Fun fact! This is a Dmanisi skull from Georgia, another type of hominin to us. 

Notice that jaw? When we lose our teeth, over time our jawbone heals the gaps, making it smooth, so when archaeologists discover skulls centuries later they can tell whether the tooth was lost after death (as the bone didn’t grow to cover the hole) or during the individual’s life.

The majority of this jaw has healed, so this person would have lived a number of years with basically no teeth. The age of this skull, according to wiki, is 1.8 million years.

This means that millions of years ago this person had a diet with soft, easy foods, and that others in the group would have known, understood, and helped by specialising their foraging for this one individual.

The thing about the episode is that it didn’t even have an inherently trans meesage? Gonzo wanted to wear a dress to this ball they were having and he was scared he was gonna be made fun of so he disguises himself as Gonzorella so he can wear the dress and then the plot to Cinderella plays out like usual, and all the other muppet babies were like “we love you gonzo, we sorry we made you feel that way, we love you just the way you are”

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.