Hands off

When I was about thirty years old, I stumbled upon a copy of American anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum's 1969 memoir Keep the River on Your Right.

It's gripping reading.  It recounts when Schneebaum, himself around thirty at the time, made his way down to Peru on a Fulbright Scholarship, looking for uncontacted tribes to study.  He was staying in a village in southern Peru when he spoke to one of the village leaders about his quest.  The leader basically told Schneebaum, "Yeah, you go into the jungle, they're there."

Schneebaum asked, so how could he find these people?

The elder replied, "Go into the jungle, keep walking, keep the river on your right.  They'll find you."

So Schneebaum did.

He was gone, and completely incommunicado, for almost two years; his family and friends presumed his death.  But then he showed back up, stark naked, wearing body paint.  He'd essentially gone native.  Keep the River on Your Right describes his time amongst the Harakmbut people, who speak a linguistic isolate -- a language that seems to be unrelated to any other known language -- and with whom he'd been accepted, even participating in their sexual ceremonies and ritual cannibalism.

Schneebaum received some criticism for what amounts to a major violation of the Prime Directive.  Although his memoir is fascinating, it brings up an interesting question.  Sure, people have rights (or should -- actions being taken by the United States government lately are making it terrifyingly clear that not everyone believes this).  But do cultures have rights?  Schneebaum didn't give the Harakmbut people a choice, he sort of just showed up one day.  The cultural knowledge certainly flowed both directions.  Did he violate the culture's rights by contaminating it with our own?

Of course, if the answer is yes, it brings up the followup question of how you determine what cultural contact is allowable.  Even having the Harakmbut see him changed them; they now know there are other people out there, who don't look, speak, or behave like they do.  It reminds me of the poignant and thought-provoking episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation called "Who Watches the Watchers?", where the crew of the Enterprise is forced to intervene when a hidden anthropological outpost on Mintaka III is accidentally discovered by the planet's natives -- who then decide Picard and his crew must be gods.

There are still a number of more-or-less uncontacted groups right here on Earth.  The most famous are the Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Island chain, nominally under the jurisdiction of India.  But the Indian government has made it illegal to contact the Sentinelese, or even to land on their island.  Not that prosecution is likely -- the last one who tried, 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau, landed on North Sentinel Island in 2018 with the intent of converting the Sentinelese to Christianity, and was promptly handed over to God himself by the expedient of an arrow through the chest.

North Sentinel Island from the air [Image is in the Public Domain]

We don't know much about the Sentinelese.  There are thought to be somewhere between thirty and five hundred of them, but the thick jungle of their home island makes any kind of estimate from the air difficult at best.  The scanty contact they've had with inhabitants of the other Andaman Islands has shown that the languages of the two nearest islands in the chain, Jarawa and Önge, are mutually unintelligible.  It's presumed that Sentinelese must be related to the other languages in the island chain -- and so belong to the Ongan language family, itself an isolate group -- but without any real data to go by, this is just a guess.

So we're left with a mystery.  Just horning in and hoping for the best, like Schneebaum did with the Harakmbut, is seriously not recommended for the Sentinelese.  And as I asked before, would it be ethical to do so even if it wasn't likely to lead to you getting turned into a pincushion?  History is replete with examples of contact between two cultures of unequal power that have ended up going very badly for all concerned.  Colonialism rightly occupies a horrible spot in the chronicles of humanity.  The Indian government -- wisely, in my opinion -- decided that the Sentinelese's right to self-determination superseded any considerations of curiosity, scientific study, missionary zeal, or even a desire to help.

And that's where we have to leave it.  There are people whose existence as a living culture would be threatened by our attempts to come in and "improve" things.  We here in the technological, industrialized West have done immeasurable damage by our arrogant assumption that the way we do things is the best, and of course everyone would be better off if they just acquiesced and did it our way, too.

Sometimes the best you can do is to keep your mouth shut and your hands off.

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Meaningful ink

It's a little odd that someone as center-of-attention-phobic as I am has chosen something that is bound to garner close looks.  I'm referring to my tattoos, which are obvious and colorful -- and include a full sleeve, so they're a little hard to hide.

Virtually everyone who comments on them, however, is complimentary.  With good reason; my artist, James Spiers of Model Citizen Tattoos in Ithaca, New York, is -- in a word -- brilliant, and realized my vision of what I wanted just about perfectly.

 

Just after it was finished

Not everyone's a fan, of course.  I was given the stink-eye by a sour-faced old lady in a local hardware store a while back, who informed me that having tattoos meant I was going to hell.

My response was, "Lady, that ship sailed years ago."

But if I do end up in hell because of my ink, I'll have a lot of company.  Not only is tattooing pretty common these days -- since I got my first one, about twenty years ago, it's gone from being an infrequent sight to just about everywhere -- humans have been decorating their bodies for a long time.  Ötzi "the Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body found frozen in glacial ice on the Austrian-Italian border, had 61 tattoos, mostly on his legs, arms, and back.  (Their significance is unknown.)  In historical times, tattooing has been observed in many cultures -- it was widespread in North and South American Indigenous people and throughout east Asia and Polynesia, which is probably how the tradition jumped to Europe in the eighteenth century (and explains its associations with sailors).

The role of self-expression in tattoos varies greatly from person to person.  Ask a dozen people why they chose to get inked and you'll get a dozen wildly different answers.  For me, it's in honor of my family and ethnic roots; the Celtic snake is for my wildlife-loving, half-Scottish father, the vines for my gardener mother.  But the reasons for getting tattooed are as varied as the designs are.

The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery that was described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of a twelve-hundred-year-old mummified body from the pre-Columbian Peruvian Chancay Culture, which showed some of the most intricate ancient tattoo patterns ever seen.  Virtually every square inch of the person's skin was covered with a fine latticework of black geometric designs -- the similarity was immediately noticed to the adornments on clay figurines from the same time and place.

This becomes even more amazing when you realize that the person was tattooed using the "stick-and-poke" method, which involved being jabbed over and over with implements like wooden needles, slivers of flint or obsidian, or sharpened bird bones.  This sounds a hell of a lot more painful than what I underwent, which was bad enough.

But it was still worth it. After I stopped screaming.

In any case, I find it fascinating how old the drive to adorn our bodies is, and also that the chosen designs had (and have) such depth of meaning that people were willing to wear them permanently.  For myself, I've never regretted them for a moment; I'm proud of my ink, whatever the sour-faced little old ladies of the world might think of it.  And knowing that what I have is part of a tradition that goes back thousands of years gives me a connection to the rituals and culture of the past.

And for me, that's something to cherish.  Even if I do end up in hell because of it.

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The aliens of Mexico

Because my reputation has apparently preceded me, I have now been sent a link five times to a news story about an alleged governmental meeting in Mexico which one-upped the recent U. S. congressional hearing on UAPs/UFOs by bringing out some bodies of mummified aliens.

The story (and the pictures) are now making the rounds of social media, but were supposedly part of a press release from Mexican governmental officials.  So without further ado, here's one of the aliens:

You can't see in this photo, but the alien bodies have three fingers on each hand and foot, and have necks "elongated along the back."  They are said to come from the town of Nazca, Peru, which immediately gave all the Ancient Aliens crowd multiple orgasms because this is also the site of the famous "Nazca Lines," designs drawn on the ground that (when viewed from the air) can be seen to be shaped like monkeys and birds and whatnot.  Alien visitation aficionados claim that the Nazca Lines are an ancient spaceship landing site, although I have no idea why the fuck aliens would build a landing strip shaped like a monkey.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Delso, Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 49, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Needless to say, I'm a little dubious, and my doubt spiked even higher when I read that one of the scientists involved, one Jaime Maussan, was "able to draw DNA data from radiocarbon dating."  This is patently ridiculous, given that DNA extraction/analysis and radiocarbon dating are two completely different techniques.  So Maussan's statement makes about as much sense as my saying "I'm going to bake a chocolate cake using a circular saw."

Maussan also said that his analysis showed that "thirty percent of the specimens' DNA is unknown" and the remains "had implants made of rare metals like osmium."

The problem is (well, amongst the many problems is) the fact that Maussan has pulled this kind of shit before.  Back in 2015 he went public with other Peruvian mummies, which upon (legitimate) analysis turned out to be the remains of ordinary human children.  Some of them looked a little odd because they had undergone skull elongation rituals -- something not uncommon from early Peruvian cultures -- but their DNA checked out as one hundred percent Homo sapiens.  Add to this the fact that Maussan has repeatedly teamed up with noted New Age wingnut Konstantin Korotkov, who claims to have invented a camera that can photograph the soul and specializes in "measuring the human aura," and we have yet another example of someone who has just about exhausted any credibility he ever had.

So while the people weighing in on TikTok and Reddit seem to be awestruck by the Alien Mummies, reputable scientists are less impressed.  There's no evidence these are anything but the remains of human infants, and there are credible allegations that some of them have been deliberately (and recently) altered to make them look more non-human.

I..e., it's a fraud.

If so, the whole thing really pisses me off, because it's hard enough making good determinations based on slim evidence without some yahoos faking an artifact (not to mention desecrating human burials from indigenous cultures) to get their fifteen minutes of fame.  Regarding the whole alien intelligence question, I've generally adopted a wait-and-see policy, but with this kind of bullshit it's really hard not to chuck the whole thing.  We skeptics have sometimes been accused of being such habitual scoffers that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it right in front of our noses, and there might be a grain of truth there.

But if you really want to fix that, stop allowing the phonies, frauds, and cranks to dominate the discussion.  And that includes shows on the This Hasn't Actually Been History For Two Decades Channel.

Anyhow, I'm thinking the "alien bodies" will turn out to be just the latest in a very long line of evidence for little more than human gullibility and the capacity for deception, including self-deception.  A pity, really.  At this point, if aliens actually do arrive, I'm so fed up with how things are going down here that I'll probably ask if I can join the crew.

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Pink, pink, gold

When I was in Ecuador in 2019, I was blown away by its natural beauty.  The cloud forests of the mid-altitude Andes are, far and away, the most beautiful place I've ever been, and I've been lucky enough to see a lot of beautiful places.  Combine that with the lovely climate and the friendliness of the people, and it puts the highlands of Ecuador on the very short list of places I'd happily move to permanently.

What brought me there were the birds.  It's a tiny country, but is home to 1,656 species of birds -- about one-sixth of the ten-thousand-odd species found worldwide.  Most strikingly, it has 132 different species of hummingbirds.  Where I live, in upstate New York, we have only one -- the Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) -- but there, they have an incredible diversity within that one group.  Because each species is dependent on particular flowers for their food source, some of them have extremely restricted ranges, often narrow bands of terrain at exactly the right climate and altitude to support the growth of that specific plant.  You go a few hundred meters up or downhill, and you've moved out of the range where that species lives -- and into the range of an entirely different one.

The most striking thing about the hummingbirds is their iridescence.  My favorite one, and in the top five coolest birds I've ever seen, is the Violet-tailed Sylph (Aglaiocercus coelestis):

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK, Violet-tailed Sylph (33882323008), CC BY 2.0]

What's most fascinating about birds like this one is that the feathers' stunning colors aren't only due to pigments.  A pigment is a chemical that appears colored to our eyes because its molecular structure allows it to absorb some frequencies of light and reflect others; the chlorophyll in plants, for example, looks green because it preferentially absorbs light in the red and blue-violet regions of the spectrum, and reflects the green light back to our eyes.  Hummingbirds have some true pigments, but a lot of their most striking colors are produced by interference -- on close analysis, you find that the fibers of the feathers are actually transparent, but when light strikes them they act a bit like a prism, breaking up white light into its constituent colors.  Because of the spacing of the fibers, some of those wavelengths interfere destructively (the wavelengths cancel each other out) and some interfere constructively (they superpose and are reinforced).  The spacing of the fibers determines what color the feathers appear to be.  This is why if you look at the electric blue/purple tail of the Violet-tailed Sylph from the side, it looks jet black -- your eyes are at the wrong angle to see the refracted and reflected light.  Look at it face-on, and suddenly the iridescent colors shine out.

So the overall color of the bird comes from an interplay between whatever true pigments it has in its feathers, and the kind of interference you get from the spacing of the transparent fibers.  This is why when you recombine these features through hybridization, you can get interesting and unexpected results -- as some scientists from Chicago's Field Museum found out recently.

Working in Peru's Cordillera Azul National Park, on the eastern slopes of the Andes, ornithologist John Bates discovered what he'd thought was a new species in the genus Heliodoxa, one with a glittering gold throat.  He was in for a shock, though, when the team found out through genetic analysis that it was a hybrid of two different Heliodoxa species -- H. branickii and H. gularis -- both of which have bright pink throats.

"It's a little like cooking: if you mix salt and water, you kind of know what you're gonna get, but mixing two complex recipes together might give more unpredictable results," said Chad Eliason, who co-authored the study.  "This hybrid is a mix of two complex recipes for a feather from its two parent species...  There's more than one way to make magenta with iridescence.  The parent species each have their own way of making magenta, which is, I think, why you can have this nonlinear or surprising outcome when you mix together those two recipes for producing a feather color."

The gold-throated bird apparently isn't a one-off, as more in-depth study found that it didn't have an even split of genes from H. branickii and H. gularis.  It seems like one of its ancestors was a true half-and-half hybrid, but that hybrid bird then "back-crossed" to H. branickii at least once, leaving it with more H. branickii genes.  All of which once again calls into question our standard model of species being little cubbyholes with impermeable walls.  The textbook definition of species -- "a morphologically-distinct population which can interbreed and produce fertile offspring" -- is unquestionably the most flimsy definition in all of biology, and admits of hundreds of exceptions (either morphologically-identical individuals which cannot interbreed, or morphologically-distinct ones that hybridize easily, like the Heliodoxa hummingbirds just discovered in Peru).

In any case, the discovery of this hybrid is fascinating.  You have to wonder how many more of them there are out there.  The fact that its discovery ties together the physics of light, genetics, and evolution is kind of amazing.  Just further emphasizes that if you're interested in science, you will never, ever be bored.

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Jars, bones, and solar calendars

Today we're back to the subject of cool archaeological discoveries, thanks to a couple of loyal readers of Skeptophilia who sent me links about recent research giving us a lens into humanity's past.

The first has to do with the discovery of 65 giant sandstone jars that were found buried in Assam, in the northeastern part of India.  "Giant" is no exaggeration; these jars average three meters tall and two meters wide, and some weigh over three hundred kilograms.  Stone artifacts are notoriously hard to date accurately -- the archaeologists believe that they were created some time before 1300 C.E., but might be as much as two millennia older than that.  Just about everything about them -- who created them and why, and why they were buried in the site -- is unknown.  They must have had some pressing reason, as fashioning (and then burying) tons of sandstone into a lidded jar is no inconsequential amount of work.  But the jars haven't yielded any contents of note that might account for their creation.

But the story has an interesting legendary twist.  The Naga people, who are one of the main ethnic groups in the region, say they've stumbled upon such jars before, and found them filled with bodily remains and valuables -- i.e., that they were used in burial rituals.  However, they're insistent that they (well, their ancestors) weren't the ones who made the jars.  The jars were created, they say, by a mysterious people called the Siemi -- a race of small, dark-skinned people who dwelled in the forest, and were known to be "uncanny" and adept at magic.  In particular, they were skilled at making deo-moni, or "spirit beads," that conferred power upon the wearer.  Well, in the thirteenth century C.E., when the region was overrun by the Bodo-Kachari, the king caught some of the Siemi and wanted to know how the beads were made.  The Siemi refused, even under torture, to reveal the secret.  Infuriated, the king wiped out the entire culture, except for a few survivors who disappeared into the jungle, where they still live today, in secret.

The legend has a lot of commonality with the Irish sídhe, which is sometimes translated as "fairies" or "elves," and who are supposedly the descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a magical race who were the first inhabitants of Ireland.  When the sídhe were defeated and ousted, they went into hiding, and became the "good people" of wild areas, for whom the appellation "good" is more appeasement than it is accurate, because they were tricksters and sometimes outright dangerous.  (The famous banshee -- Irish bean sí -- is one of them, and the name translates to "fairy woman")

Our second story comes to us from Peru, where a remarkable structure in the desert known as Chankillo has been found to be a solar calendar.  It's a curious-looking place, thirteen massive stones in a line down the crest of a hill, each with a slot cut into it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juancito28, Foto torres de chankillo, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Excavation of the site not only uncovered a fortified temple, but clarified the function of the towers.  They are angled so that the rising Sun shines straight down the slot of each tower in turn as the point on the horizon drifts southward in summer and northward as winter approaches.  The angle at which the sunlight at dawn strikes the slots makes the array act as an enormous sundial -- but keeping track of the day of the year rather than the hour of the day.  Scientists have suggested that careful observation of this angle could have allowed its creators to estimate the day of the year to an accuracy of a day or two on either side, a highly useful skill in an area of extremes of seasonal rainfall and drought.

The people who built Chankillo are called the Casma-Sechin culture, but they're almost a complete mystery.  The earliest traces of the Casma-Sechin are in the region of Chankillo all the way back in 7600 B.C.E., and for the next seven millennia they left a continuous (if sparse) archaeological record of pottery, textiles, and stone structures.  There are signs of hostile invasions toward the end of their rule, and evidence of complete destruction in around 100 B.C.E. -- leaving behind traces of a mysterious people about whose ethnic affinities, language, and culture we still know next to nothing.

Our final story comes to us from Hungary, where relics of an ancient civilization of conquerors have yielded secrets of their origins.  I'm not talking about the infamous Huns, who ruled much of central and eastern Europe in the fifth century C.E., but the Avars -- who were in charge afterward and for almost three times longer, only collapsing under pressure and outright attacks from the Franks (to the north and east) and the Slavs (from the south and west) in around 900 C.E.  

Despite their being well-attested in the records, nothing was known about where they came from, nor whether they were allied to another group that went by the same name in the Caucasus Mountains.  But now, a DNA analysis of bones from eight Avar graves in Hungary has found their surprising origins -- thousands of kilometers away in what is now eastern Mongolia and northern China.

"The Avars did not leave written records about their history and these first genome-wide data provide robust clues about their origins," said Choongwon Jeong of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Archaeology.  "The historical contextualization of the archaeogenetic results allowed us to narrow down the timing of the proposed Avar migration.  They covered more than five thousand kilometers in a few years from Mongolia to the Caucasus, and after ten more years settled in what is now Hungary.  This is the fastest long-distance migration in human history that we can reconstruct up to this point."

What could have impelled them to haul ass across the steppe is still uncertain, but a good guess is that these are the remnants of the ruling class of the Rouran Empire, who ruled what is now the state of Xinjiang, China and much of Mongolia, only collapsing under pressure from the Turks and Chinese in the mid-sixth century C.E. -- right around the time the Avars tore into eastern Europe.

And that's this week's cool stuff from the ancient world.  And thanks to the readers who sent me the links -- keep 'em coming.  I'm always eager to learn about stuff I didn't know, and all three of these were completely new to me.

So much to know, so little time.

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Grave matters

Today we take a trip into the past with three new discoveries from the world of archaeology, sent my way by my eagle-eyed friend and fellow writer, Gil Miller.

The first one has to do with ancient fashion.  Have you ever wondered how our distant ancestors dressed?  Whether it was crudely stitched-together rags, as the peasantry are often depicted?  Leopard-skin affairs, like the Flintstones?  Or nothing but a brass jockstrap, like this guy?

Turns out it wasn't so different from what you and I are wearing.  (I'm assuming you're not naked except for a brass jockstrap.  If you are, I won't judge, but I also don't want to know about it.)  An analysis of the clothing worn by a 3,200 year old mummy recovered from China's Tarim Basin was wearing tightly-woven, intricately-made trousers, built to be durable and allow maneuverability -- a little like today's blue jeans.

The pants worn by "Turfan Man" [Image from M. Wagner et al./Archaeological Research in Asia, 2022]

The cloth is a tight twill weave -- something that was assumed to be invented much later -- and had a triangular crotch piece that seems to be designed to avoid unfortunate compression of the male naughty bits while riding horseback.  The decoration, including an interlocking "T" pattern on the bands around the knees, is very similar to patterns found used on pottery in the area, and as far away as Kazakhstan and Siberia.

From ancient Chinese fashion items, we travel halfway around the world for something a little more gruesome -- a burial in the Lambayeque region of Peru that seems to contain the skeleton of a surgeon, along with his surgical tools.

The burial has been dated to the Middle Period of the Sican Culture, which would have been somewhere between 900 and 1050 C. E., and was recovered from a mausoleum temple at the rich archaeological site of Las Ventanas.  The man was obviously of high standing; he was wearing a golden mask pigmented with cinnabar, a bronze pectoral, and a garment containing copper plates.  But most interesting was the bundle of tools he was buried with -- awls, needles, and several sizes and shapes of knives.  This, the researchers say, identifies him as a surgeon.

It's hard for me to fathom, but surgery was done fairly regularly back then -- up to and including brain surgery (called trepanning).  There was no such thing as general anesthesia, so it was done under local anesthesia at best, probably supplemented with any kind of sedative or painkilling drugs they had available.  Still, it was a horrible prospect.  But what is most astonishing is that a great many of the patients, even the ones who had holes drilled into their skulls, survived.  There have been many cases of skeletons found that show signs of surgery where the surgical cuts healed completely.

But still, the ordeal these poor folks went through is horrifying to think about, so let's move on to the third and final article, that comes to us from England.  An archaeologist named Ken Dark has led a team of researchers in studying 65 grave sites in the counties of Somerset and Cornwall that date back to a time of history I've always had a particular fascination for -- the Western European "Dark Ages," between the collapse of the Roman Empire as a centralized power in the fourth and fifth centuries C. E. and the reconsolidation of Europe under such leaders as Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, four hundred years later.

The "darkness" of the so-called Dark Ages isn't so much that it was lawless and anarchic (although some parts of it in some places probably were), but simply because we know next to nothing about it for sure.  There are virtually no contemporaneous records; about all we have, the best-known being Gildas's sixth-century De Excidio et Conquesto Britanniae, are accounts that contain legend mixed up with history so thoroughly it's impossible to tell which is which.  I bring up Gildas deliberately, because his is the only record of King Arthur written anywhere close to the time he (allegedly) lived, and the graves that Dark and his team are studying date from right around that pivotal time when Christianized Romano-Celtic Britain was being attacked and overrun by the pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

The burial practices of noble sixth-century Britons stands in stark contrast from Anglo-Saxon burials from the same period; the Britons, it's believed, scorned the ostentation and ornate decorations of pagan funerals, and by comparison even high-status individuals were buried without much pomp.  What sets these graves apart from those of commoners is that they were set apart from other graves, had a fenced enclosure, and were covered with a tumulus of stones that the early Celts called a ferta, which was a sign of high standing.

"The enclosed grave tradition comes straight out of late Roman burial practices," Dark said.  "And that's a good reason why we have them in Britain, but not in Ireland -- because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and Ireland wasn't...  We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others.  When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials."

So that's today's news from the past -- ancient blue jeans, primitive surgery, and Dark Age noble burials.  Sorry for starting your day on a grave note.  But it's always fascinating to see not only how things have changed, but how similar our distant ancestors were to ourselves.  If we were to time travel back there, I'm sure there'd be a lot of surprises, but we might be more shocked at how much like us they were back then.  To borrow a line from Robert Burns, a person's a person for a' that and a' that.

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King of the whales

For a long time, one of the biggest evolutionary mysteries was the evolution of whales and dolphins.

Even for someone steeped in the evolutionary model, it was hard to imagine how these aquatic creatures descended from terrestrial mammals.  That they did was undeniable; not only do some species have vestigial hip and hind leg bones, inside their flippers they have exactly the same number and arrangement of arm bones as you have -- one humerus, radius, and ulna; seven carpals; five metacarpals; and fourteen phalanges.  If whales were a "special creation," it's hard to imagine why a Creator would have given them 29 articulated arm bones and then completely encased them in a flat, muscular flipper.

Skeleton of a baleen whale (drawing from the Meyers Konversationslexikon (1888) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So their relationship to terrestrial mammals was obvious, but what wasn't obvious is how they got to where they are today.

Then in 1981 a fossil bed was uncovered in the Kuldana Formation of Pakistan, a sedimentary deposit from what was a shallow marine estuary back in the early Eocene Epoch (on the order of fifty million years ago), that contained a treasure trove of fossilized cetaceans.  This allowed researchers to piece together the evolution of whales and dolphins, placing them in Order Artiodactyla (their closest terrestrial relatives appear to be hippos).  

Skeleton of Ambulocetus, one of the amphibious species of cetaceans linking their terrestrial ancestors with today's aquatic whales [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Notafly, AmbulocetusNatansPisa, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Back in the Eocene, some of these proto-cetaceans were some badass apex predators.  Take Basilosaurus -- the name is Greek for "king lizard," a misnomer, at least the "lizard" part -- which lived in the Tethys Ocean, a body of water that has since been largely erased by plate tectonics.  (The Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas are about all that's left of it.)  Basilosaurus could get to twenty meters in length, and probably ate large fish like sharks and tuna.  It's Basilosaurus that got me to thinking about this topic in the first place; a couple of loyal readers of Skeptophilia sent me a link to an article about a new fossil discovery in Peru.  It's hard to imagine it, but the now bone-dry Ocucaje Desert of southern Peru was once the floor of a shallow sea, an embayment of the (at that point) rapidly shrinking Tethys.  It's provided huge numbers of Eocene fossils, but the one they just found is pretty spectacular; a complete, well-preserved skull of a Basilosaurus that when it was alive was on the order of seventeen meters from tip to tail.

"This is an extraordinary find because of its great state of preservation," said Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, part of the team that found the fossil.  "This animal was one of the largest predators of its time.  At that time the Peruvian sea was warm.  Thanks to this type of fossil, we can reconstruct the history of the Peruvian sea."

It's fascinating that we're still piecing together the evolution, ecology, and geology of the ancient world -- in this case, a world with carnivorous proto-whales twice as long as a school bus, equipped with big nasty pointy teeth.  Life in the seas back then must have been risky business.  If ever time travel is invented, I'd love to go back and see it for myself -- preferably from a safe distance.  And as interested as I am, I doubt I'd be donning my scuba gear to get a closer look.

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Knotty problem

As a language geek, the loss of our ability to understand communication from past civilizations always strikes me as tragic.

It's worse when that loss was the deliberate work of people trying to silence a culture.  This is the case with the strange and fascinating khipus (also spelled quipus), a set of strings with knots that the Incas used to encode something -- we're not sure what -- and which were systematically destroyed in the 17th century by the Spanish, who were suspicious of a system of communication they couldn't understand, and worried about how it might be used against them.

It's probable that they served more than one purpose -- as most written languages do -- one of which was enumeration.  There are current Andean societies that make at least limited use of khipus for keeping track of numbers of livestock,  But it's far from clear that this was their only use; after all, the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals can be used for everything from shopping lists to censuses to history texts to telling a story.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Claus Ableiter nur hochgeladen aus enWiki, Inca Quipu, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Part of the problem with decoding them, however, is the same difficulty faced by anyone trying to decipher the Plougastel-Daoulas inscription that I wrote about a few days ago; there simply aren't many of them left.  The Spanish priests who gathered up and burned every khipu they could find simply did their job too well.

The other problem is the one I referenced in the same post, in connection to Linear B and the Voynich Manuscript; we don't even know how the knots correspond to units of language.  The type of knot seems as significant as the spacing, as does the color of the thread, but what any of those features mean is at this point speculation at best.

Another piece of the puzzle was added this week, however, in a paper authored by Alejandro Chu and Gary Urton in the journal Latin American Antiquity.  Chu has discovered 29 khipus at a site called Qolqawasi, and each one was found with quantities of edibles -- chili peppers, peanuts, and other regional crops.  This has led Chu and Urton to theorize that the khipus represented quantities of produce -- and, perhaps, the amount of taxes to be collected on it.  The authors write:

These khipus contain a formulaic arrangement of numerical values not encountered on khipus from elsewhere in Tawantinsuyu (the Inka Empire).  The formula includes first, a large number, hypothesized to record the sum total of produce included in a deposit, followed by a “fixed number,” and then one or more additional numbers.  The fixed number plus the additional number(s) sum to the original large number.  It is hypothesized that the fixed number represents an amount deducted from the deposit to support storage facility personnel.  As such, it represented a tax assessed on deposits, the first evidence we have for a system of taxation on goods in the Inka Empire.  It is proposed that the size and complexity of the storage facility at Inkawasi prompted the “invention” of a kind of financing instrument—taxation—not known previously from Inka administration. 

Their interpretation is not certain -- witness the number of times they use the word "hypothesized" and "proposed" -- but it's an intriguing possibility.  Whether the khipus were used for other purposes, such as in place of a written language, is still worth considering.  It's to be hoped that there will be additional discoveries of these odd artifacts, and that at some point the work of archaeologists such as Chu and Urton will lead to a complete decipherment -- and these voices from the past won't turn out to have been silenced completely.

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Aptly enough, considering Monday's post about deciphering scripts, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Steven Pinker's brilliant The Stuff of Thought.  Here, experimental psychologist Pinker looks at what our use of language tells us about our behavior and neural wiring -- what, in fact, our choice of words has to do with human nature as a whole.

Along the way, he throws out some fascinating examples -- my favorite of which is his section on the syntax of swearing.  I have to admit, the question, "Just what does the 'fuck' in 'fuck you' actually mean?" is something I've never thought about before, although it probably should have given that I'm guilty of using the f-word a lot more than is generally considered acceptable.

So if you're interested in language, the human mind, or both, this is a must-read.  Although I'll warn you -- if you're like me, it'll leave you thinking, "Why did I just say that?" several times a day.

Trouble brewing

A general rule of historical anthropology is that societies only last so long, and inevitably go into decline and are superseded.

The causes, though, are numerous and often mysterious, which is why your typical one-line explanations -- like "classical Rome collapsed because of the invasion by barbarian tribes" -- are inaccurate oversimplifications at best.  Sure, the barbarians didn't help matters, but centuries of misrule, overreach by emperors greedy for land (leading to revolt in outlying provinces they no longer had the military strength to control), unfavorable alterations in climate, and repeated outbreaks of the plague were all major contributors to the downfall of the Pax Romana.

Some civilizations have collapsed more suddenly, and for a few of them, we have no real idea why.  Mycenaean Greece, the "Golden Age of Heroes," went into decline around 1200 B.C.E., and by 1100 was erased entirely, their cities and palaces abandoned.  From a hastily-scrawled clay tablet found at the Palace of Pylos, one of the main Mycenaean strongholds, we get the impression that invasion (in this case by the Dorians, a tribe from northern Greece) may have been a contributor:

The enemy grabbed all the priests from everywhere and without reason murdered them secretly by simple drowning.  I am calling out to my descendants (for the sake of) history. I am told that the northern strangers continued their (terrible) attack, terrorizing and plundering (until) a short time ago.

[It may interest other linguistics geeks that the above passage was translated by Michael Ventris, who along with Alice Kober finally deciphered Linear B -- a script which beforehand was entirely mysterious, even as to what language it represented and which characters stood for which sounds.  In fact, it wasn't even known whether the characters stood for single sounds, syllables, or entire words.  Imagine facing that as a task...]

Anyhow, it's unlikely that the Dorian invasion is the sole reason Mycenae fell.  After all, these are the people who kicked some major ass during the Trojan War; a bunch of invading barbarians wouldn't have successfully eradicated the Mycenaean civilization unless there had been other factors at work as well.

My point is, what destroys civilizations, not to mention what keeps them alive, is seldom a single factor.  But some anthropologists working in South America have identified one that seems to be critical to a society's survival:

Beer.

I'm not making this up.  Patrick Ryan Williams (Field Museum), Donna Nash (Field Museum and University of North Carolina Greensboro), Josh Henkin (Field Museum and University of Illinois at Chicago) and Ruth Ann Armitage (Eastern Michigan University) are the authors of a paper in Sustainability that was released last week, looking at the role of breweries in the Wari society, which flourished in what is now the western half of Peru for over five hundred years.  The authors write:

Utilizing archaeometric methods, we evaluate the nature of production of feasting events in the ancient Wari state (600–1000 CE).  Specifically, we focus on the fabrication of ceramic serving and brewing wares for the alcoholic beverage chicha de molle.   We examine the source materials used in the creation of these vessels with elemental analysis techniques. We then assess the chemical traces of the residues present in the ceramic pores of the vessels to detect compounds indicative of the plants used in chicha production. While previous research has identified circumstantial evidence for the use of Schinus molle in the production process, this research presents direct evidence of its existence in the pores of the ceramic vessels.  We also assess what this material evidence suggests about the sustainability of the feasting events as a mode of political interaction in the Wari sphere.  Our evaluation indicates that regional resource use in the production of the ceramic vessels promoted locally sustainable raw material procurement for the making of the festivities.  Likewise, drought resistant crops became the key ingredients in the beverages produced and provided a resilient harvest for chicha production that was adopted by successor groups.

"This study helps us understand how beer fed the creation of complex political organizations," said study lead author Patrick Ryan Williams in an interview in Science Daily. "We were able to apply new technologies to capture information about how ancient beer was produced and what it meant to societies in the past...  It was like a microbrewery in some respects. It was a production house, but the brewhouses and taverns would have been right next door...  People would have come into this site, in these festive moments, in order to recreate and reaffirm their affiliation with these Wari lords and maybe bring tribute and pledge loyalty to the Wari state...  We think these institutions of brewing and then serving the beer really formed a unity among these populations, it kept people together."

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons http://www.pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=&pg=8748]

Which makes total sense to me.  I don't know about you, but getting together with friends for a nice pint is often the high point of my weekend.  And yeah, we could get together and have soda and Shirley Temples, but... it just wouldn't be the same, somehow.

So next time you have a beer, keep in mind that you're not just drinking a fizzy, mildly alcoholic beverage, you're actually helping society to cohere.  Which, I think, is a noble thing we're all doing.

Bottoms up!

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

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

Whales, fossils, and the limitations of commons sense

One of my favorite things about science is its ability to jolt us out of our preconceived notions.

We all have common-sensical ideas about how the universe works, and they allow us to function pretty well most days.  The problem is, some of them are correct and some of them are wildly wrong, and how do you tell which is which?  As physicist Sean Carroll eloquently puts it, in his wonderful book The Particle at the End of the Universe:

It's only because the data force us into corners that we are inspired to create the highly counterintuitive structures that form the basis for modern physics...  Imagine that a person in the ancient world was wondering what made the sun shine.  It's not really credible to imagine that they would think about it for a while and decide, "I bet most of the sun is made up of particles that can bump into one another and stick together, with one of them converting into a different kind of particle by emitting yet a third particle, which would be massless if it wasn't for the existence of a field that fills space and breaks the symmetry that is responsible for the associated force, and that fusion of the original two particles releases energy, which we ultimately see as sunlight."  But that's exactly what happens.  It took many decades to put this story together, and it never would have happened if our hands weren't forced by the demands of observation and experiment at every step.

That's why I find it frustrating when someone says, "Oh, that can't be right, it sounds ridiculous," and forthwith stops thinking about it.  We've seen over and over that "sounding ridiculous" is not a reliable indicator of the truth of a claim.  The only acceptable criterion is hard evidence -- as long as you've got that, what your claim sounds like is entirely irrelevant.

This point comes up every year in my AP Biology class when we talk about the evolutionary history of whales.  The fossil record for whales was pretty lousy, because being marine mammals their skeletons are mostly destroyed by scavengers and degraded by seawater, not to mention the fact that many of them end up in the abyssal regions of the ocean floor.  After that, we'd only find them if those deep oceanic sediments get scooped up by the movement of tectonic plates and thrust up onto land -- something that (1) doesn't happen that often, and (2) results in significant deformation of the rocks formed, thus completely destroying any fossils that were present.

It wasn't until a fossil bed was discovered in Pakistan in the early 1980s that we actually got any data on what the ancestors of today's whales looked like.  The northern parts of Pakistan and India -- i.e., the Himalayas -- were formed in exactly the way I've described above.  We lucked out, though, because at least one rock formation not only has ancestral whale fossils, but ones that survived in reasonably good condition.

Now, here's the counterintuitive part; the fossils found in Pakistan and India have conclusively shown that the nearest living non-cetacean relatives of whales are hippos...

... and artiodactylid ruminants.  For example, cattle, sheep, goats, deer, and antelopes.

This is the point where people look at a picture of a blue whale and a white-tailed deer and say, "Hang on a moment.  That can't be right."  But it is -- as confirmed not only from the fossil record, but from extensive genetic studies.

We just got further confirmation of this relationship from an entirely different fossil bed -- this one from mid-Eocene (i.e., about forty million years old) rocks in Peru.  A team led by paleontologist Olivier Lambert, of the Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique, has discovered not only a new species but an entirely new genus of proto-cetaceans.  Called Peregocetus pacificus, it catches whale evolution right in the middle between the terrestrial ancestors and their aquatic descendants.

The authors write:

[T]his unique four-limbed whale bore caudal vertebrae with bifurcated and anteroposteriorly expanded transverse processes, like those of beavers and otters, suggesting a significant contribution of the tail during swimming.  The fore- and hind-limb proportions roughly similar to geologically older quadrupedal whales from India and Pakistan, the pelvis being firmly attached to the sacrum, an insertion fossa for the round ligament on the femur, and the retention of small hooves with a flat anteroventral tip at fingers and toes indicate that Peregocetus was still capable of standing and even walking on land.  This new record from the southeastern Pacific demonstrates that early quadrupedal whales crossed the South Atlantic and nearly attained a circum-equatorial distribution with a combination of terrestrial and aquatic locomotion abilities less than 10 million years after their origin and probably before a northward dispersal toward higher North American latitudes.

So that's kind of amazing.  It also illustrates why we can't rely on "that sounds reasonable" to determine what's true.  This is just one example of how science has come up with a result that we never would have arrived at using common sense -- as helpful as that is in most ordinary situations.

Reconstruction of ancestral cetacean Pakicetus inachus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Pakicetus BW, CC BY 3.0]

Myself, I like the capacity of science to astonish us.  It would be incredibly boring if the universe turned out to work exactly the way we thought, that our minds are perfect little windows through which we perceive everything right the first time.

Much better to be reminded of our limitations -- and to have such a powerful tool to check our guesses, and correct us when we're wrong.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)