Burning down the house

It's always thin ice to make too many assumptions about why our distant ancestors did what they did.

Most of the time, all we have is the traces of what they made to go by, and that only gets you so far.  Imagine some future archaeologist got a hold of some of the artifacts from our civilization.  These kinds of remains are always fragmentary; like fossilization, the preservation of human-made objects is largely a matter of chance, and the vast majority of them don't survive.  So... suppose a future archaeologist found a bent, rusted hand-cranked can opener.

What would (s)he make of that?

Unless there was the fortuitous survival of a can of beans nearby, they might never figure out what it was used for.

So it would very likely be placed in a museum with a card saying "Probably used in rituals."

I'm not meaning to cast aspersions on the archaeologists, here.  To their credit, they are unhesitating in saying "we're not sure" -- something every good scientist should be willing to do.  We humans are just endlessly curious, and we want solutions to mysteries.  Leaving the question open might be the most honest thing for a skeptic to do, but it's also profoundly unsatisfying.

Especially when we have lots of evidence.  Like, for example, the strange case of the "Burned House Horizon" -- the layers of accumulated archaeological evidence (horizons) in a large part of eastern Europe showing evidence of entire settlements being repeatedly burned to the ground.

For over two and a half millennia.

The earliest evidence we have of the practice is from the the Starčevo–Körös–Criş Culture, which spanned from what is now Serbia all the way to eastern Bulgaria, and dates to around 5,900 B.C.E.  The latest is from the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, which is found from Romania to western Ukraine, in 3,200 B.C.E.  How the behavior spread is uncertain -- whether one culture learned it from the other, or one culture descended from the other, is unknown.  Unfortunately, it's usually impossible to differentiate between cultural (learned) transmission and genetic transmission, barring (even more) fortuitous survival of adequate human remains from which to extract DNA.

So we don't know how it spread, or why.  Some anthropologists believe that it didn't spread as a behavior; there are a few who claim the Burned House Horizon is simply preserving a record of accidental house fires, tribal violence, or both.

A lot of others disagree, however.  Mirjana Stevanović of the University of California - Berkeley, writing in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, makes a persuasive argument that a simple house fire of a wattle-and-daub, thatched-roof structure -- whether accidental or deliberately set -- wouldn't cause temperatures sufficient to produce the kind of vitrification of clay that is seen all through the Burned House Horizon.  In fact, Stevanović, along with archaeologists Arthur Bankoff and Frederick Winter, actually built a house using the techniques known to have been utilized by cultures in Neolithic eastern Europe, then burned it down:

[Image credit: Stevanović et al., 1997]

They found the only way they could get the clay to vitrify was to pile up enormous amounts of brush, straw, and other burnables against the foundation of the house.

In other words, the houses seem to have been burned deliberately, and regularly, by their owners.  But why?

Hypotheses vary from the practical to the bizarre.  Some suggest that it was a way of destroying the habitats of disease-carrying pests during the regular epidemics our forebears were prey to.  Others think that because wattle-and-daub structures eventually become dilapidated, it was a way of getting rid of them so their owners could rebuild -- using the convenient fired clay bricks produced by the burning.  Some have even suggested that it was a religious ritual they've called domicide -- the symbolic killing of the houses in an entire settlement, followed by another cycle of "birth."  (The adherents of this model point out that in the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, the one we know the most about, the complete burning of houses in a settlement happened on average every 75-80 years -- back then, pretty much the upper bound of a human lifespan.  Coincidence?)

The thing is, though, all we have is the evidence, which amounts to 2,500 years' worth of burned rubble, distributed over a (very) wide geographical region.  The reason why this happened could be any of the above, or a combination, or one thing during one period and something else during another, or an entirely different reason we haven't yet dreamed up.  It's a puzzle.

But then, so is much of our history.  If you're interested in the past, you have to get used to that.  Even during periods when there were written records, the sad fact is that a great many of those documents didn't survive to the present, and whatever was contained within them is gone forever.  But in non-literate cultures, we have even less -- just broken remnants of what they did.

Why they did these things, and in fact who those people were, will always remain in the realm of informed speculation.

So that's this morning's rather unsatisfying conclusion.  Burned houses, ancient cultures, and the persistence of mystery.  It's the way of things in science, though, isn't it?  As Richard Feynman put it, "I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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A leap into the dark

Beliefs in an afterlife of some sort are pretty ubiquitous.  It's understandable; death is scary, and seems final, and it's natural enough to want life in some fashion to continue.  My own view is that I simply don't know what comes after death.  I'm inclined to agree with the comedian who quipped, "Lots of things happen after you die.  They just don't involve you."  On the other hand, I suppose it's possible there might be some kind of survival of consciousness, even if my rational/scientific side finds it hard to imagine how that could possibly work.

In any case, I'll find out eventually one way or the other.  I hope not too soon.

So it's unsurprising that most cultures and religions have beliefs in an afterlife.  What I find strange, though, is how specific many of those beliefs are, and I'm not just talking about religion, here.  The reason this rather macabre topic comes up is a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a paper by folklorist and anthropologist Stuart Dunn of Grisham College entitled, "Corpse Roads: Digital Landscape Archaeology," which looks at the peculiar British tradition of designating certain pathways "corpse roads" because they were used to bring dead bodies from villages with no consecrated churchyard to one that had a burial ground.  (Many of these roads, it turns out, are still called "Such-and-Such Corpse Road," or less grimly, "Lych Road" -- líc was the Old English word for "body.")

These corpse roads were often considered liminal spaces, passageways not just of the obvious spatial sort.  So all kinds of traditions arose around them, including the rather terrifying idea that if you didn't conduct the body to its final resting place in exactly the right way, the dead person's spirit might travel back up the path and return to haunt the spot where (s)he died.  In order to obviate that possibility, you had to make sure to carry the corpse feet-first down the road, and never let it touch the soil until it reached the burial site.  Some of these pathways still have "coffin stones" alongside them -- places the pallbearers could set the coffin down and take a rest without it touching the dirt.

Another weird belief I learned about from Dunn's paper was the association between death and yew trees.  He speculates that it's because yew trees can be extremely long-lived, so they're associated with immortality.  He mentions a rather scary idea from Wales that is definitely one of the less comforting afterlife beliefs:

[I]n R. V. W. Elliott’s classic 1957 study, “Runes, Yews and Magic”... he describes the Brittonic belief that the root of a churchyard yew grows out of the mouth of each corpse buried therein, thus sustaining the former and ensuring its continued survival.

Then there's the idea of the totenpass -- German for "passport for the dead" -- the name given to a Greek and Egyptian tradition of burying an inscribed piece of metal with the deceased, either hung around their neck or put inside their mouth.  The inscription was a set of instructions for the dead person's spirit, so they wouldn't get lost in the next world.

Google Maps for the Afterlife, is the way I think of it.

These instructions were often amazingly detailed.  One totenpass from Crete had the following inscription:

You will find on the right in Hades's halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives.  Do not even draw nigh this spring.  Farther on you will find chill water flowing from the pool of Memory: over this stand guardians.  They will ask you with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades.  They will ask you for what reason you have come.  Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: 'I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my birth: this you know yourselves.  I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.'  Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory.  After that you will rule amongst the other heroes.

One has to wonder how the person who wrote the inscription, who was presumably still alive at the time, figured all this out.  But maybe it's best not to ask too many questions.

A fourth century B.C.E. totenpass from Thessaly [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Orphic Gold Tablet (Thessaly-The Getty Villa, Malibu), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then there's an Aztec belief -- also incredibly detailed -- about the use of a special type of paper called amatl or amate, made from the fibrous bark of fig trees, which was intended to give the dead person's spirit protection during the initial phases of the afterlife.  This process makes "going to your Eternal Rest" not sound so restful.  You needed six pieces of paper, each with the right designs drawn on it, or you were in some serious shit.  Here's how one source describes it:

The first piece of amatl paper was used to pass safely through two contending mountains.  The second piece helped the deceased to travel without any danger on the road guarded by the Great Serpent.  The third piece allowed a safe crossing over the Great Crocodile’s domain.  The fourth piece was a passport, which allowed the deceased to cross the Seven Deserts.  The fifth piece was used for a safe passage through the Eight Hills.  Finally and perhaps most importantly, the sixth piece was used for defense against the north wind.  In addition, for this latter challenge, the Aztecs burned the clothes and arms of the deceased so that the warmth coming from the burning body might protect the soul from the cold northern wind.

Seems like a lot of work to me.  One has to hope that after all that, there'd be something pleasant to look forward to.

The neighboring Mayans weren't much better.  Their concept of the underworld -- Xibalba, meaning "place of fright" -- makes the Judaeo-Christian hell sound like the French Riviera.   Just one of the special offers in Xibalba is a set of demons whose very names are enough to make going there a big old nope (not, I suppose, that you had any choice in the matter).  There's Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab"), Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood"), Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon"), Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon"), Chamiabac ("Bone Staff"), Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff"), Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon"), and  Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon"), just to name a few.  And if you think "Sweepings Demon" doesn't sound so bad, I should mention that Ahalmez teamed up with Ahaltocob to torture the souls of bad housekeepers.  Ahalmez hid in the dust of unswept parts of your house and lured your spirit over, then Ahaltocob jumped out and stabbed you.

This would be problematic for me and my wife, because our approach to housekeeping can be summed up as "there seems to have been a struggle."  It's likely that one of these days we'll both go missing, and when the police investigate, they'll find us both trapped inside giant dust bunnies.  So I guess it's a good thing we're not Mayan.

Anyhow, I find this all very curious, because it falls squarely into the "How exactly do you know any of this?" department.  But it's hardly the only devoutly-held belief I could say that about.

In any case, I'm okay with not knowing what'll happen after I die.  Death is the ultimate leap into the dark -- either into something new and different, or into nothing.  I'd just as soon if it is something new and different, that it not involve having to keep bunches of pieces of paper straight, because most days I have a hard enough time keeping track of simple paperwork like paying the electric bill.

But I guess the incentive for getting it right is pretty strong.  I for sure will remember not to draw nigh to any ghostly cypress-trees.  That sounds scary.

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The skull in the cave

"If humans came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

If there is one phrase that makes me want to throw a chair across the room, it's that one.  (Oh, that and, "The Big Bang means that nothing exploded and became everything.")  Despite the fact that a quick read of any of a number of reputable sites about evolution would make it clear that the question is ridiculous, I still see it asked in such a way that the person evidently thinks they've scored some serious points in the debate.  My usual response is, "My ancestors came from France.  Why are there still French people?"  But the equivalence of the two seems to go so far over their heads that it doesn't even ruffle their hair.

Of course, not all the blame lies with the creationists and their ilk.  How many times have you seen, in otherwise accurate sources, human evolution depicted with an illustration like this?

It sure as hell looks like each successive form completely replaced the one before it, so laypeople are perhaps to be excused for coming away with the impression that this is always the way evolution works.  In fact, cladogenesis (branching evolution) is far and away the more common pattern, where species split over and over again, with different branches evolving at different rates or in different directions, and some of them becoming extinct.

If you're curious, this is the current best model we have for the evolution of hominins:

The cladogenesis of the hominin lineage; the vertical axis is time in millions of years before present  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dbachmann, Hominini lineage, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The problem also lies with the word species, which is far and away the mushiest definition in all of biological science.  As my evolutionary biology professor put it, "The only reason we came up with the idea of species as being these little impermeable containers is that we have no near relatives."  In fact, we now know that many morphologically distinct populations, such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, freely interbred with "modern" Homo sapiens.  Most people of European descent have Neanderthal markers in their DNA; when I had my DNA sequenced a few years ago, I was pleased to find out I was above average in that regard, which is undoubtedly why I like my steaks medium-rare and generally run around half-naked when the weather is warm.  Likewise, many people of East Asian, Indigenous Australian, Native American, and Polynesian ancestry have Denisovan ancestry, evidence that those hard-and-fast "containers" aren't so water-tight after all.

The reason all this comes up is because of a new study of the "Petralona Skull," a hominin skull found covered in dripstone (calcium carbonate) in a cave near Thessaloniki, Greece.  The skull has been successfully dated to somewhere between 277,000 and 539,000 years ago -- the uncertainty is because of estimates in the rate of formation of the calcite layers.

The Petralona Skull  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nadina / CC BY-SA 3.0]

Even with the uncertainty, this range puts it outside of the realm of possibility that it's a modern human skull.  Morphologically, it seems considerably more primitive than typical Neanderthal skulls, too.  So it appears that there was a distinct population of hominins living in southern Europe and coexisting with early Neanderthals -- one about which paleontologists know next to nothing.

Petralona Cave, where the skull was discovered [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carlstaffanholmer / CC BY-SA 3.0]

So our family tree turns out to be even more complicated than we'd realized -- and there might well be an additional branch, not in Africa (where most of the diversification in hominins occurred) but in Europe.  

You have to wonder what life was like back then.  This would have been during the Hoxnian (Mindel-Riss) Interglacial, a period of warm, wet conditions, when much of Europe was covered with dense forests.  Fauna would have included at least five species of mammoths and other elephant relatives, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, cave lynx, cave bear, "Irish elk" (which, as the quip goes, was neither), and the "hypercarnivorous" giant dog Xenocyon.  

Among many others.

So as usual, the mischaracterization of science by anti-science types misses the reality by a mile, and worse, misses how incredibly cool that reality is.  The more we find out about our own species's past, the richer it becomes.

I guess if someone wants to dismiss it all with a sneering "why are there still monkeys?", that's up to them.  But me, I'd rather keep learning.  And for that, I'm listening to what the scientists themselves have to say.

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The lady in red

I've been interested for years in how religions get started.

There are a handful that come about from the work of a single person; Joseph Smith with the Church of Latter-Day Saints, L. Ron Hubbard's creation of Scientology, and Mary Baker Eddy's launching of the Christian Science movement come to mind.   But I'm much more curious about ones that arise more organically, from a groundswell of belief that ends up sort of taking on a life of its own.

Of course, none of this happens in vacuo.  Belief systems always arise because of a combination of social conditions and prior beliefs.  Previous religious traditions are often combined, rearranged, jiggered around, and have new components added, resulting in something sufficiently different to what came before to warrant classification as a new religion.  In fact, this is so common that the anthropologists have a name for it; syncretism.  

As an example, let me tell you about one of the world's newest religions: the Church of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte.

The name translates to Our Lady of Holy Death, and the deity is a female figure that is a personification of death.  But it's not a belief system that reveres death; Santa Muerte is considered a protector figure, listening to and granting the prayers of devotees, and the association with death is that she guarantees to the faithful a peaceful transition to a pleasant afterlife.  Her depiction, though, isn't exactly reassuring:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The Church of Santa Muerte got its start in Mexico, and does share with my previous examples the fact that its meteoric rise popularity is largely due to the efforts of one person, Enriquita Romero, who founded a shrine to the goddess in Mexico City in 2001.  But the roots of the religion go back to at least the mid-twentieth century, when a belief system arose that took parts of Roman Catholicism and melded them with Indigenous beliefs, particularly the worship of the Aztec goddess of death Mictēcacihuātl, who played a similar role in pre-colonization Mexico.

You're probably wondering if the worship of Santa Muerte is more or less the same as the rituals associated with the Day of the Dead, given the similarity in the imagery.  The answer is that there is some overlap, but it's far from complete.  The Day of the Dead, celebrated on November 1 or 2 (it varies in different areas), is a thoroughly Catholicized practice that involves praying for the departed, decorating their graves, and going to Mass in the hopes that the devotions will improve the deceased family and friends' lot in the afterlife.  While Santa Muerte has some Christian symbolism incorporated into it, it is a religion of its own that has in fact been roundly condemned by both the Catholics and the evangelical Protestants.  Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, said, "It’s not religion just because it’s dressed up like religion; it’s a blasphemy against religion."  The Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, John Wester, told his flock outright that you can't be a Catholic and at the same time worship the Skeletal Lady.  Pope Francis himself visited Mexico in 2016, and on his first day there repudiated Santa Muerte as "blasphemous and satanic... a symbol of narco-culture."

The last objection has some merit.  As a movement that was underground for a long time (in fact, the Mexican government has gone so far as to bulldoze shrines and places of worship), it has become associated with people on the fringes of society -- the poor, the homeless, prostitutes, and people involved in the narcotics trade.  Interestingly enough, it's also become a haven for LGBTQ+ people; Santa Muerte herself is seen by many queer people in Mexico and Central America as their particular protector, who will intercede for them in matters of safety, prosperity, and love.  It's apparently become quite common for practitioners of Santa Muerte to officiate at same-sex weddings.

Its influence is spreading fast.  Andrew Chesnut, a historian who studies religion, has said that it is the single fastest-growing new religion in the world.  There are now places of worship in New York City, Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Tucson, and elsewhere, and even a temple built on a piece of ultra-expensive real estate on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood.

Honestly, I can understand the appeal.  When life is uncertain -- which it is now, for about a hundred different reasons -- putting your trust in a deity who champions the weak and powerless, protects the poor and oppressed, and (should death occur) makes the transition to the afterlife easy, has got to be attractive.  Anthropologist Lois Ann Lorentzen writes, "The subversive Santa Muerte, favored by undocumented migrants, including LGBTQ migrants, provides solace and protection against both church and state, while also reflecting their liminal, precarious lives."  Writer Carlos Garma calls it a "cult of crisis."

Myself, I'm not religious, but my attitude toward religion -- particularly this sort, which (unlike other religions I will refrain from naming) doesn't bludgeon its way into political power and then demand that everyone believe likewise, or else -- can be characterized as, "Whatever gets you through the day."  I've landed on a set of beliefs that (most of the time) helps me to make sense of the universe and keeps me putting one foot in front of the other.  Who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle?

I used to be a great deal more militant about atheism, but I've come to recognize that (like everything) religion is complex.  My real beef is with religions that aren't content just to do their thing, but desire to compel universal compliance.  (And often create a fake persecution complex on the part of the true believers, because people who feel embattled and frightened will be much quicker to strike out in anger -- and are easier for the leaders to control.)  I'll fight like hell against religions that try to force adherence, or who muscle their way into public schools, which amounts to the same thing -- but otherwise?  Eh, I've got no problem with you.  Maybe I've tempered with age, or maybe I've just come to realize that "pick your battles" is one of the most important principles for a happy life.

So I'm more interested than repelled by Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte.  If it gives you solace, and doesn't impel you to try to force me to believe, I'm happy you're happy.  It's a hard old world, and we need all the help we can get, wherever it comes from.

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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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The world of the trickster

Sometimes I run across a piece of research that is just so charming I have to tell you about it.

This particular one comes from the European University of St. Petersburg, where anthropologist and folklorist Yuri Berezkin has been working on tracking down the origins of trickster myths worldwide.  Every culture seems to have them -- characters from folk tales who are clever, wily, getting themselves into and then deftly out of trouble, often helping we humans out as they go (although we're the butt of the joke just as frequently; one of the persistent themes is that tricksters may be dashing and funny, but they can't be trusted).

I remember first coming across trickster myths when I was a kid, and had a positive obsession with mythology.  Loki, from Norse mythology, was a trickster of a more malevolent kind; the Greek god Hermes was the messenger of Olympus, but got his start as a small child stealing his brother Apollo's sacred cattle; and Coyote, a character in the stories of many Indigenous American cultures, one that was generally more benevolent to his human acquaintances.  When as a teenager, I read Richard Adams's amazing novel Watership Down -- in the characters' tales of the wise and daring El-Ahrairah (his name means "The Prince With a Thousand Enemies," translated from Lapine), I recognized the tropes right away.  El-Ahrairah is courageous, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness; out for his own gain and that of his friends, even if it means breaking the rules; not above taking every opportunity to make his foes look like idiots; fiercely loyal to the weak and powerless who call on him for help.

What Berezkin found is that trickster figures fall into three broad categories: fox/coyote/jackal, the most common, found throughout Europe, Siberia, East Asia, North Africa, much of central and eastern North America, and the Andes region down into Patagonia; hare/rabbit, found in the tales from southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (from which it jumped to North America via the slave trade; thus the Bre'r Rabbit tales, and ultimately, Bugs Bunny); and raven/crow, found in northwestern North America and across central Canada, far eastern Siberia, and a few spots in east Asia and Australia.

Coyote the Trickster (Edward Curtis, ca. 1915) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What's fascinating is that it appears that as people moved, they carried their stories with them, but upon settling in new areas, simply applied the same stories to a different set of anthropomorphized animals, based on whatever wildlife lived in the new region.  (For example, as Indigenous Americans moved from the Northwest into the Plains, their stories remained similar in theme, but they substituted Coyote for Raven.)

Berezkin writes:

The existence of two major zones of trickster tales in Eurasia and Africa, one with the fox/jackal and another with the hare/rabbit, seems to reject the differentiation of Homo sapiens populations after entering Eurasia from Africa.  During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Pacific borderlands of Asia and the northern/continental Eurasia were isolated from each other by sparsely populated mountainous and desert areas.  Each of the major zones populated by modern people during the LGM produced its own cultural forms.  When the LGM was over, the bearers of both cultural complexes took part in the peopling of the New World.

Humans have been storytellers for a very long time.  If Berezkin is right, trickster stories go back at least to the Last Glacial Maximum, which is on the order of twenty thousand years ago.  How much older they are than that is anyone's guess, but given how widespread they are, and the commonalities between them worldwide, they might be twice that old or more.

So the next time you tell folk tales to your children, or read mythical accounts of the derring-do, cleverness, and craftiness of figures like Prometheus and Anansi and Kokopelli and Veles, you are participating in a tradition that far antedates written language, and has been passed down through the oral tradition back into a shadowy and unknown past.  You are helping to keep alive something that unites every culture on Earth.

I think Coyote would be proud.

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A light on bias

A woman walks into the kitchen to find her husband on all fours, crawling around peering at the floor.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Looking for my contact lens."

"Oh, I'll help."  So the woman gets down on the floor, too, and they spend the next fifteen minutes fruitlessly searching for the missing lens.  Finally, she says, "I just don't see it.  Are you sure you dropped it in here?"

The husband responds, "Oh, no, I dropped it in the living room."

"Then why the hell are you looking for it in the kitchen?" she yells at him.

"Because the lighting is better in here."

While this is an old and much-retold joke, there's an object lesson here for scientists -- which was highlighted by a paper this week out of George Washington University that appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution.  In it, paleobiologists Andrew Barr and Bernard Wood considered a systematic sampling bias in our study of fossils of ancestral hominid species -- and by extension, every other group of fossils out there.

A large share of what we know of our own early family tree comes from just three sites in Africa, most notably the East African Rift Valley and adjacent regions in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.  Clearly that's not the only place early hominids lived; it's just the place that (1) has late Cenozoic-age fossil-bearing strata exposed near the surface, and (2) isn't underneath a city or airport or swamp or rain forest or something.  In fact, the Rift Valley makes up only one percent of Africa's surface area, so searching only there is significantly biasing what we might find.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michal Huniewicz, Great Rift Valley - panoramio, CC BY 3.0]

"Because the evidence of early human evolution comes from a small range of sites, it's important to acknowledge that we don't have a complete picture of what happened across the entire continent," said study co-author Andrew Barr.  "If we can point to the ways in which the fossil record is systematically biased and not a perfect representation of everything, then we can adjust our interpretations by taking this into account."

You can only base your understanding on what evidence you actually have in your hands, of course; besides the areas that might bear fossils but are inaccessible to study for one reason or another, there are parts of Africa where the strata are from a different geological era, or simply don't contain fossils at all (for example, igneous rock).  But you still need to maintain an awareness that what you're seeing is an incomplete picture.

"We must avoid falling into the trap of coming up with what looks like a comprehensive reconstruction of the human story, when we know we don't have all of the relevant evidence," said study co-author Bernard Wood.  "Imagine trying to capture the social and economic complexity of Washington D.C. if you only had access to information from one neighborhood.  It helps if you can get a sense of how much information is missing."

Now, don't misunderstand me (or them); no one is saying what we have to date is likely to be all wrong.  I absolutely hate when some new fossil is discovered, and the headlines say, "New Find Rewrites Everything We Knew" or "The Textbooks Are Wrong Again" or, worst of all, "Scientists Are Forced Back To The Drawing Board."  For one thing, our models are now solid enough that it's unlikely that anything will force a complete undoing of the known science.  I suppose something like that could occur in newer fields like cosmology and quantum physics, but even there we have tons of evidence and excellent predictive models -- so while there might well be additions or revisions, a complete overturning is almost certainly not gonna happen.  

Second, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "As scientists, we're always at the drawing board.  If you're not at the drawing board, you're not doing science."  We are always exploring what he calls "the perimeter of our ignorance," testing and probing into the realms we have yet to explain fully.  What Barr and Wood are doing for the field of human paleobiology is to define that perimeter more clearly -- to identify where our inevitable sampling biases are, so that we can determine what direction to look next.  Not, like our hapless contact-lens-searchers, to continue to look in the same place just because the lighting happens to be better there.

Biases are unavoidable; everyone's got 'em.  The important thing is to be aware of them; they can't bite you on the ass if you keep your eye on them.  In science -- well, in everything, really -- it's good to remember the iconic line from physicist Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself; and you are the easiest person to fool."

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The ghost children

It's often difficult to look at other cultures, especially ones in the distant past, in a dispassionate way, without making value judgments about them based on the way we do things in our own.

I've written recently about the Roman Empire, which is a culture a lot of people in the western world revere for its dedication to art, architecture, and literature.  The fact remains, however, that they were (from our standpoint) classist and sexist, had no problem with slavery, and punished people for minor offenses in a way most of us would describe as extremely brutal.  You can't laud them for their (very real) accomplishments without simultaneously opening your eyes to the many ways in which their culture, from a modern perspective, breaks all manner of standards for conventional morality and ethics.  Those practices were as much an integral part of Roman society as were the beautiful things they created.

I'm not saying we should condone what they did, but it's important to try to understand it. 

Another example, and the reason the topic comes up, is the Classical Mayan civilization, which lasted from the third to the ninth century C.E., at which point the government collapsed from what appears to be internecine warfare triggered by a massive drought and famine.  The Mayans had some traditions that are difficult for us to comprehend -- a good example is the ritual ball game.  It was played on a court ruled by the Lords of Xibalba (the underworld), and so was considered to be a liminal space somewhere between the real world and the spirit world.  The losers were often sacrificed -- but it was considered to be an honor to lose your life in a ball game, and it assured you a high place in the next plane of existence.

Strange, perhaps.  Although given our adulation of sports superstars, maybe it's not as far away from our culture as it might appear at first.

Even further from our norms is their practice of ritual child sacrifice.  A paper in Nature last week describes the discovery in Chichén Itzá of 64 skeletons, mostly young boys, who were apparently sacrificed to the gods -- most intriguingly, the DNA evidence shows that many of them were closely related to each other, and a few were pairs of identical twins.  There's a legend recorded in the Mayan sacred document Popol Vuh of a pair of hero twins fighting (and winning) against hostile deities, and it's possible that this is why the twins were chosen for sacrifice.  The children died toward the end of the Classic Period, and the conjecture, based upon inscriptions in the tunnels where the skeletons were found, is that the sacrifices were to the rain god Chaac.

Understandable considering what was unfolding climatically at the time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Unfortunately, too little is known for sure about pre-contact Mayan practices to be all that certain about the context in which these sacrifices were made.  The Christian missionaries who came into what is now Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala did far too thorough a job of stamping out indigenous beliefs and destroying the Native people's artifacts and writings to have very much to go on.  But what's certain is that child sacrifice was widely practiced -- and not of captured children of conquered enemies, but of their own offspring, leaving behind these pathetic remains, the ghost children of a long-gone civilization.

It's hard to fathom.  "Protect your children" is one of the foundational moral values of most of the world's cultures.  But what I wonder is, what if they believed this was protecting them -- dedicating them to the gods, assuring their place in the afterlife, just as the losers of the ball game believed?  Belief can make people act oddly -- at least, oddly from our perspective.  If the climate was careening toward drought, crops failing, wells and sinkholes drying up, maybe parents felt it was an honor to offer their children up, both for the sake of improving their fate in the next world but for the good of the entire community.

I'm not saying I understand it, not really.  This sort of thing still strikes me as the darkest side of what superstition can drive people to do.  But you have to wonder how an advanced alien civilization would view our own culture.  How many of our own accepted practices would horrify and disgust them?  We routinely turn our faces away from homelessness, poverty, and hunger in our own communities.  The same people who proudly call themselves "pro-life" and follow a deity who said "Let the little children come unto me" regularly vote against programs to help our own society's poor children obtain access to food and medical care.  We shrug our shoulders at famine and war and suffering, as long as the ones affected are The Other -- a different skin color, language, ethnic identity, or religion than our own.  We marginalize people -- in some countries, imprison or execute them -- because they are LGBTQ+.

Once again, perhaps we're not so different from the cultures of the past as we'd like to believe.

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Paleobling

We are hardly the only animal species that sports adornments, but most of the others -- bright colors, flashy feathers, ornate fins, and so on -- are created by genes and produced by the animal's own body.  We're one of the only ones who fashion those adornments out of other objects.

It's a curious thing when you think about it.  Virtually everyone wears clothes even when there's no particular necessity for purposes of protection or warmth; and a great many of us don such accessories as ties, scarves, hats, necklaces, bracelets, and rings.  The significance of these objects is largely culturally-determined (e.g. in western society a guy wearing a tie is a professional, someone with a ring on the fourth left finger is probably married, and so on).  Some have ritual meanings (clothing or jewelry that marks you as belonging to a particular religion, for example).  Others are simply for the purpose of increasing attractiveness to one's preferred gender.

But the odd fact remains that in the animal world, such items are almost entirely confined to the human species.

However such practices got started, what's certain is that they go back a long way.  A study that came out in Nature this week, by a team led by Jack Baker of the University of Bordeaux, has shown that not only does jewelry-making and wearing go back at least 34,000 years, the jewelry styles of prehistoric Europe belong to nine discernibly different styles -- suggesting that beads, necklaces, and the like may have been used as markers for belonging to particular cultures.

A few of the shells, beads, teeth, and other trinkets used in the Baker et al. study

The study was comprehensive, analyzing artifacts from Paviland, Wales east to Kostenki, Russia, and covering a period of nearly ten thousand years.  "We've shown that you can have two [distinct] genetic groups of people who actually share a culture," Baker said.  "In the East, for example, they were very, very much more focused on ivory, on teeth, on stone.  But on the other side of the Alps, people would have adorned themselves with really flamboyant colors: reds, pinks, blues, really vibrant colors.  If you were to see one person from each group, you could say, ‘He's from the East, and he's from the West,’ at a quick glance."

The intricacy and complexity of a particular adornment, Baker said, were probably reflective of wealth or social status -- just as they are today.

Interestingly, there was no particularly good correlation between the genetic relatedness of two groups and the similarity in their jewelry.  As Baker put it, "This study has shown really nicely that genetics does not equal culture."

Given its ubiquity -- there are very few cultures that don't wear some sort of jewelry -- you have to wonder how it got started.  Who was the first early human who thought, "Hey, I could string this shell on a piece of leather and hang it around my neck"?  Why would that thought have occurred to him/her?

And how did the other early humans react?  I picture them looking at their necklace-wearing friend and saying something like the Gary Larson/The Far Side line, "Hey!  Look what Zog do!"

It's interesting to try to consider it from the standpoint of an alien scientist studying anthropology.  How would you answer the question, "Why are you wearing that bracelet?"  Okay, you think it looks good, but why?

I'm not sure I have an answer to that.

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