10,000 B[rainless] C[ontent]?
The movie, 10,000 B.C., blew away the competition last weekend, with an estimated $35.7 million in US box office receipts.
I think it is a disaster movie of epic scale -- at least, from the point of view of anthropology!
My favorite quote from a reviewer comes from Peter Canavese's "Groucho Reviews":
It was actually raconteur HL Mencken who said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public," but it was P.T. Barnum who lived it, putting over entertaining hoaxes on an eager public. Barnum's modern-day disciple is Roland Emmerich, specialist in the epic of stupidity. For an encore to the global-warming action picture The Day After Tomorrow (in which Dennis Quaid walks -- through a blizzard -- from Washington D.C. to Manhattan), our favorite Teutonic huckster presumes that prehistory means that anything narrative goes: hey, who can prove him wrong?
As narrator Omar Sharif intones at picture's outset, "Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend." See? If Omar Sharif said it, it must be true!
Oh, that hits a little close to home -- considering the extent to which TV documentaries about archaeology expect us to believe Alec Baldwin's or Liev Schreiber's authoritative-sounding voices. Hey, if they can sell us cars, they can sell us science, right?
But for a little bit lighter view of the movie's reception, we can turn to the movie's IMDB forum (I credit Simon Greenhill with this idea). Or, maybe it makes for an even more depressing picture; I guess it depends on your point of view.
For instance, we have this criticism:
Next is the fact that they did not speak English back then. I am aware that they could have grunted throughout the movie(i.e. Quest for Fire) but common, with the movie goers to day you can barely have a movie that doesn't have explosions or boobs in it do good. It is just unrealistic for the times.
Well, naturally there is an answer for everything:
Plus, consider this: its still EARTH and their descentants several dozen centuries later will be speaking English so it's way less of a stretch than everyone speaking English in STAR WARS which is ANOTHER GALAXY and I don't see the English dissers here trolling the STAR WARS sites.
Point taken. Those who don't question mystical midichlorians are poorly placed to object to anachronistic pyramids.
Of course, any film dealing with prehistoric life may bring out a certain kind of critic. We all know the type:
The correct term is 10,000 BP, before present. I find the term BC, before Christ, extremely offensive. I am an atheist and I do not want to feel obliged to use all this Christian terminology that is being pushed on me 24/7.
Or maybe that wasn't the type of critic you were expecting? Before you head off to set that writer straight, rest assured that a wide array of well-meaning alumni of undergraduate science courses are ahead of you, brimming with variably-accurate news about radiocarbon chronologies.
One might, perhaps, do better, but this forum is not a place for the sane to wander. Consider one hypothesis about the origins of the movie's story:
The idea was that there were these whitish people who both Asian people and white people were related to. In India it's considered that these people founded India as we know it. Anyway, these people were like the elves from The Lord of The Rings. They were vegetarians and even had an organ which allowed a type of psychic communication. The idea of being "psychic" cropped up heavily when these stories were popular in the 1800s, and still it continues today.
White people lost these powers, according to the story, when they mated with people from the mideast. That's because scientists, and this is true, found hybrid Jewish Neanderthal bodies in the mideast. It was concluded that the human race got "devolved" by mixing with the animal people who once lived on Earth.
I'm going to start putting "and this is true" randomly into my blog posts. It will really increase my links from kooks.
Could it get worse? Of course it could: we just need some "anthropologists" to show up and start educating people! Like this:
All human lineages appear to converge on Africa in the distant past. However, 12,000 years ago there were varied races living in widely distributed civilizations all over the world. This film takes place either in Europe or North America (I don't know which), where there would at that time have been no negroids (although in N. America there also would've been no caucasoids).
Or, OOH OOH, this!
Your spoken and stated strident supposition that there totally no "Caucasoids" in North America over 10,000 B.C. is completely in-correct. Are you at all aware of the conversed "Clovis" and supposedly stated "Solutrian" connection? The interest on the internet in this intriguing interelationship is increasing immeasurably since the National Geographic Channel's documentary demonstratably detailing and declaring that the Mammoths were massacred or a mass extinction event by a major mile wide meteor about 10 millenia ago. So, it surely seems the Cacusoids were killed along with the mammoths and the majority of mega-fauna in most of N. America at about 9,700 B.C., basically.
Check out the alliteration there! I can't wait until I get demonstrably detailed and declared -- AND THIS IS TRUE! -- by a major mile wide meteor!
Later, a "history major" shows up to bring sanity to the place:
Any movie about this time period is going to have to be almost completely made up because we know almost nothing about it. Understand? If you think you know something about that time period, (and please, grow up, I'm only talking about cultural history here ok? Not geology, or ancient animals. If you're a geology or ancient animal freak...i don't know what to tell you. Movies in general probably aren't for you, Ok?)...you don't.
Understand? If you know when sabretooths and mammoths ruled the earth, then maybe movies in general aren't for you.
I have to say, I'm increasingly feeling that way....
But there's always hope. Here's another commenter's assessment of the movie:
So boring a caveman could do it.
"Ape to Man" to debut Sunday evening
The History Channel is showing its new human evolution program, "Ape to Man" this Sunday, August 7, at 9:00 EDT / 8:00 CDT. The show has a website, which gives the list of interviewees (Leslie Aiello, Joe Cain (history of science), Chris Stringer, and Colin Menter (fossil sites of South Africa). There is also a quick synopsis:
Highlights of APE TO MAN include:
Reenactments of the work of Eugene DuBois, an Amsterdam physician who left his practice in 1890 in search of the Missing Link and found what would be called Homo erectus, a 500,000-year old ape-like skeleton, in Sumatra. DuBois' assertion that he has found the Missing Link results in his rejection by the scientific community. Only later did people realize the impact of the discovery.
Examination of the key elements that marked the evolution from ape to man, including the ability to walk upright, the use of tools, the harnessing of fire, the ability to form communities, and the ability to reason and plan.
The story of Piltdown Man, a skeleton discovered in England in 1912 which was, for a time, considered by many to be the definitive Missing Link, but later discovered to be one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of science.
Raymond Dart's 1924 discovery of Taung Child, a fossilized brain in Africa, nearly two million years old. It was the oldest finding to date, but was completely ignored by the scientific community because people still believed in the erroneous story of Piltdown Man.
The two key shifts in thinking that led to our understanding today: the shift to Africa as the birthplace of the human species and the shift from the thinking that brain size was the driving force of evolution, to the understanding that the use of tools was really the key step.
The online preview shows a Dalmatian running in front of a Land Rover, so I assume they'll have reenactments of the Leakeys also.
I found the online game to be strangely entertaining, since you have to navigate a little Indiana Jones-looking archaeologist around his campsite to find fossils, while avoiding spiders, bees, and quicksand, and returning to the water bucket every couple of minutes for a drink. Of course, when you do it the third time around, and "Zhoukoudian" looks exactly like "Olduvai Gorge" except with more spiders and bees, well, you get the picture. The "quiz" I found less entertaining since several of the questions give out slightly wrong information, and one is really wrong (Dubois' Trinil discovery is around a million years old, not 50,000, in case you're wondering).
But at the end of the game, there is a cool newspaper, with the headline, "MISSING LINK FOUND!", a photo of the Bone Clones version of Toumaï, and the story:
One of the greatest riddles in human history has been solved after leading anthropologist Dr. John Hawks found The Missing Link in human evolution. The discovery came after a grueling quest that spanned three continents, and tested the very limits of human endurance.
Almost enough to get me to watch!
Ape to Man
OK, we have it on, and I've already had a couple of laughs, so I guess I'll take some notes as it goes.
8:10 They didn't really just say that did they? Oh yes they did: Neandertals had big noses because they had a good sense of smell. Arrrggh!
Evidence: against. Human smell receptors have been evolving to inactivity for far longer than our common ancestor with Neandertals; there's no compelling reason to think their sense of smell was different from our own.
8:12 I'm not sure I would call Fuhlrott a "Victorian naturalist"; he was, after all, a German living in Germany.
8:20 On to Dubois on Sumatra. Is it just me, or does he look like Mr. Bean wandering around the forest? He even talks like Mr. Bean (that is to say, his Dutch sounds remarkably like Mr. Bean's mumbling).
8:24 By this time, this seems to me to have a remarkably low information density. There are many silent moments lacking voiceover. Is it really that dramatic to watch Dubois open a crate? I'll grant that the Dutch argument had some drama, but what does it really accomplish other than to show Dubois was a jerk? They don't really explain allometry, which was Dubois' major innovation. Of course, that's usually left out of the story anyway.
8:26 OK, here's an actor dressed up like Homo erectus. Do they really have to pay new people to do this every time? Or does the BBC use old footage from the last time they dressed somebody up like Homo erectus? It's not like they're different or anything.
And why should Homo erectus be hairier than us? Or at least than people living in Java today? If it's true that they were sweating, which seems likely, then they shouldn't be sporting all that fuzz.
8:44 Piltdown. Now this is possibly my biggest complaint. I understand that this is a show about the history of the field, rather than about what we actually know. But it seems like such a waste.
They're setting it up to look like Dawson is the culprit, by the way.
8:51 Of course the entire point of the Piltdown story is to make Dart look like a hero. As perhaps he should, but I wonder if the story is really so simple. There were plenty of Piltdown doubters, and plenty of Australopithecus believers. We don't hear their story very often.
And this telling is a very British-centric story, having to do with Arthur Keith's influence on the British scientific establishment (although Keith features in the program only in a minor way). The story in Germany is very different, and America presents a blend of the two.
9:02 Ape-woman sniffing at rubber carcass is not engaging me.
9:09 Twenty-five years after Piltdown was found, it was "examined scientifically for the first time." What, anthropology isn't scientific? You have to burn something in chemicals to be science? Sheeesh!
And it doesn't really reflect the history. Piltdown was proved a hoax after more australopithecines emerged in South Africa. The anthropology led here, not the chemistry. I wonder what happened to Robert Broom, by the way, who entered the story to console young Dart, but didn't get to make his pre-Leakey discoveries....
9:16 Nice choice of actor for Louis Leakey.
9:21 "Leakey decides that this was the toolmaker." Only problem: the cast they are showing with the voiceover is KNM-ER 1813, from a different site, a different country, and found fifteen years later. Can we not understand fragments? Or did they just have trouble finding a cast? Their cast of OH 5 is comical, so I guess it's probably the latter.
I wonder if Tobias is ticked about this, since he described both.
9:24 Colin Menter is drawing a phylogeny in the sand. Or...is he starting an episode of "Lonely Planet"?
9:30 Nice choice of actor for Johanson.
Is there supposed to be some suspense about these reenactments? We know they found something, otherwise it wouldn't be in the program. So why is their long, long, long, period of not finding anything in the program? Are we supposed to learn from this? Because I am afraid that what viewers may be learning is that paleoanthropology is bo-ring.
9:38 Bipedal locomotion. Once again, wondering what happened to Broom. Did we know that australopithecines were bipedal before Lucy? Hmmm...I'm thinking Broom would know. If only we could see Broom and his discoveries...then we would know all....
9:40 Traveling back in time through a long, long, long line of ape-people, single file, over hills into the past. Wouldn't that be a ladder, not a bush?
Hey, there has been no mention of bushes in this show at all! My opinion is going up!
9:45 Neandertals again, back "on the scent of red deer." But we saw them rub red deer scat all over themselves. How exactly did they follow the scent, then?
9:47 Wow. Krings worked for CSI!
The thing is, I'm sure most viewers probably believe that genetics labs have this moody coroner lighting (I think it may actually be from a BBC crime drama, can't remember the name). And that the Feldhofer fossils were kept in some kind of cold metal lockup with clanging steel bars (they actually do have a lockup now, but I don't recall the bars and clangs).
Oh, oh...this is looking suspiciously like a bush coming up...
The first meetup between Neandertals and modern humans "was a profound shock". As in, "Whoa, man, what's that plasticine junk on your face"? And why is it that no "modern human" in these shows ever has a superciliary arch? Did they screen out all the tough-looking actors?
9:55 Modern humans "supplemented their diets with fish, spurring their brain development."
Evidence: against. Neandertals had equally large brains. And there's no special reason to think Neandertals didn't eat as much fish as early modern humans.
9:57 They hunted down the Neandertal and killed him! I've never seen that before! Poor Neandertal. I can remember him now: "I'm just a caveman. Your modern world frightens and confuses me."
My opinion
The history is pretty standard. Since this is The History Channel, that's a good thing.
But it's pretty slow. It really makes the field look duller than it is. And it focuses too much on a few discoveries and not enough on how the context of science changed.
I wouldn't show it in class. It's too long, for one thing. And it would put everybody to sleep.
But more important, it doesn't present any alternative views. The best in-class use of video is to show opposing scientists in their own words. The scientists here are good ones, and their film clips don't present any controversial ideas, but there are just not enough of them to give the flavor of the field.
And they would need more historians of the field to give a flavor of the history. You want the Piltdown episode in? Tell the whole story, including the early detractors and the whodunnit theories. Want Johanson to make A. afarensis the common ancestor of Homo habilis and Australopithecus? Then you'd better cover his debate with Richard Leakey.
I don't have a good feel for how much more they could have added, but they certainly could have knocked out much of the reenactment, which featured a lot of fluffy voiceover, or even silence. I think a Ken Burns-like approach could pack in a lot more information; with interviews and voiceover going over video and pictures, and actors reading some original passages from the discoverers themselves.
On second thought, Ken Burns isn't very exciting either, so you'd have to replace the slow photo pans and maudlin music. Maybe opera music?
Apocalypto and Collapse
There has been quite a bit of discussion about how Mel Gibson's film Apocalypto fits or doesn't fit certain good or bad cultural stereotypes. Such as:
- He employed Maya actors (good).
- He shot a fictional mural of a beheading (bad).
- He used the Maya language (good).
- He exploited violent colonialist stereotypes (bad).
When I read this review of the movie, a sentence struck me:
It is not an obsessive opera like Mr. Herzog's "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," but rather a pop period epic in the manner of "Gladiator" or "Braveheart," and as such less interested in historical or cultural authenticity than in imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place.
Haven't you noticed that Apocalypto is basically a novelization of the Maya part of Jared Diamond's Collapse?
Here's the plot outline of the movie from IMDB:
As the Maya kingdom faces its decline, the rulers insist the key to prosperity is to build more temples and offer human sacrifices. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young man chosen for sacrifice, flees the kingdom to avoid his fate.
If you want to read a short version of Diamond's claims about the Maya, you can find them in this online version of Diamond's Harper's magazine article from 2003:
Bringing matters to a head was a drought that, although not the first one the Maya had been through, was the most severe. At the time of previous droughts, there were still uninhabited parts of the Maya landscape, and people in a drought area or dust bowl could save themselves by moving to another site. By the time of the Classic collapse, however, there was no useful unoccupied land in the vicinity on which to begin anew, and the whole population could not be accommodated in the few areas that continued to have reliable water supplies.
The final strand is political. Why did the kings and nobles not recognize and solve these problems? A major reason was that their attention was evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not have the leisure to focus on long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them.
Diamond pushes this simplified version of Maya history as an allegory for U.S. ecological hubris.
Gibson apparently has taken the same tale and made it -- like his other movies -- into a morality play about individual liberty and defense of family. He's less into ecological hubris, and more into the dangers of unrestrained power. That's probably a good idea, since films about ecological hubris are generally very dull.
On the other hand, films about abuse of power generally paint with a very broad brush. And when the premise (as in Collapse) is that the abusive power is used stupidly, the morality play can reach absurd proportions.
In any event, if you're looking for the social zeitgeist behind this Apocalypto phenomenon, it would seem to derive from these widespread assumptions about Maya ecology and political structures that Diamond has helped to popularize. Collapse itself already simplifies vastly to make his point about ecologies and social regulation. The entire book is a case of "imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place."
Gibson has certainly simplified far more to make the situation dramatic. But clearly the two are tied together, and plausibly the film wouldn't have its form without the book.
Guns, Germs and Steel on PBS
Starting next week (July 11), PBS is airing a three-part series based on Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Science is running an early review of the film by reporter Michael Balter. Some quotes:
More worrying, however, is the fact that during all of Diamond's journeys--which take him across the globe by boat, train, airplane, and helicopter, with film crew in tow--the viewer is told only once (at the end of the first hour) that there are scholars who disagree with his thesis. Nor are any of these dissenters ever interviewed, even though a number of other experts and personalities appear in the film to bolster Diamond's viewpoint. This imbalance is a disservice to television viewers, who are surely sophisticated enough to hear challenges to Diamond's ideas without losing track of the plot line. The omission might not be so serious if Diamond had only recently presented his thesis, but over the eight years since the book was first published its tenets have been much debated.
I've heard from many with much to say about Diamond's ideas, so it is indeed unfortunate that a wider discussion is not part of the series. Some of the ideas are old, and relatively uncontroversial. The real problems with the book are omissions -- omissions of factors that likely were very important to human history, but don't fit nicely into Diamond's scheme.
Diamond's fundamental idea is that geographical barriers of one kind or another prevented the free movement of technological knowledge and economic items. These barriers include ecological boundaries (across which it may be difficult to move crop plants) and resource abundances (without which it may be difficult to develop new technologies like metallurgy or domesticate new animals).
If you haven't heard of Diamond's book, these ideas may nonetheless seem familiar. That is because they are essentially the same arguments made by Franz Boas and other early anthropologists who focused on human cultures as primarily differing for ecological and geographic reasons. Diamond adds a strongly Marxist element, placing the mode of production and its geographical prerequisites as necessarily causal to other
The book is leavened by historical episodes like this one, which are not always portrayed rightly:
But in the second segment, the film falters badly by devoting almost the entire hour to a day in November 1532, when 168 Spaniards led by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro massacred 7,000 Incans in the highlands of Peru and captured their emperor, Ataxalpa. This horrific episode is intended to demonstrate how the Spaniards' skills on horseback (the horse being one of the 14 domesticated animals), combined with their technological ability to produce swords of fine tempered steel, could overcome the superior numbers of Ataxalpa's 80,000-man army. Yet despite several entertaining sequences featuring a swashbuckling expert swordsman and horseback rider who demonstrates how the conquistadors cut down the Incas, we are also told that the Spaniards attacked a peaceful gathering and that Ataxalpa had made the fatal decision not to arm his men with their bronze weapons that day. This raises at least two questions: First, whether the Spaniards would have won had they faced Ataxalpa's army in a real battle. Second, why, even if the Europeans did have the ability to wipe out the Incans, they were willing to carry out such terrible acts. Is conquest of other peoples a logical outcome of technological superiority? Today, most of us would argue against any such notion. Here lies a major weakness in Diamond's entire thesis--it fails to explain the conscious decisions that humans make when they resort to violent conquest.
As for myself, I think the book is very entertaining. But it clearly leaves out much of what we know from archaeology about the origins of complex societies -- and much of what we know is not congenial to his thesis. By and large, Diamond does not think that non-geographic social factors were important to the makeup of complex societies. Nor does he give any credence to the idea that genetic differences have any causal role. It has been many years since I read the book, but my troubles with it mainly derive from these issues. Diamond assumes that the fate of societies is essentially cast by their ecological circumstances. Once agriculture begins, all else is an inevitable consequence of population growth and local ecology.
But societies and people are heterogenous in their willingness to adopt technological innovations and cultural changes. Today, the interaction of different groups is in many cases driven by forces internal to each society. Hunter-gatherers still exist not because of their local ecology, but because the structure of social benefits does not favor their adoption of agricultural life. Sometimes these benefits differ between members of the same society, especially between men and women, but also between haves and have-nots. There is every reason to expect that groups were equally or more heterogenous in the past in such social structures. It adds complexity to the simple ecological base assumed by Diamond. In particular, such social differences may help to explain the rapaciousness of conquest, the abandonment of ostensible moral rules in interactions between groups, and the persistence or collapse of some societies in the face of ecological or social challenges.
Likewise, people are genetically heterogenous. Diamond gives some attention to disease, but it is difficult to overestimate its effect on human history. People have in some cases vastly different evolved immune adaptations to diseases, and different parts of the world differ greatly in the incidence of such diseases, which have likely increased over time. Disease likely made some social or technological transitions difficult in some parts of the world. But it also made some parts of the world essentially impenetrable by would-be conquerors or colonizers.
In any event, the series looks like it may be interesting compared to many other recent offerings, so we may be tuning in. If so, you can bet I'll cover it.
Anthony Bourdain's Bushman encounter
I really like Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" show -- the schtick is that he's a freewheeling chef-with-attitude who travels around the world seeing unusual sights and eating unusual meals. What makes it entertaining is Anthony's attitude: deep down, he appreciates the basic food of other cultures as an element of human experience and the fundamental building blocks of high cuisine; but he finds an incredible array of creepy, questionable, or plain disgusting-looking meals.
So, he ends up eating raw seal meat with Inuit people in Quebec, incredibly old pickled things in Vietnam, and bushmeat in Ghana. Mind you, he also eats a broad variety of really high-class foods -- my favorite from last season was his meal at El Bulli in Spain with chef Ferran Adria -- you can't get any more refined than that! The thing is the juxtaposition; eat what the poor people eat, eat what the rich people eat, look for the connections.
My favorite moment so far this year, I saw last week -- his visit to a bush farm in Namibia, where some local people fed him, well, read the description:
Where
Bushmen Farmland, Arnold Huber
What
Tony joined a hunt, took a tour and ate authentic bushmen dishes, including an ostrich-egg omelette, warthog brains/rectum/meat, tree beetles and Namibian truffles.
He really liked the tree beetles.
Gotta change
Bizarrely, I'm now listening to the voice of Drew Carey telling me about Neanderthals. It's on Prehistoric Planet, which is one of the Discovery Kids shows. This particular Neanderthal, who looks like an outtake from "Walking with Cavemen," is being charged by a wooly rhinoceros.
Yeaoww! The rhino just gored him!
Oh, yep, they are the Neanderthals from "Walking with Cavemen." "Prehistoric Planet" is a repackaged version with new narration for kids.
Now a bunch of mammoths are just walking along the edge of a very high cliff. This seems like a critical error of mammoth judgement.
And the Neanderthals are waiting with blazing firebrands.
It's risky getting right up in your prey's face like this. Especially when your prey has tusks!
It's an interestingly jumbled ending, with Neandertals going extinct because "they can't adapt to their changing world," the mammoths going extinct -- 19,000 years later -- because it gets too warm for them, and Cro-Magnons having a happy ending as they become ... us! All temperature, no killing spree. Don't you see, you just have to be able to change!
Well, it didn't keep Goodwin's attention, but then he's only two.
Celebrity genealogy reality show?
Yes, I'm always following the latest entertainment news in The Hollywood Reporter. Today I learn that Lisa Kudrow is going to produce a new reality show that gives celebrities encounters with their ancestors:
The network has ordered a genealogy reality series called "Who Do You Think You Are" from U.K. production house Wall to Wall (PBS' "Frontier House") in association with Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky's Is or Isn't Entertainment.
The one-hour series is based on the hit British series where stars are shown the oft-surprising details of their ancestors' lives. In the U.K. version, the uncovered backstories included tales of bigamy, wartime heroism and, in one case, attempted murder. Celebrity participants often are brought to tears as they learn about their relatives' hardships.
The British version has a Wikipedia page, with quite a list of (British) celebrities -- Stephen Fry, Nigella Lawson, David Tennant....OOH OOH, David Dickinson!
Summaries of the episodes are available at the program's website, and they seem pretty interesting. They use traditional geneaological research with documentary records, not really any genetics that I've noticed -- no "African-American Lives"-like gene tracing. What an interesting story David Dickinson has.
Well, so I think an American version might have potential, but I'd be even more interested in having BBC America show the originals!
UPDATE (2008/03/13): A reader reports that the Canadian version of the show has used some DNA testing in its research:
Before heading to the New Brunswick archives to investigate the Gosmans further, [opera singer] Measha [Brueggergosman] and her brother Neville decide to send their DNA for analysis. Testing their DNA can provide information about their ancestorsâ distant ethnic background. Scientists compare genetic markers on chromosomes to see if they match up with samples compiled in a worldwide data bank.
This could be a lot of fun, depending on who the celebrities are.
"The bottom end of a muu muu has just been stolen by that macaque"
I'm watching mid-day kid-friendly animal programming, when I realize a central fact of television reality: Jeff Corwin is a freak. Not just any kind of freak. A climbing-up-on-Indian-rooftops-with-urban-monkeys kind of freak. A "Hey lady, that monkey just stole your jogging shorts!" kind of freak.
LUCY: "I don't want this kind of show. I don't want it! I don't want it! I don't want this kind! I don't want this kind!"
DADDY: "Really, you don't want this show?"
LUCY: "I want a cartoon."
DADDY: "Believe me, that's what you're watching."
"Daily Show" investigates evolution/creation controversy
All week long, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart is devoting its comedy to "Evolution Schmevolution".
Tonight it's a visit to Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the Scopes Trial. There was also an interview with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science.
Tomorrow they will be at the Bronx Zoo, and will interview Kurt Vonnegut (not at the same time, I assume).
So far, the evolution part is relatively minor, driving the monologue and the on-location segment. The on-location stuff I always find to be mean-spirited, myself. But the monologue made me laugh -- especially the maladapted fire-breathing godzilla giraffe.
Coming attractions
This has got to have more potential than that movie, Homo erectus:
March 3, 2007 -- ABC is turning the Geico caveman ads into a half-hour sitcom.
"Cavemen" will revolve around three pre-historic men who must battle prejudice as they attempt to live as normal thirtysomethings in modern Atlanta.
Various smart-aleck remarks:
In their defamation lawsuit, the cavemen retain Denny Crane.
BRUNO TONIOLI: "That tango WAS A LATIN PLEISTOCENE DREAM!"
I can't wait to see how they react to typing 4,8, 15, 16, 23, 42 again and again...
IZZIE: (fighting back tears) "We tried, but there just aren't any matching donors for a new caveman heart..."
Next week, in a touching episode of Ugly Betty...
Three words: Caveman Wife Swap...
Meanwhile, further down in the story:
Few TV shows have come out of the commercial sphere, but it's not without precedence: The 2002 CBS comedy "Baby Bob" revolved around a talking baby character that was first seen in a series of dot.com ads.
I've got to figure it's a bad thing if your Variety story mentions the words, "Baby Bob".
Giganto: The Real King Kong
Gretchen found this show on the History Channel tonight. It turned out to be a really good program on Gigantopithecus. Russ Ciochon did a great job -- he should be on TV more. Jack Rink was good, too, and Esteban Sarmiento was very entertaining.
Of course, a lot of the show was devoted to the "mystery ape" aspect, including Bigfoot -- which of course is what so many people are interested in about Gigantopithecus. Even so, this was handled a bit better than in most other programs, with witness interviews and the program following a mystery ape hunt in Washington. Ciochon got his views across very clearly that "mystery apes" are nonsense and have no connection at all to Gigantopithecus.
They also mentioned that the date of the most recent site (earlier than 300,000 years ago) is too old for DNA extraction. But with the crystal aggregate story and the new metagenomic approaches, I think it will be worth a try before long. The Gigantopithecus genome project would be much more worth doing than most.
Meanwhile, the show followed Ciochon and Rink to China, visiting apothecary shops and Gigantopithecus-bearing caves. They collect samples for ESR dating, and Ciochon carries some of von Koenigswald's Gigantopithecus teeth from the Seckenberg Museum to Max Planck for microCT scanning.
The web listing for the show isn't much, but it should tell the next time it will be showing.
Consistently every month I get a high proportion of my Google hits from searches for Gigantopithecus, and of course my Gigantopithecus files are there for your perusal. But you should also check out Ciochon's own site, which is really great.
Thanks for the plate tectonics, CBS!
I've been seeing these ads for this new show, "Jericho", which is supposedly about how a western Kansas town reacts to some kind of nearby nuclear explosion.
I've got to say, I'm freaking tired of seeing mountains in these ads that supposedly happen in Kansas!
Now, you know I'm from western Kansas, and this is looking to me like the worst kind of lunacy since Tom Clancy put a secret bioweapon lab outside of Salina, complete with bus stop on I-70!
Let's read a description:
JERICHO is a drama about what happens when a nuclear mushroom cloud suddenly appears on the horizon, plunging the residents of a small, peaceful Kansas town into chaos, leaving them completely isolated and wondering if they're the only Americans left alive.
(Me: Sure, right. That's totally what would happen. Of course, it's hard to be totally isolated when there's nowhere more than a half-hour drive from anywhere else. Yeah, we're the only Americans left alive because the magic ju-ju bomb has whacked the whole country!
Gretchen: The whole premise is stupid! Do they think that Kansans are all some kind of rubes who disintegrate into some kind of science-fiction scenario as soon as something bad happens?!)
I just don't understand where the mountains are supposed to be. I mean, is this like somebody nukes Colorado Springs, and we're supposed to be able to see it from Kansas? Or did the nukes make the mountains? Have any of these people been to Kansas?
Neanderthal -- The Rebirth
Just liveblogging this show on the Science Channel -- we'll see if it's any good.
0:01: Flipping just after the start, Chris Stringer is explaining who Neandertals were.
(Voiceover: "It was the beginning of a legend. What was this ancient creature? When had it lived?")
The map plotting Neandertal sites looks like it was cribbed from The Bourne Identity or something.
0:05: Gary Sawyer enters, reconstructing skulls. He's explaining how he made up the "complete Neandertal skeleton" composite.
(Gretchen: "Sure, the complete Neandertal Frankenstein!")
0:13: Trent Holliday walks to AMNH to see the skeleton.
I'm beginning to realize: this is a whole show about that composite skeleton!
(Voiceover: "...bringing the reconstruction to life, with startling anatomical accuracy!"
Me: "What, no Ken bump?")
0:16: Holliday explains flared ribcage. Ice expands over animated Europe, like Day After Tomorrow. Dramatic noise (definitely not music), sort of like locusts flying through a hollow pipe.
0:18: Leslie Aiello appears in a Bowflex commercial. No, you really have to see this to appreciate: the music, the exercise equipment scenes -- it's really a Bowflex commercial!
Two "volunteers" have been selected with different physiques -- a guy who is Neandertal-proportioned, and another tall, skinny guy who is "modern human" proportioned. They put them in an ice bath to see how they conserve heat. The Neandertal-proportioned guy retains heat better.
Man, I hope these guys got paid!
0:21: (Voiceover: "Calories...Mean...Meat!") Steve Churchill walking through the woods talking about energy expenditure.
Some Neandertal-dressed guy with a totally unchanging facial expression is stalking an elk.
John Shea flaking stone, and walking with spears through a full parking lot. I like this scene -- clever juxtaposition, and no locust-pipe noise. Although it seems to me that the argument about not throwing the spears probably should have showed just how badly the reconstructed spears behaved when thrown -- and I assume they did film it since Shea is doing all this stuff at some sort of sports field.
0:29: Holliday describes skeletal evidence for spear thrusting. This is very good.
And now Churchill is actually thrusting sensor-equipped spears into a pad, explains how forces affect the arms asymmetrically.
Back to the elk-stalking. We see the Neandertal approaching within spear-thrusting range of the standing elk.
(Voiceover: "A carnivorous predator with an insatiable hunger for meat! ... blah blah ... So does this mean he really was inferior to modern humans?"
Me: "What about the startling anatomical accuracy?")
0:33: Ralph Holloway is playing the blues on a trumpet, in a blue-lighted room! This has got to drive Milford crazy -- why did he never talk any producers into something this cool? Now Ralph's pumping green goo onto the inner table of some cranial cast. And he has a big, white endocast.
(Gretchen: "That looks suspiciously like a giant mozzarella.")
0:37: Now we're in some kind of British cell phone commercial. Oh, I get it, they're all talking, time for the language issue -- Ooh! Flash back to the elkstalker. Voiceover: "The question is: could he talk?"
Commercial break -- and the commercial is an actual Bowflex commercial! They have to have underwritten this!
0:41: Focusing on the hyoid bone. Bob Franciscus is putting people through a scanner to reconstruct vocal tracts. And he's got prismatic models of the human and Neandertal vocal tracts, with the Neandertal one basically shaped like a modern human female.
Patsy Rodenburg is a voice coach, getting some English man to count in a high-pitched voice.
(Gretchen: "So apparently Neandertals sounded like Dame Edna?"
Voiceover: "It seems he wasn't actually the ape-man of legend at all."
Me: "He was actually an ape-woman!"
Voiceover: "In the ice age of Europe, he should have been king!"
Gretchen: "Make that 'queen.'")
0:47: Clive Finlayson tells us about the deteriorating climate in Europe.
Now we're looking at Neandertals walking from space, like in Patriot Games. They're apparently out of food.
A-ha! Shea is throwing the spear, explaining why it wouldn't work in the open. I don't know, I don't really see one sneaking to thrusting distance in the forest, either.
Now we see Braveheart's dad using an atlatl.
0:54: (Voiceover: "Once again, the skeleton holds a clue. A relic of one of the tiniest and most sensitive parts of the body: his inner ear.")
Fred Spoor is explaining about the inner ear and balance. Smaller semicircular canals in Neandertals. "The only logical conclusion is that Neanderthals were less agile, and maybe didn't include as much running and jumping in their general behavior."
I have to say, this seems incredible to me: we've just heard how Neandertals have to use asymmetrically balanced force to thrust their spears, and they're sneaking on tiptoe up to the back of elk in the forest, and they don't need to balance?
Shea explains that modern humans were able to exploit open habitat.
(Voiceover: "The traditional saga of superior modern humans ... wiping out the Neanderthals seems implausible. Instead the reason ... may be something much more random: changing climates and the twists of evolutionary fate.")
And the end credits are rolling over that same expressionless elk-stalking face. Just standing there in the snow.
Well, that was pretty good, all things considered. The actors were pretty mannequin-like, but they weren't comical and they didn't interrupt the flow of the program. I like the spear-thrusting stuff, and the science was pretty clear. And the composite skeleton made a template for the presentation, but they didn't overblow it's importance. Generally pretty well done.
But it definitely needed a different voiceover script; it was clunky and gave rise to several gaffes. I think my students would be rolling!
And what is with the camera angles and lighting? My advice if you're ever in one of these shows is to insist on an open field like Shea -- they couldn't Bowflex-ize it. No filming the inside of his nose, either!
Nova: "Bone Diggers"
I've flipped to a Nova, titled "Bone Diggers," about Australian paleontology. They're interviewing Australian paleontologist John Long, formerly of the Western Australian Musuem -- now at Museum Victoria -- and showing a skeleton of "an animal that has puzzled paleontologists for a hundred years."
They go out on the Nullarbor Plain, which has "thousands" of deep-shaft caves. They got some e-mail from some spelunkers showing a spectacular skeleton, and have come to excavate and survey what else is there. Apparently, there is a huge threat of fossil poaching from these caves.
I really like this Nova -- it doesn't have any of the trumped-up controversy of most paleontology docs, and the narration is fairly minimal. There is a lot of opportunity for Long to explain things in his own words. And all the time is spent following the paleontologists -- you get a view of how they set up their camp, how they practice with rockclimbing gear, and the efforts they take to minimize the chance that poachers will track them to the cave. And you see them preparing the fossils: a half-million year old complete skeleton of Thylacoleo, eight new species of fossil kangaroos, and many other skeletons.
It's an ideal kind of site for filming, because the paleontologists just had to walk through the cave and find things on the surface. So it's not characteristic of the high failure-rate and large-scale digging out backdirt of many paleontological sites. But the site gives the opportunity to see the scientists reflecting on what they are finding, and several instances where the paleontologists are turning over bones and suddenly recognize that the bones represent a new species. So that's pretty cool.
And you see them don protective suits to take bone samples for DNA and radiometric dating. They have the idea that the bones may be among the most recent found of the Australian megafauna, but they turn out to be several hundred thousand years old. Which is quite stunning, since the bones look like they were placed in the cave very recently. It's amazing to imagine such a pristine environment, without dust or significant moisture, for a half million years.
Then, a bit over halfway through, they return to the museum and you see comparative work, with not only Long but also Rod Wells describing the biology of Thylacoleo. After this follows several sequences of research on the fossil, including a CT scan, a computer reconstruction of the endocast, laser scanning and virtual reconstruction to assess locomotor characteristics, an anatomical artist drawing a fleshed-out reconstruction and then sculpting one; the sculpture being laser-scanned, and finally animated. And then you see the skeleton on exhibit in the museum.
They find out interesting things; like the large clawed front paws for bringing down animals; the specialized, kangaroo-like chevron bones in the tail that indicate the Thylacoleo could take on an upright, tripod stance; and the flat-footed, bear-like walking style. I usually hate animated 3-d reconstructions of things, but in this case, the animal is so much a mixture of features from living models, that it seems really uncanny to have them put all together. So the model conveys a lot of information that can't be absorbed easily otherwise.
This is a really nice presentation of what paleontology is about -- from beginning to end showing people working on finding, preserving, and interpreting the fossils. Only in the last ten minutes does the show divert to other scientists musing on why the Australian megafauna disappeared; that's interesting and all, but I'm glad the show didn't focus on that problem. Because the Thylacoleo itself is interesting enough.
Now it's Lahn on Numb3rs
OK, Numb3rs is definitely the coolest crime show on television. In December, there was the episode with the pseudo-Kennewick skeleton. Now, the two math guys are having a conversation about Bruce Lahn's work -- recent evolution of microcephalin and ASPM!
Not only that, they're discussing them as possible evidence for recent changes in human mental abilities. Of course, in the context of this episode, that means psychic abilities....
Hey, if you writers are reading the blog, let me know, OK? I'll keep it on the DL if you want.
Sewall Wright on Numb3rs
Last year, the show had several anthro-related episodes, but this year it has been mostly network theory and the like. Until last night, when Sewall Wright was mentioned by name!
That's right, folks. US network drama. Friday night. Sewall Wright.
Sweeeeeeeet!
Why Sewall Wright? Well, our intrepid mathematician, Charlie, had to calculate the inbreeding coefficient for a monomaniacal polygamist cult leader. His pedigree for five generations or so was sewn into a quilt, and neither Charlie nor his attractive mathematician girlfriend knew what the symbols represented -- until Charlie's department chair, played by Kathy Najimy, for goodness sake, (who happened to be in Charlie's house because she is getting it on with Charlie's dad -- you know, Judd Hirsch -- recognized the pedigree symbols from cattle breeding!
Is this a great show, or what?
Of course, they followed that moment with some genetic nonsense about how the cult leader couldn't conceive with any of his highly related wives, so he had to have a particular unrelated female to mate with. I say, "nonsense," mainly because it was irrelevant to the plot, and didn't really convey a correct understanding of "recessive" alleles.
But how much can I ask for, really? Especially when I happened to be reading Sewall Wright at that very moment!
Numb3rs takes on Kennewick
I actually like CBS's Numb3rs much more than Bones, but it usually doesn't have anything to do with anthropology. But this week's episode, "Bones of contention" was great --- it was a total send-up of the Kennewick story.
Archaeologists find 10,000-year-old skeleton in California; it has "European" features; there's a court battle with a tribe; the archaeologists are bent on showing that the tribe has no claim to their casino land; the tribe's chief (Graham Greene) steals the bones and kills one of the archaeologists.
And besides that, they have bitter tribe members who are being thrown out for having insufficient blood quanta -- just like the "Black Indians"
You can see why I would find this cool -- it's like they wrote the whole episode from posts on my blog!
Now, Numb3rs is all about using math to help the FBI, so they had Charlie helpfully explaining radiocarbon decay curves and discriminant functions (they even mentioned FORDISC!). Of course, a math genius is a bit of overkill for that, so they have him do a completely irrelevant side issue finding possible ancient sites from water holes. This falls into the category of "How many cases can a math professor really help the FBI with, anyway?"
I have to say my favorite part was watching the "anthropologist" (the one played by Kate Burton) try to explain "race" to Don. I'll paraphrase:
DON: So you can tell what race the skull is?
ANTHRO: It's not really about race. Race is a social construct. It's more about geography. We can tell from the features of the skull, like whether the nose is well-suited for a cold, arid climate, what part of the world it is from -- Africa, Asia, or Europe.
HAWKS (at home): So you're saying it's about race!
DON: Oh, I see.
Later...
DON: It turns out the skull is European.
DAVID: So they can tell what race it is?
DON: It turns out it's not really about race -- that's more of a social construct.
DAVID: I guess I didn't get that memo.
HAWKS (at home): (laughter)
The PBS science showdown
I like my science-show narrators disembodied. I especially like it if they sound like Liev Schreiber. Alec Baldwin, I don't mind, although I always feel like next he's going to tell me about the caterpillar drive.
So all three of the new pilots that PBS aired this month as candidates for the "new" science show basically turned me off. Two of them -- the Wired and Science Investigators shows -- are definitely tuned for a younger, hipper demographic. At least, a younger hipper demographic that wants to see young pseudoreporters wandering clumsily through labs, ponds, and other exotic locales. I'm not convinced there's any space between "young and hip" and "dorky" in the science-show universe.
The two of them beat 22nd Century pretty easily. Get this description from Scientific American's Nikhil Swaminathan:
Robinson co-hosts this show with a reincarnation of Aldous Huxley--I kid you not; though it's an actor playing the role, obviously--who's job it is "to remind us that all progress is not a step forward," and Orlanda Bell, an astral projection (half human, half machine), who presumably the show's producers have created to spread what will likely turn out to be half truths from the future. ("Almost all deadly diseases have been eradicated," being one of the first phrases out of her mouth.) Basically, it's like the dad from Punky Brewster bickering with a hologram that could have looked like anyone--so, obviously they chose Designing Women's Annie Potts--over whether we're all going to grow up to be cyborgs.
Yes it is that bad. It's like over-the-top Crossing Jordan bad. Maybe they should have had a seance and brought back Edgar Cayce instead.
I will say that Science Investigators probably had the best chance for my attention, since they went to 454 Life Sciences to talk about Neandertal DNA. But they definitely lost it when their discussion ran to how easy it would be to clone a Neandertal, if only it weren't so ethically wrong. As if!
Anyway, if you want to see more about the shows, Nikhil Swaminathan of Scientific American has been blogging them (that link goes to the last installment, which links to the other two). I basically have the same opinion, that Wired had the most potential of the bunch.
But if it were me, I would just kill this and ScienceNOW! and triple the amount of Nova. Or make more Scientific American Frontiers -- somehow that show makes the magazine format with short stories work in a way that these clunkers didn't manage. What's more, Alan Alda manages to be hip without being dorky.
Geladas grazing
I'm watching the Discovery Channel's new "Planet Earth" miniseries -- though not in primetime but in rebroadcast. The series seem like a way to sell people HD televisions, and I have to say they're gorgeous. In the second episode there is a long segment showing geladas in highland Ethiopia, moving in groups of several hundred.
The series includes many long shots from the air, which allows them to show the movement of herds (or troops) from a longer perspective that shows their dynamics. In the first episode, this was used to great effect showing the hunting tactics of wolves and Cape dogs.
Also in the first, there was footage of baboons wading bipedally into the Okavango Delta.
Lions hunting elephants, redux
Wow, "Planet Earth" tonight had nightime footage of lions taking down an elephant. It was one of those lone young males, and it had thirty lions running it down, with multiple lions jumping up on its back. I wrote about this last year; it's fascinating to see it in action.
They didn't catch the final takedown on film, but they had the gratuitous hungry lions eating the elephant shot.
It's the "Great Plains" episode; which actually had very little about the real Great Plains -- that is, the part of the American West where I'm from.
Two snippets of film, separated by one week
Last Sunday, I was flipping around the local channels and happened upon a devotional program -- I didn't catch the name -- that caught my attention for a few minutes.
It had a fellow testifying about his development of belief in an intelligent designer. He went through a standard story: he started as a nonbeliever, then doubted the "scientific account" that said we evolved "by random chance", then came to the belief that our existence itself proves an intelligent designer must exist also.
After coming to his belief in a designer, the man said he began exploring different religious traditions to evaluate whether any could be verified by their predictions. I thought this part was likely to have a predictable result, and it did: the man found the biblical prophesies about Jesus to be a compelling scientific reason why Christianity is the correct religious belief system.
Last week one of my colleagues caught me in the hall and raised the topic of intelligent design. I described what I had seen on television, and said, "It's amazing the opportunities for dissemination that the intelligent design message has."
This Sunday, we were flipping around the cable channels and happened across the last few minutes of "The Neanderthal's World", a Discovery Channel film from a few years ago.
The scene was dramatizing whether Neandertal-modern human mating ever took place. So of course we look into the face of one of the no-browridge-makeup "modern" humans who is standing in a cave trying to make up his mind about something. Then one of his no-browridge buddies starts beating a drum.
Then "modern" man starts having joyless, animalistic sex to the drumbeat with the browridge-laden "Neandertal" woman. More joyless than Quest for Fire, if you can believe it.
I really only watched about three minutes of both programs, which share nothing other than being on at 9 am Sunday morning on two consecutive weeks.
But they raise some interesting points about communicating a message.
a) Why do science programmers think they need to "sex up" (literally) their shows with those hokey reenactments and dramatizations? The devotional shows how compelling it can be to have a person talking about ideas. We are naturally interested in listening to people who are honest and direct -- which means not hidden behind jargon, not ensconced in a dimly-lit laboratory, and not talking in passive lecturese.
b) There are, of course, religious programs that include reenactments or dramatizations of biblical events. There is a good reason for this: They have a script! This is a good reason for science programming to be very, very careful about dramatizations.
c) What have all these computer graphics gotten us? Lately, they just give programmers new ways to drain all the color out of "ancient" landscapes. I can't be the only one to notice all the grey landscapes, dim interiors, and brown forests. So not only are the people constantly depressed, they have constant seasonal affective disorder from the perpetual greyness. Stop it, already!
d) Seeing one of these science programs in the morning really brings home the appearance that they were meant to be viewed at night. They are too poorly lit for daytime. They have too much brooding music and low-toned voiceover. I'm sure people who show these films in their classes must have noticed the same thing. How does anyone stay awake watching these things? Can't we have some color?
e) Why is every representation of ancient humans sapped of all happiness? Chimpanzees have fun. Chimpanzees smile. Chimpanzees enjoy sex. Ancient people are a whole lot more like us than chimpanzees. Get with the program, people!
f) I like Clan of the Cave Bear. Clan of the Cave Bear is hugely popular. I like The Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments is hugely popular. Religious programming often relies on people's familiarity with fictional accounts like The Ten Commandments (among many others) to bring additional interest to their subject. Evolution programming lately seems like it's trying to become Clan of the Cave Bear. It does not enhance the message of science to make it indistinguishable from fiction.
Survivor follies
I suppose it's uniquely anthronerdy to be irritated by the fake skull props on Survivor. But they're like biker skulls with sutures in the wrong places!
And they've given them a "flint" right away this time. That irritates me every time, because it is really one of these magnesium bars, where you shave off some and make some sparks and it lights up to 5000° (compare and contrast with a real flint and steel here).
Of course, when that tiebreaker last season had two people trying to start a fire with these things for over an hour and a half, I was rolling!
I always tell my students that Survivor is the best show to watch for anthropological insights. If you want to see how hard it is to make Machiavellian intelligence work, this is the one to watch!
I love how nobody wanted to pick Ms. Smartypants, and she got sent to Exile Island. And, oh no! The immunity idol is a fake skull, with baseball-like fake stitches and a spangle of fake ulnae!
The Ultimate Survivor!
OK, I was drawn in by the first few minutes, so I'm liveblogging the National Geographic show, "The Ultimate Survivor."
8:02 -- Lee Berger has fossil evidence of a giant race of ancient humans?
8:05 -- The basic theme is the bush vs. ladder theme. To illustrate the ladder, they have an australopithecine pick up a steel baton and pass it on to later hominids. Forty years of Hollywood technology since "2001" and we've got a bunch of plasticine freaks passing a steel baton. I want the monolith back!
8:10 -- The idea of a family tree is very easily illustrated--use a tree. So we have a tree with hominid pictures on it. But did you notice that this particular tree looks remarkably like Ernst Haeckel's primate phylogeny tree?
8:13 -- Establishing the bush theme: Kenyanthropus as a new species apart from A. afarensis. Louise Leakey is featured.
8:16 -- Obviously Kenyanthropus was a different genus. It has brown fur and Lucy has black fur!
8:22 -- The Homo erectus model is a little distracting. He looks like an airbrushed white guy. Are these the same actors the BBC used?
8:23 -- On to Dmanisi. Reid Ferring says there are many piles of round river stones that were probably collected for throwing. They show a couple of hominids throwing rocks at a sabertooth. OK, the skull suddenly fleshing to life in Lordkipanidze's hand is frightening. There's a Hollywood touch.
8:35 -- Gretchen is complaining about their made-up common names, "Nutcracker" for A. boisei, "Handyman" for Homo habilis. Is there any point to dumbing it down this way? Who do they think is watching?
8:38 -- Swartkrans burned bones. "If these burned bones aren't the result of a natural fire, then they are the first evidence of a controlled fire by humans." Well, yes, since those are the only two choices.
8:39 -- RICHARD WRANGHAM ALERT! He's talking about fire IN FRONT OF A SMOKING WEBER GRILL! NOW HE"S CHEWING RAW MEAT! Whoa, man, that grill is smoking up a storm....NOW HE'S BEATING MEAT ON A TREE!
8:42 -- This is a very clever illustration of the small gut, small tooth, small jaw muscle changes, with body parts computer morphing.
8:48 -- Lucinda Backwell is talking about A. robustus diet and termites. There is really too much narration here. I would much rather hear the scientists telling us about this stuff. It's not that complicated that it needs to be dumbed down.
8:55 -- "Lee Berger is on erectus's trail." He's excavating a fossil hyena den. He has a leg bone from an ancient human that he estimates was six feet tall. The amazing thing "is that we think it's a child or female." Berger and Steve Churchill build a reconstruction of the Kabwe specimen. OK, this is nothing new -- it was published in 1923, people! I guess this is just going along with the theme of giving everything a nonsensical name: "Goliath" is the name for Homo rhodesiensis. Nothing against Lee and Steve; I'm sure they think it is as hokey as I do. On the other hand, they did pose in front of a computer at a library workstation to have a mockup of a hominid computer-inserted in the film later....
9:06 -- Steve Chuchill is measuring the volume and surface area of his H. rhodesiensis mold. He ends up dangling a macabre skin with face painted on. Too cool!
9:07 -- The voiceover still hasn't called it anything but Goliath, but the hint that it may have went to Europe means that we may be talking about Homo heidelbergensis instead. Hey, I have a suggestion: if the taxonomic names are too complicated, maybe we could call them all Homo sapiens and just talk about the site names?
9:10 -- Another Flores snippet. The film is really jumping around a lot, but it is clear that the only new thing is Flores, and the rest is just a summary of results from paleoanthropology over the last five years.
9:15 -- The hobbit skeleton laid out includes a humerus and ulna. The computer-generated hobbits are walking around the Liang Bua excavation like Kevin Pollack and his buddy in "Willow."
9:20 -- "Goliath!" The reconstruction of Kabwe is 6 foot 4 inches. I especially like the veins popping out on the arms -- he's a pro wrestler! -- and that goes with the theme of him being hot all the time. He didn't have the surface area to get rid of heat in a hot, moist climate, so he had to stay where it was dry. Not sure what the problem is here, exactly; are there no large people living in Africa now?
9:26 -- Henshilwood at Blombos. Nice shots of the ocean, and reconstruction of the cave during occupation. Good emphasis on the incised ochre chunks. This is a nice part.
9:30 -- "Equipped with greater brain power, some of us headed to Europe." A suddenly Caucasian modern human comes face-to-face with a Neandertal! BZZZAP -- they're gone!
9:32 -- Back to Flores: "For thousands of years, modern human migrants likely shared this island with another species: hobbits." Hmmm...could it be that these modern humans made all those tools at Liang Bua? Nope, can't ask that question.
9:36 -- Commercial break. How is it that they can make "Hogzilla" seem intrinsically more interesting than human evolution?
9:37 -- Spencer Wells "has made a startling discovery about our struggle to survive: we almost didn't make it." Wells is selling us Toba! Voiceover:"There is no way to know how many of us died...only how many lived." Wells:"It may have taken a global catastrophe to actually kick-start the mind into high gear." OK, the concept du jour is "survivor genes," that were spread around Africa before Toba erupted (they haven't named the volcano for us yet) and allowed some people scattered around Africa (but nowhere else? except for Neandertals and hobbits?) to survive. I guess this is supposed to explain why our genes show geographic diversity dating to the Lower Pleistocene?
9:42 -- "You don't wear jewelry unless you care about what others think about you, and that is a uniquely modern human trait." Well, and Neandertals....
9:45 -- Lice genetics. "Body lice live under clothes, not just the rough animal hides worn by earlier humans." What?
9:51 -- FoxP2: it allowed us to ululate, and that sets us apart from other animals, "more than any other human talent, it is the ultimate power tool."
9:52 -- RICHARD WRANGHAM ALERT: The grill is still smoking. "Chimpanzees have bouts of violent aggression with each other about 100 to 1000 times more often within their communities." "We have a coalition of the timid." "That kind of killing [of violent people within groups] led to selection against the genes that cause aggression within groups." That, and BEATING MEAT AGAINST A TREE! OK, that's overkill. In any event, this is one of the most sensible parts of the show, and it's only two minutes long. This could be expanded into a half-hour section--how did cooperation arise in ancient humans?
9:55 -- "Consider the tuber." Lee Berger is mincing, grating, ricing, and macerating potatoes with 18 different kitchen tools. And yet, he isn't in Wrangham's backyard. Hmmm...better to stay out of the SMOKY MEAT WARFARE ZONE.
9:58 -- Steve Churchill gets the last word: "Wherever we encountered them, we outcompeted them. We made this come to pass."
Bones again; long-dead teen hanging in tree
I didn't have much to add last week. Although I did have the same question as this week: Doesn't this fictional D.C. have a medical examiner? I mean, both of these (the bomb victim; the mummified hanging victim) are cases that a forensic anthropologist might well get called in on, but not until the ME (or coroner) had performed the legalities (like signing a death certificate) and released the body to the Jeffersonian Medico-legal lab. I guess skipping that part helps tighten up the plot (and gives a good reason for Brennan to pal around with a hunky FBI agent.
I can appreciate the catch-22 between declaring a homicide or not, but this is exactly the sort of thing that will get you thrown out of a lot of future court cases. I guess it's lucky that Brennan hasn't had to go to court yet!
OK, now it seems to me that actually watching all the tapes is something you could have the minor characters do, to give them a reason for being.
Another week without much for the anthropologists. Maybe it's time for a Civil War crime to surface.
"Bones" debuts on Fox
Tonight was the series debut of the TV show Bones, which is a CSI-alike focused on forensic anthropology instead of just forensic science. What that means, in a nutshell, is that the bodies are too far gone for the next-of-kin to identify.
CSI has had a few forensic anthropology plotlines; this show is going to be all anthropology all the time.
Bones is based on the novels of forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs Reich's website is a Flash wonderland with information about her novels and work in forensic anthropology. Here's her background:
From teaching FBI agents at Quantico how to detect and recover human remains, to separating and identifying commingled body parts in her Montreal lab, as a forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs has brought her own dramatic work experience to her mesmerizing forensic thrillers. She continues to work full time for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and for the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Medecine Legale for the province of Quebec. She is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. She is one of only fifty forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and is on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
Most recently she has traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide. For her work with CILHI she has identified war dead from World War II and from all over Southeast Asia - she even examined the remains from the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. How does she bear this kind of work? "You get used to it," she has said. "I don't like to see maggots. But you put on your mask and your surgical scrub and your latex gloves and you go at it."
Here's what Reichs told CNN about the difference between fictional and real forensics:
Coroner's offices and laboratories, also, are generally more gritty and less pretty than those on TV -- as are those who work in them. Forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, for one, said she's "never gone to a crime scene wearing pumps and pantyhose" like her onscreen "CSI" facsimiles.
I must admit, I've never worn pumps to a crime scene either. In fact, I've never been to a crime scene, and I've only worked indirectly on a couple of forensic cases. I study only bones that are beyond the maggot stage.
Nevertheless, all my students know I follow CSI pretty closely. Although Dr. Sheldon Hawkes was fairly clearly not based on me.
So, is this new show going to be any good?
The show
Skeleton found in a lake in D.C.: I suppose it's Chandra Levy.
Forensic anthropologists can find evidence of bursitis, and it may suggest physical activity. On the other hand, they generally don't do it just after pulling a skeleton out of a lake, and "tennis player" is the kind of detail that, if you found it in a missing person report, you would think it consistent. It wouldn't be the kind of thing you'd put in your lab notes -- a defense attorney could easily challenge your identification if the victim turned out to be, say, a weightlifter.
If any graduate student out there gets treated like Zack does in this show, please consider a transfer. No self-respecting scientific institution would tell students "not to talk to Ph.D.s". (OK, maybe I can think of a couple, but I would tell those students to transfer, too.) And you probably have good grounds to sue if your Ph.D. supervisor writes a novel with a fictional account of your sex life.
Great lab set -- in the middle of a giant, open greenhouse. Just the place to isolate insects in human remains -- unless of course they actually were living in one of the nearby plants. I've got to stop thinking like a defense attorney.
Very cool holographic reconstruction program, which is of course totally fake. The main value of it is to show us a facial reconstruction without taking the time to actually do one. No, there is no software that can, at the click of a button, change a facial reconstruction from one race to another. And since the tissue depth markers on the skull have to be based on a tissue depth standard for some race to start with, you can see that the point of putting them on would be to allow a single facial reconstruction assuming one race.
Generally, the characters who have mystical computer skills are the most interesting, and that will probably be true of "Angela Montenegro", also. But the computer stuff is totally made up.
Confirmed! Yes, it's the fictionalized missing intern of "that senator".
Why is the smart professional anthropologist following the FBI dude like an insecure puppy? I guess it's a way to dramatize why she is not acting like a forensic anthropologist.
Oh, well, yeah, when she pulls a judo move on a senator's aide, she's not your average forensic anthropologist. I guess she's not too worried about being suitable as an expert witness.
Now Gretchen wants to know why I don't have a glowing wall of bones. I want to know how they get them to stay in there articulated at strange angles. It does cut the need for labels on the drawers if you can see bone silhouettes on all of them.
Not too much science since the first fifteen minutes. Yes, they can find stab wounds, and cutmarks on finger bones would be consistent with fingerprint removal. Fetal ear bones? Not impossible.
"For someone who hates psychology, she sure has a lot of it." Yeah. Like "Crossing Jordan". Not exactly the kind of thing that secures your career at the "Jeffersonian" Institution.
I'm pretty sure the FBI dude ("Seeley", David Boreanaz) would have an easier time trusting the "squints" (have you ever heard a scientist called that?) if he wasn't surrounded by psycho ones.
Now she's breaking into a house. Now she shot a guy in his own house, without a warrant. Now she's getting her stalker to do first aid on the guy she shot.
I'm thinking in the real world she would be out of a posh Jeffersonian job and into a mental ward.
Would I watch it again?
Yeah, it's not bad. It could use multiple plotlines like CSI; that would make it easier to live with weird never-gonna-happen elements and would cut the need for some of the fake drama.
And I find Temperance's colleagues at the lab to be some of the most potentially interesting characters. Although the storyline for Zack looks pretty predictable. Zack, rebel from your "I'm not really a virgin, far from it," dialogue!
Aside from that, they have the best lines, too ("How many warnings did you give before you sniped them?"). Give these supporting characters something to do!
I only hope Temperance doesn't go all "Crossing Jordan". The "missing parents" are a bad, bad sign. Maybe her boss at the Jeffersonian could just put her on unpaid medical leave and we could see how Montenegro would do in her place. And it's not like Brennan's the only forensic anthropologist south of Montreal (yes, she really said that). Hmmm..."Crossing Jordan" brought in Jack Klugman, maybe "Bones" could have guest roles for Angela Lansbury as a novelist/forensic mentor.
Did I just say I wanted more Angela Lansbury on television? Yeah, but not full-on Jessica Fletcher, more like a cool almost-"Manchurian Candidate" Lansbury. You've got to imagine how tough a Ph.D. advisor would have to be to put up with self-destructive Temperance. Psychological-control abilities would be a plus.
Gretchen says Peter Falk, and yeah, that would be good too. Or he could be a villain. That would be awesome.
If they are serious about having all this tension between Seeley and Temperance, they ought to consider something more like the Bruce Willis--Cybill Shepherd relationship in "Moonlighting". Cybill could be frustrated and angry with Bruce without acting like a spoiled child. So far, Temperance is looking like a stereotypical teenager, like she was emotionally stunted when her parents went missing. Boreanaz would have much more to work with if Temperance actually acted like a smart professional instead of constantly saying she is one (complete with saying she has a "high IQ"! Who says that?).
The biggest problem with the pilot is that there were no lingering clues. CSI always has clues that they discover early in the episode that they don't resolve until the end. "Bones" had nothing -- the instant she finds something, we hear what it is and what it means. That means there is no suspense at the end. Instead, the lame action tries to make suspense (why exactly did a smart senator's aide think that burning his house down was going to help?).
Granted, the pilot has a lot of extra work introducing characters. We'll see how it looks the next few weeks. Hopefully they'll send Temperance to some kind of sensitivity training.
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks