Quotes from Ian Tattersall

The alternative to extinction is stagnation, and stagnation is seldom a good thing.

It is...highly probable that from the very beginning, apart from death, the only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.

Hominids typically haven't so much adapted to change, as they have accommodated to it.

And we can't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology's turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider's perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today.

In all of these papers, we find the key words admixture and expansion used over and over again. In other words, no matter how much Homo sapiens explores and moves about, we like to mate with whatever other people we meet up with.

Human beings, on the other hand, are symbolic creatures. Inside their heads they break down the outside world into a mass of mental symbols, then recombine those symbols to recreate that world. What they subsequently react to is often the mental construct, rather than the primary experiences themselves.

There are three major genetic observations that have been made about the diversity of people living on the African continent. First, Africa shows more genetic diversity than the other continents. Second, most of the genetic variation outside of Africa is a subset of the variation found within Africa. Finally, genetic diversity decreases with increasing distance from Africa.

In fact, Wilson and King showed that the difference in the average protein-coding gene sequences of chimps and modern humans was about 1 percent. In other words, the proteins that we use in our day-to-day biology are nearly identical to those that chimpanzees and bonobos use.

technologies (reflecting new and more complex behaviors) do not tend to be associated with the appearance of new kinds of hominid. It was old kinds of hominid that started to do new things, even though those new things always seem to indicate a step up in cognitive complexity.

We tend to take what is familiar for what is natural

The fact that Homo sapiens is the only hominid species on the Earth today makes it easy to assume that our lonely eminence is historically a natural state of affairs—which it clearly is not.

the chimpanzee can't articulate his state of mind to us, or answer our questions about it. But then, for all of his physical differences, if he could talk he would be one of us. Nothing else he could do would place him more emphatically in the human camp, for it has been recognized since ancient times that language defines us as nothing else does.

A people is what is seen before the eyes or what history reveals; a race is what is looked for and is often assumed." Here was one of the first explicit intimations that race might be an intellectual rather than a biological construct.

some current controversies are caused, or at least stoked, by a reluctance to abandon received ideas that may well have outlived their usefulness.

It is...highly probable that from the very beginning, apart from death, the only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.