john hawks weblog

Michael Bérubé writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Why I Resigned the Paterno Chair", with a discussion of academics versus athletics. I'm linking because of this:

The day thousands of alumni cheer "We are Penn State" in celebration of the fact that the anthropology department is No. 1 nationally (having defeated Duke in the prestigious Boas Bowl) will be the day we know we've changed the culture in Happy Valley.

Somehow I don't see it happening, although a Boas Bowl would be entertaining.

Here's a story that showed up in my feed this morning: "Prehistoric man ate panda, claims scientist".

Wei Guangbiao said prehistoric man ate the bears in what is now part of the city of Chongqing in south-west China.

Wei, head of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, said excavated panda fossils "showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man".

This really wouldn't be very surprising, as occasional evidence of human predation or consumption of other carnivores, including bears in Europe, goes way back.

El Pais has a fascinating story about the Paleolithic sites in the Lozoya river valley: "A Neanderthal trove in Madrid".

It was on the floor of Des-Cubierta that the Neanderthal must have placed the dead body of a small child aged two-and-a-half to three years old. They placed two slabs of stone and an aurochs horn on top, and set the body on fire. [Enrique] Baquedano explains that they found some of the child's teeth - they call it a little girl, although they have no scientific evidence of its gender - as well as a piece of coal that turned up just a few days ago and which will enable precise dating. "Complete burials, with a clear structure that allows [researchers] to reconstruct behaviors, is a very rare thing in any part of the world," says [Juan-Luis] Arsuaga, who is also co-director of the excavations at the major prehistoric site of Atapuerca.

This one sounds like an incredible context, if it really is as described.

Arsuaga is author of The Neanderthal's Necklace.

Ashley Montagu is a unique character from the history of anthropology. I ran across an essay of his yesterday, which I found entertaining for its many zingers. It's entitled, "A cursory examination of the relations between physical and social anthropology", and while it has a four-field (well, two-field) tenor, it's far from complementary of his contemporaries [1].

As for the effects of social anthropology upon physical anthropology, I am not aware that there have ever been any; yet, as we shall see, not only have physical anthropologists a great deal to learn from the findings of social anthropologists, but we shall also see that unless they make certain of these findings part of their methodological procedures, much of their labor is likely to prove abortive. The same may be said of social anthropologists in relation to the findings of physical anthropology. Each division in its many branches has been so intent upon pegging out its claims that the peggers seem almost to have lost sight of one mother for the number of the pegs. In a science such as anthropology, which covers so wide and so complex a range of phenomena, this is not altogether surprising; but the pioneering stage is over and it is time that the peggers began to take some cognisance of the larger purposes of their activities.

I already tweeted that first line (my emphasis). What a classic!

On craniometrics:

In the past physical anthropologists have been content merely to philander upon the outskirts of these subjects, their chief occupation, being the production of a sort of calculated confusion with calipers wrought upon unoffending crania. The measurement of long series of crania has now been proceeding for more than 100 years as the main pastime of numerous workers, but with the exception of the work done within relatively recent years, it would be difficult to conceive of any work more useless or more barren of results than this.

The final paragraph of the essay expresses an early version of Ashley-Montagu's later concern with race and social justice:

The world would be immensely the poorer for the dissolution of all cultural differences between peoples. There is one belief, however, which is an essential article of faith and practise of many peoples, expressed in the notion: “We are the best, all others are our inferiors; they must be kept in their proper place.” I deem it among the most important tasks of the anthropologist to make available the evidence which may eventually prove to all mankind whether any people has, or has ever had, any justification for such a belief other than an hypertrophied sense of its own importance and the wishful mythology they have devised to support them in this belief. Only when the combined labors of physical and social anthropologists have laid bare the true meaning and value of such beliefs will anthropology have justified its claim to be called the science of man.

References

I ran across a 1940 paper by George Barton, a specialist on Near Eastern religious tradition, during the course of researching a paper I'm writing. The paper is entitled, "The Palaeolithic origins of religion" [1], and it has one of the most incredible abstracts I've ever seen:

The burials and the art of the Aurignacian period show that men then worshipped a mother goddess, and this worship can be traced back to Mousterian times, when Neanderthal man flourished. The same art shows that women reverenced the erect phallus. These are the only objects that they seem to have considered divine. There is reason to believe that the part of a father in procreation was not yet known. The worship was not a fertility-cult in the later sense. No privacy existed; men and women knew the details of each others' physical forms. Men saw women miraculously produce children. Like the male animals, they had from instinct coitus with her. Orgasm give them the divinest thrills they knew. It was to them like the later bacchic ecstasy of intoxication. Women became their goddesses. Probably they did not generalize more than the dog, but each was devoted to his mistress. Women obtained a similar mystic ecstasy from the experience. She did not deify man, but the erect phallus. The heart of religion is a mystic thrill, uplift or satisfaction. Creeds, rituals, and conduct are all subordinate to this. Palæolithic religion was, then, sex-mysticism. The psychologic unity of the race made it universal as its survivals in the historic period prove. This is the real origin of religion. It was not begotten by fear (Lucretius), nor by animism (Tylor), nor by ancestor worship (Herbert Spencer), nor by the mysterium tremendum (Otto), but by the mysterium feminium -a mysterium tremendum indeed, but scarcely that which Otto contemplated. In adult life we forget the umbilical cord and the nursing; similarly religion has now almost everywhere left far behind its biological beginnings.

They just don't write them like that anymore.

The article fits perfectly as an illustration of the excesses of using prehistoric evidence from archaeology as a strut for interpreting the evolution of behavior, which is why I'm citing it. The article as a whole is less foolish-sounding than the abstract, rooted in exposition of the archaeological record of "ritual" then known. These aspects of the archaeological record were often wishful thinking, but that wasn't Barton's fault.

References

I'll be flying out to Colorado next week for a lecture in Boulder. The lecture is Friday, October 12, at 4:00 pm, in Hale Science 270. I'll be excited to see some friends in Boulder, and if you're in the Boulder area, I'd love to see you there!

Harry Jerison, famous researcher of brain sizes across classes and orders of animals, commented on the relation of "encephalization" to the intelligence of animals by considering the problem one of multidimensional optimization [1]:

The insight is that comparable amounts of intelligence in different species may not (and normally would not) reflect comparable kinds of intelligence. Many and various intelligences (in the plural) must have evolved in conjunction with evolving environments and with brains and behaviours adapted to those environments.

That intelligences would be of various kinds is almost an axiom of evolutionary analysis, since adaptations evolve in the contexts of the environments in which they are effective, and species never occupy identical niches. The evolution of neural and sensorimotor adaptations provides many fine examples of uniqueness of species. The visual systems of deer and wolf, for example, may be similar in many ways, for example, in the structure of the sensory cells, neural networks of the retina, and the central nervous pathways and centres. Yet these systems are significantly different: the deer, like most ungulate 'prey' species, probably has panoramic vision whereas the wolf's visual field is more nearly like the primate's proscenium stage. The visual system encumbers significant amounts of nervous tissues and, thus, contributes to brain size and measured encephalization. Neural machinery associated with the sensory systems and motor control systems as a group determines a large fraction of the mass of the whole brain. Equality of encephalization of deer and wolf, thus, implies that the neural control systems for the specialized adaptations, though different in the two species, sum to approximately equal amounts relative to body size.

References

Steve Silberman provides an in-depth interview of Lee Billings, in the middle of writing a book about the discovery of extrasolar planets: "Five Billion Years of Solitude: Lee Billings on the Science of Reaching the Stars".

I do think humans are motivated to daydream about extraterrestrial intelligence, and, to put a finer point on it, extraterrestrial “people.” They are motivated to dream about beings very much like them, things tantalizingly exotic but not so alien as to be totally incomprehensible and discomforting. Maybe those imagined beings have more appendages or sense organs, different body plans and surface coverings, but they typically possess qualities we recognize within ourselves: They are sentient, they have language, they use tools, they are curious explorers, they are biological, they are mortal — just like humans. Perhaps that’s a collective failure of imagination, because it’s certainly not very easy to envision intelligent aliens that are entirely divergent from our own anthropocentric preconceptions. Or perhaps it’s more diagnostic of the human need for context, affirmation, and familiarity. Why are people fascinated by their distorted reflections in funhouse mirrors? Maybe it’s because when they recognize their warped image, at a subconscious level that recognition reinforces their actual true appearance and identity.

Anthropology and technology combine in a Sarah Bakewell piece about the most recent Channel swimmer, Karen Throsby: "Man is a work in progress, constantly adding technology". Purists pooh-pooh anyone who swims the Channel in a wetsuit.

Throsby's contribution was to remind us that even something as elementally "human" as marathon swimming involves many artificial techniques: gaining weight, acclimatising to the cold, monitoring one's psychology, and developing new micro-senses – an awareness of tiny differences in water temperature, a heightened kinetic sense of the body's balance and position, and so on. It means self-transformation, and is filled with "uncountable, mundane bodily technologies". Channel swimmers use rubber caps, sunblock, Vaseline to prevent chafing, sleek swimsuits and energy-boosting snacks. They are accompanied by boats with GPS.

I can't believe there are Channel-swimming purists. I mean, if they brought back Annette Kellerman, they'd still find a woman in a full-body suit.

Annette Kellerman, from Wikimedia Commons

Of course the technology that accompanies the body is only one aspect of Channel swimming. The technology inside the head is even more essential; a product of training, pacing, knowledge about risks and methods, contingency plans and logistics. I often use Channel crossing swimmers as an example of human potential, an incredible achievement for a primate body made possible by a human brain.