11 Quotes by Thor Hanson

In a result oriented culture like ours, it is easy to get hung up on endings, on figuring things out and finding precise solutions. But a true fascination continues building with each new piece of information, making new connections, revealing new patterns and opening new perceptions. The exploration of natural miracles is a fundamentally open ended and curiosity driven enterprise. It reminds us that science is not always about the answer, it is about the questions.

By shifting to a highly digestible, cooked diet, our forebears no longer needed the massive molars and expansive guts that apes need to process fibrous raw foods. And with so much more energy available, we could suddenly afford the metabolic demands of a larger brain.

Bill had discovered an ancient river valley in Illinois, 100 miles long, where every detail of the forest was beautifully preserved in the rocky ceiling of the mine. “We simply look up and map the plants,” he told me.

Never argue with a fool – an onlooker can’t tell the difference.

Wrangham’s theory proposes cooking as the critical innovation separating advanced members of the genus Homo from their more ape-like ancestors.

Anyone familiar with children, for example, understands the origin of punctuation. It started with the exclamation point.

Each buoyant husk surrounds a single fist-sized kernel that is hollow except for a nutritious liquid known to health-food enthusiasts as “coconut water.” Whatever branding specialist coined that term cannot be blamed for shying away from the more accurate, technical description: acellular endosperm.

Given time, evolution is much more likely to provide us with a multitude of solutions than it is to give us one ideal form.

Without the act and anticipation of planting and harvest, there could be no agriculture as we know it, and our species would still be wandering in small bands of hunters, gatherers, and herdsmen. Indeed, some experts believe that Homo sapiens might never have evolved at all in a world that lacked seeds.