Word: artes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...somewhere between 2 million and 1 million years ago, came the dramatic growth of the brain and our ancestors' first emergence from Africa. Finally, just a few tens of thousands of years ago, our own species learned to use that powerful organ for abstract thought, which quickly led to art, music, language and all the other skills that have enthroned humans as the unchallenged rulers of their planet...
...brains in a fundamentally different way. Despite their burials, for example, the Neanderthals left no clear evidence of any ritual or any belief in an afterlife. Nor is there any hint of Neanderthal language. Most telling of all, Homo sapiens began, some 40,000 years ago, to create art in an astonishing variety of forms, including cave paintings and female statuettes...
...this, Tattersall and others believe, represents a single, profound change: the development of symbolic thought. "Art, symbols, music, notation, language, feelings of mystery, mastery of diverse materials and sheer cleverness: all these attributes, and more, were foreign to the Neanderthals and are native to us," he writes in his 1998 book, Becoming Human. For the first time, innovation was a routine part of human life that could easily be shared with others--not just something that occurred every million years or so. Against that kind of competition, no other human species could hold...
...real problem with parents' playing Mozart or making the baby listen to foreign-language tapes or forcing him to look at works of great art is that this satisfies the parents' agenda, not necessarily the child's. "Babies are like little scientists," says Kuhl, who, along with two co-authors, presents her ideas in a book also coming out next month, The Scientist in the Crib. "They take in data, make hypotheses about the outside world and test them." This sort of learning goes on throughout life, but Kuhl argues convincingly that the process is most intense and wide ranging...
...Simon accompanied him for a few duets, including a bulked-up The Sound of Silence. But by the time Simon began his solo set, it was all anticlimax. He put on a fair performance, but he was in the presence of an eclipsing talent. Now Simon must know how Art Garfunkel felt all those years...