On the run

Race on Wednesday, April 23 Race on Saturday, April 26 Well, today I didn't run on Friday, on Thursday I had dinner with good friends and I had a lot of dinner, whenever I eat a heavy dinner I sleep badly. This time was no exception, I slept badly. And I didn't dare to get up and run. So today, Saturday, I ended up doing it. During the week I thought that I left the appearance of the humans half done, I justified that the Australopithecus and first Homo were not, I mentioned them as archaic humans and that the endurance race was responsible for us acquiring the physical adaptations characteristic of modern humans, but I did not say when this occurred. But let's think about archaic humans, living in the African steppes they did not have it easy, with animals 1.5 m tall competing with much larger animals. There was no shortage of food, in the African steppes there was a lot of carrion, but being so small they had to wait for the other scavengers to leave the remains that th...

Race on Tuesday, April 15 Race on Friday, April 18 Lately, I've been wondering when humans appeared. Well, it is impossible to say from what moment a species in the fossil record can be considered human, there is a transition of traits that appear during geological time. Let's start with what we have now, humans are part of the “Great Apes”, along with orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos, We are in the Hominidae family, the hominids, the truth is that we are not that different. But there is something that clearly distinguishes us from other hominids. No, I'm not talking about intelligence, our relatives are quite intelligent.  The difference is that we walk upright, erect, that is a trait exclusive to humans. There are other bipedal animals, but they have tails to swing and are not completely upright. We call Hominids that walk upright Hominins. Should we consider that being hominin is synonymous with human? Yes, but no. Yes, because we are currently the only Hominin; but n...

  Race on Wednesday, April 8 Race on Friday, April 10   Now it really feels like spring, I hope the weather stays like this all year round, Guaymas would be a paradise. But I know that the heat will arrive in a very short time. It's curious about time, I think we don't realize that the human time scale is something negligible, in fact the historical time scale is negligible. Let's think a little, let's try to imagine that the 4,600 million years of history of the earth is one meter, 1000 mm. In that meter let's put transcendental events not so much in the history of the earth, but in the history of human beings. At the zero millimeter the earth was formed, the next event that occurs to me would be the collision between the proto-earth and a proto-planet the size of Mars, with which we became the Earth-moon binary planetary system, that would be at the 22nd millimeter. Life appears at millimeter 174 and photosynthesis at 239. The great oxidation caused by the accumul...

Race on Tuesday, March 25 Race on Tuesday, April 1 Race on Friday, April 4 Well, last week, I couldn't go for a long run. I had a very annoying flu, and I preferred to take care of myself. So today I had quite a bit of rambling to do and that was it. Since I started the race I asked myself: “Where do we come from?”. It is notorious that I like to talk about evolution, so this question had to do with that. But I wasn't referring to where humans come from, something further back. Nor where do we primates come from, further back. Come on, not even our origins as tetrapods, or chordates, we don't even go as animals, much further back. WHERE DO LIVING THINGS COME FROM? It's complicated. Obviously, there is no fossil record of the last terrestrial common ancestor. In English, they call it LUCA, for "Last Universal Common Ancestor," but that term universal seems very presumptuous to me. I am sure that there must be other forms of life in the universe that have nothin...