Word: homo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Humans! They do like their words. Studies--by scientists who stuck recording devices on them and then counted--suggest that they speak some 16,000 words a day. Vervet monkeys, prairie dogs and European starlings have rudimentary language systems, but for serious verbiage, you have to hand it to Homo sapiens...
...eminent scholar of animal behavior who also happens to be autistic. These humans have written two books that look very different but are, in their warm-blooded, four-chambered hearts, very similar. In The Well-Dressed Ape (Random House; 351 pages), Holmes attempts to produce a thorough description of Homo sapiens using the kind of language we ordinarily reserve for animals. In Animals Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 342 pages), Grandin does the opposite: she describes animals in terms we usually associate with human beings. Both writers are after the same thing. They want to demolish the hard line...
...premise of The Well-Dressed Ape is that everybody knows human beings are really animals but nobody cops to it linguistically. Just talking about ourselves the way we talk about animals is a step toward self-knowledge. "We Homo sapiens," Holmes writes, "so eager to describe the rest of the world, have been chary about committing our own species to paper." Holmes describes us quite wonderfully, and she's a tireless compiler of biological trivia. She scours the extremes of the earth for anomalous and specially adapted humans, like the Tierra del Fuegians, who (before they died out) wore...
...stroll-obsessed. It's a fruitful topic: walking is so essential to daily life that one can connect the act to almost every and any historical event or human endeavor - battles, expeditions, feats of endurance, or plain old human evolution as we move from crouched primates to upright homo sapiens. And while Nicholson commits that all-too-common sin of conflating his subject with his life - the book is as much memoir as history - he does so with the kind of wit capable of charming readers into glossing over his missteps...
Tutu charmed the audience with his enthusiasm and energy, calling himself the “token male” on the panel and pumping his arms to the cheers of the crowd when Huerta noted that all humans were Africans, since the species Homo sapiens originated in Africa...