9 Quotes by Ian Tattersall

Hominids typically haven't so much adapted to change, as they have accommodated to it.

For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology’s turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider’s perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today.

It is...highly probable that from the very beginning, apart from death, the only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.

Behavior is ultimately the product of the brain, the most mysterious organ of them all.

The alternative to extinction is stagnation, and stagnation is seldom a good thing.

Hominids typically haven’t so much adapted to change, as they have accommodated to it.

And we can’t take absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

In all of these papers, we find the key words admixture and expansion used over and over again. In other words, no matter how much Homo sapiens explores and moves about, we like to mate with whatever other people we meet up with.