Birdwalking into the Miocene

From the One Thing Leads To Another department, we have: a cute little fuzzy mammal from Madagascar, some thoughts about genetic drift, and a period of geological history during which a lot was happening.

I'd like to say that this kind of twisty mental path is infrequent for me, but unfortunately, it happens pretty much on a daily basis, and has since I was a kid.  When I was around twelve years old, my parents splurged on a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, ostensibly to assist me with my schoolwork, but they (the Encyclopedia, not my parents) were honestly more of a hindrance than a help.  I'd go to the Brittanica to look up, say, something about the Monroe Doctrine for social studies class, and my mom would find me three hours later with fifteen open volumes spread on the floor around me, with me in the middle immersed in an article about venomous snakes in Malaysia.

It's why conversations with my older son, with whom I seem to share a brain, are like some kind of weird exercise in free association.  We've occasionally tried to reconstruct the pathway by which we got to a particular topic, and there's usually a logical connection between each step and the preceding one, but overall, our discussions give new meaning to the word labyrinthine.

Anyhow, today I started on this particular birdwalk when someone posted a photograph on social media of an animal I'd never heard of: the ring-tailed vontsira (Galidia elegans).  The vontsira is kind of adorable:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Charles J. Sharp creator QS:P170,Q54800218, Ring-tailed vontsira (Galidia elegans) 2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The vontsira and its relative the falanouc are in the family Eupleridae along with a species I had heard of, the fossa, which is a sleek, elegant, weasel-like animal that is only distantly related to other members of the Order Carnivora.  All of the eupleurids live in Madagascar, and like most of the endemic species on the island, they're threatened by habitat loss and competition from non-native species.

What I found most curious about these mammals is that they're a clade -- genetic studies have found that eupleurids all descend from a single small population that arrived in Madagascar something like twenty million years ago, and then diversified into the species you see today.  Chances are, the ancestors of the vontsira, falanouc, fossa, and other eupleurids came over from Africa via rafting in the early Miocene Epoch.  They're distant cousins of the much more common and widespread mongooses, hyaenas, genets, and civets, and it was probably some prehistoric viverroid (the parvorder that includes all five groups) that made its way to Madagascar and gave rise to modern eupleurids.

This led me to looking into what was happening, geology-wise, during the Miocene.  I knew it was a busy time, but I didn't realize just how busy.  Tectonic movement closed off the Mediterranean Sea from the Indian Ocean, and then a shift at the western end of the Mediterranean closed off the Straits of Gibraltar; the result was that the Mediterranean dried up almost completely, something called the Messinian salinity crisis because what was left was a salty desert with an average temperature of something like 110 F and two disconnected lakes of concentrated brine.  At the end of the epoch, another plate movement reopened the Straits, and there was a flood of a magnitude that beggars belief; at its peak, the flow rate was enough to raise the level of the refilling Mediterranean by ten meters per day.

This is also the period during which the Indian subcontinent rammed into Asia, raising the Himalayas and introducing a bunch of African species into Asia (this is why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India, but none in the Middle East).  Also, it's when the Columbia River Flood Basalts formed -- an enormous (175,00 cubic kilometers) blob of igneous rock covering what is now eastern Washington and Oregon, and the west parts of Idaho -- an eruption probably due to the same hotspot which now underlies Yellowstone.

Because of all this, the climate during the Miocene might as well have been attached to a yo-yo.  Warm periods rapidly alternated with cold ones, and wet with dry.  As you might imagine, this played hell with species' ability to adapt, and groups came and went as the epoch passed -- the borophagine ("bone-crushing") canids, the terrifying "hypercarnivorous" hyaenodonts, and the enormous, superficially pig-like entelodonts amongst them.  The first apes evolved, and the split between the ancestors of modern humans and modern chimps occurred in the late Miocene, something like seven million years ago.

If all that wasn't enough, some time during the Miocene -- geologists are uncertain exactly when -- there was an asteroid impact in what is now Tajikistan, forming the twenty-five-kilometer-wide Karakul Crater Lake, which at an elevation of 3,960 meters is higher than the much better-known Lake Titicaca.

So there you have it.  A brief tour of the chaotic paths through my brain, starting with a furry woodland animal from Madagascar and ending with a meteorite impact in Tajikistan.  Hopefully you found some stops along the way interesting.  Now y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go look up a single fact in Wikipedia to answer a question a friend asked about linguistics.  You'll find me in a few hours reading about how general relativity applies to supermassive black holes.

I'm sure how I got there will make sense to me, at least.

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Utopia for pirates

There are very few tropes that have had quite the cachet (and staying power) that pirates do.

Consider the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean series (what are we up to now, movie #5?  #8?  #12?  Who the hell can keep track?).  But it's been going on for a long while.  Treasure Island, for example, written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1881, has seen several movie adaptations, of which this one is objectively the best:

The movie is brilliant from beginning to end, and if you can listen to the song "Cabin Fever" without guffawing, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

In other iterations, the approaches vary from the comic (Our Flag Means Death) to the deadly serious (Blackbeard, Captain Blood), and I learned from Wikipedia that there have also been a few pornographic pirate movies, which I would prefer not to think about.  Even Lost in Space, never content to be left out, gave piracy their best shot with Cap'n Alonzo P. Tucker the Space Pirate, complete with (I shit you not) an electronic parrot:

In addition to the parrot, Tucker is identifiable as a pirate because he says "Arrrrh" and "Avast ye swabs" and "Ahoy matey" a lot.

So many legends have grown up around piracy that it's often hard to sort fact from fiction.  Sometimes it's easier to tell than others, though.  Disney, for example, seems to need a refresher on what the word "pirate" actually means:

As a biologist, though, I'm more puzzled by how the hell that parrot can fly, given that its head is bigger than the rest of its body put together.

The whole topic of pirates comes up because of a strange historical footnote I just recently learned about.  It has to do with a guy named James Misson, the ship La Victoire, and the country of Madagascar.

Misson, so the story goes, was Provençal, born somewhere in the southeast of France in around 1660 or so.  He started out as some sort of diplomat, and had been dispatched to Rome, but was "disgusted by the decadence of the Papal Court," and soured on the entire idea of autocratic government (very much in vogue at the time).  He fell under the influence of a "lewd priest" (which were also apparently common) named Caraccioli, who (along with Misson) signed on to the crew roster for a warship called La Victoire.  Why the crew needed a "lewd priest," I have no clue, but then, I have no idea what a bo's'un does, either, so maybe it's just one of those nautical things I never learned about.

In any case, Caraccioli had definite ideas about lots of things, and started having long discussions with Misson and the rest of the crew.  According to the 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, Caraccioli "fell upon Government, and shew'd, that every Man was born free, and had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired... that the vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusillanimous Subjection on the other."

Which I certainly can't find fault with.  Considering that at the moment, the top one percent of people, wealth-wise, own more than the rest of the world put together, I'd say we haven't progressed all that far in that regard.  Maybe we need more Notorious Pyrates to rough the place up, I dunno.

In any case, Misson took Caraccioli's sermons to heart, as did the rest of the crew, and they collectively decided to put Misson in charge and to embark on a career of piracy.  The General History doesn't say who the captain of La Victoire beforehand was, or what he had to say about this eventuality, but Misson took over anyhow to joyous shouts of acclaim from the crew, and they decided to found a piracy-based colony named Libertatia on the east coast of Madagascar.  The colony was intended to be a direct democracy run on socialist guidelines, where everything was shared and the people held the reins with regard to leadership, laws, and practices.

Hell, if Arthurian England could have an anarcho-syndicalist commune, why not a socialist pirate colony in seventeenth century Madagascar?

Well, there's only one sticking point to all of this, and you've probably already guessed it.

Libertatia, and James Misson, seem to be nothing more than a tall tale.

The first clue is that the only records of Misson are written at least forty years after his heyday, and in them he's variously called "Olivier" (not James) and "Mission" (not Misson).  But names were frequently messed about with back then, so that by itself isn't conclusive.  However, historians and archaeologists have tried like crazy to figure out where Libertatia was, and have found not a scrap of evidence that it ever existed.  There were several settlements made on Madagascar by pirates -- Abraham Samuel started one at Fort Dauphin, Adam Baldridge on the island of Ile Ste.-Marie, and James Plaintain at Ranter Bay, for example -- but all of these are reasonably well documented, and none of them match the details of James Misson and Libertatia from the General History.

This is unfortunate, because it makes a good story, doesn't it?  Good enough, in fact, that it's appeared in a number of works of fiction (notably two novels by William S. Burroughs), films, documentaries, and at least four different video games.  

So, like I said, it seems like a lot of us love a good pirate yarn.  A pity this one turns out to have been fashioned from whole cloth.  Like the strange story of Prester John, though, it seems like there being exactly zero evidence of its veracity hasn't slowed it down any.  And in this case, the mythical figure of James Misson is someone we can at least grudgingly admire -- little as we've followed his utopian vision of how society should run in the intervening three centuries.

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