A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [276]
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*48Absolute brain size does not tell you everything—or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations. It is relative size that matters, a point that is often overlooked. As Gould notes, A. africanus had a brain of only 450cc, smaller than that of a gorilla. But a typical africanus male weighed less than a hundred pounds, and a female much less still, whereas gorillas can easily top out at 600 pounds. (ever since darwin 181–3)
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*49One possibility is that Neandertals and Cro-Magnons had different numbers of chromosomes, a complication that commonly arises when species that are close but not quite identical conjoin. In the equine world, for example, horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys 62. Mate the two and you get an offspring with a reproductively useless number of chromosomes, 63. You have, in short, a sterile mule.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Bryson is the author of numerous works of travel literature. In addition to his bestselling books for Broadway, including A Walk in the Woods, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, he is the author of Mother Tongue, The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, and Neither Here Nor There. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife, Cynthia, and their children.
ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
The Lost Continent
Mother Tongue
Neither Here Nor There
Made in America
Notes from a Small Island
A Walk in the Woods
I'm a Stranger Here Myself
In a Sunburned Country
Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words
Bill Bryson's African Diary
Go to the Next Page to Read Chapter 7 from
Bill Bryson’s At Home
Coming in October 2010
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
THE DRAWING ROOM
I
If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.
Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing room was challenged in more refined circles by the French salon, which was sometimes anglicized to saloon, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that saloon came first to signify a roomfor socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile. Salon, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places