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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The mystery of the Etruscans

One of the unresolved mysteries of European anthropology is where the Etruscans fit into the big picture.

The Etruscans lived in northwestern Italy, in the region now called Tuscany -- in fact, the name Tuscany comes from the Latin Tusci, one of several names they had for the people who lived there.  The Greeks called them the Τυρσηνοί -- the Tyrrhenians -- etymologically related both to Etruria (the region where they lived) and, obviously, the Tyrrhenian Sea that still bears their name.  They called themselves the Rasenna, a word which, like most of their language, is of uncertain origin.

The big question is whether the Etruscans were autochthonous (academia-speak for "they'd always been there") or allochthonous (migrants from somewhere else -- and if so, from where?).  Of course, the truth is that all Europeans are ultimately allochthonous, because we all started out in east Africa -- it's just that some of us have been in place for a lot longer than others.  We know the Etruscans were already in that region when the Romans got there, who encountered them in something like 500 B.C.E. and ultimately absorbed them completely.  (An occupation the Romans excelled at.)

The historian Thucydides said they were related to the Pelasgians, a bit of a catch-all term ancient Greeks used to describe the inhabitants of Greece prior to the arrival of the classical Greek-speaking Dorians, Ionians, Achaeans, and Aeolians.  The word Pelasgian was almost synonymous with barbarian -- the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans shared a rather off-putting self-congratulatory bent, summed up as "if you're not us, sucks to be you."  

Of course, they're hardly the only civilization to feel that way.  I could name a modern one or two that still haven't gotten over that attitude.

In any case, there's good evidence that the Etruscans had already been there a while when the Romans encountered them, and that they were not closely related to the people in the neighborhood.  Their language, for example, is still a mystery, and has only been partly deciphered by linguists.  The general consensus is that, like Euskara (the language of the Basque people), it is non-Indo European.  There are two other languages it seems to be related to -- the Rhaetic language, an extinct language once spoken by people in what is now eastern Switzerland and western Austria, and Lemnian, spoken on the distant island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea prior to their being conquered by speakers of Attic Greek in the sixth century B.C.E. 

The latter suggests that Thucydides may have been right on the money in connecting the Etruscans to the Pelasgians.  Together, Etruscan, Rhaetic, and Lemnian seem to be related to no other known languages, and are tentatively classified as a linguistic isolate family (Tyrsenian).

None other than the Roman Emperor Claudius wrote a twenty-volume set on the history and language of the Etruscans -- apparently he himself was a fluent speaker, and was fascinated by their culture -- but tragically, no trace of that extensive manuscript remains.  It's one of a long list of works we only know by their titles, and through references in other books.

The Monteleone Chariot, bronze inlaid with ivory, from sixth century B.C.E. Etruria [Image is in the Public Domain]

A genetic study of Etruscan remains found that they seemed to be related to the central European Urnfield Culture -- so named because of their practice of cremation and burial in ceramic urns -- which probably originated on the steppes of eastern Europe.  But as this path was a pretty common one -- the ancestors of the Celts, Slavs, Hungarians, and Germanic peoples all came that way -- it might not tell us all that much about how or when the Etruscans arrived.

At least their later history was happier than that of many people who bumped into the Romans.  There was some warring and jockeying for power, which the Etruscans ultimately lost, but they were eventually subsumed into the Roman Republic, becoming full Roman citizens.  Many Etruscan towns went on to make large amounts of money as middlemen between the Romans and the conquered Celtic tribes to the north and west.  Several prominent families who were to rise to position of power in the Republic (and later Empire) had Etruscan roots, including the Caecinia, Urgulania, Tarquinia, and Volumnia families, all names that will be familiar to aficionados of Roman history.  Most of the people from modern Tuscany have Etruscan roots, indicating their ancestors have been living in the same place for over three thousand years.

In the end, though, we're left with a mystery.  A people who left behind buildings and works of art and an only partly-understood language, whose connections to other ancient peoples are lost to the shadows of time.  And a mystery is always fascinating -- even if we might never fully discover the answers to all the questions.

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Echoes of the ancestors

I recently finished geneticist Bryan Sykes's book, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: A Genetic History of Britain and Ireland, which describes the first exhaustive study of the DNA of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.  From there, I jumped right into The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O'Connell, which looks at one of the bloodiest battles on record -- the nearly complete massacre of the Roman army by the Carthaginians at the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.E.  That book, like Sykes's, considers the large-scale movements of populations.  The Carthaginians, for example, were mostly displaced Phoenicians who had intermarried with Indigenous North African people, and then occupied what is now Spain, adding in a Celtic strain (the "Celtiberians").

One thing that made my ears perk up in O'Connell's book is that Hannibal, in his march toward Rome, crossed through Transalpine Gaul, picking up large numbers of Gaulish mercenaries along the way, who of course had their own grudge with Rome to settle.  And his path took him right near -- perhaps through -- the valley up in the Alps containing the capital of the Celto-Ligurian tribe called the Tricorii, a town then known as Vapincum.

The name Vapincum eventually was shortened, and morphed into its current name, Gap, a modern town of forty thousand people.

It also happens to be about ten kilometers from the little village where my great-great-grandfather was born.

My last name was, like the name of Gap, altered and shortened over time.  It was originally Ariey, and then picked up a hyphenated modifier indicating the branch of the family we belonged to, and we became Ariey-Bonnet.  When my great-great-grandfather, Jacques Esprit Ariey-Bonnet, came over to the United States, the immigration folks didn't know how to handle a hyphenated name, and told him he'd have to use Ariey as his middle name and Bonnet as his surname, so all four of his children were baptized with the last name Bonnet, despite the fact that it wasn't his actual surname.

Just one of a million stories of how immigrants were forced to alter who they were upon arrival.

In any case, about three years ago, I had my DNA analyzed, and one of the things I found out was about my Y-DNA signature.  This is passed down from father to son, so I have the same Y DNA (barring any mutations) as my paternal ancestors as far back as you can trace.  And it turns out my haplogroup -- the genetic clan my Y-DNA belongs to -- is R1b1b2a1a2d3, which for brevity's sake is sometimes called R1b-L2.  And what I learned is that this DNA signature is "characteristically Italo-Gaulish," according to Eupedia, which is a great source of information for the histories of different DNA groups.

Distribution of the larger R1b Y DNA haplogroup [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Maulucioni, Haplogrupo R1b (ADN-Y), CC BY-SA 4.0]

What's most interesting is that as far back as I've traced my paternal lineage, they hardly moved at all.  My earliest known paternal ancestor, Georges Ariey, was born in about 1560 in Ranguis, France, only about a kilometer from the village of St. Jean-St. Nicolas where my great-great-grandfather Jacques Esprit Ariey-Bonnet was born three hundred years later.  And the DNA I carry indicates they'd been there a lot longer than that.

I have to wonder if my paternal ancestors were some of the Gauls who were there to see Hannibal's army headed for their fateful meeting with the Romans -- or even if they may have joined them.  The Tricorii were apparently noted for going into battle wearing nothing but body paint, so maybe this accounts for my own tendency to run around with as little clothing as is legally permissible when the weather's warm.  What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh, as John Heywood famously said.

So then I had to look at my mtDNA haplogroup.  The mt (mitochondrial) DNA descends only from the maternal line, so we all have mtDNA from our mother's mother's mother (etc.).  Each person's mtDNA differs from another's only by mutations that have accrued since their last common matrilineal ancestor, and this can provide an idea of how long ago that was (in other words, when the two lineages diverged from each other).  Simply put, more differences = a longer time span since the two shared a common ancestor, making both mtDNA and Y DNA something geneticists call a molecular clock.  The mtDNA from my earliest known maternal ancestor, Marie-Renée Brault, who was born in 1616 in the Loire Valley of western France, belongs to haplogroup H13a1a.  Once again according to Eupedia, this lineage goes back a very long way -- it's been traced to populations living in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, and from there spread through the mountains of Greece, across the Alps, and all the way to western France where my maternal great-great (etc.) grandmother lived.

So that genetic signature was carried in the bodies of mothers and daughters along those travels, then crossed the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, then went back across to France when the British expelled the Acadians in the Grand Dérangement, and crossed a third time to southern Louisiana in the late eighteenth century, finally landing in the little town of Raceland where my mother was born.  My dad's Y DNA took a different path -- staying put in the Celto-Ligurian populations of the high Alps for millennia, and only in the nineteenth century jumping across the Atlantic to Louisiana, eventually to meet up with my mother's DNA and produce me.

It's astonishing to me how much we now can figure out about the movement of people whose names and faces are forever lost to history, echoes of our ancestors left behind in our very genes.  However much I'd like to know more about them -- a forlorn hope at best -- at least I've gotten to find out about the shared heritage of our genetic clans, and can content myself with daydreams about what those long-ago people saw, heard, and felt.

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Woolly dogs

When I lived in Olympia, Washington, I knew a woman who was a professional spinner and weaver.  She made beautiful wearable items as well as decorative wall hangings, throw rugs, and blankets.

What's unusual about her is that among the many kinds of fiber she used was dog hair.  She owned three enormous (and extremely friendly and exuberant) Great Pyrenees, a breed with huge quantities of silky white hair, and she'd periodically brush their coats, wash the fur that came out, and spin it into thread.  She showed me a knit hat she'd made entirely from dog fur -- it was softer than angora.

Turns out, that region of the world has a long history of doing this.  A paper last week in Science looked at a legend amongst the Coast Salish, especially the Sto:lo, Skokomish, and Snuneymuxw tribes, of "woolly dogs" whose soft fur was spun, dyed, and woven into ceremonial rugs and cloaks that were a symbol of authority.  (My weaver friend in Washington didn't belong to this tradition -- she was from Luton, England -- although she may have gotten inspiration for it from Indigenous sources.  Or, maybe, she just owned three gigantic hairy dogs and came up with a way to use the copious fur they produced.  I'm not sure.)

In any case, the people of European descent who settled in the Northwest thought this was just a legend -- that any dogs belonging to the Coast Salish were very recent imports, possibly the descendants of dogs brought in by whalers and explorers from Japan or Russia.  In any case, the woolly dogs of the Salish had completely vanished by 1900, so it seemed like there was no way to be sure.  But there was one hard piece of evidence to study -- the pelt of a dog named Mutton who had been acquired as a puppy by an ethnographer in 1859.

Artist's rendition of what Mutton looked like [Image courtesy of Science and artist Karen Carr]

DNA analysis of Mutton's pelt showed something fascinating -- he wasn't closely related to Japanese breeds like the Akita or Shiba Inu, nor to northern European breeds like the Spitz and Samoyed.  Mutton's DNA showed his lineage had diverged from all other known dog breeds at least four thousand years ago, so very likely he and the others of his breed had been brought over from Siberia by the ancestors of the Coast Salish many millennia ago.

"It’s nice to hear Western science say this is how long you’ve had a relationship with woolly dogs," said study co-author Michael Pavel, a knowledge keeper of the Skokomish Nation.  "Often we are the subjects of research, but in this case, we were able to weave our considerable knowledge together with a Western scientific perspective."

Which is a polite way of saying, "we freakin' told you so."  Non-Indigenous American and European anthropologists have a long and sorry history of paying little attention to the cultural memories of Indigenous people, of dismissing their oral history as little more than a curiosity.  Time after time there's been vindication of the accuracy of these histories -- a recent example we looked at here at Skeptophilia is the tale, also from coastal tribes of the Northwest, that there'd been a monstrous earthquake and tsunami one midwinter night around three hundred years ago, which turned out to be right on the money.

Maybe the anthropologists are finally starting to take the traditions of Indigenous people more seriously.  One can only hope.

The ultimate story, though, is a sad one.  Christian missionaries in the Western Hemisphere generally did their damndest to eradicate any traces of Native beliefs and practices, especially ones that were involved in prestige and authority.  In the Northwest, that included forbidding the keeping of woolly dogs and the weaving of their fur into ceremonial garments.  Ultimately, the entire breed went extinct, and other than some woven pieces that have survived, knowledge of the practice itself died as well other than a cultural memory that it had once been done.

The men and women who contributed to the article in Science, though, by and large put a happier spin on it.  "All we knew was that the dogs were all gone, and [we had] just that -- stories," said Sto:lo Grand Chief Steven Point.  "Nobody knew what happened.  The woolly dog became a casualty of colonialism.  But the woolly dog is part of who we are, and it feels like a link to our past is being filled in.  It’s a good news story."

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