The sound of the whistle

In his absolutely terrifying 1904 short story "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come For You, My Lad," British writer M. R. James tells us about a young professor named Parkins who is recovering from an emotional upset and decides to take a seaside R&R in coastal Suffolk.

Parkins is wandering the beach one day, and finds, half-buried in the sand, an ancient bronze whistle.  A historian himself, he is intrigued, and cleans it up, discovering upon inspection that it has two inscriptions, both in Latin: "Quis Est Iste Qui Venit?" ("Who is this who is coming?") and the more mysterious "Fur Fla/Fle Bis," which Parkins is unable to disentangle, but which James intended us to piece together as "Fūr: flābis, flēbis," which roughly translates to "Thief: if you shall blow, you shall weep."

Parkins, as it turns out, should have worked harder to figure out the second inscription.

Evidently not realizing that he is in a horror story, he blows the whistle, which is unexpectedly loud and shrill.  Nothing happens -- at least immediately.  But later that day, while out on the beach, he sees in the distance an "indistinct personage" who seems to be attempting to catch up with him, but never does.  The person moves in a strange way -- a kind of flapping, flailing motion, not at all like a human running.

Then he starts hearing noises at night, which at first he attributes to mice.  A bellhop has a panic attack while looking up at Parkins's room from the outside, saying that there was a "horrible face" in the window.  One of the maids complains that Parkins didn't have to pull all the bedclothes off the bed and throw them onto the floor in the morning -- when he'd done no such thing.

What the whistle had summoned was an incorporeal creature who fashions itself a body out of whatever happens to be handy -- in the case of the bellhop, for example, a twist of fabric from the curtains.  At the end of the story, as Parkins is lying in bed, sleepless, the light of the Moon coming in through the window, he sees the sheets and blankets on the other bed suddenly pull together into a crumpled humanoid form, and sit up -- then it reaches out its cloth arms, feeling around to try and find him.

It is one of the most flat-out terrifying scenes I've ever read.

I was put in mind of James's story (rather reluctantly) by a paper in the journal Nature Communications Psychology about a fascinating study of what are called "Aztec death whistles" -- ceramic whistles shaped like skulls, that when blown generate an unearthly sound that resembles a high-pitched human scream.

The study looked at human responses to the sounds, and found that one hundred percent of volunteers had "strongly aversive reactions," which is science-speak for "the test subjects nearly pissed their pants."  The researchers did fMRI scans of volunteers' brains, which showed strong responses in the auditory cortex and amygdala (the latter being central to the fear response).  The authors write:

All four skull whistle sound categories were rated similarly in terms of their high negative valence, and they revealed significantly the most negative valence compared with all other sound categories.  Skull whistles trigger significantly higher urgent tendencies than all other sound categories...  Skull whistles sounded more unnatural than original biological sounds (human, animal, nature) and exterior sounds, and they largely also sounded less natural than some musical sounds (music, instrument)...  The sound of skull whistles thus seems to carry a negative emotional meaning of relevant arousal intensity.  This seems to trigger urgent response tendencies in listeners, which is a typical psychoacoustic and affective profile of aversive, scary, and startling sounds.

The authors admit they have no idea what the whistles were used for, but suggest that they might have been played during human sacrifices.

Because those apparently weren't horrifying enough already.

Anyhow, naturally I wanted to hear these things for myself, so I clicked on the link that has clips of the whistles being blown.

I'd read the paper, so I should have been ready for it, but holy shit, those things are scary-sounding.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.  I'm really sound-sensitive, so maybe I had a stronger reaction than you will; but it bears mention that when I listened to the clips, my dog Rosie was asleep on the papasan chair in my office, and she freaked.  Normally Rosie is the most placid of animals; she's very used to my having music going on my computer, as well as hearing voices and other sounds from things like YouTube videos, and ordinarily has zero reaction to any of it.  But when this thing sounded -- and I didn't even have the volume up very high -- she jolted awake, eyes wide, hackles raised, and looked terrified.

So whatever it is that these Aztec death whistles are doing to the brain, I can say with some confidence that dogs also have the same response (at least to judge by a sample size of one).

However, I'm happy to report that thus far, playing the whistle noises hasn't generated any other untoward effects.  I haven't seen any horrible faces in my office window, and I've yet to be chased around my house by an animated bedsheet.  So that's good.  But I don't think I'm going to listen to those whistle clips again.

Suffice it to say that, like M. R. James's character Parkins, I'm not eager to repeat the experience.

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The voices of the Aztecs

When a region is conquered, one of the first things the conquerors usually do is to suppress (or explicitly outlaw) indigenous languages.

One reason is purely practical -- to eliminate the possibility that the subjugated group can communicate with each other without being understood.  The other, however, is more insidious.  Language is a huge part of culture, and if you want to destroy the native society (or, more accurately, replace it with your own, something euphemistically called '"assimilation"), you must eliminate the most vital part of that culture -- how its members communicate with each other, how they express poetry and ethnic history and local knowledge.

Destroy the language, and you've struck at the heart of the culture itself.

An excellent (if tragic) case in point is Australia.  It is the home of over three hundred languages, 170 of which are indigenous.  (One of the reasons why indigenous Australians dislike the word "Aborigine" about as much as Native Americans do "Indian;" it implies the wildly-incorrect assessment that the entire indigenous population is a single culture.)  What is appalling, though, is that even if you exclude English -- the most widely-spoken language in Australia -- none of the top-ten-most-spoken languages in Australia are indigenous.  (In order, they are: Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Greek, Italian, Tagalog, Hindi, Spanish, and Korean.)  Only a quarter of a percent of Australian citizens speak an indigenous language at home.  Of the 170 indigenous languages that still survive (i.e. with at least some native speakers), all but fifteen are classified as severely endangered, with virtually no one learning them as children.  All of the speakers of those remaining 155 unique languages are elderly, and with the passing of that generation, they'll be gone forever except as a curiosity amongst linguists.

Not all indigenous languages are in quite that bad a shape.  One somewhat more hopeful case is Nahuatl, the language of the pre-Spanish-conquest Aztecs in central Mexico.  The clash of the Spanish and native cultures in the Americas is rightly depicted as the worst of the worst -- between the conquering armies and the self-righteous (and often just as violent) Christian missionaries, only a few decades after conquest there usually wasn't much left of the original language, art, music, and religion.  In the case of central Mexico, however, the conquerors took a more nuanced approach, introducing the Latin alphabet but allowing native speakers to continue using their own language.  In fact, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the missionaries did a decent job writing Nahuatl grammars and dictionaries, and during that time there were hundreds of works written in the language, including administrative documents as well as poetry, stories, histories, and religious codices.  Most striking of all -- and, as far as I know, unique in the history of contact between conquerors and the conquered -- in 1536, only twenty years after the arrival of the Spanish, the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco was founded, where bilingual classes were offered to teach Nahuatl to the missionaries and Spanish to the natives.  It wasn't until 1696 that King Charles II of Spain outlawed Nahuatl, but by that time enough of the Mexican Spanish upper-crust spoke Nahuatl themselves that it was pretty much too late to do anything about it.

As a result, there are still 1.5 million speakers of Nahuatl in Mexico.  Not bad, considering the moribund nature of most of the indigenous languages in the world.

The reason this comes up is because of a discovery that was the subject of a paper in Seismological Research Letters a couple of weeks ago that was about the intersection between historical linguistics and another fascination of mine -- geology.  A recently-deciphered fifty-page codex in Nahuatl turns out to describe a series of massive earthquakes that hit central Mexico between 1460 and 1542, including one that triggered a flood resulting in the drowning of eighteen hundred warriors.

The codex itself was created by Aztec tlacuilos ("those who write with painting") and is made up of pictograms that predate the adoption of the Latin alphabet by speakers of Nahuatl.  One of the most striking is a combination of four projections like the vanes of a windmill around a central circle, followed by a rectangle filled with dots.  The windmill-like symbol is the pictogram for the word ollin, meaning "movement;" the rectangle is tlalli, meaning "earth."  Taken together, it means "earthquake."  Further, if the central circle is open, it indicates that the quake happened during the daytime, and if it's closed, it happened at night.

You can see the composite pictogram for "earthquake" in the lower right; all the way at the bottom is a depiction of the unfortunate warriors who drowned in the resulting flood.

As far as the timekeeping, the Aztecs -- like many Central American cultures -- were obsessive about the calendar, and had a 52-year calendrical cycle represented by the arrangement of four symbols -- tecpatl (knife), calli (house), tochtli (rabbit) and acatl (reed) -- arranged in thirteen different permutations.  Decoding that system allowed researchers to figure out that the earthquake that killed the warriors took place in 1507.

At night.

It's simultaneously fascinating and sad how few of the world's cultures have left significant traces for us to study, and of course that's largely humanity's own fault.  For example, the campaign of suppression by the Romans two-and-a-half millennia ago eliminated virtually every last trace of Etruscan -- there are over thirteen thousand inscriptions in Etruscan known to archaeologists, and they've been able to decipher only a fraction of them.  I can only hope that the endangered languages of our own time are treated more kindly.  What a pity it would be if in three thousand years, of the estimated 6,500 languages currently spoken, the only ones our descendants will be able to read are Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

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My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Play ball!

The phenomenon of sports is a funny thing, isn't it?

I say this even though there are sports I thoroughly enjoy.  I've rooted wildly at many a Cornell University hockey game.  I always make a point of watching the Olympics, especially ski jumping and short-track speed skating (in winter), and the track and field events (in summer).  I don't currently participate in a team sport -- but even my favorite athletic activity, running, becomes a great deal more fun when I'm in an actual race.

Not that I ever win, mind you.  I like running, but that doesn't mean I'm fast.  I doubt I'll be in contention for a medal until I'm in the "Men Ninety and Over" group, and if at that point I'm still running at all, I'll feel pretty damn good about it even if (1) I'm the only person in that category, and (2) I come in last.

But the whole phenomenon of sports is a little peculiar, if you picture trying to explain it to an alien intelligence.  The conversation might go as follows:

You: So, there's this ball, and it's kicked around in a field, and you're trying to get it into the net. 

Alien: Why? 

You: Because that's how you score points.  Oh, and nobody can use their hands except the ones standing in front of the net. 

Alien: But doesn't that make it harder? 

You: Yes.  That's why they do it that way.  And each team is trying to get control of the ball and kick it toward their opponent's net. 

Alien: So the people on each team want the ball? 

You: Yes. 

Alien: Why don't they just give each team member their own ball? 

You: Because that's against the rules. 

Alien (radioing the mother ship): You were right, there's no intelligent life down here.  As soon as I beam up, vaporize the planet.

One possible explanation is that sports act as a proxy for warfare.  We can form tribes and vie for something pointless, and frequently beat the absolute shit out of each other, and at the end everyone goes home more or less intact.  As author Jonathan Haidt put it in his wonderful TED Talk "The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives," "This behavior is deeply rooted in our tribal psychology, and it... is so deeply pleasurable to us that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun.  Sports is to war as pornography is to sex; we get to exercise some ancient drives."

However odd it is, sports is ubiquitous.  As far as I've heard, anthropologists have found something in the way of team or individual sports competitions in every culture studied.  But if you think we take sports seriously here in the United States, consider the Aztecs.

The Aztecs played a sport called ullamaliztli.  It looked a little like a weird amalgam of soccer and basketball -- there was a stone ring at each end of a court, and players were trying to get a heavy rubber ball through the ring.  But like soccer, they couldn't use their hands -- they hit the ball with their hips.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Photograph: Manuel Aguilar-Moreno / CSULA Ulama Project, Ulama 37 (Aguilar), CC BY 2.5]

Now I don't know about you, but the idea of swiveling my hips so fast I could strike a rubber ball hard enough to propel it through a stone ring eight feet off the ground is so far out of the realm of possibility that I have a hard time even picturing it.  Archaeologists have found evidence that in some forms of the game bats, rackets, or the players' forearms were allowed, but to be honest, we really don't know much about the rules.  There's a form called ulama (the word comes directly from the Nahuatl name referenced above) still played in a few communities in Mexico, but no one knows if the rules are the same as the traditional game as it was played centuries ago.

It is known, however, to be a seriously rough sport.  Apparently ulama players are constantly covered with bruises from the hard rubber ball.  Still, it's not as bad as it used to be.  Aztec ball games frequently ended with human sacrifice -- whether of the losing or winning team or both is unknown.  (Being sacrificed to the gods was apparently considered an honor at some points during Aztec history, so competing to vie for who gets his heart cut out is not out of the realm of possibility.)

And it's been going on for a long time.  The reason this particular topic comes up is that this week a paper appeared in Science Advances that a ball court was uncovered by archaeologists in Etlatongo in the hills of southern Mexico that is 3,400 years old.

"The discovery of a formal ball court [at Etlatongo] … shows that some of the earliest villages and towns in highland Mexico were playing a game comparable to the most prestigious version of the sport known as ullamalitzli some three millennia later by the Aztecs," said Boston University archaeologist David Carballo, commenting on the study (he did not participate in the research). "This could be the oldest and longest-lived team ball game in the world."

For some reason, the Etlatongo ball court was burned, some time between 1174 and 1102 B.C.E.  Charred clay figurines of ball players have been found at the site, as well both human and non-human animal bones.  It's impossible to tell from what was found why the site was burned, but just the idea that this place has evidence of a 3,400 year old sport is pretty amazing.

You have to wonder how long evidence of our own sports would last in our absence.  Stadiums, courts of various sorts, ball fields... it's hard to see how any of them would clue in future archaeologists about what sorts of games we played and watched, even if they survived long enough to be recognizable.  Maybe kids' sports action figures would have a better chance, leaving the researchers a thousand years hence trying to puzzle out rules to our sports from the attire and stance of the players, captured in plastic.

A little like what we're doing with clay figurines left behind from the Mesoamerican ball games played more than three millennia ago.  Which shows that our penchant for competing over pointless stuff is very far from recent vintage.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]