Everything Perfect for Everyone Forever

some of my fav npc gals from fantasy high

shanidar 1 is a neanderthal who, at a pretty young age, was hit in the head hard enough to blind him. this also led to that side of his brain shutting down and withering his right arm, and possibly crippling his entire right side. not only that but his skeleton also shows that at some point, he broke a bone in his foot and, in addition to the other factors, resulted in a noticeable limp. there are some sources which say he likely had degenerative diseases. (arthritis was really common in neanderthals) 

going off of widespread ideas of “”primitive”” (no longer the word used in anthropology/academia to describe early-modern humans) societies, shanidar probably died really young, deliberately abandoned or killed. i mean, he was severely crippled, blind, etc., he couldn’t contribute anything, he would have been a “”burden to society””, right? 

except he lived to be between 40 and 50 years old. (about ~80 in human years)

this means that his social group had to have taken care of him for a minimum of two or three decades without his ‘contributing’ anything significant to the group. this discovery (and Shanidar III’s) was huge because it basically proves that early humans had a concept of hospice. early modern humans cared for the sick and the elderly, greatly extending their lifespan, simply because they cared. 

biologist:

 (Like we’re so aggressively social that we looked at APEX PREDATORS and went ‘they look soft! Friend????’)

He was a master storyteller, and a master baby whisperer, having rocked my 7 month old to sleep in the middle of shooting our episode of @PartsUnknownCNN in #Gaza. I wasn’t sure what to expect of him, but upon first setting foot in Gaza where we met, the first thing he said to me was that he was absolutely dumbfounded at what he’d witnessed in the West Bank and Jerusalem. “That is something seriously (expletive) up. And one has to see it to believe it. I told the Israelis-you are not gonna like the cake you’re baking-it’s only a matter of time before it implodes.” He also later confided to me that the episode almost didn’t air “We fought like hell, though, to tell the stories we did–best we could tell them and I’m, on balance pretty happy-though definite reservations. In any event, all the right people are infuriated.” The Peabody Awards describes him best when they said “He (was) irreverent, honest, curious, never condescending, never obsequious.” RIP @Bourdain