Quotes About Origins

The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye

well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe.

Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts." Martin

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.

Our word "salary" comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, "salt money"—the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy.

supernova explosions could have generated the necessary heat to create the heavy elements that led to the formation of rocky planets and, eventually, us. (credit

the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.

we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.

When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.

For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees.

Wind back the tape of life21 to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

he sees our lineal success as a fortunate fluke: "Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." Gould

assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I

People in Philadelphia don't come from there; they come from "Fuhluffia.

as in the Old English word burh (place), which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.

The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.

You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light.

we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor – a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. You may have heard her referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. She is, in a sense, mother of us all.

It is beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant—or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from around the world convened in 1969 at a conference on the origin of corn at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times so personal, that the conference broke up in confusion and no papers from it were ever published.

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism

Farming was independently invented at least seven times—in China, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Andes, the Amazon basin, Mexico, and West Africa.

The more you think about things, the weirder they seem. Take this milk. Why do we drink COW milk?? Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said, 'I think I'll drink whatever comes out of these things when I squeeze 'em!'?

a long time ago when cataclysms were common as sneezes and land masses slid around the globe looking for places to settle down and become continents, someone introduced us at a party.