Carnival Time

Including this interesting ditty:

Eric Johnson wonders whether schizophrenia-associated genes were under selection because they increase shamanic visions:

What if, [Sapolsky] wondered, schizophrenia maintained itself in human populations because of selection for schizotypal personalites? As luck would have it, for a hundred years anthropologists had observed such individuals thriving in nearly every society they encountered: shamans.

And this:

Archaeozoo posts “Eating the Dead,” examining the practice of mortuary feasts in the Aegean Bronze Age:

Memory is a social rather than an individual process and all memory is collective, structured by group identities. Eating and drinking has mnemonic power. Incorporated into a mortuary context where emotions and sensory stimuli due to food are combined with those of the experience of death, a much more powerful mnemonic device would be produced.

Oh, it gets a bit more gruesome than that!