Mysteries of Dinaledi Cave

Homo sapiens, humans with brains like ours, have been around for about 200,000 years.

Various members of the genus Homo have been around for 2 to 3 million years.

Another genus in the ape family, the Australopithecines, has been around for 4 million years.  Its most famous archaeological remain is Lucy, a member of Australopithecus afarensis, found in 1974 in Ethiopia.

The cover article in the October 2015 issue of National Geographic Magazine discusses new findings in a cave thirty miles northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, the Rising Star Cave.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150910-human-evolution-change/

In this cave are remains of at least 15 individuals from infant to elderly and both genders.  They seem to have been dropped in the furthest part of the cave as a kind of burial or protection.  

Fascinating, when you consider that these remains have brains less than half the size of ours.  They are 560 cu cm for the males, 465 for the females--nowhere near Homo erectus at 900 cu cm.  Our brains are nearly 1500 cu cm.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-has-human-brain-evolved/

"The message we're getting is of an animal right on the cusp of the transition from Australopithecus to Homo," reports Lee Berger, the paleontologist at Witwatersrand University who has been studying them.

This article is the most interesting I have read in years.

I want to know more about these ape-like humans, possibly a missing link in our human development.

Were they indeed protecting the bodies of their dead relatives?

What were they thinking?

What were their family relationships like?  What did they eat?  Where did they live?

"It's an animal that appears to have had the cognitive ability to recognize its separation from nature," says Berger.

In other words, unlike my dogs, it may have understood that death would come.  It may have thought about its place in the world--"Why am I here?"

It may have had goals other than food and shelter and reproduction.

Did it think, "Who created all this?  Is there another Being, larger than we are?"

I am fascinated by this evidence of early human-like behaviors in a being not yet Homo sapiens.

I want to know God's thoughts about these creatures.  For 2-3 million years, they were the most interesting creatures on Earth, perhaps God's pride and joy.

These questions bring to mind Bethany Sollereder's article "The Purpose of Dinosaurs: Extinction and the Goodness of God" in Christian Century, Oct. 2, 2013 (vol. 130, no. 20).

"Thug God's providential action is twofold," she concludes.  "Each individual creature and species is an end in itself, existing for the glory and delight of God in that moment; and the disparate story lines of all beings that exist or have existed are wound unto the epic tale of earth's history."

Top 20 Grand Canyon Photos

Sun, rain, and 500 million years of rock...

A Life of Faith

Faith Annette Sand, a member of EWC in the 1980s and an active member of EEWC-CFT’s Southwest chapter, died in August.  A family gathering was held shortly after.

Her memorial service will be celebrated on Saturday, November 7, at the Cathedral Center of St. Paul, 840 Echo Park Avenue, Los Angeles 90026, followed by a reception at another church.

For details, call the Cathedral Center at 213-482-2040. http://www.ladiocese.org/Contact%20Us/contact-us.html

Faith was born in Minneapolis in 1939, attended Hampden DuBose Academy, and graduated from Wheaton College in 1961.

After serving on the mission field in Brazil for fifteen years, she returned to the US and earned an MA in Missiology from Fuller Theological Seminary in 1982.

She leaves her husband, the Reverend Albert Gleaves Cohen; two daughters from her first marriage, Heather and Heidi Pidcoke; and eight children adopted and raised while in Brazil.

As founder of Hope Publishing House, she published many books and wrote three books, Travels of Faith, Adventures of Faith, and Prayers of Faith.

I am grateful to Faith for her courage to publish my pro-choice book, Abortion--My Choice, God's Grace: Christian Women Tell Their Stories in 1994.  

Members of the Southwest chapter of EEWC-CFT will remember Faith for hosting their annual Epiphany party in her beautiful home for many years.

She had prayed courageously for healing from metastatic melanoma. 

See also http://prabook.org/web/person-view.html?profileId=359064 and her recent Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/faith.sand.

Here’s a summary of her book Prayers of Faith: https://books.google.com/books/about/Prayers_of_Faith.html?id=2BcotVZrnmAC&hl=en.

Fall Forward? or Fall Back?

As usual, this time change thing has me completely bamboozled.

Fall forward is my instinct when falling; spring back is my instinct when faced with danger.  Therefore, I first debate the whole fall back (or forward?) and spring back (or forward?) thing.

Usually, someone tells me it's fall back, spring forward, which means to move your watch and clocks backwards an hour today, which is also All Hallows' Eve, the liminal time when the boundary between the living and the dead becomes thinner and things get spooky.

But this year I'm driving to Colorado on the weekend that includes the time change crisis.

Therefore, I have more to think about.  I'm crossing into the Rocky Mountain time zone (one hour ahead of the Pacific zone where I live).  So does 1 hr. ahead + 1 hr. back = zero ---don't do anything?

I think so--except that I already changed my watch, so now I have to change it again, moving it back to California time, aka Rocky Mountain Standard Time.

Except if I'm in Arizona, which goes with California in the summer (I think)--except for the Navajo Nation, which sticks with Colorado--and I think Nevada sticks with Arizona (or is it California?).

But Utah sticks with Colorado and stays on Rocky Mountain time year round, though only a small corner of the state has the Rockies in it.  Wikipedia confirms this fact: 
https://www.google.com/search?q=rocky+mountains+location&es_sm=93&tbm=isch&imgil=s324k2sX5TmEwM%253A%253BZxh3zV93X_gRWM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.ducksters.com%25252Fgeography%25252Fus_states%25252Fus_mountain_ranges.php&source=iu&pf=m&fir=s324k2sX5TmEwM%253A%252CZxh3zV93X_gRWM%252C_&biw=986&bih=679&ved=0CCkQyjdqFQoTCP7Z9qLF7sgCFQ71YwodIkYCbg&ei=rqk1Vv7KCY7qjwOijInwBg&usg=__2dgjDf_cFEVwkxHnlqZcs3dyNdE%3D#imgrc=s324k2sX5TmEwM%3A&usg=__2dgjDf_cFEVwkxHnlqZcs3dyNdE%3D

 Utah mostly looks like Arizona and Nevada, not Colorado, so it's hard to be in SW Utah and go with the time zone belonging to Denver.  Nevertheless, I'll buy it.  They had to draw the line somewhere.

The really hard part comes in contemplating the whole concept of Daylight Savings Time.

I never understand why we need to save daylight in the summer, when there's plenty of it.

They say saving daylight really has to do with farmers getting up to do work in the summer.  Again, for a resident of Los Angeles, understanding farm time logic is a stretch, but if I don't get it, I will never be able to change my clocks in the correct direction with confidence.

Okay, in the summer Standard Time doesn't work for farmers because they don't want to waste any early morning time.  If daylight occurs 5 am to 8 pm, and they get up at 6 am to milk cows, they have wasted a whole hour of daylight when they could have done something important outside and there was plenty of light.

So they want the clocks to say 6 am when it's really 5 am.  That means that when it's 8 pm, the clocks are going to say it's 9 pm.  I guess they want to go to bed at 10 pm when it's really 9 pm.

I myself don't fancy going to bed at 9 pm, summer or winter, standard or daylight time.  I tend to waste electricity staying up until midnight whether it's summer or winter, and I wake up with daylight no matter what time the clock says.

Don't get me wrong: I appreciate the sun setting at 9 pm, not 8 pm, in the summer, thanks to daylight savings time.  I love those long beautiful evenings.  

Nevertheless, if they called it Electricity Savings Time, I could get my mind around it easier.  In the summer, we want to get up earlier to take advantage of all those free watts from the sun, so we take 5 am and call it 6 am.  In the winter we're not going to have that much sunlight at either end of the day, so it's okay just to go with natural time.

Unless we live in Alaska, in which case---   

Does Alaska do daylight savings time in the summer?  Or does it try to save daylight in the winter, when there's not much to go around?

Aaaaarghhh!

Very Corny

I usually take the highways for granted, driving to and from Telluride and from Los Angeles to here, and I don't give the food in the grocery stores a second thought either.

But the highways were carved out of the mountains 130 years ago and gradually paved and improved.  The food in the stores has to be grown and then driven over the roads.

Yesterday I encountered this scene on Hwy. 145 at milepost 66, near where you can stop and look at Wilson Peak and Sunshine Mountain.

The 18-wheeler was carrying 23,000 lbs. of Olathe sweet corn.  The driver survived.

The highway was closed from Sunday afternoon through Monday while two wreckers were being used to haul up the truck.  

Traffic was detoured through Ames and Illium, a mostly dirt road with nice cliffs.  The first mile or two are challenging, especially in pouring rain with yellow rivulets of mud running down the road.

Caution: one lane road the sign says--but five cars were coming at me uphill as I started down.  I moved to the inside half of that lane, dodging small piles of rock that had slid off in the rain, while the other cars took the outside.  

Where was that corn going?  Olathe is between Montrose and Grand Junction, and I suppose most of the corn goes north to I-70 to get to markets, but going south over Hwys. 50, 62, and 145 is harder for big rigs.

Here's to the drivers who carry our food!  And may they all slow down for the sharp curves in the road.

Monsoon Driving

After putting John on the train, I faced a scary drive north from Gallup NM on Hwy. 471.

Ahead I could see very black clouds with quite a light show on both sides of the highway.  Then I drove into them and had heavy rain until Shiprock.  

After I entered, for about 20 minutes the rain was blowing sideways, no visibility, constant flashing of lightning on each side of road.  I could not see stripes on the road or judge how much water was on the road, but on hills it was running down the road and maybe an inch or two standing I guess on lower parts.  Much up and down.  

Good factor was that this was divided highway and no traffic.  I could crawl along at 5 mph and not worry about getting hit.  Only two cars passed me during an hour and a half; when they approached, I put on flashers.  

I debated whether to pull over and wait it out or whether to try to drive out of the storm.  If the cell was stalled, the wait could be long.

I slowed to 10 and 5 mph, following the car ahead of me to see where road was.  When it pulled over, so did I.  

I couldn't pull over sooner because it was hard to judge where I was (low spot or top of hill--the latter not good b/c of lightning) and how much shoulder was available.  When the other car started up again, so did I, feeling safer with someone to follow. 

Toward Shiprock the storm let up, and I stopped for a taco and bathroom break for me and the two dogs.  

I was listening to KTNN, The Navajo Nation, all the way, and as we entered Shiprock, Buck Owens was singing "You wouldn't judge me if you'd walked the streets of Bakersfield."

No rain then until Rico, and no deer or elk the whole way up Hwy. 145 to Trout Lake, but just before Cayton Campground some sort of large cat crossed the road in front of me.  All I could see was its bright eye and the shadow of its body.  The motion of the legs and body was very fluid, like a cat.  

I've seen a bear cross this highway, galumphing like a rabbit with the hind two feet ahead of the front two at one point.  This animal was bigger than a coyote, which crossed Hwy. 145 ahead of me a few days ago, its legs moving fast while the body was just carried along without the shoulders moving.  

Driving on ice is scarier, but for above 40 degrees weather conditions, this was the worst I've faced. 

Hallelujah!  I made it home.

Fear and Delight

Alex Honnold on Overhanging Rock near Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park

I love and hate the cover of today's New York Times Magazine:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2015/03/11/magazine/15Honnold-promoimage/15Honnold-ss-slide-8L1E-sfSpan.jpg

I hate it because I have a terrible fear of heights.

I love it because of the sweeping view of Yosemite and the feeling I get of what it is like to be there looking out--but in my mind I am ten feet to the right of Alex Honnold, lying flat with only my head lifted to see the view.  And I will have to be rescued from that spot by helicopter.

When I first saw the photo this morning, I involuntarily whispered, "Move back!"

I want him to move back from the edge.  I can't stand the thought of him doing ropeless climbing on Half Dome as described in the accompanying article.

The father of one of the kids in my daughter Ellen's classes in elementary school fell to his death while doing ropeless climbing with his 12-year-old son near Idyllwild, California, in the San Jacinto Mountains.

This guy Alex will eventually fall too--and die doing what he loves.

Neverthless, I have to thank him and photographer Peter Bohler for this disturbing, breath-taking photo.

More photos of Glacier Point:
http://www.yosemitehikes.com/glacier-point-road/glacier-point/glacier-point.htm#photos

On Skiing and Nothingness

To read a philosophy of life based on skiing, look at this piece in today's New York Times Magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-skiing.html?ref=magazine

Aleksander Hemon says he lives to ski.  He also says that Sartre mentions skiing in Being and Nothingness:

No wonder Sartre discusses skiing in “Being and Nothingness.” For my (modest, writerly) money, skiing is just about the best way of Being. Too bad climate change will probably end it. We might be in the last days of skiing, which is to say that any day not spent skiing is one step closer to Nothingness.

I would substitute the word hiking where he uses skiing.  We can all probably relate to this passion for something and insert the word of our choice.

Each day of our lives we are one step closer to non-being.  Hence the ancient maxim, "Seize the day."

Hemon plans his time around " accumulating 50 to 60 skiing days a season — which is my only real goal in this, American, life."

My own goal is to spend 50-60 days a year hiking in the Rocky Mountains, including a few hours of those days sitting at high altitude and gazing out at the peaks and valleys, feeling close to my Maker and reflecting on the brevity of human life.

The maximum I've achieved so far is maybe ten of these days per summer... So many Colorado days have to be spent maintaining a home and yard, shopping, paying bills, hosting guests, etc.--after earning a living and driving from California.