The work of a male ...

Men are designed to make nests. Women are designed to cuddle-up in them. Some men do not make nests. Some women do not lie in them. Modern industrial life provides the technology to free men and women from their evolutionarily constrained roles and made nest-making an intellectual task for some and a practical task for others.

Still, our lives still go in cycles of nest-making and nesting and all of the traumas and joys that go with it. We are technologically far more sophisticated than birds in some respects but we pretty much behave like them, the men – and increasingly the women -- spending the working hours earning enough money to pay for the nest and all of the material stuff we put in them.

Environmental events trigger very specific nest-supporting events. The onset of winter drive us inside, preferably into a cacoon of warmth. In earlier times we retreated into caves kept warm by wood-kindled fires. That is why there is no greater sense of dream-like comfort than kindling the campfire, with the dog our early warning signal friend lying in proximity, on the watch.

Proud to be curly

As we head into winter, which the climatologists say will be colder and wetter than usual, I wondered about why we have so little bodily hair to keep us warm.. We wear clothes, layers of it during winter, while my dogs have thick curly fur that trap the air and therefore keep their bodily heat to themselves for longer, much like the ozone layer traps the earth’s heat.

Hair does not fossilise easily. It is very difficult therefore to establish from the fossil record when and how we lost our bodily hair. Our closest living relative the Chimpanzee may provide some clues. About 6.2 million years ago we shared a common ancestor with the Chimp and went our separate ways since.

Vitner's delight

Carole Meredith is a grape geneticist in the world of wine science. She works at the University of California at Davis, an institution noted for its excellence in agricultural science. Along with researchers from France, in 1999 Meredith found that the celebrated Chardonnay grape has modest beginnings of roughly 1,700 years ago.

The DNA technology for tracing human ancestry and our historical patterns of divergence is now well established. As all living things share the same basic DNA, Meredith used a similar technology developed for animals and human beings to confirm that Chardonnay is the offspring of one of the Pinot family of grapes believed to have originated in Burgundy 300 AD.

Meredith also found traces of a more obscure grape in Chardonnay’s ancestral pedigree. The Romans brought a variety called Gouais Blanc from Croatia and to France during the 3rd century. It is a more obscure grape variety and likely spread prolifically on the Burgundy plains. A hybrid of Pinot and Gouais Blanc emerged during the Middle Ages.