She turned a branch into a bush

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, anthropology, anthropologists, human origins

I once read about Maeve Leakey that as a girl she would work a jigsaw puzzle from the back, not seeing the picture; this prepared her to work as an anthropologist, matching chips and slivers of fossil bone to reconstruct a skull or a mandible or part of a femur. Although she doesn't mention this youthful skill in her memoir The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past (co-written with Samira Leakey), she does tell of herself and her team members spending hundreds or thousands of hours piecing bits of fossil together. In the landscapes where she works, it is rare to find a scrap of bone as large as a hand, or even a finger.

While I typically find or generate an image relevant to a book I will review, in this case I could do no better than the cover photographer. This picture is a classic portrait of the remarkable paleoanthropologist.

The book touches on her younger life, but primarily begins when she had finished her PhD and was planning to work with living primates. She was invited to join an expedition with Louis Leakey in Kenya. It isn't clear when she moved to Kenya permanently, but she has lived primarily in that country ever since. She published Sediments in 2020 while her husband Richard Leakey was living; he died in 2022. Certain segments of the book outline his health challenges: Kidney disease beginning in 1969, multiple kidney transplants beginning about ten years later, and a liver transplant much later. Naturally, these episodes affected her and her work, but she persevered.

Maeve and her husband shared an admirable combination of formidable technical skills with great administrative ability, though their personalities and styles differed quite a bit. This enabled Maeve to carry on the anthropology, including fundraising and directing teams of workers while Richard filled crucial roles in major conservation organizations. Throughout the book and in the Acknowledgements she credits numerous field assistants, mostly Kenyans, whose labors enabled the tremendous scientific achievements we read about.

The thread that runs throughout is the conviction Maeve had from very early that the evolutionary path from the human-chimpanzee common ancestor to the genus Homo and then the species Homo sapiens (us) was not linear, but was one pathway through a branching bush. Near the end of the book she points out that in the period roughly 1.4-2 million years ago there were typically four hominin (human related or ancestral) species sharing the landscape of northeastern Africa. 

Further, when "early modern" H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe for the last time in prehistory, about 60-70,000 years ago, they came into the presence of the descendants of earlier migrations, the Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. There are hints that another hominin species or two existed alongside them. We do know that modern Eurasians bear a small percentage of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. Her image of a "family bush" has been vindicated.

I have read a few other books about the life and work of Richard's parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, who stand as monuments of the field, and of Richard's work. This book rounds out the collection, full of stories of a top scientist among stellar scientists, who has herself become a monument, a living legend. It helps that she is a master storyteller. I loved this book.

Spiders multiplying?

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

Wow! I thought spider scanning the past few days was heavy. Today the total is about 50,000 views. A new record by a large factor. The spiders seem to be multiplying.

This is the rate chart for the past 24 hours:

A blast of activity, that peaked above 6,500/hour, hit a lull, and then rose to roughly one hit per second (~3,600/hr) for the past eight hours. I looked at the "now" record to see that in detail, there are peaks of 2-3 per second with little dips between, but few minutes pass that contain fewer than 20 hits each. Here is the country breakdown for the past 24 hours:

Brazil again tops the list with about 17% of the total, with the US and Iraq (!) tied for second with 5% each. As usual, many countries have large counts. I can only attribute this to AI training. I mean, now much spying could be going on related to the Ukraine and Iran wars? Well, perhaps a lot. Particularly with a critical deadline arriving in three hours as I write this.

I guess more frequent checking is warranted. This may be a barometer of something…

Brazil spiders go bonkers, leading the world

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

The stats on this blog went bonkers the past two days, ~20,000 hits yesterday and ~10,000 so far today. Here is the view for the past week, of the places of origin; about 46,000 hits for the whole week:

Sorry for the fuzziness; I had to reduce scale to get everything on one screen. Brazil tops the list, yet it accounts for only 14.4% of the world total. There appear to be numerous AI training exercises going on, via VPN, and I suspect most of them originate in the US and Vietnam.

Using the "Now" selection, here is a shorter list of places:

This is the "hit list" for the past two hours. Prior to AI training and other uses of automated spider scanning, this blog's peak popularity varied between 100-200 views per day, and for most of the past 10 years, 50-100 per day. The minute-by-minute breakdown:

A few of these peaks exceeded 30 views per minute. On average, it's 8-9 per minute. I sure hope somebody is getting value for their effort! I'd like to think that some substantial amount of this activity represents humans actually reading my posts. Yeah, and bees have lips!

Retracing a pioneer wolf

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, wolves, hiking, conservation, agriculture

This meeting never took place, as much as it was ardently desired by Adam Weymouth. In his book Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness, Adam relates getting a moment's glimpse through binoculars of a wolf briefly emerging from the forest and then vanishing again. A thousand-mile trek along the trail of a wolf, culminating in a few seconds at most.

In this mini-memoir of a thousand-mile walk parallel to the path of a wolf named Slavc ten years earlier, he notes a few times that he was sure a wolf or wolves observed him, but he never saw them; just this one time, weeks after journey's end, accompanying a wildlife photographer who tells of a dozen pre-dawn stakeouts needed just to see a wolf once, and perhaps to catch a quick photo.

A note on the wolf's name. In the Slovene language, the letter V is pronounced as an F, like in German, and a final C is pronounced "ts". Further, S is softened to "sh" and the vowel A is somewhere between an A sound and a U sound. Therefore, phonetically, Slavc is pronounced "shlufts", almost like the name of Tufts (a University). The wolf is named for Slavnik ("shlufnik") Mountain, near the place he was born just north of the Slovenia-Croatia border.

Slavc's journey was well documented because he was captured and collared at about the age of one year, a few months before he left his pack to travel north and northeast across Slovenia into Austria, looping through Austria into northeast Italy, and finally settling into his own territory northwest of Verona in or near Lessinia Regional Park. He had met and paired with a female wolf who was soon given the name Juliet—you may recall that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was placed in Verona.

The wolf spent about four months on this journey. Adam's retracing was perhaps a little shorter in duration, but not all at once. As he explains in an introductory note, having two young children at the time, he went for a few weeks at a time over the space of a couple of years, after the COVID-19 pandemic had run its course. The book is written as though it were the memoir of a single long hike, so as to focus on the story of the landscapes through which Slavc had traveled and the people Adam met along the way.

This is also a story of love and hate. The people living in the hinterlands of Slovenia, Austria and Italy are mostly herders or ranchers, and they hate wolves. EU laws protecting the wolves are flouted at various levels. Others love the wolves, but it must be admitted that these are mostly city dwellers, who don't have to cope with burying the half-eaten corpse of a horse or cow…or a pasture littered with several from an overnight feeding frenzy by a wolf pack. Some folks, probably not many, neither love nor hate wolves, but accept them as a historic part of the landscape. Yet trouble can come when such a phlegmatic farm family takes measures to protect their livestock by getting dogs or building fences. The rabid anti-wolf brigades criticize them as "giving in" to the pro-wolf faction, and may even vandalize their efforts. Between the wolves and the fanatics, and the shifting climate, it is getting less and less possible to make a living in some areas, and farms are being abandoned. Yet there are those who love the pastoral life, as hard as it may be. At least a few that Adam met are younger, energetic enough to persevere, and bring hope that the countryside will not be abandoned.

Slavc was the first wolf in decades to establish a territory in northeastern Italy. Wolf families are increasing throughout Alpine Europe. Various numbers were given, but I think it sufficient to note that the total number of wolves inhabiting the three countries through which Adam walked is less than 2,000. That's about the size of the small mining institute where I went to graduate school. In all of Europe, there are a bit more than 20,000, while in North America, somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000. I am not sure what conclusion to draw from that.

One summer I walked more than a thousand miles, not on long journeys but in loops through field areas, studying the geology. I love mountain country and I love hiking, but I am not all that fond of tent living. I appreciate Adam's experiences, and his comparisons of the various landscapes he passed through and the many people he connected with. Clearly, he is more sociable than I am. This is a wonderful book.

CHOMP

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, teeth, history

I asked Whisk for a picture of someone with perfect teeth. It delivered. The book of the week is Bite, An Incisive History of Teeth, From Hagfish to Humans by Bill Schutt.

The first three parts of this four-part book are titled

• Toothy Adaptations in Nature: The Specialists
• Who, What, Where, and How Many?
• Teeth, Who Needs 'Em?

The 13 chapters in these parts cover a number of nonhuman animals with interesting teeth, or interesting things teeth do. Naturally, the scariest ones come first, Vampire Bats. Guess how big a vampire bat is. To use Charades categories, are they Bigger than a breadbox, Smaller than a cigar, or somewhere in between? For simplicity, in the list below, keep in mind that the wingspan is about twice the body length. There are three species:

1. The Common vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, has a body length of about 9 cm (3.5 inch), and weighs 25-40 grams with an empty stomach; about an ounce.
2. The Hairy-legged vampire bat, Diphylla ecaudata, is the same size, with a little more variation, but the largest ones don't exceed 9.5 cm or 3.75 inch.
3. The White-winged vampire bat, Diaemus youngi, is a little smaller, around 8.5 cm (3.3 inch) and usually weighs less than 35 grams.

Did you say, Smaller than a cigar? ding-ding-ding!

The body length of all three vampire bat species is very nearly the same as the Little Brown Bat, Myotis lucifugus, though vampire bats weigh about twice as much as a Little Brown Bat, and have shorter wings. I see Little Brown Bats frequently, flitting about in the warm season here. They are found throughout North America. Vampire bats, by contrast, are found in South America. An elderly Little Brown Bat fell dead right in front of me while I was walking in a park near home. Naturally, I collected it and took it to the nearby Museum of Natural History for their collection. I was surprised to see that its body was no bigger than my thumb.

Now, as to vampire bat teeth…they don't puncture the way Dracula would. They shave off a small bit of skin with teeth so sharp their victim may feel nothing. Then they lap the blood as it seeps out (no gushing), and their saliva, like the saliva of a mosquito, has an anticoagulant, keeping the blood flowing longer.

So vampire bats don't have Fangs. Snakes do. There is much discussion about the varieties of fangs. Vipers such as rattlesnakes in the New World and the Gaboon viper, Bitis gabonica, of Africa (with the longest fangs, at 5+ cm, or about 2 inches) have hypodermic-style fangs attached at the front of the mouth. The mouth opens almost flat when they strike, so the fangs drive straight in. Cobras and their relatives, including the Coral snake of North America, have fangs set a little farther back, and tend to strike and then chew, to give venom more time to emerge. Snakes such as the Boomslang, Dispholidus typus, also of Africa, have their fangs in the back of the mouth, where they really need to chomp down to inject venom. Also, the fangs are not hollow like a viper's, but grooved. They make up for such disadvantages by having extra-toxic venom.

The largest teeth are the various tusks, with African elephants, Loxodonta africana, holding the prize for the largest ones among living animals. In the 1890's a few elephants were killed that had tusks exceeding 3 m in length (~10 ft), weighing as much as 100 kg (220 lbs) each. The largest fossil tusks, of a Columbian mammoth, are almost 5 m long (~16 ft) and weigh considerably more than elephant tusks. Another prize-winner would be narwhal, Monodon monoceros; each male has a single spiral tusk that looks like the horn of a Unicorn (which led to many myths), 2-3 m long (7-10 ft), but it is slender and hollow, seldom weighing more than 7.5 kg (16.5 lbs).

There are a small number of toothless mammals, primarily the anteaters and echidnas, but larger numbers are found in other groups such as birds and many frogs. The largest toothless animals are the great baleen whales. 

The fourth part embarks on human dentition, "Human Teeth: The Bad Old Days and Beyond". The author starts with a discussion of Washington's teeth…or the lack thereof. By the time he was a public figure George Washington had only one natural tooth. It was used to anchor a denture until it also was lost. Thereafter, he had various full sets made, none of which worked well. This spring-loaded contraption had to be held in the mouth by constant biting pressure. I suppose the dentists never got springs of the right strength to open easily without causing the wearer to produce huge cheek muscles (look at portraits of Washington, grimly holding his mouth shut). The bases were pieces of lead, quite heavy (and toxic).

It is said that at public dinners George Washington ate nearly nothing and drank little. However, his teeth were not wooden as some legends state. They were a mix of carved ivory, animal teeth such as pig, and human teeth. The rumor that some of those human teeth came from his slaves is discussed and dismissed. Washington's dentist did purchase teeth from slaves, but he is not known to have used any in the dentures he made for Washington.

There is a chapter about the various torture devices used for extracting teeth, which like all surgeries, was done without anesthesia until the 1840's. Of course, even in ancient times alcohol's stupefying effects were sometimes used for that purpose, but it was risky. To really knock someone out with wine you need to almost kill them.

I was surprised to read that more than 80% of humans have problems with wisdom teeth, and at least half have one or more removed by middle age. I wonder if those statistics relate primarily to the West, or are worldwide. I haven't been able to verify. I had all 32 of my teeth until I was 65, when one of them got a cavity that was too big for ordinary "drill-n-fill", and there was already bone recession. It was pulled, so now I have 31. But the last chapter in Part IV introduces technologies being developed that may permit new teeth to be grown in place, and other possible marvels that will make trips to the dentist less of an existential dread.

We think we are sort of average. In the tooth department, at least among mammals, that's close. The mammal with the fewest teeth is the walrus (18), while the giant armadillo has 70…but at sea, dolphins have 250 teeth. So our mouth full of 28 to 32 pearly whites is about in the middle, at least for land mammals. But non mammals can have many more than 70 teeth: 3,000 for some sharks, 9,000 for some catfish (including teeth on their tongue!), and for teeth not in the jaws at all, the common garden snail has a tongue with 15,000-25,000 tiny teeth. 

The Epilogue, "How Science Works", tells the story of a shovel-tusk animal called Platybelodon, one of the Gomphotheres, a relative of elephants. This genus had a very extended lower jaw, more than a meter, with two enormous incisors at the end that resemble a scoop shovel half a meter wide. The author regales us with the tale of the various hypotheses by different scientists, of the way(s) this unique appendage was used. The message: scientific conclusions are always provisional. New ways of studying evidence, new instruments and techniques for gathering evidence, and new discoveries in the field, all redirect the thinking of scientific workers. One hopes that each new theory comes closer to the truth. 

This just scratches the surface. There is much to learn here.

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I must touch upon a few errata:

• On page 42 and a couple of other places the author discusses C3 and C4 photosynthesis, and how the evolution of grasses changed the tooth structure of horses. Grasses and a few other plant types are tougher and contain more silica, so a grazing animal needs teeth that keep growing as they wear down. But he calls C3 and C4 "isotopes". They are not. They refer to a chemical with three carbon atoms in the photosynthesis mechanism of most plants, and a more efficient mechanism using a chemical with four carbon atoms in grasses and their relatives. They are different molecules with closely related functions. One could call them "functional analogs". The word "isotope" refers to an atomic nucleus with a specific number of neutrons and protons, as compared to a nucleus with the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. For carbon, the common isotope has six protons and six neutrons and is called C-12. The other stable isotope of carbon has seven neutrons and is called C-13.
• On page 79, discussing venoms, we find some components listed, including "proteins (especially enzymes), chains of proteins (called peptides), …". Oops. Peptides are mini-proteins, short chains of amino acids. NOT "chains of proteins".
• On page 242, discussing vestigial anatomy, we read that the tailbone "whose only function seems to be to break if we land on it or even sit down too hard". The tailbone, the coccyx, holds our pelvic floor together. Many muscles and tendons attach to it. Ask your doctor what would result if your coccyx had to be removed.

Nobody's an expert on everything. Get this book anyway!