracle of this research has been the realization that what is unique from one perspective may be constructed of mostly old parts from another.

In one of the most remarkable studies of the transmission of ideas over time, the economists Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth found evidence that animosity endured generation after generation, for as long as six hundred years. Voigtländer

The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.

Because Y DNA and mtDNA don't get reshuffled with other DNA, they can be used to learn something about an individual in your family tree who lived 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 years ago. That person is still there, in a sense, in you in a completely disproportionate way to the rest of your grandparents.

Indeed, humans won't speak or produce language unless they are taught to do so, which means that our remarkable capacity doesn't amount to much at all if someone isn't there to provide a model for how to use it.

Africans believed they were being captured and shipped over the ocean to be eaten. The insecurity of life in a world of slavery is hard to imagine, let alone the extraordinary length of time that the threat of abduction loomed.

Study the past if you would define the future. —Confucius O

After a few minutes, though, I started to take in what all the attendees were looking at: hundreds and hundreds of historical documents, self-published books, CD-ROMs with lists of lists of names, databases chock-full of people who had once lived and whom no living person now remembered. Everyone in this hall was looking for someone who was gone forever.

Despite the availability of testing, at least half of the population at risk for Huntington's disease still has children without making use of the new technologies. Even some of the people who have prenatal testing for Huntington's still have a profound reluctance to learn their own status. Couples who try preimplantation genetic diagnosis may even conceive a child and choose not to find out if the parent at risk has the mutation. Deciding

Developmental psychologists now talk about the cross-modality of language, meaning that language is expressed in various ways. Instead of the image of a brain issuing language to a mouth, from which it emerges as imperfect speech, think, rather, of language emerging in the child as an expression of its entire body, articulating both limbs and mouth at the same time.

The problem of rapidly evolving technologies or "digital migration" was rather alarmingly illustrated in England in the 1980s with a considerably larger amount of information. Actually, it began in 1086 with the Domesday Book. The first public record ever made in England, the Domesday Book was instigated by William the Conqueror, who wished to take a census of his people and, more specifically, their possessions.

The nineteenth-century German missionary Sigismund Koelle asked over 140 ex-slaves how they had been taken. Almost 20 percent of them told him that family or friends had given them up.

Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues found that when the experimental subjects gestured during their explanation, they later remembered more from the word list than when they did not gesture. She noted that while people tend to think of gesturing as reflecting an individual's mental state, it appears that gesture contributes to shaping that state. In the case of her subjects, their gesturing somehow lightened the mental load, allowing them to devote more resources to memory.

If the hyperconnectedness of humanity is true, it would mean that everyone alive today—you, your neighbor, Vladimir Putin, and the emperor of Japan—could count the same Egyptian pharaoh, as well as everyone else alive at the time, as a distant grandparent.

genealogy companies have quietly and steadily expanded to become some of the biggest data organizations of the twenty-first century.

Where genealogy was concerned, I met many people who proclaimed their indifference to it, but it was often an extremely vigorous indifference.

It is extremely unlikely that anyone in the twenty-first century does not have some consanguinity in his or her family within the last three hundred years. Yet according to Feldman, more than half of all human populations today still engage in consanguineous marriage, and up to 10 percent of all humans are in first- or second-cousin marriages.

Totalitarian power thrives when it alienates people from basic information about themselves. When European slavers abducted people from Africa, they essentially took away their history as well.