"The tail is a very useful thing and modern man could use it". Alexander Markov and Olga Orlova discuss the evolutionary meaning of tail loss in episode 14 of the CounterEvolution podcast.
Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin explored carnival and laughter culture in the stagnant years of the late Soviet Union and called such topics "material-bodily bottom. Half a century later, anthropologists held a conference about excrement in St Petersburg entitled Anthropopology: Brown Studies and the Unclean Turn.
Could humans have done without religion in their development? Apparently not. Whatever the genesis of religious consciousness, our mind is so organised that belief in the supernatural, omens, fortune-telling, and spirits is almost inevitable. Alexander Markov, Doctor of Biological Sciences, talks about this in episode 12 of the CounterEvolution podcast.