Facebook in our Genes?

A new study indicates that social networking is an integral part of humankind's nature, carried down from ancient humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago.

This was Hadza land, a type of rugged African landscape that we have all seen in pictures and movies about the African Serengeti. Coren Apicella and her research assistants were frequently on the move, traveling the region by Land Cruiser, struggling to cross mud-drenched trails. At one location, they had to lay felled trees on the ground in order to advance, and at another point, they had to flee a horde of elephants. But it all came with the territory. They were studying a nomadic people called the Hadza, or Hadzabe, an ethnic group of people in north-central Tanzania, living around Lake Eyasi in the central Rift Valley and in the neighboring Serengeti Plateau. The Hadza people number less than 1,000 in total population. Roaming over 4,000 square kilometers of the African landscape, several hundred of them still live as hunter-gatherers, much as their ancestors lived tens of thousands of years ago before the invention of agriculture. Some consider them to be the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa. To Coren and other researchers, they offer an interesting case for ground-breaking research and discovery about the dynamics and evolution of social networking in the human family, one element that made modern humans what they are today.

Read the rest of this article...