Totally fascinating. The curmudgeonly, carefully hedged academic quotes — “It’s pretty brave,” “It’s opening a can of worms rather than resolving a set of questions,” “I’m certainly more excited about this topic today than I was yesterday” — are priceless. Cheers to the researchers who mad enough to make such a stunning argument and jeers to ones afraid to be wrong. Although “and perhaps giving rise to cave art as humans hid for long periods to avoid skin-damaging ultraviolet rays, the authors proposed” is pretty sketchy. I hope it’s not representative, but the Science article is 🤬 paywalled. Anyway, Marshall Sahlins comes to mind: “Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and paleolithic tools, we judge his situation hopeless in advance.”