Bella's World

 PART ONE:    I decided to use my boyfriend as my partner in this experiment.  I told him I was coming over to see him and I will be conducting an experiment for my Physical Anthropology class.  I decided not to share the rules or details because I thought it would make the experiment more fun for me.  When I arrived at his apartment I gave him a hug and smiled.  He started talking right away with the usual, "How are you? How was the drive? Are you hungry? I missed you," and other random questions.  I nodded my head to answer a few of my questions and then he started noticing that I was not speaking.  This concerned him at first, he thought I was mad or upset about something.  After speaking his concerns, he put two and two together and asked, "Wait...Is this part of your experiment?"  I nodded my head yes.   He then went on to ask "why" which is kind of hard to answer with your head or facial expressions so I just shrugged....

  In early 1900’s England, an amatuer archaeologist, Charles Dawson claimed to have found remains of an ancient human skull in the little town of Piltdown.  Acclaimed geologist, Arthur Smith Woodward, and paleontologist Father Teilhard de Chardin joined Dawson in studying the fossils.  Together they studied and announced the findings of what seemed like a human jaw and other parts of a human skull that seemed to date back about a million year.  They based this information off of animal fossils that could help date surrounding remains.  The piece of ancient human jaw bone they seemed to discover supported the idea of a human creature with remaining qualities of an ape.  During the time of discovery, scientists had already found ancient human remains in France, Germany, and parts of Asia, but definitely not England which may have urged English scientists to push the idea that these ancient humans could have also survived in England.  After their announce...

  Above we have a squid and a snail.  I'm sure when you think of a squid you think of a big, slimy, deep sea creature that used to terrorize pirates and take down large ships in fairy tales.  When you think of a snail you also probably think slimy, but small and slow, a harmless creature that likes to hide in a shell and graze on your vegetable garden. The slime factor isn't the only thing they have in common.  Snails ancestors are one of the oldest known animals in the world.  There is fossil evidence that their ancestor gastropods date back to around 500 million years ago!!  Although snails are gastropods and squids are cephalopods, they are both mollusks.  This means they both lack an inner skeleton.  Squid ancestors have also been know to date back pretty far in history.  Ancestors of the squid known as ammonites date back to about 400-65 million years ago, they swam underwater like squids and they had shells just like snails! The ammonit...

  What do you think of when you think of evolution? During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, there was a boom in geology and evolutionary theory.  Today scientists base their theories and discussions off of naturalists and theorists from the nineteenth century.  Many people were involved in the evolution of evolutionary theory.      Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an English economist.  Malthus was known for his theory that the population of man kind may grow, but that doesn't mean its resources grow with it.  He noted that food and water supply for humans would mean constant worry and fear that we run out as our population continues to grow.     He wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population , then published it in 1798.  He never wrote about species change like Charles Darwin or Alfred Russel Wallace which makes it hard to understand why Malthus would have such an influence over both of their studies of evolu...

   If I could only bring two items with me to a desert island, I would probably want to bring a boat and gas for the boat....so I could leave.  Of course that seems like the easy way out.  I realize a lot of people answer this question thinking about how to survive on the island, but I like to think about what I would need to get off the island.  If I can't bring a boat, and gas for my boat, I would probably bring a multi-tool to use to turn trees on the island into a raft, and some sort of radio or device that would work to call for help.  If I were really stranded and I hoped to find two items just laying about waiting for me, I would hope to find a fishing rod or fishing net and maybe something to make shelter with, like a tarp. It's all about survival right? What two items would you bring?