Hominin Quotes & Sayings

How does language interact with thought? Does language enable us to think, or does thinking enable us to talk? Can we think in a sophisticated manner without silent internal speech? And lastly, how did this extraordinarily complex, multicomponent system originally come into existence in our hominin ancestors? — V.S. Ramachandran

I always imagined myself somehow as an electron around some atom, and you're just, like, bouncing around and spinning. There was a never-ending supply of places to go, people to see, things to do, and fitting it all in became kind of an art. — Tom Freston

This is all we get, I thought. Just quick moments of brightness that get taken away before you understand what you've been given. Then — Louisa Hall

If you work all the time, you lose the intermittence of reflection and thought at every stage. Take breaks - for you and your work. — Peter Megargee Brown

Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love. — Yann Martel

A behavior has occurred that is good, bad, or ambiguous. How have cultural factors stretching back to the origins of humans contributed to that behavior? And rustling cattle on a moonless night; or setting aside tending your cassava garden to raid your Amazonian neighbours; or building fortifications; or butchering every man, woman, and child in a village is irrelevant to that question. That's because all these study subjects are pastoralists, agriculturalists, or horticulturalists, lifestyles that emerged only in the last ten thousand to fourteen thousand years, after the domestication of plants and animals. In the context of hominin history stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, being a camel herder or farmer is nearly as newfangled as being a lobbyist advocating for legal rights for robots. For most of history, humans have been hunter-gatherers, a whole different kettle of fish. — Robert M. Sapolsky

A trans-rational definition of spirituality therefore encompasses these two elements. First, uncovering our peaceful internal center, and then, allowing that peace to guide our actions in the world. — Gudjon Bergmann

I had my own motor boat which we would take to Khadakvasla, but that was 40 years ago. — Baba Kalyani

Your true situation will be found out only when you compare it to other people's situations. — Sunday Adelaja

Once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity. — V.S. Ramachandran