Things are about to get interesting. Probably. The world of independent comics – and yes, there is indeed a vibrant world out there – is experiencing something new. We can call it a digital revolution but I’ll get back to that in a second.
I co-write and publish First Law of Mad Science, a Lovecraftian horror meets Cyberpunk comic that was funded on Kickstarter and is now available for sale on ComiXology thanks to the brand new ComiXology Submit. The actual process of bringing First Law to readers has been four years in the making and is one that wouldn’t have been possible without these excellent websites. I mention this for subsequent anecdotal evidence. Also, and let’s face it, so I can plug my comic in hopes that you might give us the time of day.
Things are about to get interesting. Probably. The world of independent comics – and yes, there is indeed a vibrant world out there – is experiencing something new. We can call it a digital revolution but I’ll get back to that in a second.
I co-write and publish First Law of Mad Science, a Lovecraftian horror meets Cyberpunk comic that was funded on Kickstarter and is now available for sale on ComiXology thanks to the brand new ComiXology Submit. The actual process of bringing First Law to readers has been four years in the making and is one that wouldn’t have been possible without these excellent websites. I mention this for subsequent anecdotal evidence. Also, and let’s face it, so I can plug my comic in hopes that you might give us the time of day.
The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.
Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.
But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.
Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.
To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to hunt as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.
But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.
To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in mammals like dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongeese, goats and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.
Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and that allowed them to move more efficiently.
And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later. The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr Raichlen, of the new article.
And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”
Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr Raichehlen says, and almost unprovable.
But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.
The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.
Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.
But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.
Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.
To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to hunt as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.
But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.
To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in mammals like dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongeese, goats and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.
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