Humans' control over breathing enabled them to laugh, unlike other animals such as horses.

Stories prepare our minds for what is to come. Dreams are a sort of training process for the development and consolidation of neural architecture.

Cultural accumulation changes what we are and what we do from one generation to the next and, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned, changes occur so quickly that we tend to imagine them as distant theories or very recent developments.

But it is one thing to be aware of the annual astronomical cycle and another to discover the mechanisms of life. We don't know for sure what, but something happened about 40,000 years ago in what is now Europe.

What kind of sign is a rhinoceros footprint? It is an index, an iconic representation, and can become a symbolic image. A whole world condensed into a single footprint.

Over the centuries, several authors have attempted to put together popularisation works about the big history of scientific knowledge. One of the is Vestiges, by Robert Chambers.