Day 316: Humankind

Biogeographically speaking, islands are in some ways just small bits of mainland. Indeed, sometimes islands are literally small bits of mainland. They have broken away from the edge of a continent and moved out to sea, propelled by plate tectonics. Alternatively, they are still strongly connected to the mainland, but the connection happens for the moment to be flooded by high sea levels. Between ice ages, sea levels are high, as they are today. During ice ages, the water gets converted to ice, and sea levels drop. At the height of the last glaciation, roughly twenty thousand years ago, sea levels were over a hundred meters lower than they are now. If global warming does not prevent the return of the next glacial period, sea levels will then fall as in previous ice ages, and many coastal islands will return to being part of the mainland. Britain and Ireland will no longer be islands but, instead, simply the western edge of Europe, as they were during the last ice age.

That could be a pity, because in many ways, islands are special. Cut off by water, isolated from contact with others of their kind, island animals and plants can go their own way evolutionarily. The result is many species unique to a particular island and found nowhere else. The lemurs of Madagascar are a classic case for primates. The nene, or Hawaiian goose, is classic for birds.

A relevant piece of biogeographic jargon out there is the word “endemism,” or “endemic.” It means confined to a particular region. The lemurs are endemic to Madagascar. One often thinks that endemism means confined to a small area. However, the size of the region is irrelevant. In Hawaii, some bird species are endemic to just one island, but the kangaroo is endemic to Australia, and the reindeer is endemic to northern Eurasia.

Biogeographers speak of island “rules” to describe and explain a number of general ways in which island fauna and flora differ biologically from mainland fauna and flora. Humans follow some of the rules, but not others. To introduce one of the island rules, I am going to start with “Flo,” the Flores island “hobbit.” Strictly, Flo is probably not relevant in a book on human biogeography, for reasons that I will come to. However, the story allows me to introduce an island rule that Pacific-island humans break. Understanding why a phenomenon breaks a rule is often just as informative concerning underlying causes as understanding the reason for the rule in the first place.

In 2004, the announcement in the journal Nature of a new species of the genus Homo from Asia, Homo floresiensis, electrified the anthropological world. The species name comes from the discovery of 40,000- to 13,000-year-old bones in a cave on the island of Flores, east of Java and Bali in the Indonesian archipelago.

“Flo,” or the “hobbit,” as the tiny new species affectionately became known, was the first new hominin species claimed in Asia for over a century. The last one, oddly enough, was the first Homo erectus ever discovered. Named Java Man, it was found in 1891 by the Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois or, to give him his impressive full name, Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois.

The hobbit was strange in many ways. Apparently alive on Flores well over ten thousand years after the last non-human hominin died out elsewhere in the world, its skeleton turned out to be weird enough that doubts immediately arose regarding almost everything to do with it. Arguments and counter-arguments flared, burned out, and flared again. And the arguments were not, sad to say, always politely expressed, reasoned differences of opinion. Sarcastic commentary with the word research in quotation marks to denigrate the others’ scholarship marked one exchange. Other different opinions were characterized as “unsubstantiated assertions” by a “vocal group.” Suggestions of, shall we say, incomplete reporting of measurements, along with accusations of mishandling of the original material and denial of access to it, exemplify just some of the all-too-human nature of the early debate.

If the hobbit had been only slightly different from all human ancestors, probably only paleontologists, a journalist or two, and the occasional informed member of the public would have paid any attention. But the hobbit was extraordinary. It had such a mix of modern, ancient, and its own unique features, such as almost ridiculously long feet, that disagreement was inevitable.

Perhaps the most amazing feature of the hobbit was its small size—hence the nickname. Let me say that only one near-complete skeleton has been found, so I refer to the hobbit in the singular. The hobbit stood just over one meter high. That is thirty centimeters shorter than any human pygmy. I am a normal-sized male for my generation in the UK, at one meter seventy-eight centimeters. The hobbit would reach the bottom of my rib cage. The hobbit was stocky, so at thirty kilograms it weighed more than many modern-day pygmy adults do. Added to its amazingly small stature is an amazingly small brain. The one skull found shows a brain so tiny—four hundred and twenty-five cubic centimeters, one third the size of a modern human’s, in fact the size of a chimpanzee’s—that we have to go back three million years in human evolution, beyond Homo to the australopithecines, to find another hominin with a brain this small.

Is the hobbit a relict australopithecine species? If not, what is it? How do we explain its extremely long feet? How can the hobbit be a hominin, and yet have so small a brain? Why is this hobbit so small? How do we explain its mix of modern and ancient traits?

With no evidence of any australopithecines outside of Africa, one of the early explanations for the hobbit’s small body size, and especially its small brain size, was that it suffered from microcephalic dwarfism. The “microcephalic” part of that is just the typical doctor’s Greek jargon for “small-brained.” I cannot resist a story from my brother-in-law. He had a swollen knee. He went to the doctor. “Aah,” said the doctor, “you have patellitis.” Patellitis is Latin and Greek for swollen knee!

Other pathologies to explain the hobbit are Laron syndrome, or a form of cretinism. Both of these conditions come with small stature. The first is a genetic condition, while the second can result from mineral deficiency, especially lack of iodine. It characterizes individuals who lack fully functioning thyroid glands, the glands that produce hormones essential for full growth. A recently suggested pathology to explain the hobbit’s features is Down syndrome, which can explain the odd mix of modern and apparently ancient traits.

If the hobbit was in fact a modern human suffering from a disease, it would not be relevant to this book on the biogeography of humans, given that none of the suggested diseases to explain its small stature and brain size confine themselves to any one part of the world. However, the hobbit lived on the small island of Flores, in eastern Indonesia, and the biogeography of small islands is highly relevant to the hobbit. Conversely, the hobbit is relevant to the biogeography of small islands, given how intensely scientists have studied it.

Flores covers on the order of thirteen and a half thousand square kilometers, approximately the size of Connecticut in the USA, or Northern Ireland in Britain. A feature of small islands is that species that are large-bodied on the mainland often evolve to become smaller, sometimes far smaller. On the islands of the Mediterranean Sea, such as Cyprus, Malta, Crete, and Sicily, elephants and mammoths shrunk over many generations’ time to half the height that they were on the mainland, so they ended just one and a half meters high at the shoulder.

California’s Channel Islands too had their own pygmy mammoth, just a little taller than the Mediterranean elephants. Similarly, the mammoth of Wrangel Island off the north coast of Siberia was roughly thirty percent smaller than the average mainland mammoth, as judged from their tooth sizes.

Flores is no exception to this phenomenon of miniaturization. An extinct form of elephant in mainland Asia, stegodons, were some of the largest elephants ever to have lived. The Flores version on the island at the same time as the hobbit was one third smaller than its mainland relative. The adults, at about eight hundred and fifty kilograms, were too big for the hobbit to hunt, but they hunted the young ones. Archeologists have inferred this from cut marks on the bones in the cave.

~~Humankind: How Biology And Geography Shape Human Diversity -By- Alexander H. Harcourt

Day 166: Book Excerpt: Modernity At Large

As with mediation, so with motion. The story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is hardly a new feature of human history. But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes.

Thus, to put it summarily, electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination. Together, they create specific irregularities because both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional spaces. Of course, many viewers may not themselves migrate. And many mass-mediated events are highly local in scope, as with cable television in some parts of the United States. But few i mportant films, news broadcasts, or television spectacles are entirely unaffected by other media events that come from further afield. And few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or already coming back home, bearing stories and possibilities. In this sense, both persons and images often meet unpredictably, outside the certainties of home and the cordon sanitaire of local and national media effects. This mobile and unforeseeable relationship between massmediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern. In the chapters that follow, I show that the work of the imagination, viewed in this context, is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.

Ever since Durkheim, and the work of the Annees Sociologiques group, anthropologists have learned to regard collective representations as social facts-that is, to see them as transcending individual volition, as weighted with the force of social morality, and as objective social realities. What I wish to suggest is that there has been a shift in recent decades, building on technological changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has become a collective, social fact. This development, in turn, is the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that there is anything new about the role of the imagination in the contemporary world. After all, we are now accustomed to thinking about all societies as haVing produced their versions of art, myth, and legend, expressions that implied the potential evanescence of ordinary social life. In these expressions, all societies showed that they could both transcend and reframe ordinary social life by recourse to mythologics of various kinds in which social life was imaginatively deformed. In dreams, finally, individuals even in the most simple societies have found the space to refigure their social lives, live out proscribed emotional states and sensations, and see things that have then spilled over into their sense of ordinary life. All these expressions, further, have been the basis of a complex dialogue between the imagination and ritual in many human SOcieties, through which the force of ordinary social norms was somehow deepened, through inversion, irony, or the performative intensity and the collaborative work demanded by many kinds of ritual. All this is the surest sort of knowledge bequeathed to us by the best of canonical anthropology over the past century.

In suggesting that the imagination in the postelectronic world plays a newly significant role, I rest my case on three distinctions. First, the imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies. It has entered the logic of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered. Of course, this has precedents in the great revolutions, cargo cults, and messianic movements of other times, in which forceful leaders implanted their visions into social life, thus creating powerful movements for social change. Now, however, it is no longer a matter of specially endowed (charismatic) individuals, injecting the imagination where it does not belong. Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and mediation.

~~Modernity At Large -by- Arjun Appadurai

Day 101 : Book Excerpt : A Billion Wicked Thoughts

The year 1886 witnessed the birth of two remarkable scientific disciplines, each founded by a German. One scientist gazed outward at the hidden patterns of the physical universe. The other peered inward at the secret workings of the mind. One discipline has achieved stunning progress. The other, perhaps surprisingly, lags far behind.

Heinrich Hertz built the very first radio antenna in 1886. He wanted to test for the existence of electromagnetic waves as predicted by Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Hertz became the first person to successfully transmit and receive a radio signal, simultaneously proving Maxwell correct and inaugurating the field of radiophysics. The subject of this new field was a strange, invisible “wave” that no philosopher or priest had ever dreamed of in their most extravagant fantasies. Yet over the ensuing century, radiophysicists developed the lasers used in DVD players and eye surgery. They figured out how to scan the brain for tumors. They even listened to the lingering sounds of the big bang, the event marking the origin of the known universe.

We all have a more intimate and personal relationship with the subject studied by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a subject scrutinized by humankind since we yawped our first words in the valleys of Africa. In 1886, Krafft-Ebing published a landmark book. He deliberately wrote sections in Latin and chose a Latin title in order to discourage laypeople from reading it. The book was Psychopathia Sexualis. It addresses such arcane topics as clitoral stimulation, reduced libido, and homosexuality. The discipline Krafft-Ebing founded is known as sexology.

So in the 125 years since Psychopathia Sexualis initiated the scientific study of a very familiar activity, how do the field’s achievements match up to those of radiophysics? It’s rather like comparing the Olympics gold medal tallies of the United States and Fiji. Unlike the origins of electromagnetic energy, the origins of desire remain mysterious and controversial. There’s no consensus on which sexual interests are normal, abnormal, or pathological. Scientists can’t even agree on the purpose of female orgasm, whether there is such a thing as having too much sex, or whether sexual fantasies are innocent or dangerous.

Today, a wide variety of scientists study desire, including neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and pharmacologists. One of their most basic questions is: why do we like the things we like? This question has never been adequately answered, because we must first determine what people like. To steal an expression from American writer William S. Burroughs, we need to “see what’s on the end of everyone’s fork.” But stealing a look at men and women’s true interests has been far from easy.

While modern radiophysicists have discovered black holes and developed the means for communicating with extraterrestrials, scientists studying desire still struggle to identify basic differences between the sexual interests of men and women. Why is there such a gap between the achievements of the fields founded by Heinrich Hertz and Richard von Krafft-Ebing? One big reason is data acquisition.

The best method for acquiring scientific data is direct observation. Nothing beats watching a subject in action. But scientists have an easier time gazing at intergalactic quasars than peeking into someone’s bedroom. Quasars don’t close the curtains out of modesty or suspicion. In contrast, most of us are unwilling to let curious scientists photograph us as we tumble between the sheets. Radio waves may be invisible, but they don’t try to deceive curious physicists and they’re incapable of self-deception. Humans are guilty of both.
Since direct observation of sexual behavior is so challenging, most scientists acquire sexual data using self-report surveys. But are you willing to jot down answers to questions like “Have you ever felt attracted to your pet schnauzer?”—even if the unshaven young grad student surveying you insists, “Trust me—your answers are completely anonymous.”

~~A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What The World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire -by- Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Day 87 : Book Excerpt : Ideas: A History

Much more controversial, however, are the reasons for why agriculture developed, why it developed then, and why it developed where it did. This is clearly of major importance in understanding mankind’s mental development. It is also an even more interesting question than it looks when you consider the fact that the hunter-gathering mode is actually quite an efficient way of leading one’s life. Ethnographic evidence among hunter-gatherer tribes still in existence shows that they typically need to ‘work’ only three or four or five hours a day in order to provide for themselves and their kin. Skeletal remains of Stone Age farmers reveal more signs of malnutrition, infectious diseases and dental decay than those of their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Why, therefore, would one change such a set of circumstances for something different where one has to work far harder? In addition, reliance on grain imposed a far more monotonous diet on early humans than they had been used to in the time of hunting and gathering. In any case, when people first domesticated crops, these remained a minor part of the diet for centuries, possibly more than a thousand years. Again, why the change?

One theory is that the switch to agriculture was made for ritualistic or social reasons, because the new foods were rare luxuries, which gradually spread, the way designer goods do in our own day. Lentils, for example, grow just two per wild plant and would hardly have staunched the hunger of a Stone Age family. Yet lentils are among the first crops of the Near East. Some palaeontologists feel beer was the most important end-product of these grains, the importance of alcohol in a ritual feast being obvious.

But the most basic of the economic arguments stems from the fact that, as has already been mentioned, some time between 14,000 and 10,000 BP, the world suffered a major climatic change. This was partly a result of the end of the Ice Age which had the twin effects of raising sea levels and, in the warmer climate, encouraging the spread of forests. These two factors ensured that the amount of open land shrank quite dramatically, ‘segmenting formerly open ranges into smaller units and arranging the niches for different species by altitude and type of vegetation . . . Sedentism and the reduction of open range encouraged territoriality. People began to protect and propagate local herds, a pre-domestication practice that can be referred to as food resource management.’ A further aspect of this set of changes was that the climate became increasingly arid, and the seasons became more pronounced, a circumstance which encouraged the spread of wild cereal grasses and the movement of peoples from one environment to the next, in search of both plants and animal flesh. There was more climatic variety in areas which had mountains, coastal plains, higher plains and rivers. This accounts for the importance of the fertile crescent. Grasses were naturally prevalent in this Near Eastern region (wild stands of emmer and einkorn wheat, and barley, exist there to this day). But it is not difficult to work out what happened. ‘The harvested batch of seeds would be selected in favour of non-shattering and uniform maturation. As soon as humans began to sow the seeds they had harvested, they automatically – even if unintentionally – initiated a process of selection in favour of the non-shattering genotype.’

Mark Nathan Cohen is the most prominent advocate of the theory that there was a population crisis in pre-history and that it was this which precipitated the evolution of agriculture. Among the evidence he marshals to support his argument is the fact that agriculture is not easier than hunter-gathering, that there is a ‘global coincidence’ in the simultaneous extinction of mega-fauna, the big mammals which provided so much protein for early humans, a further coincidence that domestication emerged at the end of the Pleistocene Age, when the world warmed up and people became much more mobile, and that the cultivation of wild species, before agriculture proper, encouraged the birth of more children. It is well known, for instance, that nomads and hunter-gatherers control the number of children by not weaning them for two years. This limits the size of a group that is continually on the move. After the development of sedentism, however, this was no longer necessary, and resulted, says Cohen, in a major population explosion. Cohen also claims that evidence for a population crisis in antiquity can be inferred from the number of new zones exploited for food, the change in diet, from plants which need less preparation to those which need more, the change in diet from larger animals to smaller (because larger ones were extinct), the increasing proportion of remains of people who are malnourished, the specialisation of artefacts which had evolved to deal with rarer and rarer animals and plants, the increased use of fire, for cooking otherwise inedible foodstuffs, the increased use of aquatic resources, the fact that many plants, though available as food in deep antiquity, were not harvested until around 12,000 BP, that grass (cereals) is a low priority in food terms, and so on and so on, all of which Cohen contends is corroborated by archaeological excavation. For him, therefore, the agricultural revolution was not, in and of itself, a liberation for early humans. It was instead a holding action to cope with the crisis of overpopulation. Far from being an inferior form of life, the hunter-gatherers had been so successful they had filled up the world, insofar as their lifestyle allowed, and there was no place to turn.

It is another attractively simple hypothesis but there are problems with it. One of the strongest criticisms comes from Les Groube, who is the advocate of a rival theory. According to Groube, who is based in France, it is simply not true that the world of deep antiquity was in a population crisis, or certainly not a crisis of overpopulation. His argument is the opposite, that the relatively late colonisation of Europe and the Americas argues for a fairly thinly populated Earth. For Groube, as man moved out of Africa into colder environments, there would have been fewer problems with disease, simply because, from a microbial point of view, the colder regions were safer, healthier. For many thousands of years, therefore, early man would have suffered fewer diseases in such places as Europe and Siberia, as compared with Africa. But then, around 20,000 years ago, an important coincidence took place. The world started to warm up, and man reached the end of the Old World – meaning that, in effect, the known world was ‘full’ of people. There was still plenty of food but, as the world warmed up, many of the parasites on man were also able to move out of Africa. In short, what had previously been tropical diseases became temperate diseases as well. The diseases Groube mentions include malaria, schistosomiasis and hookworm, ‘a terrible trinity’. A second coincidence also occurred. This was the hunting to extinction of the mega-fauna, which were all mammals, and therefore to a large extent biologically similar to man. All of a sudden (sudden in evolutionary terms), there were far fewer mammals for the microbial predators to feast on – and they were driven to man.

~~Ideas: A History -by- Peter Watson