beach party and clam bake news

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A report in today's Nature indicates that 164,000 years ago (far earlier than scientists had supposed), people on a coastal cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean in far-southern Africa cooked shellfish and used make-up. "Shellfish were among the last additions to the human diet before the debut of domesticated plants and animals, [the lead researcher] said. Early hunter-gatherer relatives of modern humans for millions of years dined on only land plants and animals, the scientists said."

For millions of years! That's what's so amazing (old news anewly surprising to re-realize). For millions of years, our species didn't figure much out. Homo had been around for millions of years—millions and millions of years—then whomp!—relatively suddenly—we mind-bogglingly accelerate to become a planetary communications organon self-formatively accelerating, lonely hearts of the cosmos.

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