Resurrecting a fossil

A year ago I wrote about linguistic isolates -- single languages, or small clusters of related languages, that have no apparent relation to any other language on Earth.  The problem, of course, is that being spoken by only a small number of people, these are some of the most endangered languages.  There are many of them for which the last native speakers are already elderly, and there's a high risk of their going extinct without ever being thoroughly studied.

And as I pointed out in my post, the sad part of that is that each one of those is a lens into a specific culture and a particular way of thinking.  Once lost, they're gone forever, or only exist in scattered remnants, like the fossils of extinct animals.  What you can reconstruct from these relics is perhaps better than nothing, but still, there's always an elegiac sense of what we've lost, and what we're still losing.

This topic comes up because of an article in Smithsonian sent to me by a friend and frequent contributor of topics to Skeptophilia, about some linguists who are trying to reconstruct the extinct indigenous Timucuan language of northern Florida.  Timucuan was a linguistic isolate, and seems to be unrelated to the languages spoken by neighboring groups (such as the Seminole, Muscogee, and Choctaw).  The Timucua people, which at the time of European contact in 1595 comprised an estimated 200,000 people in 35 chiefdoms, each of which spoke a different dialect, was decimated by war and by diseases like smallpox.  By 1700, there were only about a thousand Timucuans left, and the slave trade eradicated those few survivors.  There is currently a genetic study to see if some populations in Cuba might be the descendants of the Timucuans, but so far the results are inconclusive.

This would just be another in the long list of complete and irretrievable cultural loss, if it weren't for the efforts of linguists Alejandra Dubcovsky and Aaron Broadwell.  Working with a handful of letters written in Timucuan (using the Latin alphabet), and a rather amazing bilingual document by Spanish missionary Francisco Pareja called Confessions in the Castilian and Timucua Language, With Some Tips to Encourage the Penitent, they have assembled the first Timucuan dictionary and grammar, and reconstructed how a long-gone people spoke.

A page from the Confessions, with Spanish on the left and Timucuan on the right [Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University]

Which is incredibly cool, but there's also a wryly amusing side to it, because with Dubcovsky's and Broadwell's knowledge of the Timucuan language, they're able to compare what Pareja wanted the translators to say with what they actually did say.  "Our favorite is the description of marriage," Dubcovsky said.  "The Spanish side asks very clearly, 'Have the man and a woman been joined together in front of a priest?'  And the Timucua version of that sentence is, 'Did you and another person consent to be married?'  The Timucua translation not only takes out any mention of gender, but it also removes any mention of a religious officiant.  A priest did not write this, because a priest does not forget to include himself in the story."

So the Confessions document is not only a Rosetta Stone for Timucuan, it gives us a fascinating window into how the Timucuan translators saw the Spanish Catholic culture that was being imposed upon them.

It's tragic that this language and its people were so thoughtlessly (and ruthlessly) eradicated; worse still that such tragedies are all too common.  So it's all the more important that people like Dubcovsky snd Broadwell work to resurrect these extinct languages from the scant fossils they left behind.  It can't ever repair the damage that was done, but at least allows us to glimpse the minds of an extinct culture -- and to honor their memory in whatever way we can.

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The natural pharmacy

A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the discovery and decipherment of a codex written in Nahuatl, one of the languages spoken by the Aztecs (and still spoken in central Mexico).  The study highlighted the fact that language is one of the most critical pieces of culture, embodying a unique way of describing the world.  When languages disappear, that perspective is forever lost.

It's even worse than that, according to another study, that appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a couple of months ago.  In "Language Extinction Triggers the Loss of Unique Medicinal Knowledge," authors Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte of the University of Zürich look at the role of language in preserving information about medicinal plants -- information that might well be encoded in only a single one of the estimated 6,500 languages currently spoken on Earth.

Cámara-Leret and Bascompte considered indigenous languages in three places -- New Guinea, Amazonia, and North America -- lining up those languages with databases of medicinal native plants.  Specifically, they were looking at whether the knowledge of the medicinal value of native flora crossed linguistic boundaries, and were known (and used) in the cultures of the speakers of different languages.

Some, of course, were.  The use of willow bark as an analgesic was widely known to Native Americans throughout the eastern half of North America.  The sedative nature of poppy sap was also widespread, and has a long (and checkered) history.  (It's no coincidence that these two plants produce compounds -- aspirin and morphine, respectively -- that are part of the modern pharmacopeia.)

Illustration and uses of mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) from Dioscurides's De Materia Medica (7th century C.E.) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But what about the rest of the myriad species of medicinal plants that have been catalogued?  What Cámara-Leret and Bascompte found is simultaneously fascinating and alarming.  They looked at 12,495 species of medicinal flora native to the regions they studied, and found that over 75% of them were only named and known as pharmacologically valuable in a single language.

Worse, the researchers found that there was a correlation between the languages with the rarest medicinal knowledge, and how endangered the language is.  "We found that those languages with unique knowledge are the ones at a higher risk of extinction," Bascompte said, in an interview with Mongabay.  "There is a sort of a double problem in terms of how knowledge will disappear."

That knowledge isn't purely of interest to anthropologists, as a sort of cultural curiosity.  Consider how many lives have been saved by quinine (from the Peruvian plant Cinchona officinalis, used in treating malaria), vincristine (from the Madagascar periwinkle, Catharanthus rosea, used in treating leukemia and Hodgkin's disease), digoxin (from the foxglove plant, Digitalis purpurea, used for treating heart ailments), taxol (from the Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia, used in treating a variety of cancers), and reserpine (from the south Asian plant Rauvolfia serpentina, used in treating hypertension).  And that's just some of the better-known ones.  The whole point of the Cámara-Leret and Bascompte study is that the majority of pharmacologically-useful plants aren't known outside of a single indigenous ethnic group -- and when those languages and cultures are lost or homogenized into the dominant/majority culture, that information is lost, perhaps forever.

"There is life outside English," Bascompte said.  "These are languages that we tend to forget—the languages of poor or unknown people who do not play national roles because they are not sitting on panels, or sitting at the United Nations or places like that.  I think we have to make an effort to use that declaration by the United Nations [the UNESCO decision that 2022 to 2032 will be the "Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages"] to raise awareness about cultural diversity and about how lucky we are as a species to be part of this amazing diversity."

I can only hope that it works, at least to slow down the cultural loss.  It's probably hopeless to stop it entirely; currently, the top ten most common first languages (in order: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, and Punjabi) account for almost fifty percent of the world's population.

The remaining 6,490 languages account for the other half.  

I understand the drive to learn one of the more-spoken languages, from the standpoint of participation in the business world (if that's your goal).  You probably wouldn't get very far international commerce if you only spoke only Ainu.  But the potential for losing unique knowledge from language extinction and cultural homogenization can't be overestimated.  Nor can the purely practical aspects of this knowledge -- including the possibility of life-saving medicinal plants that might only be recognized as such by a single small group of people in a remote area of New Guinea. 

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Like graphic novels?  Like bizarre and mind-blowing ideas from subatomic physics?

Have I got a book for you.

Described as "Tintin meets Brian Cox," Mysteries of the Quantum Universe is a graphic novel about the explorations of a researcher, Bob, and his dog Rick, as they investigate some of the weirdest corners of quantum physics -- and present it at a level that is accessible (and extremely entertaining) to the layperson.  The author Thibault Damour is a theoretical physicist, so his expertise in the cutting edge of physics, coupled with delightful illustrations by artist Mathieu Burniat, make for delightful reading.  This one should be in every science aficionado's to-read stack!

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

Bear talk

As Randall Munroe (writer of the amazing comic xkcd) said, "Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, 'Look over there.'"

I immediately thought of that quote when I bumped into a fascinating study that appeared in Ecology and Society last week, about grizzly bears.  Turns out that grizzlies, which are native to the northern continental United States, western Canada, and Alaska, have been spreading lately into territory in British Columbia where they hadn't been seen before, so some zoologists decided to do genetic testing and see where those bears were coming from, and what their relationship was to other bears in the area.

So they created bear bait from a fish slurry, which is as nasty as it sounds (as researcher Lauren Henson of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation put it, "it smells really really terrible to us, but is intriguing to bears").  They put the bait in the middle of a low tangle of barbed wire, which was intended not to hurt the bears but to catch and pull out bits of their fur.  The scientists then did genetic analysis on the bear fur thus collected.

What they found was that there are three distinct populations of grizzlies in British Columbia, which seem not to have a lot of overlap.  This by itself isn't unusual -- a lot of animals have isolated sub-populations and regional variation not only in genetics, but in color, size, even behaviors like vocalization patterns -- but where it got interested was discovered because the RCF's study involved cooperation with five indigenous groups, the Nuxalk, Haíɫzaqv, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Gitga’at, and Wuikinuxv, primarily because a lot of the traps needed to be set on Native-owned land.

And when the scientists and the representatives of the indigenous groups took a look at the results, they discovered something really perplexing: the boundaries of the populations of genetically-distinct grizzly bears followed the boundaries of the indigenous language groups in the area.

What's more perplexing still is that neither the grizzlies' range boundaries nor the regional language families coincide with any obvious geographical barriers -- large rivers, rugged terrain, areas with permanent snow cover or glacial ice.  Jenn Walkus, who coauthored the paper and is part of the Wuikinuxv Nation, wasn't that surprised.  "Growing up in a remote community called Rivers Inlet, I saw firsthand that humans and bears have a lot of the same needs in terms of space, food, and other resources," she said.  "It would make sense for them to settle in the same areas—ones with a steady supply of salmon, for instance.  This historic interrelatedness means Canada should manage key resources with both bears and people in mind."

While I don't doubt that she's right, it still is very weird to me that the settlement and dispersion patterns in humans and grizzlies would coincide like that, without there being a specific genetic barrier establishing and maintaining the boundaries.  It's hard to imagine why two human territories abutting each other, which have different indigenous ethnic background, would have any impact on where the bears are going.

Most of these kinds of regional variations in genetic makeup follow one of two patterns -- known to biologists as allopatry and sympatry.  The former is where there is a geographical barrier keeping the two populations apart; the ranges don't overlap, so the members of the two population don't mate because they don't meet.  My favorite example of this are the cute little tufty-eared Kaibab and Abert squirrels, which live (respectively) on the North and South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Azhikerdude, Kaibab Squirrel, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Sympatry can be a little harder to explain, because the ranges overlap -- so there has to be something other than geography keeping the populations separate.  One of the more curious examples of sympatry is the pink salmon of western North America, which has a strict two-year life cycle.  The eggs are laid in freshwater rivers, hatch, and the young make it out to the ocean, where they spend a year -- then in the second year, the adults come back to the river where they were spawned, reproduce, and die.  But what this means is that there is an odd-year and even-year population of pink salmon.  This year, the ones spawning are odd-year salmon, and their even-year cousins are out at sea (but will return to spawn themselves in 2022).  So even though they may inhabit the same range, the odd-year and even-year salmon never mate.

The grizzlies, though, show an odder pattern; it's called parapatry, where the ranges share a border but don't overlap.  True parapatry is rare, because something's got to keep the border relatively impermeable to migration.  While in some cases it's a geographical barrier of some kind, here there's no such easy explanation.  The grizzlies are maintaining genetically-distinct populations that show no obvious reason, but -- bizarrely -- coincide with the linguistically-distinct populations of people who inhabit the same area.

So here we have a really intriguing correlation that is definitely waggling its eyebrows suggestively, but admits of no evident causation.  I'm pretty certain there is one; it's hard to imagine this being chance.  But in the absence of an explanation, it's just another of those intriguing mysteries -- and fertile ground for zoologists and ethnologists to tackle in future studies.

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I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

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