Cells build long molecules using activated nucleotides and amino acids. In the construction of RNA and DNA, nucleotide triphosphates are used, their combination in a chain is accompanied by the release of pyrophosphoric acid, rather than water. A similar trick allows the cells to collect proteins. However, Miller’s apparatus produces normal, not activated amino acids. Without complex cellular activation systems, it is impossible to obtain proteins from them in the aqueous medium.

Therefore, on a lifeless planet, to unite amino acids and nucleotides into chains, one must somehow get rid of water. For this purpose, for example, bays and lagoons on the shores of the ocean, which fill with water at high tide and dry out in low tide, are well suited. Similar conditions of frequent drying are possible in volcanic areas due to regular discharges of hot water from geysers.

Experiments have shown that baking dry mixtures of nucleotides at a temperature of 120 оС leads to the formation of short chains of RNA from 3-10 nucleotides. To combine amino acids in proteins, these conditions are too stringent, they lead to the decomposition of the amino acids themselves. However, as it turned out, complete drying and not required: it is enough that in the solution there was no “chemically free” water. In a strong brine (100 grams or more NaCl per liter, as in the Dead Sea), all water molecules are firmly bound to sodium and chlorine ions and are not chemically free. Therefore, in brine at temperatures of 60-80 оС, the equilibrium is shifted toward bonding, and the amino acids combine in short chains (this reaction is called “salt peptide synthesis” and will be described in more detail in the following chapters). So, although water is necessary for life, it should not be too much.

Another problem of the “primary broth” theory is related to the fact that it has no boundaries. In cells, thousands of genes “play in the same team” thanks to the cell membrane separating them from the external environment. In order to create the simplest cooperation between different RNAs, some of which are engaged in copying, while others, for example, prepare nucleotide details for this, these RNAs should somehow separate their close company from the rest of the world. Then the nucleotides will go on copying only those RNAs that made them, and the copying RNA will copy only itself and its neighbors that supply it with nucleotides. In the boundless broth, these nucleotides will blur and reach all neighbors, regardless of their contribution to the common cause. Copying RNA, which tries to replicate not only itself, but also other molecules, in conditions of the broth can not distinguish allies from hangers-on and eventually lose in competition.

Scientists have proposed two different solutions to the problem of borders, which by analogy with the “primary broth” were named “primary pizza” and “primary mayonnaise”. In the “primary pizza” model, set out in the book “The Major Transitions in Evolution” (John Maynard Smith, Eörs Szathmáry, 1995), life was born as a thin layer of organic molecules on the clay surface (for example, kaolinite or smectite); whose particles consist of thin aluminosilicate layers. Clay can swell, because water molecules, like other cations and anions, penetrate between these layers, increasing the distances between them. Experiments have shown that clay quite firmly binds amino acids, nucleotides, proteins, RNA and other biological molecules. On the surface of clay crystals and between its layers they accumulate in high concentration even from a very dilute solution. Adsorbing properties of clay are also used in everyday life: you probably saw smectite called “mineral filler for cat litter”. On clay nucleotides spontaneously line up exactly as they need to be “stitched” into the RNA chain. Long RNA molecules are very rarely separated from the clay completely, but can move slowly along its surface, detaching itself from one end or the other. Mathematical modeling of the interaction of different RNAs on a flat mineral surface (Czaran T., Szathmary E., 2000) showed that under such conditions groups of different molecules linked by mutual help are easily formed, and the multiplication of parasites is limited and does not lead to the extinction of cooperating RNA.

So, although there are no clear boundaries on the mineral surface, it sufficiently restricts the mobility of RNA and nucleotides, so that close self-help groups can appear.

Another contribution of the mineral substrate to the emergence of life is that it can work as a catalyst, i.e., accelerate chemical reactions. This function comes to the fore in those variants of the “primary pizza” model, in which non-clay is offered as a mineral base, and sulfide minerals are pyrite (FeS2), sphalerite (ZnS), alabandine (MnS). Further in this chapter, we will consider in more detail the relationship of sulfide minerals with biochemistry.

The model of “primary mayonnaise” was proposed by Harold Morowitz in the book “Mayonnaise and The Origin of Life: Thoughts of Minds and Molecules”. It suggests that primitive analogues of cell membranes existed from ancient times, even before the appearance of self-replicating RNAs. In other words, the whole world of RNA existed inside the protocells – small fatty vesicles. The theory of “primary mayonnaise” has fewer supporters than the theory of “primary pizza”, because there is a nutritional problem for the rosette: nucleotides pass very badly through the membranes. In modern cells, there are special transport proteins for this, but no adequate solution for the uptake of nucleotides by primitive protocells has been found so far. But in the “primary mayonnaise” model, very effective separation of RNA molecules into cooperative groups is achieved, so scientists are not in a hurry to reject it. Moreover, there are ways of combining theories of “primary pizza” and “primary mayonnaise”: clay particles, as it turns out, help the formation of membrane vesicles, with the resulting bubble surrounding the clay particle from all sides.

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The thought of having to do your own research project makes you sweat? You can breathe, empiricism is much easier than your reputation announces. After all, research is like cooking a four-course meal: it depends on adding the right ingredients at the right time. And just as with food, you can not know how it tasted until you prepare and eat it.

Structure is everything: research projects need red threads

For each research project, a red thread is really important: all phases of the empirical survey depend on it in turn – from the first research idea to the presentation of the results and the summary. This applies to surveys as well as to focus groups, content analyzes, expert interviews or scientific observations. So, in a row, and every research and statistics muddled part of the past belongs to the past.

Step 1: The interest in knowledge

You can only research if you know exactly what you want to research. That should be clarified. Each research project initially has a general interest in cognition. From this research questions or hypotheses are derived. This takes place in the economy from factual contexts, in science in the course of detailed literature searches. The research questions formulate the exact details to be investigated.

A little tip: It is better to ask, “What influence do the ingredients of a dish have on the taste?” Instead of: “Do the ingredients have any influence?” – otherwise you can only answer your research question with a yes or no.

The difference between research question and hypothesis

Hypotheses in turn use findings from the literature, from preliminary studies or parallel surveys and make a guess based on it. There you formulate: “The more cream added, the better it tastes” or: “When cream is added, then the taste changes.” Only when you have worked out your research questions or hypotheses, you can think in accordance with how you achieve the most efficient results.

Note: you answer research questions, hypotheses are checked.

Step 2: The Setting

How to set up your investigation, you can either after you have the research questions or hypotheses set up or in parallel to think. Be careful here: determining the right research methodology steers your entire project including evaluation and presentation of results.

Qualitatively or quantitatively research

On the one hand, you can do something qualitatively – in search of verbal content – or on the other hand quantitatively – in search of numbers.

Definition Qualitative Research: In qualitative settings, you are looking for verbal answers to questions such as “What does a dish have to contain to make it taste great?”.

Definition Quantitative Research: Quantitative empiricism, on the other hand, aims at the collection of numbers in the form of percentages, averages or the like. For example, you might ask, “Did you like this dish?” Or “Please rate this dish with a grade.”

Step 3: The population

If you do not think carefully about who or where you want to find out, it will not work. In interaction with the setting of a survey is the exact definition of your population: Who – in a survey – or where exactly – in an observation or content analysis – should be examined at all? Unfortunately, many make the mistake of not making this determination or not sufficiently accurate. This leads to results that are not or poorly useable, because it is not clear what they apply at all.

Full survey or sample?

Once you have clearly defined the population, you can consider whether a full survey – of the entire population – is possible. If this is not the case, you will take a sample and examine only part of the population. You choose this part randomly, according to certain characteristics or arbitrarily – depending on how your setting requires it.

Step 4: The survey

Now it goes to the actual survey by questionnaire, guide, coding scheme or protocol sheet. Your questions or survey dimensions must be absolutely accurate here. This means that there should be no contradictions or blurring on your research questions or hypotheses. Also the measurement level is crucial for how much you can read out of the data later. For example, if you merely ask, “Did you like this dish?” You can read far less about the results than “Please judge this dish with a grade,” or “How many times a year would you like to eat this dish?”

Step 5: Pretest and evaluation

At the pretest, the survey instrument is checked for suitability. If it does not work satisfactorily, it has to be reworked. After collecting it goes to the evaluation.

Note: Data analyzes are initially technical. Only then do you interpret.

Step 6: Collect, evaluate and interpret data

When collecting the data, do you check whether you were able to collect enough data? Has the full elevation really been fully charged, and does the sample show satisfactory returns? – Otherwise, your results may not be representative. If the data are then available, their technical evaluation follows. Here you use – especially in quantitative surveys – best a statistical evaluation program such as SPSS. Again, this is easy to learn and use with an instruction manual.

Result section: First evaluate, then discuss

When evaluating, you first describe your results in descriptive statistics, then you sample them for your population – the significance checks. Now you can start to interpret the results, i.e. answering your research questions or testing your hypotheses. If necessary, you will conduct in-depth data analyzes. Finished?

Now it is still necessary to prepare and present the results as strikingly as possible, so that everyone – even those who are hearing about your investigation for the first time – can quickly get used to it. Not so hard, right? Otherwise, you always can address to writing services for research paper writing help.

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If we substitute an “animal” for this definition, what will happen? Nonsense? It turns out, no. The behavior of animals is difficult, and in a number of cases the word culture can be applied to it. Some scholars prefer to use the phrase “behavioral tendencies” (for example, the well-known ethologist Jason Badridze believes that “culture” is human, it implies art and such things), but we will not go into terms. Behavioral tendency is only one direction of activity transmitted through training, and by culture usually means a set of behavioral tendencies. That is, the culture of animals is a complex of skills, skills and, I’m not afraid of this word, knowledge that is transmitted in this community from generation to generation. Cultural traditions are not inherited, they are transmitted either by imitation, or in the course of learning from parents to children. Culture is clearly different from learning something by trial and error. Moreover, the culture is limited to the framework of a population that lives for a long time in a single territory, where a specific approach to solving a particular problem is developed. More details on this can be found in the remarkable book of Frans de Waal “Are we so clever to judge the intelligence of animals?”

Most often, the cultural traditions of animals relate to ways of obtaining food. For example, in one place in the African continent of a chimpanzee, simply put the picked up sticks in an anthill in order to feast on its inhabitants, and in the other, these sticks are specially prepared, they remove the bark from them so that it would be more convenient for them to work – and, probably, so tastier. If chimpanzees from these different groups meet, they will not understand each other – they have different languages, like different human tribes.

The notion of culture in animals was introduced into scientific practice by Japanese researchers, in particular, in 1952 the founder of the Japanese school of primatology Kinji Imanishi was the first to express the idea of the existence of a kind of culture in monkeys. In front of scientists, a new cultural tradition arose among Japanese macaques several times. These “snow monkeys” live for many centuries on the Japanese islands in complete harmony with the harsh nature and are well studied. In 1953, assistant professor Imanishi Satue Mito watched as a young low-ranking self-styled Imo named before the meal to wash the tubers of sweet potato, after which almost all of her relatives took possession of this skill; a few years later they began to wash the sweet potatoes not in fresh water, but in the sea, which was quite far away – obviously they liked the taste of salt. In the 60-ies. The monkeys learned how to warm themselves in the harsh winters in the hot springs of the last century, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s a culture of stone handling was born. At present, they have discovered several new behavioral tendencies, for example, young people play with snow. It is noteworthy that in some cases, adults learned from their children, and the latter were mastered by these skills of high-ranking males!

In the 90s of the last century, the study of cultural traditions became a priority in the work of many ethologists. To list all the found behavioral traditions and cultures, we must write a huge review, so we will limit ourselves to only some of the most interesting.

The most complex, of course, is the culture of using tools by animals and the culture of their manufacture. In the Soviet period, in the course of history (for those who do not know what it is, I will explain – historical materialism, an integral part of the so-called “Marxist-Leninist philosophy”) postulated after Engels that “work created man,” and accordingly ” instrumental activity “(this is already the term of modern ethology) is inherent in him and only him. However, the fact that animals can use some “tools” has been known for a long time. But still some half a century ago it was believed that only man can make tools of labor! The first one watched the animals making guns, Jane Goodall – they were chimps in the Gombe forest. When Luis Leakey received her report about this, he wrote: “Now we must reconsider either the concept of” tool “or the concept of” man “, or consider chimpanzees as people.”

The most developed culture is in our closest relatives, anthropoid apes. In the chimpanzee, for example, 39 behaviors were described. They make and use not just tools, but often make them out of several parts, in various ways, “snort” ants and termites, make “sponges” of leaves and plant them on a stick to extract water from the hollow. Let’s remember when our ancestors first made a compound weapon, namely, a spear with a stone tip – according to the latest finds, it was 500 thousand years ago (artifacts from the archaeological monument of Katu Pan 1 in South Africa).

Especially inventive are the chimpanzee, when they want to eat honey of wild bees. In Gabon, they for this purpose manufacture and use five types of guns. At first, a thin rod is used for probing the bottom of the bee nest (bees build nests under the ground here). Then a thick stick punches the entrance to the nest, with a thinner curved stick this entrance is widened and broken from within its walls. Next, “brush” is used – a stick with a crumbled end that is dipped in honey. Honey is also scooped from the bark with spoons. All these tools must not only be made, which can be done only in stages, but also bring to the right place! In the Congo, in the Nuabale-Ndoke reserve, chimpanzees act differently. Here, bees make nests in trees, at the ends of thin branches. Chimps climb up trees and destroy these nests with clubs, then small chopsticks brought with them are dipped in honey and licked. I saw a video about how people of the San people (that is, Bushmen), descendants of the very first sapiens, get honey. In the same way – they break a hollow with a club of bees with a club, then they get out honey from there who is a chipper, who just hands. Perhaps, so did our ancestors in the Paleolithic. And in other cases, most likely, they used more complicated equipment, successively several guns, like Gabon chimpanzees.

Each chimpanzee population has its own “dialects” and marriage rituals, slightly different. In West Africa, the tradition of cracking nuts with stones (“anvil” and “hammer”) is common, and this tradition, according to finds of paleontologists, goes back to the distant past (archaeologists excavated in Cote d’Ivoire a “workshop” of chimpanzees aged 4300 years), and in East Africa there is no such culture in any community.

Stone culture is also inherent in the Capuchins. They belong to the broad-eared monkeys of the New World, which are considered to be more primitive than the narrow-knuckled, but the capuchins among them are the most “advanced”, some kind of “anthropoids.” Perhaps this is a consequence of convergent evolution – in each set of species of primates living on continents separated from each other, there must be a vertex. Capuchins carry stones for cracking nuts, and nuts themselves, in the hands and even tails (in broad-billed monkeys, the tails are grasping). Sometimes they carry their cargo a few kilometers, and sometimes stones are heavy, up to a third of the weight of the capuchin. And here the stone culture goes back to the past – scientists excavated the site, where the capuchins worked with stones, the prescription in 700 years. A particularly complex culture exists in one community of Capuchins in Brazil. They collect and eat juicy fruits, and throw stones to the ground. After a couple of days, the monkeys return, collect the dried bones, smash them with stones, eat tasty contents, and then they lacerate with larvae that are already swarming in them. It’s not for nothing that the outstanding Dutch primatologist François de Vaal, known for his studies of chimpanzees and bonobos, is now studying Capuchins in his laboratory at Emory University in Atlanta.

Stone is also used as a tool for macaques – crabbirds (these monkeys were seen by everyone who visited Bali and Thailand – they are everywhere, especially near the temples). We saw with our own eyes how a solid male was working a mature coconut, he twisted it and beat it on a stone slab – and eventually got delicious contents. Stones these monkeys break shells of mollusks and shells of crabs, which are collected on the littoral at low tide.

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In general, a review of myths and legends on a global scale shows that the diversity of ideas about the origin of people is extremely large. In addition to these versions, there are many more local options. In the ancestors of people recorded dwarfs and giants, various plants and animals – not only fish, dogs and pigs, but also ants, frogs, worms, birds. In the pantheon of our ancestors there was a place for monkeys. Myth makua (Mozambique) reports that the creator of Muluku created a man and woman and tried to teach them the basics of culture, but they did not want to learn and fled into the forest. Then the annoyed creator taught two monkeys, which turned out to be very sensible. Cutting off their tails, Muluku turned monkeys into humans, and attached tailings to negligent people, turning them into monkeys. So people are descendants of savvy monkeys, and monkeys are descended from negligent people.

A wide distribution of some plots about the origin of man is associated with their inclusion in the composition of world religions. At the same time, new versions arose, in which local and borrowed motives formed bizarre combinations. For example, in Siberia, among the Khakas, Khanty, Mansi, Yakuts, Evenks, the biblical story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise as punishment for the eaten fruit, which God forbids them, has its own interpretation. The first people, whom people in the full sense of the word could not be named, ate blueberries, cowberries or other forest berries. After this, wool or horny covering came off their bodies, and they spawned a large number of offspring. By the way, it is not at all obvious that the motif of the forbidden fruit was borrowed by the Siberian aborigines from the Russians, it could have penetrated here much earlier from the Middle East through Central Asia.

In fairy folklore, whose stories have spread widely across Eurasia and North Africa over the last fifteen hundred thousand years, there are sometimes the same motives as in the myths about the origin of man. How random such coincidences are, it is often impossible to say. Having ceased to be a part of the mythological tradition, fairy-tale motifs were easily borrowed and extended to great distances. To determine in this case their initial range is difficult. Here is, for example, a fairy tale about a clever peasant Gavril, recorded 100 years ago by ethnographer Vladimir Dobrovolsky in Smolensk province. Formally, it corresponds to the story of the appearance of people from fragile materials, but this story in this case is perceived as a notorious fiction, and the corresponding myth is hardly ever known in Europe. It is said that Gavrila wanted to blind a clay man, that he commanded the peasants. But the clay man died in the rain. The second variant from a rye dough was eaten by a pig. The pig was beaten with an oak stick and a vine – so did the Dubinsky and Lozinsky appear.

Some mythological subjects are now experiencing a second birth in popular culture, when the myths of different peoples try to find a reflection of real events that took place in ancient times. Here it is possible to attribute attempts of creationists to bring a scientific base under the biblical tradition about the creation of the world. Or, for example, people descending to Earth from the sky – than not naive interpretation of “paleocontact”, ideas about the alien origin of man. However, the question arises: why does the myth of descendants from the sky reflect the reality to a greater extent than legends about people climbing out from under the earth, from a crack in the rock or from a built-up tree? Pseudoscientific films about ancient giants – the ancestors of modern people – were shown even by federal channels of television. Here folk tales about giants intertwined with the teachings of the mystics of the XIX century and formed the basis of illiterate but attractive to the public ridiculous hypotheses.

Traditional folklore, including “myths” – is the key to the past. There are several such keys, some are managed by archaeologists, others by genetics, the third by linguists, etc. Comparison of the results obtained by these sciences, their synthesis, reveals not only the paths of ancient migrations and contacts between different cultures that left material traces, but also the ideas of people of the distant past about the world around them, what worried them and what they told their children. Folklore remains a unique source of data for the reconstruction of the elements of the spiritual culture of ancient societies, and much remains to be explored on this path.

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The option with the release of people from under the ground is more revealing than the option describing the descent of people from the sky. According to him, there were many people, among them were men and women, children and adults. This is a completely different concept than in most myths about the creation of man by a deity. As for the descent of people from the sky to earth, there are different versions – as with many people of different sex and age, and with a couple of ancestors, from which then humanity happened. This last option (with a pair of ancestors) is occasionally found in continental Eurasia (for example, in the Khanty). However, in general, both the “descent from the sky” and the “escape from the earth” are confined to those territories on which other plots, probably, originated from our African ancestors, are also fixed.

Very ancient may be the idea of the origin of people from plants or the story that people have grown like grass. However, the specific versions of these narratives are very different, so the independent emergence of such narratives in different regions is quite possible.

The next group of myths about the origin of man is represented in the Indo-Pacific regions of Asia and in America, but is absent in Africa and most of continental Eurasia. To get to the New World, these stories should have been known in East Asia at least 15 thousand years ago, whereas the absence of African analogies indicates that 50 thousand years ago such narratives have not yet arisen. Age of about 15, maximum 20, at most 30 thousand years ago is more likely than about 30-50 thousand years ago, since people of the modern type had not yet existed in East Asia 30,000 years ago. Following along the coast of the ocean, they have long penetrated into Australia, but in the folklore of Australian aborigines’ analogies to such stories have not been found.

The group of myths, probably first spreading within the Indo-Pacific margin of Asia, includes ideas about the origin of people from drops of blood. Admiralty islands say that people originated from drops of blood of a goddess who cut her finger with a shell, the Nanaese had a bite of their finger, in the south in the Southeast of the United States the first people come from the menstrual blood of the Sun, and the Yanomami in South Venezuela believe that a certain hero The month was shot, and the progenitors of the tribe were born from his blood. The same group includes stories about the origin of people from grains, about their creation from skin scales or mud collected from their breasts not long washed by God. During the same period, stories spread in East Asia that people in general or individual tribal groups and tribes are descendants of a dog. It is characteristic that in South America all these subjects are either completely absent or are found only in areas relatively close to the Isthmus of Panama, but they do not exist on Tierra del Fuego or in Eastern Brazil. In general, they are typical for the western and northern regions of North America. Such a distribution testifies to the fact that in the mythology of the very first migrants to the New World, relevant plots were absent. At the same time, in the Old World, they are not characteristic of Siberia, but of Southeast Asia and probably infiltrated America with those settlers who walked along the ocean coast.

To this group may also belong to the story that the first people were created from a fragile, unsuitable material (oil, wax, snow or dough) and therefore proved to be inferior. Only with the second, third, or even the fourth attempt of the deities it is possible to create real people. Such a motif in myths of creation is, however, rare. It is much more characteristic for narratives, which do not talk about people in general, but about a specific character.

The most recent can be stories that have a regional distribution, such as the origin of people from a pig or the story that fallen from the tree fruit or coconut leaves turned into women. Both occur in fairly limited areas in Asia and Oceania. It is logical that the story of the origin of women from coconut is found in Southeast Asia and Melanesia, that is exactly where the coconut tree comes from.

The myth about the woman giving birth to a pumpkin, a bag of eggs, a piece of meat, etc., deserves more attention in South-East Asia, with the adjacent regions of India and southern China. The birth is cut, chopped, pieces turn into people, from a pumpkin or a bag, too, come out a lot of people – usually the ancestors of individual tribes. Typically, this story is part of a long mythological narrative that begins with a story about how the brother and sister managed to escape the flood and how they decided to break the ban and get married. Along with the Indian-Siberian-North American plot of obtaining land from the ocean floor (often followed by the appearance of people), the myth of the flood and the “birth of people from pieces” is the most complex and developed in all world mythology. Since it is not known in America or even in northern China or Indonesia, this cycle as a whole is unlikely to have formed in the Paleolithic. At the same time, it is based on a more general theme: the generation of present people by a brother and sister, usually saved after a catastrophe that destroyed ancient humanity. This motif is in America, and its distribution in the Old World clearly indicates its initial appearance within the Indo-Pacific margin of Asia. Accordingly, its antiquity may well be more than 15 thousand years. As for the motive for the appearance of the first people from the pumpkin, judging by the images of the ancient Maya and some of their neighbors, he was known in Mesoamerica, although in the texts recorded after the arrival of the Spaniards, this story is not fixed. It is unlikely that the myth reflected in these Mesoamerican images is historically associated with variants from Southeast Asia, rather it is a coincidence.

Part of the plots is found only or mostly among American Indians, and not everywhere, but only in certain regions: people arose from sticks, or from the bones of former people, or were caught as fish. As for the Old World, in the vast expanses from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean recently (hardly before the middle of the 1st millennium AD), the myth spread about how God made people, left the dog as a watchman, and himself went to bring people to the soul. At this time, the enemy of God bribed the dog, giving her a warm skin, and spoiled human preparations – spit them or revived himself, thus depriving immortality. The origin of this plot is complex and confusing and reflects the transcontinental connections of the last millenniums. It seems that the plot was formed among the Indo-Europeans who lived in the Bronze Age in the Eurasian steppes. In this initial version, the enemy of God was a horse, trying to trample human figures, and the dog valiantly defended them. In a similar form, the plot survived in India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Abkhazia, Georgia (from the Swans), Armenia. His echoes are noted among the western Mongols, Kirghiz and even in the far north from the Nganasan. After the radical cultural and linguistic transformation of the second half of the 1st millennium AD, when Zoroastrianism (where it was) gave way to Islam, and the Iranian languages were largely replaced by the Turkic ones, the plot turned out to be turned inside out: the place of the “devil’s horse” “Took the previously revered dog. For “betrayal” God forced her to be a servant of man and suffer adversity. In the Indian and Caucasian variants, a horse is subjected to such punishment, and the dog is awarded.

Was the myth of the horse, the dog and the creation of man familiar to most Indo-Europeans, and not just to the inhabitants of the steppe zone (probably Indo-Iranians)? In Danish, Norwegian or Lithuanian folklore there are some parallels, but they mostly concern only the notion of a horse as a creation of a trait. The pre-Christian mythology of the population of Spain, France, Italy is very poorly known (the Latin sources mostly follow the Greek models). So, it’s difficult to reconstruct a story that is characteristic of ancient Europe, especially for the period before the Neolithic period.

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The share of consonants with the fact that a person has descended from pre-existing primate species varies from less than 40% (Turkey and the USA) to more than 70% in different countries (Sweden, Denmark, Iceland). The rest hold different views or are not at all interested in such a question.

Among other versions of the widely known biblical, according to which man was created by the creator of the dust of the ground. Moreover, even the majority of believers do not deny that the living nature evolves, but for an individual an exception is made. Sometimes you have to deal with the allegations that a person is sent to Earth by aliens whose origins and goals are worthy of a thriller or comedy. It is clear that the stories about the newcomers appeared only in the 20th century, together with the growing popularity of fantasy novels and the beginning of space exploration.

Modern ideas about the evolution of the living and human world as a part of it are also of relatively recent origin, although ancient philosophers also talked about the possibility of evolution. The statement that a man came from a monkey was formulated in the 18th century by Scottish lawyer and researcher James Burnett, a friend of Robert Burns and opponent of George Buffon. About the great apes, as well as the inhabitants of other continents at that time knew little. Therefore, some believed that chimps are simply wild people, while others, even from different races, were considered different species. Charles Darwin in the book “The Origin of Man and Sexual Selection” (1871) wrote the origin of man from ancient anthropoid apes and believed that the origin of man was the African continent

If the history of scientific thought is studied quite well, then the time of the appearance of ideas about the creation of man by God is unknown. The oldest surviving written sources in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages, which describe the creation of people from clay, belong to the Old Babylonian period (XX-XVI centuries BC). One of the texts tells of the god Enki and the goddess Ninmah (she is Ninto). It says that the tired of the work of the gods decided to create people, so that they worked in their place. Enki sculpts people from clay, and Ninmah determines their fate. People are defective, but everyone has an application – the blind person suits singers, the bow-legged can be a jeweler, etc. It is possible that Enki added his own blood to the clay, as in the Akkadian version, which directly refers to the blood mixed with clay.

The Ancient Histories

To date, ethnographers, linguists, folklorists, and earlier travelers and missionaries have recorded hundreds of thousands of texts of legends, myths and fairy tales of different peoples of the world. The vast majority of records are made in the 19-20 centuries. and only a small (though, of course, very valuable) part is contained in medieval and ancient written monuments. The earliest Sumerian and Egyptian texts that convey the content of myths refer to the III millennium BC, Semitic texts – to the II millennium BC, Greek and Chinese – to the 1st millennium BC. However, early written sources knowingly do not contain information about all the folklore subjects of the respective epochs – their authors simply did not have such a goal, and only fragments of the oldest texts reached us. Simultaneously with the Egyptians and Greeks on earth lived thousands of other tribes and peoples, whose folklore no one recorded. What do we know about the folklore and mythology of the Slavs of the VI. AD, when they began to settle in the Balkans and Eastern Europe? Almost nothing. Moreover, compared with the history of mankind or even with the time that has passed since the end of the last glaciation, two, three or even four thousand years – the time is not so long.

Does this mean that the folklore-mythological heritage of humanity is almost completely lost? Not really, although the concrete texts of the ancestors of the Slavs, Celts or Albanians can hardly be reconstructed. But you can roughly determine the time of the distribution of certain mythological subjects, as well as the territory for which they were characteristic. Using only the folklore material itself, this can not be done, but if you apply the areas of distribution of certain mythological episodes and images to a geographical map, and then compare this information with the data of geneticists and archaeologists about the ways and time of migration of ancient people, then some assumptions can be made.

Such work was carried out on the basis of the “Analytical Catalog of Mythological Motives”, which includes repetitive elements of folklore (narrative episodes and images), isolated from more than 50,000 texts written in different languages among the peoples of the Old and New Worlds. Although the catalog does not include all the records (as already said, hundreds of thousands, if not millions) of records, it contains a fairly representative sample of data and, what is extremely important, reflects the folklore traditions of all continents approximately equally.

If the regions in which this or that mythological plot was recorded lie in the way of known migrations, and in other regions this plot does not occur or is encountered singly, it can be assumed that it was during these migrations that the plot spread. The time for the release of modern man from Africa and the settlement of the New World are key to assessing the time of the distribution of folklore episodes and images. According to archaeologists and geneticists, our ancestors penetrated from Africa to Eurasia 50-70 thousand years ago. The settlement of America began 15-17 thousand years ago and continued actively until 12-14 thousand years ago. Later, certain groups of people from Siberia penetrated only Alaska and the American Arctic. The first groups of migrants to America moved, most likely, along the ocean coast, and when the Canadian and Alaskan glaciers began to melt, those who lived in continental Siberia also went to the New World. Dating of the type 15 or 50 thousand years ago is approximate, they will still be specified, but the sequence of processes and their epochal affiliation are established fairly reliably.

The area of distribution of several mythological plots coincides with the ways of settling people from the African ancestral home along the coast of Asia and then America. Most of these stories describe the origin of death and explain why people have lost the ability to live forever or why not people, and snakes (or lizards, spiders, etc.) have become immortal. The most common stories about the origin of death include the story of the change of skin (earlier people, like snakes, changed skin and rejuvenated or the ability to change skin had to go to people, but for different reasons it got to other creatures). It is also widespread that the mortal people are opposed to an immortal, eternally resurgent month. There are other subjects – rarer, but common in the same territories, i.e. in Africa, Southeast and in part South and East Asia, Australia, Melanesia, America. So, according to one of them, the character threw chips in the water and said that as chips splash in the water, so people will be reborn after death. However, another character threw a stone and as he drowned, people became mortal. To the same set of ancient motifs is the identification of the rainbow with the snake and, possibly, the origin of the fire. In any case, only in Africa and in the Indo-Pacific world is the notion that, before people got fire, they cooked food in the sun or warmed it under their arms. In the same regions it is often believed that the original owner of the fire was a certain woman. In continental Eurasia, such ideas are not fixed. Here is a woman, but also often a man is a spirit of fire, the fire itself.

The fact that the first topic that attracted the attention of our ancestors was the death rate of people, it is quite logical – is there anything more mysterious and more important? The mastery of fire was the oldest and most important step in the development of technology, and therefore everything is natural here.

We emphasize once again: the age of the corresponding myths is evidenced by their presence in the territories, contacts between which took place only in the remote past, and then for a long time were interrupted. Myths about human mortality have not only penetrated the New World, but are recorded mainly in South America, where the cultural heritage of the earliest migrants is better preserved than in the North. As for the parallels between Africa and the Indo-Pacific outskirts of Asia and Australia, they prove the appearance of such myths earlier than 50 thousand years ago. According to genetic data, the flow of the first African migrants went primarily along the southern coasts of Asia and further to Australia. People who settled continental Eurasia also left Africa, but their culture was to undergo much greater changes than the culture of those who headed east along the coast of the Indian Ocean – after all, the “northern Eurasians” came from the tropics to cold forests and tundra steppes. In addition, a significant part of these early settlers became extinct in the era of the glacial maximum (18-24 thousand years ago). As a result, little of the African cultural roots in continental Eurasia remain, and in the Indo-Pacific Asia, the oldest African heritage has remained relatively well.

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Composing Theses – What you Should and Should not Do

In case when you do not possess any ideas how to compose the thesis, perhaps you are able to find yourself during the stage of preparation when composing and forming an academic thesis: a kind of academic writing composed on a basis of original subject of research, usually introduced in the form of the final requirement for such degrees as PhD and Master’s.

What exactly can be considered as the thesis?

One has to take into account that such notions as ‘thesis statement’ and ‘academic thesis’ are two different notions. As usual, the thesis is considered as:

• A standard argument, which clearly informs what Doctoral or Master’s thesis is going to show to readers.
• One of many initial construction blocks to your colossal writing assignment. Therefore, try to keep in mind that academic writing thesis statement plays an important role in the whole paper.
• A sentence that sums up the argument you are going to make, in addition to the supporting facts you are planning to apply in order to support that argument.
• Offers a kind of roadmap for readers, which informs the latter where you are planning to go with the usage of the given thesis.

The major task of the thesis lies in persuading readers of the fact that the claim is thought out to be quite significant to your academic sphere, and it will turn out to be true enough on the basis of the facts offered before.

In order to compose a great thesis:

• Try to make a claim of knowledge, which will be able to provide a totally new idea in a certain sphere, and to make some explanations why it is considered as a new one.  The objective of all academic theses lies in adding to the present pile of knowledge in a certain sphere, or filling in all gaps of knowledge.  Strictly speaking, your knowledge claim has to state clearly why that information you have to provide is totally new within the frames of your framework of reference, and it has also persuade readers of the fact that the claim is considered as a true one with the basis on facts offered. In this way, it will be easier for you not to think about an order of a thesis statement
• Try to state an argumentative sentence that sums up those conclusions made by you regarding the subject after the review of all literary sources.  The given statement has to be centered and peculiar enough to be justified within the frames of the essay.  At the same time, it has to define the relations among supporting facts offered by you.
• Determine the goal and scope of the essay.  After you have accomplished the thesis, readers have to be aware of the essence of the given project in addition to those boundaries you are going to put on it.  Keep in mind that the thesis does not make your readers wait for something more than you are ready to introduce in the final version of the paper.

Do not forget that the thesis subject has to include an unsettled knowledge gap or issue in the topic area, which should be examined and that has a bearing upon society.  The thesis subject has to be original and, at the same time, it has to include something totally new to the present literary sources.  Simply looking for answers, which already are present somewhere, does absolutely nothing in order to make a contribution to professional or academic spheres of knowledge.

Just remember that the thesis subject has to be based on totally new facts and solutions to the present issues. Although, pursuing research regarding those questions, which have already been responded to is a considerable section of a review of literary sources and is a helpful exercise in order to learn whether some person has already pursued research on your offered research subject. Such method will definitely help you to make a thesis statement more refined.

Kinds of Theses

There exist three standard forms that the thesis may take:

• Analytical: the statement, which is able to partition the idea or thought piece by piece, and to examine and estimate every single part.
• Expository: the statement that is ready to explain the concept or some idea to readers.
• Argumentative: the statement that may claim a stance, which is open for debates, and confirms the true nature of the stance by means of specific examples and facts.

What kind of thesis you need to apply?

What kind of method you will pick depends on the character of your research.  Examining why you are composing the given thesis may offer significant hints concerning the method and steps to writing a thesis statement you need to take.  For instance:

Are you offering a new opinion or agreeing with the opinion of someone else with the usage of a few alternative interpretations?

For more information visit https://pro-papers.com/thesis-statement-writing.

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Structure of Outline

If you drill deeper, you will find out that the outline covers four sections mentioned below:

1.  Introductory Paragraph
2. Development of Argument
3. Contradiction of Opponents’ Arguments
4. Conclusion Part

Section I: Introductory Paragraph

The introductory paragraph is the place when the foundation is laid for an unbreakable argument. It consists of a catch, supporting details, and a thesis statement.

1. Catch. The very first sentence is targeted at being a “catch.” You do not have any ideas what a catch is? The answer is very simple: a sentence, which attracts attention of readers.

For instance, one is going to compose a paper why people from the USA need to start consuming various bugs.

My catch could be, “Those people who like to improve the surrounding environment and personal diets, say ‘hello’ to consuming various bugs and ‘good bye’ to dishes from pork and fish.

2. Supporting facts. Next section of the introductory paragraph is targeted at providing some detailed supporting facts concerning good argumentative essay topics.

To perform the given task, answer questions mentioned below:

What is a pressing matter? Who worries about it? Just why is it essential?

For instance, “Bugs are considered as sustainable enough. Today, people in America think to consume bugs as a constituent of particular diet programs, paying attention to food choices such as pork instead. Recently, the United Nations organization has made a declaration and called for more people to get great benefits from consumption of bugs.”

3. Thesis Sentence. As usual, the thesis is located in the introductory section.

For instance, “Diet focused on bugs will help to solve problems connected with famishment, obesity, and weather change. For this reason, people from the US need to find out how to count on many different bugs over chicken and seafood.”

In addition, you will observe that a thesis develops three statements that will be expanded a bit later: diet made up of bugs can help to solve dilemmas pertaining to famishment, obesity, and weather change.

Section II: How to Write Argumentative Essay Argument

Now, after you have coped with general points, describing your position in the introductory paragraph, start entering upon the argument.

My test outline has demonstrated three claims supported by factual information. A provision of a particular number of claims may be a simple suggestion; it is up to you to make one claim or five claims.

A particular quantity of claims you determine to add is of no importance unless your professor has provided you with some particular instructions. Here, the only important thing is to develop the argument in every manner.

1. What can be called a claim? This is a statement called to back up arguments.

For instance, “Bugs tend to be extremely nourishing and consuming all of them can solve the nagging issue of appetite in the US.”

2. What is known as evidence? Give supportive facts for every single claim you introduce. Evidence is thought out to be facts taken from trustworthy resources.

For instance, “Scientists from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the USA inform that ‘Termites contain a lot of necessary protein alongside with other micronutrients. Termites in dried form include 36 % of proteins.’”

When the facts targeted at supporting the statements have been collected, it is time for you to include the following crucial part of the outline: contradicting arguments that belong to opponents.

Section III: Contradicting Arguments

Great argumentative essays always suggest the inclusion of this part in the paper; here, you state opinions of opponents and after that, provide a rebutter.

For instance, “Those people who do not approve the diet of insects state that it is quite difficult to catch crickets just as a cow is big enough and possesses lots of meat for all dishes.”

Oh! We perfectly know that such opponents only want us to maintain eating junk food and avoid eating the soup from crickets.

Today, it is a high time to bewilder opponents with a contradiction full of tough facts.

After you have contradicted viewpoints of opponents, start working on the part with conclusion.

Section IV: What is a Argumentative Essay Part with Conclusion?

When dealing with a conclusion section, you are likely to achieve two essential assignments.

1. State the necessity of the issue once again. In this case, you would like to state why the given topic is significant.

For example, “Simply by adding insects to their diet plans, U.S. people can enhance the nourishment associated with the diet of Americans.”

2. Depict the picture of the place when your debate is not put into practice. Within the frames of concluding paragraph, make your readers look at the consequences of the argument. Just what could take place if people began consuming insects and various bugs as a basis of their diet programs?

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