Note: This article contains Man of Steel spoilers…


The new Superman film Man of Steel (2013) depicts Kryptonians as an ancient technologically advanced race that mastered space travel and began to colonize the stars thousands of years ago (even visiting Earth at one point). Growing children in chambers replaced live birth because population control in these far-flung outposts and on the overcrowded home world was...

Double-spout and bridge water vessels are common in many South American cultures. Although used as far back as the Machallila culture (1430-830 BP) of Ecuador, [1] it is most often associated with the Paracas and Nazca cultures of southern Peru. The Paracas culture (700 BCE-1 CE) can be split into two subcultures, the Cavernas and the Necropolis. The Cavernas subculture was named thusly because...

Apart from language, the manufacture and use of tools is often used to differentiate humans from animals. For instance, in his book The Cultured Chimpanzee (2004), the primatologist William McGrew explains that one common argument laid against the concept of ape culture is that they have never built and launched a space craft. However, he counters that most humans haven’t done this either. It...

Human evolution is obviously one of the most important aspects of human history, so I've decided to post information on how to tell whether or not a fossil hominid was bipedal. It's not as difficult as it sounds. The following list is by no means meant to be comprehensive. Just look upon it as a primer.

The first place to look is the head. All vertebrates have a hole in the skull through...

Animism is sometimes considered the earliest form of human religion. But what about before we started to think in terms of us vs. them (humans vs. animals), before we left the forests and evolved into our present forms? I'm currently reading The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology (2004) by William C. McGrew. The chapter on social culture mentions a very strange practice of male chimpanzees that borders...