What melting ice reveals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, glaciology, ice-patch archaeology

There are about 200,000 mountain glaciers worldwide, not counting the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. Searching for information about "perennial ice patches" I found statements about "tens of thousands". However, in a couple of areas where the ice patches and the glaciers have been comprehensively mapped, the ice patches outnumber the glaciers.

This matters to archaeologists. A glacier is on the move; that is part of the definition. That means that the ice experiences shearing. The field of glacial archaeology is primarily the study of stuff that is found where a glacier's tongue is melting, and only stone or metal objects tend to survive being squashed and shredded beyond recognition. A perennial ice patch is, also by definition, stationary. Thus, an item that was dropped, lost, or otherwise placed on an ice patch and later covered by snow and incorporated, is preserved in the ice, sometimes for millennia. 

Only the points of arrows and spears survive passage through a glacier. Entire arrows, complete with wooden shaft, fletching, and decoration, and a great many other artifacts made of or including wood, leather, bone, cloth and other perishable materials have been found melting out of ice patches. As the climate shifts, continually, an ice patch will grow from year to year and then partially melt for a few years. Once a perishable artifact emerges from the ice, it will usually rot and vanish within a few years.

The current warming cycle is a boon to ice-patch archaeologists. As reported in The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us About Climate, Culture, and a Future Without Ice, by Lisa Baril, the opportunities greatly exceed the number of ice-patch scientists and the available time to study them. This is based on the author's projection that ice patches are melting away, and may all disappear in the next few decades. I will touch on this contention later on.

The field of ice-patch archaeology was jump-started 35 years ago when the ice mummy Ötzi was discovered in the Alps. The story is told in commendable detail in the book. The man's body was dried but mostly intact, and his clothing, weapons and other possessions were nearly all intact and well preserved. Over time, with the development of more and better study techniques, it was found that he was murdered about 5,200 years ago, probably a day or two after a fight of some kind. The ice patch he was frozen into is in a mountain pass; he didn't make it over the pass into the next valley. I call this image, produced using Nano Banana 2, "Ötzi in happier times". Perhaps I should have showed him enjoying a meal with friends.

Being able to recover perishable artifacts greatly enriches our picture of the cultures of the times and places. For example, many wooden poles, some with fabric or leather "flags" attached, have been found in Norway and other areas including the Yukon. They were a mystery for a time, until indigenous people recognized them as "scare sticks" used to keep a fleeing group of reindeer or caribou on a path leading to stacked-stone blinds where hunters waited. Sadly, it has taken quite a while for "professional" archaeologists to learn the value of the knowledge in "the people who live there." This subject arises several times in the book.

The oldest artifact so far recovered from an ice patch is a part of an atlatl found to be 10,300 years old, recovered in Wyoming in 2007. In this case, the window of opportunity was just a day: Craig Lee found an ice patch that included lots of bison dung, and saw a stick poking out. He collected it, called the federal archaeologist for an emergency collection permit, and then checked around for more items. The next day it snowed, a lot. In the nineteen years since, the ice patch has grown, not melted back. In other places, ice patches have melted totally away. No matter which direction the general climate is "going", there is great variation from place to place.

This brings me to the sad subject of the over-hype about a warming climate. Is the climate warming? Yes, absolutely. Is it caused by rising CO₂? Yes, at least in part. Are humans to blame? Partly. It is a fact that in 1800 AD the CO₂ level was 280 parts per million (ppm), and now it is about 425 ppm. In 1897 Svante Arrhenius published his study of the greenhouse effect, in which he predicted that doubling the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere would increase global average temperature 4°C. However, others with a better knowledge of infrared spectroscopy later published that the effect would be 1°C or a little less. Both were wrong, in different directions.

I worked in infrared spectroscopy in the 1970's. Ten years before that I had reproduced Arrhenius's calculations, so it was easy to apply a better understanding of optical saturation and, so to speak, "hit it in the middle"; my conclusion was 1.5°C for a doubling of CO₂. Our present concentration of 425 ppm is about 1.5 times 280 ppm. Global average temperature has risen about 1°C, which indicates that my calculations are in the right range.

Now let us consider saturation. While the IPCC reports upon which climate alarmism is based do mention saturation, they don't stress it nearly enough. Saturation works this way. A chart of temperature as a function of concentration is not a straight line, but a curve, with two components. Arrhenius described one component this way, that a geometric increase in concentration produces a linear increase in temperature. He predicted that reducing CO₂ from 280 ppm to 140 ppm would reduce temperature 4°C, doubling it to 560 ppm would increase it 4°C, and doubling again to 1,120 ppm would cause a further increase of 4°C, or a total of 8°C, and so forth. This ignores saturation. By a level of 400 ppm, the CO₂ is absorbing almost all that it can absorb. Only a tiny bit more absorption is possible no matter how high CO₂ goes. 

There are very low-level secondary "wings" on the spectral absorption bands that come into play after concentration reaches a few percent, then the temperature rises more rapidly. This is what happened on Venus, where the concentration is more than 20,000 times the current concentration in Earth's atmosphere. We don't have enough fossil fuel to cause that to happen!

Saturation of absorption by CO₂ means that a further increase to 560 ppm—a doubling from the pre-industrial level—will not cause much increase in temperature, if any.

This should not make us complacent. We still need to continue adding more energy sources that don't require burning hydrocarbons. That includes nuclear fission. If CO₂ increases beyond 1,000 ppm it will be harder for some people to breathe comfortably, and the higher it goes, the greater the number of people who will feel the effects. But we need to recognize that it will be a long, long time, if ever, before a battery-powered jet aircraft will be practical, or even possible. And in cold climates, keeping an electric automobile cabin warm uses more power than moving the vehicle. The market for EV's is essentially zero in northern Norway, for example (it may improve when sodium batteries become more common; lithium does very poorly in the cold, but sodium performs very well).

Although I was a bit put off by the drum beat of climate change concern, I really like the book, and I learned a lot. I recommend it.

-------------

A few items I need to mention:

1. On page 27, discussing carbon-14 dating, it says, "This method works well for organic objects up to fifty thousand years old, after which the amount of carbon remaining in organic material becomes vanishingly small." The amount of total carbon remains almost exactly the same. The amount of carbon-14 is what vanishes. C-14 in atmospheric CO₂, from which plants make it into sugar, is 1.4 parts per trillion.
2. On page 66, discussing Pleistocene extinctions, the word "others" is needed: "All of them would go extinct, … but many continued to thrive." Not "many" but "many others" thrived, if "all" of the species mentioned went extinct.
3. On page 203, the catalog of tall Himalayan mountains is called "fourteeners". This term refers to mountains exceeding 14,000 feet in North America. The high Asian peaks, taller than 26,000 feet, are called "eight-thousanders", referring to 8,000 meters, or 26,247 feet.

Before Greek was Greek

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, decipherment, linear b, greek language, minoan script, biographies

The decipherment of Linear B was the greatest triumph of applied linguistics in history. The story of Jean-François Champollion and Egyptian Hieroglyphics is better known, but Champollion had the Rosetta Stone to provide what is effectively a trilingual dictionary. The persons who "cracked" Linear B had to manufacture their own "Rosetta stone" almost out of thin air.

Gentleman archaeologist Arthur Evans and his crew began to unearth clay tablets at Knossos, Crete in 1900. He soon determined that a small number of them were older than the rest, and seemed to be linguistically ancestral. Both scripts were drawn in clay with a pointed stylus, scribing glyphs formed of straight and curved lines, and thus they were dubbed Linear A and Linear B. This tablet of Linear B writing is better preserved than most. It is housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. 

The tablets themselves were preserved because Knossos was invaded, destroyed and burned. The tablets, destined to be dissolved and the clay re-used after a year or so, were baked, effectively fired into hard ceramic.

Evans found about 200 tablets with Linear A inscriptions. To date, just over 1,400 Linear A inscriptions are known, but with ten or fewer glyphs on most of them, the total corpus is too small to succumb to statistical analysis. By contrast, by 1952 when the decipherment of Linear B was mostly complete, 2,000 tablets were known, and at present, more than 6,000 inscribed artifacts have been found, many of them substantially longer than the typical Linear A inscription.

The story of that decipherment and the back story of the excavation of Knossos in the early 1900's are presented in The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox. To us, an unknown script is a kind of code. To the Minoans of 1400 BC, however, it was their language, just as this page is written in English, my language. Maybe in 3,000 years or so English will be as little known as is the language represented by Linear B or, even more so, Linear A.

Long ago I learned that Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris, a British architect and amateur linguist. His story is told, with only a little hype, in the documentary film A Very English Genius. However, his work relied on the statistical analyses of a very American genius, Alice Kober. This book brings her out of the shadows to which a century of male bias had consigned her. The work of both of them was, not so much depending upon, but impeded by, the attempts at decipherment by the discoverer of the tablets, Arthur Evans.

Sir Arthur Evans (knighted subsequent to his discoveries) was an excellent archaeologist, but as a scholar he was a real jerk, and kept 90% of the tablets away from others during his long lifetime. When he finally died at age 90 in 1941, the work which Ms Kober had been doing with the limited body of text available to her got a real boost. 

Not that there was an immediate breakthrough: just copying the texts in pre-computer times required hand transcription (even a photo is hard to interpret, as this example shows). Ignore the blue tinting; it is an artifact of boosting the contrast of the photo.

It had been evident to Evans that most of the tablets recorded economic transactions. This one is evidently a descriptive list of items, noting whether there one or two of each. The circle with dots inside is a logogram for some commercial object, I don't know what.

Knowing the general subject of the texts helped. Statistical work, which took years and years, gradually ferreted out the information needed for Alice Kober to discern a few crucial facts (Note: "language" is spoken; "script" is written; a "glyph" is a written symbol):

1. The language was inflected. Inflections are used in most Indo-European languages. English has only a few inflections, such as "-s" to indicate plural nouns (dog → dogs) and third-person verbs (I swim → she swims), and "-d" or "-ed" for the past tense of many verbs (work → worked), for example. Other languages have many more kinds of inflections, while Chinese, for example, has hardly any.
2. The script is logo-syllabic, meaning that most of the meaning is carried by glyphs that represent syllables, but a few glyphs represent whole words (our "&" for "and" is an example). Chinese is logographic: tens of thousands of core words are represented by a single glyph each, while other words are composed from two or three glyphs. English and most European languages are alphabetic, with a very small (26 for English) number of glyphs that each represent a single "atom" of sound. Amharic (Ethiopian) script is a syllabary with 231 glyphs, which are comprised of seven variations of 33 basic forms. The most familiar logo-syllabic scripts are Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Japanese. Japanese script uses a few thousand logograms derived from Chinese, and 72 syllabic glyphs used for inflection, foreign words, and words not expressed by the Chinese glyphs. Linear B has about 90 syllable-glyphs and perhaps 100 logographs.
3. Inflection and syllabaries don't work too well together. For instance, for "worker" and "working" it isn't hard to extract the inflections "-er" and "-ing". But suppose one has what is called a CV syllabary (such as Linear B), where CV means Consonant-Vowel. The symbol for "ke" and the one for "ki" will be different, perhaps quite different (dealing with the terminal "r" and "ng" sounds is another issue…). Alice Kober determined many of the "bridging" glyphs needed for Linear B to work with an inflected language.
4. A grid of syllabic relationships, a kind of matrix. A significant number of the glyphs could be arranged thus, making it possible to take a stab at certain meanings, without knowing how any of them were pronounced.

All this had been worked out and published by the time Alice Kober died in 1950 at age 43, probably of cancer. Her filing and sorting system depended on cards she sorted into cigarette carton boxes! She had been greatly helped during her last few years of life by the release of 80-90% of the tablets for her to view and transcribe, after the death of Arthur Evans. Now the torch had to pass to another, and that was Michael Ventris.

Michael Ventris had a few stellar qualities that made him well suited for decipherment. All three, Evans, Kober and Ventris, had a facility for learning languages. Ventris, in particular, never lost a child's ability to learn a language very quickly.

A side note on that: Many years ago my wife, a Japanese, was hired by a school district on a military base to teach one class daily in Japanese to the children of soldiers who had children born in Japan, who had not learned English yet. Classes were also held in German and Spanish for kids born into those languages. By three months into the program, it wasn't needed; the children learned English from their classmates so fast they achieved near-native fluency by Christmastime. Thus, the three teachers in the program were re-directed to teach a language class in Japanese, German or Spanish to any child in the school who wanted it, or whose parents wanted it for them.

Having already studied Linear B for half his life (he was not quite 30), Ventris now set aside his architecture career to dive into decipherment full time. From the beginning he had felt certain that the language behind Linear B was Etruscan. In about a year, greatly aided by Kober's results, particularly the grid/matrix, and having made the inspired assumption that words unique to tablets found at Knossos and words unique to tablets found in Greece were place names, gained the ability to assign sound values to a few signs. The grid then "solved itself", much like solving a Sudoku puzzle. He was forced by the decipherment itself to realize that the language was Greek, not Etruscan. He had the intellectual honesty to accept this. He announced the decipherment in 1952.

Fame swallowed up much of his time. Accolades devoured him. He was sometimes dogged with a case of imposter syndrome, embarrassed by the success. Plus, once one has climbed the highest mountain, what's next? He was still puzzling over that when he died in a car crash at the age of 34.

The Linear B inscriptions do not record sagas, hero stories, or kingly decrees. They are mostly lists and receipts of a commercial nature. In an era before money was common, a barter economy, keeping track of "stuff" was a critical requirement for a civilization to function. We may think we have a lot of paperwork now, but imagine if we had to record all transactions "in kind"?! "This chariot is worth so many sheep," and "That chair is worth about as much as a side table." How does one even figure his own net worth (the opening chapter of the Biblical book of Job gives us a hint)? The very banality of the inscriptions is their value. They record people's daily lives. We learn many day-to-day things about life in Knossos and nearby places.

Ms Fox's writing carried me right along. Riddle is a detective story, with three generations of detective, who solved a riddle that Sherlock Holmes would find baffling. In "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" Holmes solved a cipher. Those of us who like puzzles enjoy the newspaper cipher puzzles, which are about on the same level of difficulty. Solving Linear B was a half-century effort, though I think it is fair to argue that the solution process made little headway until 1941, after Arthur Evans died. Alice Kober laid the groundwork for solution in eight or nine years, working with 10% of the material. Then, once "the rubber hit the road" the American genius and the English genius solved Linear B in about twelve years.

The first empire

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, antiquities, paleography, surveys, biblical connections

It takes a while to read through a 450-page book, even one as interesting and well written as Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire by Eckart Frahm. While Assyria may not be a hot topic to most people, it is familiar to anyone who reads the Old Testament, where Assyria and the Assyrians are mentioned 141 times, and all the Assyrian kings that could be called emperors are named: Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser, Sargon, Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal (called Asnapper in Hebrew), and Esarhaddon. These six "great kings", who collectively reigned from 744 BCE to 631 BCE encompass nearly the entire time span that Assyria can be reasonably called an empire. By 631 the empire had begun to fall apart, by about 620 it was moribund, and by 609 it was no more.

When I saw the designation, "first empire" I thought, "Wasn't Akkadia an empire before Assyria? And could the Sumerians, during their expansion era, be considered an empire?" The author discusses just these things in Chapter 5 – The Great Expansion, which begins the section denoted Empire. He describes a change in style, not just size, that differentiates Assyrian hegemony from the earlier expansionist kingdoms. It is one thing to subdue a number of external polities for the sake of tribute, and quite another to rule them administratively. Having chosen to draw the line there, the author can fairly claim Assyria as the first true empire. In a later chapter he points out that Babylonian, Persian and later empires, right up to modern times, learned administrative and political lessons from the Assyrian example.

I was quite taken by a somewhat side point, that the Assyrian language was, in early and middle times, written in cuneiform on tablets, such as this one from about 1900 BCE. It is housed at The Met.

Clay tablets are durable, so there are tens of thousands of them, in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and both early and late Assyrian languages. This is a letter about buying textiles.

"Cuneiform" means "wedge writing". The stylus has a triangular profile, and a scribe could write just by tapping. It was faster than you might expect (my brother and I tried to learn to do it, but it takes tons of practice to tap with both speed and accuracy).

Assyrian in particular was to be read from left to right, in lines down the page, like most modern writing systems. The earliest Sumerian tablets, however, were in columns from top to bottom and the first column was on the right, like classical Chinese.

By 2200 BCE, when this tablet was written, Sumerian was also being written from left to right. The content of this tablet, the oldest one in the collection of Cambridge University, is about commercial transactions. Note the difference in scribal style. In particular, this tablet has deliberately inscribed lines between rows of text, while the Assyrian tablet has the glyphs "hanging" from horizontal top lines produced as each glyph is written, much like Sanskrit.

The huge number of tablets that have been found throughout Mesopotamia enable a rich view into the people who wrote them. Monumental inscriptions, also in cuneiform, concern kingly affairs and stories of conquests in war. However, many tablets are from merchants writing to merchants and other people writing of mundane matters.

A note on dates. In daily life I am like most people, using "BC" and "AD" (which mean "Before Christ" and "Anno Domine", meaning "After the Lord") to refer to historical dates. However, it is well known that Jesus was not born in the year just before 1 AD, which we would call 1 BC; there is no Year Zero. The "AD" era was determined when less was known about the death of Herod the Great, the king who attempted to have the baby Jesus killed shortly before his own death (from a few months to a year, most probably). Based on his interview with the Magi, Herod ordered babies in Bethlehem to be killed "up to age two", because of the time the "star of Bethlehem" first appeared. In Matthew, when the Magi found Joseph and Mary and Jesus, they were in a house, while in Luke, when the shepherds found the family, they were still in the stable where Jesus was born. It is implied, but not clearly stated, that the star appeared when Jesus was born. If so, he was two years old when the Magi visited (so Crèches are anachronistic). The gifts of the Magi funded the flight of Joseph and his family to Egypt until Herod died. Even now it is not certain which year Herod died. There was an eclipse at that time, but it may have been either in 1 BC or 4 BC. So Jesus was born some time between 2 BC and 7 BC. By the way, we know the crucifixion was in April of 32 AD, and the story in Luke implies that He was born in the springtime, so the age that Jesus attained was between 33 and 38. The common Christian meme that He died at the age of 33½ is certainly wrong by at least half a year, and possibly by 4½ years. Now to the point. In Assyria the author uses the archaeological convention of "CE" instead of "AD" and "BCE" rather than "BC", where "CE" refers to "Christian Era". That removes the theological element from archaeological calculations. Herein, I follow the same convention.

Assyrian culture developed over a millennium and a half, centered initially on the city of Ashur, which was also the name of their god. The town lay on the Tigris River, now in northern Iraq, east of northern Syria. The first "king" of Ashur, more of a mayor I would say, was in the 23d Century BCE, or 2250 plus or minus 50 years. About 2000 BCE the king of Ashur began expanding his realm, and incorporated Nineveh, which had already been an occupied place for 4,000 years. This began the Old Assyrian Period. The author places the beginning of a transition period in about 1735 BCE, and its end about 1400 BCE, when the Middle Assyrian Period began. In the following century Calah, the third major Assyrian city, was founded. Archaeological dates are more reliable beginning about 1114 BCE, with the accession of Tiglath-Pileser I (the one named in the Bible, in 2 Kings and the two Chronicles, was Tiglath-Pileser III). After Tiglath-Pileser II died and was replaced by Ashur-Dan II in 934 BCE, a more definite expansion of territory began, called the Neo-Assyrian Period, leading up to the the founding of the empire under Tiglath-Pileser III, who reigned from 744-727. The empire fell in about a decade, attacked by Babylonians, Medes, and a coalition of others including Elamites, all former provinces or tributaries of Assyria. It was all over by 609 BCE.

I found it fascinating that the mocking dirge over "the king of Babylon" in Isaiah 14 refers to the just-murdered Sargon II. Babylon at the time was a province of Assyria, and Sargon lived there. Although the author denigrates the theological understanding of Isaiah's lament, that verses 12-15 look through history to the fall of Satan, here called "day star" (Lucifer), this is to be expected of someone who takes the Bible as a literary work only. Christians believe that God uses the exclamations of His prophets to enlighten His people about matters such as this, without stating them directly. As Jesus stated, He used parables because "to you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of the heavens, but to them it has not been given." Jesus spoke in such a way that one had to ask Him a question to learn the interpretation. A similar reference to Satan in prehistory is found in Ezekiel 28:12-16.

While we are at it, the author also disparages the statement in Isaiah 37:37 that an angel killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, which prompted Sennacherib to return to Assyria. Perhaps it was the plague, he says, or some other sudden epidemic. He even considers that the same illness struck Hezekiah the Judean king. No Assyrian source mentions the destruction of about 2/3 of the Assyrian army. But none would! The kings only commissioned inscriptions lauding their successes. This goes for all the ancient kingdoms and empires. The author does mention that Sennacherib, who lived another 20 years until his sons murdered him (as the Bible notes), didn't send the army out for several years after returning from Judea. It's easy to conclude that he needed a couple of years to rebuild the army.

Whatever happened to the Assyrian army in 701 BCE is unrecorded by any source besides the Bible. We must recognize a principle of the miracles of God. If the Bible is true, and God created the Universe (whether 13+ billion years ago or something much more recent, as some believe, it makes no difference), then God is not a part of the Universe. What He does is not subject to the scientific laws that we have deduced over the centuries. Miracles have no "natural" explanation. People have for centuries tried to attribute things like the plagues in Egypt recorded in Exodus to sundry natural causes; some such as Immanuel Velikovsky posited fantastic scenarios such as Venus sideswiping the Earth before settling into its orbit (a process that would take billions of years, if it could occur at all). No such explanations are needed.

For such reasons, some Christians may be uncomfortable reading this book. It is best to take the phlegmatic attitude that Dr Frahm is a renowned scholar who happens to be a nonbeliever. His science is good. We can take his conclusions with a grain of salt, knowing he does not believe as we do. I am not threatened if he believes that one story or another is fictional. He has to believe that, really. I choose to believe the Bible. Assyria sheds light on things the Bible didn't mention, but not on the Bible itself. I enjoyed reading it a great deal, and I learned much from it.

Discovering Neolithic political diversity

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, anthropology, political science, history

I considered various titles for this review. One strong contender was "Is totalitarianism inevitable?" But that is too narrowly focused. The scope of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is nothing less than all of human history at least since the later part of the last Ice Age, 12-15,000 years ago.

To focus the authors' intent a bit: starting with the question, "What is the origin of inequality?", they explore the history of political thought and practice, and almost immediately reveal that the question is meaningless [indeed, it is a red herring intended to obscure the machinations of totalitarian thinkers - my sentiment]. Furthermore, they examine the framework of historical thinking that forms the basis of nearly all writing on historical development—egalitarian bands of nomadic foragers developed into agriculturalists, which began to settle into villages and cities and store grain, which necessitated concepts such as property rights and the need for hierarchical and bureaucratic structures to manage it all, culminating in kings and empires and other forms of coercive government—and they conclude that it is based on circular thinking. Generations of historians have primarily been gathering "evidence" to support the linear hypothesis, while wantonly disregarding and discarding a great mass of actual evidence that paints a very different picture; more properly, a multitude of pictures, of which the "modern" environment of nation-states that we find nearly worldwide is a recent development, even a recent aberration.

Consider the Cahokia Mounds, remnants of a large, settled area that was built up over a period of a few hundred years, primarily between about 900 and 1200 AD. This painting shows how it may have looked at its peak. The gigantic Monks Mound is near top center. The whole area was abandoned and depopulated by about 1350. Although there is evidence of two flooding episodes, in about 1200 and after 1350, it is unlikely that environmental factors led to its decline (in contrast to the environmental disaster that precipitated the decline of the Maya prior to 1000 AD).

At the time Europeans first arrived in the area in the 17th Century, a small number of indigenous Americans lived nearby, but avoided the area, designating it with words meaning "Death". Some think there had been an epidemic, but no archaeological evidence points to this. Others, including the authors of Dawn, consider it likely that a coercive political structure arose and became so overweening that, over a generation or two, everyone moved elsewhere. It is likely that the remaining "overlords", faced with declining numbers of "subjects", turned inward and effectively destroyed themselves, until the last few left, probably to find themselves considered pariahs by anyone they encountered.

The authors begin by examining two contrasting views of the human "state of nature", that of Rousseau and that of Hobbes. The first is based on the premise that people are naturally good and that equality is the natural state in which "early humans" lived in foraging bands like the Hadza of Tanzania, seen here. Such peoples have few possessions, and rather than elevating "mighty hunters", make fun of them.

The Hobbesian view is dystopian, based on the premise that people are naturally selfish and cruel. He it is who wrote in Leviathan that human life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." In fact, you can find Hobbesian societies even today: a few areas in which, if two men meet in the forest, they first stand back and discuss whether they have any common relatives or friends, to determine whether they should fight to the death, or collaborate. They are a lot like chimpanzees in that regard. There are others, and these are more common, where the two men would greet one another in a more friendly way, and discuss whether their two "tribes" have goods or skills worth trading. Such peoples are satisfyingly Rousseauian. One might compare them to bonobos, who "make love not war."

Gathering all the evidence they can, particularly in writings most authors skip over or fail to cite, the authors find a wealth of diversity in the social and political structures that have arisen over time. In areas with a definite sequence of seasons, such as North America, many peoples had a dual system: Part of the year, they would live in villages or towns—sometimes temporary like "tepee cities" and sometimes more permanent but occupied only part time—and part of the year they would be nomadic, following game animals. The political structure would evolve with the seasons. Some, in certain seasons had chiefs and temporary "police" to enforce their orders, but in the opposite season the whole structure would be disbanded. More usually, any "chiefs" were primarily skilled negotiators with no power.

Indeed, Europeans who studied the cultures they encountered in North America in the 1500's and later learned that tribal councils and other groups, frequently including both men and women, discussed politics a lot, and were quite capable of modifying political structures to suit not just the season but changing times…such as the incursion of "palefaces" who didn't recognize their rights and sovereignty. The authors make a case that indigenous Americans' political opinions, first during discussions and debates with early French and Spanish explorers, and later in Europe when some visited there, influenced Enlightenment thinkers as they developed the political theories that underlay both the French and American Revolutions. It is likely that some provisions in Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10 of the U.S. Constitution) were in part based on rights the earlier Americans considered normal. By the time the Constitution was written, political discussions among the "civilized tribes" and European immigrants had been going on for almost 200 years.

Nation-states are, in historical terms, a recent innovation. Spain was unified early, in 1512. Latecomers such as Italy were formed in the middle 1800's. Empires unified before about 1000 AD fell, rose, and reformed from time to time, with final unification occurring in the same period (think of Greece).

Fun fact: During the 1600's and later, numerous indigenous Americans visited Europe. None of them wanted to return to Europe, and they abhorred the idea of living there permanently. During the same period, some Europeans lived for various periods of time among the tribes of North America, and later returned to the Euro-American societies they had lived in before. Many of them subsequently returned to "live with the Indians".

Another cultural trend is ferreted out from various areas, and the authors focus on the northwest coast of North America, from modern northern California to British Columbia. They describe two (very) contrasting cultures, the Kwakiutl and the Yurok, as exemplars of schismogenesis, in which peoples (such as Houstonites and New Yorkers) define themselves against one another. "One man's meat is another man's poison," in a proverb from my childhood. One tribe held slaves; the other did not and eschewed the practice. Members of one tribe were boastful; of the the other, self-effacing. Compared to these two tribes, the differences between Texans and New Yorkers practically vanish.

Though many examples from North America are used, in great part because of near-contemporary accounts written during the European influx, the authors bring together similar evidence from Mesopotamia, China, South America, and Africa. Through most of human history in all these areas, the concepts of "equality" and "inequality" were meaningless, and there are no words for them in most old languages, at least, not used is a social or political sense. [In Greek we find the word ισότης (isotés), which is used for "equality" in modern texts, but really means "parity" or "evenness", and is a more technical term]. A very common situation is found to be that "cities" were used only part of the year, in many, many places. This went on for millennia.

The real question then becomes, "How did the current situation arise?", even, "Why did humanity go down such a narrow social and political path?" In Chapter 2 the authors write,

"There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion." (p 46)

And in Chapter 3:

"If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?" (p 65)

All this serves to do no more than introduce the subject. The authors define a "civilization" as an "extended moral community". Kings, bureaucrats and armies are optional. Agriculture is even optional. Great amounts of evidence demonstrate this conclusively.

Consider this: it has been shown by experiment that wheat grass can be turned into wheat in a few decades, primarily by fostering mutations that permit the grain to remain attached to the stem after ripening. Yet the "grain revolution" in Mesopotamia, for example, was more of a mosey than a sprint, taking 3,000 years between the first purposeful use of wheat grass and the widespread cultivation of wheat as a crop that required a farmer's care.

The authors report that, in place after place, agricultural methods were used for a time, and then abandoned, only to be started anew after a few generations, and then abandoned again, and so forth. We find strong indications that the liberty of individuals and groups was found to conflict with settled society. Equality is not the point. In Chapter 12, in page 264, they contrast the French "republican" ideal, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", with the concept of social liberty, consisting of "(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings, (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others, and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones."

When I was a child, my parents once praised American freedom, and contrasted it with Russian Communism, thus: "We don't need to carry papers. We can move from California to Utah without getting government permission. We can change jobs at will. We can even leave the country for any period of time we desire, and return whenever we want." I remember when the Berlin Wall was built. I also remember when it fell, on my birthday in 1989 (I wept joyfully for a long time at the news). Freedom of Location.

We find in the Bible the apostles telling the priests, "We are bound to obey God rather than men." Though they submitted to political sanctions such as imprisonment, they not only didn't agree to obey, they announced they would never obey improper laws. That is the basis of martyrdom. It is also the basis of Freedom of Conscience. You don't need a religious reason to disobey unjust laws.

The Declaration of Independence declares in its second paragraph, 

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The idea that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed" could have been based on things spoken by indigenous American statesmen a century earlier! Pay attention to that word "just". Most governments now on Earth, being authoritarian or totalitarian, are unjust. Thus, Chapter 10 is revolutionary. It is titled, "Why the State Has No Origin: The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics". Quite simply, it snuck in over generations. 

What has actually happened? The authors make passing reference to Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. What follows is my very brief synthesis of the messages of the two books.

The bow and arrow go back as far as 70,000 years. Powerful composite bows came later, perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. The sling is at least 12,000 years old. In bronze age armies employing both archers and slingers, the slingers had greater range than the archers, with similar accuracy at distances up to a quarter mile; not terribly accurate at that distance, but 100 slingers or archers can produce a fusillade that keeps an opposing body of infantry at bay. But neither bow nor sling can be said to be a good sniper's weapon. A single archer or slinger is unlikely to achieve a clean kill, whether of man or deer, at distances exceeding 50 yards. Thus, for most of human history, coercion was limited to such distances. Freedom of Location, also known as self-exile in a political context, could be exercised rapidly enough to escape the enforcement of any ambitious "ruler" who presumed to give unpopular orders. The legends of Robin Hood and similar "outlaw" bands also show that weapon use can go both ways. Weapon parity supports Freedom to Say No.

Late Medieval and Enlightenment-era palace intrigue, which relied on spies, and the funds to pay (bribe) them, could extend the power of coercion over greater distances, albeit slowly. It took the invention of firearms, and later longer-range weapons such as missiles, plus instantaneous communications, to bring about the actual ability to control country-sized areas with any reliability. A sniper with a modern rifle can kill from half a mile away, provided there isn't much wind (the record is just over 2 miles!). Nobody can outrun the radio or telephone. Large, non-personal weapons can reach anywhere on Earth.

A second "weapon" in the arsenal of the modern state is surveillance. Prior to the development of cheap video equipment, this also relied on spies and informers. Not so much any more. My cell phone has five video cameras in it, each tuned to a different use. The NSA (plus legions of hackers) is able to use the phone's audio and video functions to spy on me and on my surroundings. Of course I have some amount of phone security, but I am not naïve; NSA can get in if they want. Not only so, cell tower equipment now typically records every "ping" from a nearby phone. Police in every country (including the U.S.) routinely obtain these records to trace the movements of "persons of interest"…or anyone else they so desire. Fourth Amendment be damned [If you need to move about un-tracked, of course turn off your phone, but also put it in a bag made from an aluminized Mylar balloon. The day will come when "going off grid" that way will be considered a suspicious act in itself].

These points emphasize my opinion that governments always tend towards becoming totalitarian. At some point, it could become infeasible for "citizens" (all will be "subjects") to overcome universal surveillance and universal coercion. For a little while, some may be able to mitigate electronic surveillance by the use of frequency-scanning equipment and a device called a HERF (look it up - it burns out drones or cameras, etc., from a distance).

Authors Graeber (now deceased) and Wengrow aren't going after governments. Rather, they are tweaking the noses of anthropologists and archaeologists who have, almost unanimously, fallen prey to the linear hypothesis of social progress. Social evolution, similarly to biological evolution, is a frequently-branching tree, with many branches being pruned away even as more arise. Somehow, the bushy tree of human civilizations and social experiments has been schwacked to a single twig, that has grown monstrous and world-spanning.

Perhaps if we can, on a much broader scale, understand the varieties of social and political developments of the past, we can with a clearer eye examine today's social and political institutions, and, if we are lucky, should we find them wanting, we could resurrect (no dinosaur DNA needed!) appropriate institutions, or develop entirely new ones, that better serve the present human population.

Neanderthals come out of the shadows

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, archaeology, neanderthals

Le Monde published an article about a decade ago when it was becoming clear that most of us have a few percent of Neanderthal DNA. In other words, the Neanderthals weren't necessarily "wiped out" by Cro-Magnons (archaic humans) but more likely were assimilated.

The facial features of both figures are exaggerated. All but a few scientists are still shaking off the prejudice against Neanderthals, that they were degraded ape-men, which is how they were portrayed for at least a century and a half.

I can think of no better education in the reality of Neanderthals, as now known (and more is yet to be learned!), than Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. The book is big (400pp), and I read it closely, which explains the long delay since my last review.

In the Acknowledgements and elsewhere, Dr. Sykes credits the novels of Jean Auel with first kindling her interest in archaeology and Neanderthals in particular. I've read a couple of them also, and I recall thinking, "I bet the real Neanderthals weren't as hidebound as they are portrayed." In Kindred we find that they were definitely not that hidebound, but rather creative, innovative, explorative… in short, fully on a par with "us". It is most likely an accident of history that those we call Neanderthals are not the archaeologists wondering about the demise of "those inferior, skinny, flat-faced Cro-Magnons".

Inside the front cover of Kindred we find a map showing 99 locations of Neanderthal remains, from northeast Siberia to Gibraltar. These are selected from quite a longer list. Inside the back cover, a very tentative breeding tree shows how both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA might have become incorporated in the DNA of modern humans. Astonishingly, one fossil has been shown to be a first-generation offspring of a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother.

Our current knowledge of Denisovans, other than the DNA results, is about at the level that the Neanderthals were known in 1860, except no decent skulls have been found. Stay tuned!

I must confine myself to a few items of note. Firstly, innovation and creativity. The tool kits (plural!) used by Neanderthals, and the ways they were at times mixed-and-matched, show that they were thinking about how to improve their stone tools, and sometimes bone tools.

Let me be clear: the main tools were stone, but the tools used to make the stone tools frequently included bones or certain kinds of bone fragments. This reminds me of the time I was a machinist. I was taught by a real master. Once he showed me a tool he was making—from scratch, beginning with a block of metal—that was intended to enable him to make the parts he had been assigned to produce. Then he showed me one of the tools he was using to make the new tool, saying, "First I had to figure out how to make this, so I could make the other one." We see that level of creativity in the stone tools Neanderthals made, in the stone and bone "retouchers" used to sharpen them, and in the tools used to produce the retouchers.

Tools made of less durable materials, such as wood used for spears, doesn't preserve well, so we have very, very few non-stone and non-bone artifacts. Examining the stone "points" and "blades", however, and analyzing traces of adhesives on certain ones, we can surmise that Neanderthals had both thrusting and throwing spears, and also arrows. For example, a tiny 2 cm (3/4") point is no good on a spear; it had to be an arrow point. And the varying shapes indicate that Neanderthals were experimenting with the best way to make a small point that caused maximum loss of blood after penetrating; you want the struck animal to weaken quickly.

Secondly, what they did with the dead. The tremendous variety here indicates multiple groups of Neanderthals had cultural differences. In all cases, just as for us, the tragedy of a death, particularly an early death, is a hugely emotional period. The earlier assumption that they ignored their dead is dramatically off base. However, their responses to death ranged from apparently tender burial to dismemberment and the retention of "memorial pieces", and also consumption of portions of the deceased.

Thirdly, compassion. They also clearly helped those injured or ill among them, who sometimes survived terrible traumas by months or years; they could not have survived so long on their own.

Fourth and finally, food. Neanderthals were omnivores, as are all apes. They were perhaps more intensively carnivorous than the usual ape; this is true of certain human cultures also. We all know a Redneck or two who react to being offered a salad, "That's food my food eats!" But Neanderthals didn't just chase down woolly mammoths and spear them. They were much more likely to target horses in one part of Eurasia, cave bears in another, and deer and elk in another. They also ate birds, but the remains are ambiguous: were they killing birds to eat, or to use their feathers and claws symbolically (I could have gotten into Art, but I must refrain)? Coastal Neanderthals ate fish and mollusks and other offerings of the sea. Considering that most of the places they frequented near the coastlines are now 10-50m under water, it will take a lot of risky SCUBA archaeology to learn more in that direction. They also ate their vegetables. Because veggies don't have bones, researchers learn of the Neanderthal diet by analyzing the tartar on their teeth! Just as it is for us, a diet of exclusively lean meat is so imbalanced it can kill.

These are just a few of the subjects in the 16 chapters of Kindred. Do get this book and meet your kindred!

Afterword: I do have a quibble about language usage. Dr. Sykes is prone to writing sentences such as this one about weapons and the wounds they cause:

"Rather than being thrown, both wounds match experimental damage from being rammed in with a lunging action."

I don't recall ever throwing a wound, do you? Adding two words would save this dramatic solecism:

"Rather than being from thrown spears, both wounds match…"

Such mismatches of subject and predicate occur frequently. Dear Dr. Sykes, do spend some time with a grammarian. A couple of hours will do.

Do common themes mean common origin?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, early america

We lived in Ohio when I was a teenager. On one occasion we drove downstate to see the Serpent Mound, shown here in a recent view from a drone. We walked all around it and marveled at its size. The linear size is about 540 feet, the length along the approximate arc from tail to head, including the "egg" in its mouth, is about 740 feet, and to walk the full length along the snaking ridge is a bit over a quarter mile, about 1,340 feet. It was apparently constructed of earth carried in baskets and dumped and tamped into place, probably about 2,300 years ago, but maybe much earlier.

A detailed study of the construction, timing, and significance of Serpent Mound, located in Adams County, Ohio, opens the latest book by Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to America's Lost Civilization. Researchers he consulted while visiting the mound have reached the conclusion that a mound of some kind was first built about 5,000 years ago, and extensively renovated centuries later, perhaps twice. 

Pay attention to the oval and the "mouth" of the serpent at the upper-right corner of the picture. From the apex of the "jaws" through the center of the oval, the sight line intersects the horizon at the location of the Summer Solstice Sunset. However, it is not exactly the sunset point today. The earth's axis shifts a little, a degree or two, over many centuries. That sight line more accurately picks out a point on the horizon where the solstice sunset was about 3,500 years ago, plus or minus a century or two. That is the most likely era of the first "reconstruction" of an ancient mound that was already about 1,500 years old.

This mound is just the most spectacular of the "monuments" left by the "mound builders" of early North America. There were once hundreds of thousands of mounds and mound complexes, mostly in the continent's midsection, from Louisiana northward. Most have been plowed over. Several hundred are left, in various conditions, and traces of thousands more can be seen using radar or lidar. For decades the "archaeological establishment" has claimed that they were not so very old, at most a couple of thousand years. That view remains among a few archaeologists, mostly those who call Graham Hancock a "pseudoarchaeologist". But many, many more "real" archaeologists have gathered evidence for much greater age, and a greater range of ages, for these mysterious structures.

A guiding theme of America Before is that many major cultural paradigms seem to have been inherited from one older (much older) civilization. Evidence is seen in the astronomical alignments found in many ancient structures in both North and South America, and in Europe and Africa. Whether Stonehenge in England is actually a big calculator for predicting eclipses or not (I think it is, but I'm probably in the minority), what is certain is that it contains several notable alignments with equinoctial and solstitial sunrise, sunset, and also the extrema of the lunar cycle. Further, there is the similarity of funerary practices and beliefs between cultures of the late stone age around the world, most importantly the belief that the soul of the recently-deceased undergoes a journey among the stars, beginning in the constellation of Orion, and proceeding along the Milky Way, with ordeals and a final test that may result in either blessing or obliteration. There is also much mention of similar geometric features to be found world-wide in funerary and ritual art, such as collections of squares, circles, and triangles, and also squares inscribed in circles or vice versa.

I do not wish to be dismissive, but I don't find the geometry arguments very interesting. I used to experiment with pressing on my closed eyelids to see phosphenes. After some initial fireworks, various geometric patterns typically followed. Many of these look like the artwork used to claim cultural similarity. Apparently such patterns are also seen when under the influence of ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drug of the Americas, one of several related drugs used worldwide. I see such phenomena as rooted in common structures in the retina and brain, not in cultural dissemination or inheritance.

Considering the journey of the soul, the phenomena described in books such as Life After Life by Raymond Moody (1975) may have a common basis in biology, not culture. Regardless of culture or religion, the experience of a "white tunnel" and a meeting with an awesome being, whether a loving one or judging one, very frequently accompany near-death experiences. I know a few people who have had such experiences. Whether they "prove" an afterlife, or are also rooted in "what the brain does when shutting down", these experiences can lead to soul-journey myths regardless of culture.

The connection with Orion is an interesting feature. The big Hunter in the sky is the brightest constellation, and its proximity to the Milky Way is suggestive that it might be related to a "soul road". The constellation is just south of the Sun's path on the sky, tucked below and between Gemini and Taurus. Its southernmost bright stars, Rigel and Saiph, are just under 30° south of the Sun's path, which means that ancient people all along middle North America and North Africa, at a latitude of about 30° north, would see either of these stars as a first step to the "sword" of the hunter, and up to its belt, which leads to the Milky Way, just a bit farther in that direction. I think it is significant that the three biggest pyramids at Giza, and a couple of other sets of three large pyramids or mounds in the Americas, seem to echo the belt of Orion. Such an "as above, so below" theme is a common reaction to the beauty of the sky.

A fun side note: when I was about ten, I was given a couple of sheets of glow-in-the-dark stars to stick on the walls and ceiling of my bedroom. I was already very interested in astronomy, so I used a cheap sky-sighting viewer that was available for $1 from Edmund Scientific, to locate stars of appropriate size such that when my head was on my pillow, my room appeared as the mid-Autumn sky. It took days!

Given that the sky was a much more evident presence at any time prior to the invention of street lights, and the fascination nearly everyone has with the sky when they get under a really dark, clear sky, the shapes seen in it were once a common inheritance of all peoples.

So we come to the theme of the book. Was there a high civilization in the ice age, before some 13,000 years ago? This seems to be a theme of Mr. Hancock's life. If such a civilization existed, and it was centered in North America, a comet-induced extinction event seems to have wiped out all evidence for it. Much of the book discusses the Younger Dryas period, which began with abrupt cooling of the Earth around 12,800 years ago. Whatever else was driven to extinction at this time, the Clovis culture was extirpated; it was once thought to represent the earliest human settlements in the Americas.

These distinctive fluted Clovis stone points are unique, found nowhere (and nowhen) else. We don't know what preceded them. They are found only below a soil horizon called the Black Mat, that represents continent-wide, and perhaps global, burning of vegetation, that occurred intensively for about two years around 12,800 years ago. According to evidence found in ice cores from Greenland, the burning interval was 12,830-12,828 years before 2018, or 10,813-10,811 BCE (noting that there is no "year zero").

There are numerous proxies of cometary impact, including nanodiamonds and a spike in abundance of platinum and iridium, found from 12,836-12,815 years ago, or 10,819-10,798 BCE. Author Hancock, following others, posits a series of impacts from a comet that broke up, possibly one associated with the Taurid meteor stream, leading to about 8 major impacts by multi-kilometer ice-and-rock bodies and many more smaller impacts. Maps in the book show an impacted area across all of North America and reaching to mid-Europe. Considering that the Laurentide ice sheet was still partially present, still melting in a relatively "new" interglacial interval, these impacts are presumed to have mainly blasted out large masses of ice.

There is a further set of geomorphological features that may indicate just such an "ice splash". This map from the book (p. 414) shows a possible oblique crater that we now call Saginaw Bay, in Michigan, and the "butterfly pattern" of splashed-out ice that would result from impact of a multi-km scale impact on a glacier a mile or two thick.

The "East Arc" corresponds to features called the Carolina Bays in the Carolinas, and by several other names in Delaware, Maryland, Georgia and Florida. The "West Arc" corresponds to the Nebraska Rainwater Basins. Areas north of the line marked "Extent of Ice Sheet" should have no remaining features because the chunks of ice landed on thick ice.

Geomorphologists and others who pooh-pooh the idea of such an ice splash claim the Bays and Basins are fluvial features somehow related to sand ripples, caused by rapid melting of the ice cap. Note, however, that the Carolina Bays, as seen in this aerial photo, are oriented northwesterly, as they should be due to oblique impact of big chunks of ice coming from Saginaw Bay, and the Nebraska Basins are oriented northeasterly, also pointing toward Saginaw Bay. They only occur where there were thick, soft sediments.

I know something about fluvial structures, having interned on several very interesting projects while studying Geology in graduate school. This picture shows an area of the Channelled Scablands in Washington State. These are fluvial, scoured out by rapid melting of the ice sheet. There are no series of oriented ovals.

Thus, so far as physical evidence goes, it is pretty clear to me, and to anyone who doesn't have an axe to grind, that a 21-year bombardment by a fractured comet is the best explanation of these and many other features, and that the timing of other impact evidence does explain the sudden end of the Clovis culture in America.

Other matters, such as what preceded Clovis, include evidence going back at least 30,000 years, and perhaps much longer (130,000 y!). I have long thought that there was more than one "immigration pulse" to the Americas, and that walking along a Bering Strait land bridge, exposed by lowered sea levels, was just one possibility. Coastal navigation in rafts or boats is another. Humans have been seafaring for at least 50,000 years; witness the peopling of Australia, which could never have been accomplished by walking. Such things are not yet clear enough to draw firm conclusions.

Late chapters take a different turn, and there the author leaves me. He posits spiritual things, even a "psychic technology" that he calls on to explain features of certain megalithic monuments. Let me state that as a Christian who knows the Bible well, I do not discount that some psychic phenomena may indeed be possible. However, rather than dig into that here, let me refer an interested reader to The Latent Power of the Soul by Watchman Nee. Mr. Nee discusses the scanty descriptions of human abilities before the "fall of Adam", and considers that certain extraordinary powers have been "imprisoned" in the human body. If we all could easily accomplish telepathy and telekinesis, we would be so dangerous to one another that the human species would have been wiped out within the first generation from the time these powers were attained. Occultic practices are attempts to subdue the body in various ways so as to regain these forbidden powers. Fortunately, they don't work very well. To any atheist or agnostic reading this: understand that any Bible-believing Christian who takes the faith seriously believes there are actual entities such as demons and angels (separate orders of being) and that God permits certain miracles to be performed. But in this era in particular, supernatural phenomena are severely restricted, as the New Testament writers predicted.

Mr. Hancock dives deep into such things, with very little to go on but speculation. In that regard, I think he is not really a "pseudo-" anything, but just dramatically wrong in this regard. He is no charlatan, and he is no "pseudoarchaeologist". He is as "real" an archaeologist as the more "official" crowd, with numerous ideas about physical archaeology and geology that the rest ought to follow up. He points out (with relish) how wrong the "in crowd" have been in the past, such as with the "Clovis First" theory, which is now quite out of date. We have verified evidence for pre-Clovis people in the Americas 25,000-30,000 years ago. We also have plenty of evidence that the Amazon basin was gardened using biochar for thousands of years. With much left to find, it would be best for the "established" scientists to dig deeper than their prejudices. Much deeper.

Solving a 3-generation mystery

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, linguistics, decipherment

Consider preparing for a monumental task, a life's work, for which no training program exists, no college courses address. When Alice Kober (1906-1950) rose to such a challenge she began by learning a host of ancient languages and scripts (languages are spoken, scripts are written). She was already a professor of ancient Greek and Latin, to which she added Etruscan, Syriac and perhaps a dozen others. She also studied, on her own, archaeology, physics, statistics, linguistics, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics. A true autodidact has little time to attend "courses", and learns much quicker from books and a mentor or two.

What kind of task required such a decade of preparation? It was the decipherment of a script that had not been used for more than 3,000 years, and determining the language it encoded. As we read in The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, Alice Kober, with her exceptional brilliance and unparalleled persistence, became the central figure without whose work the script would have taken a great deal more time to solve.

Expecting to spend the rest of her life at the task, she undertook her decade of study beginning in 1935, and then began working to decipher Linear B, the Minoan script used from about 1450 BCE to about 1200 BCE. During just five years, 1945 through 1949, she solved several problems that had dogged earlier decipherers, beginning with Arthur Evans (1951-1941), who had discovered the first cache of tablets at Knossos on Crete in 1900. She began to ail in 1949 and died of cancer in 1950, on the verge of completely deciphering the script.

It fell to young Michael Ventris (1922-1956)—whom Kober thought little of but shared her findings with—to add his own efforts to her work and to Evans's, and to publish a decipherment in 1952. His final breakthrough was probably delayed by a year because he had early on formed the conviction that the language of Linear B was Etruscan. Only when he had proved that was impossible was he open to think of other languages of the region. He finally determined that Linear B was the first script used to write early Greek, 650 years before the time of Homer and the alphabetic script that became "Greek".

The book is a partial biography of Dr. Kober, whom Ms Fox terms "the Detective", and of Evans and Ventris, whom she terms "the Digger" and "The Architect", respectively. But even more, it is a great primer in the art of decipherment. Drawing on the notes of, particularly Kober and Ventris, the author helps a reader understand the myriad problems one has to solve when confronted with a doubly unknown script. Linear B was harder to crack than Egyptian hieroglyphs, there being no Rosetta stone to help out.

This shows an example of Linear B, a tablet from Pylos on the Greek mainland. The image is the principal illustration from the Wikipedia article. In all, Arthur Evans unearthed about 2,000 tablets. A few hundred more were found on the Greek mainland by others.

Ironically, the tablets were preserved because in about 1200 BCE Knossos was burned, as were Pylos and other locations, in the Late Bronze Age Collapse. All the tablets preserved had been written during the last year before the fall of the city, because the scribes had a practice not of baking their clay tablets, but of re-dissolving them and making a fresh set every year. They recorded ephemeral things such as inventories and transactions. There was no Minoan literature, at least not on clay tablets.

When confronted by an unknown script, it is helpful if there are related scripts with which to compare. In this case, the only related script is Linear A, as shown here. The collection of tablets with Linear A is much smaller, and it has not been deciphered. Only a few comparative things are known. The number of signs used by each script is different, but roughly similar. Some signs are the same or similar, but others are unique to the script. The statistics of sign frequencies are different, and while Linear B encoded an inflected language, Linear A probably did not.

Ah, Inflection, the bane of English language-learners. English does it only a little, mostly in the formation of plurals (dog, dogs; man, men; child, children) and with a few irregular verbs (I am, you are, it is and so forth). Languages such as Latin are strongly inflected. Word endings that confer case, number and tense can really shorten an expression: qui morituri te salutatum means "We who are about to die salute you". This phrase was the standard greeting by the gladiators before every duel. The stem mor- conveys the concept of dying. The rest of the word conveys "plural", "future tense" and an invocative mood.

Now, why is the script called Linear? Because the glyphs are drawn as a series of lines (glyphs in philology are the physical shapes of the signs, and can differ in various ways from the ideal, conceptual sign). The Latin script used for English and all European languages is a linear script. Cuneiform, as shown here, is produced by pressing a wedge-tipped stylus into clay. A quick scribe could made a letter or word glyph by tapping rapidly. A glyph in a linear script is drawn. The third method of writing, used only on hard surfaces or paper, is brushing, as traditional Chinese or Mayan (Mayan carvings are intended to resemble glyphs brushed on paper).

Initially, everything depended on counting signs. This is not always easy. Are two similar glyphs really different, or are they orthographic variations? The Greek σ (sigma), at the end of a word, looks like ς. Both versions of the sigma are considered one sign. Many older printed books in English use run-together letters such as æ or various combinations of f with l or i. These give OCR software fits! Early on, however, it was clear that Linear B had about 80-90 signs used with great frequency, and another 100 or so used like we use special signs or abbreviations; think of a smiley face or the & for "and". These last were probably logograms that stood for whole words.

Alphabetic scripts seldom have more than 40 signs, and include the Latin script used for English (26), the Hebrew script (22) and Cyrillic for Russian (36). Totally logographic scripts such as Chinese require thousands of signs. In between are syllabaries. They typically have between about 60 and a few hundred signs. The Ethiopian language uses the Amharic script with its 283 signs, and the phonetic kana that can be used to write all Japanese has 72 signs. We'll say more about Japanese in a moment.

Linear B was considered "probably" a syllabary by Evans, and this was proved by Kober. Some languages are well suited to syllabaries. English is not. We use such a forest of run-together consonant sounds ("strengths" or "inkstand", for example) that a syllabary might wind up using more signs than we use letters to write a sentence, or become too clumsy; Amharic, for example, is on the verge of fatal clumsiness. This is because in all syllabaries nearly every sign includes both a consonant and a vowel, and rarely a c-v-c combination. All include 4 or more vowel-only signs, but not more than a very few consonant-only signs. Thus a language which has lots of words ending in consonant sounds is also ill suited to using a syllabary.

Let us consider Japanese. The only ending consonant used in the language is the -n, so their kana syllabaries (there are two, just to complicate matters) include a "n" sign. Young Japanese children first learn only the hiragana, the kana syllabary used only for Japanese words. Later they learn the katakana, used for foreign words. Soon they begin learning the logograms borrowed from Chinese, called kanji. About 7,000 kanji are in common use, though by government decree only about 2,400 can be used for newspaper publication and official documents. Traditional Chinese used more than 70,000 logograms.

The Japanese had no written language (that we know of) prior to adopting Chinese logograms a few hundred years ago. The kana were developed by simplifying kanji that had appropriate sound values. They are particularly important for adding the inflections, because spoken Japanese is inflected, while Chinese is not. Chinese doesn't even have an irregular "to be" verb, as nearly every other language does. The Chinese "conjugation" of "to be" would be translated "I be, you be, he be, we be, they be", and tense is indicated by adding a time noun if needed. So to say you are going somewhere, you say, "I go", but for future or past, you say, "I go tomorrow" or "I go yesterday", or whatever day or time is appropriate. The Japanese for "understand" is wakaru, "I understand" is wakarimasu, and "I understood" is wakarimashita. They write these using the logogram for wakaru followed by kana as needed to add the inflection.

Thus, Japanese have a difficult script because the Chinese script is so ill-suited to the way their language works. When Alice Kober and later Michael Ventris began learning how to assign sound values to signs in Linear B, it became clear that a similar case existed. Finally, Ventris realized that the strongly inflected Greek language was being written at Knossos, Pylos and elsewhere with a syllabary, based on Linear A, that had been originally derived to suit a noninflected, or lightly inflected, language. If perchance Linear A is ever deciphered, we will learn what that language sounded like.

In a way, then, Linear B had a history with some relation to the way written Japanese developed, except the Greeks never used the logograms in sentences, but only as symbols of commodities being enumerated or transacted. Also, while Japanese scholars went to the Chinese to learn writing, the Greeks were conquerors of Crete, and decided to spiff up their act by adopting the writing system in use there.

Riddle is a highly readable, incredibly informative portrayal of the amazing labors that went into unlocking Linear B, and in addition, a delightful window into the lives of the three very, very different people who did so.

Of 2012 and bugs

kw: archaeology, pests, photographs

I am host this weekend to an itinerant archaeologist, who is attending a conference that kicks off the University of Pennsylvania's new exhibit, Lords of Time, about the Maya and the 2012 prophecies. He is the author of a book debunking the notion that the world will end in December this year.

Meanwhile, I have an apocalypse of my own to avert. I have been battling privet rust mites for a few years. I have about 300 feet of privet hedge. For three years I have sprayed in late May, and sometimes also in June, with horticultural oil. That is apparently too late.

This morning I took leaves from several places on the hedge and resorted to my trusty microscope. Here is one image of the result (magnification, about 50x in this image, more than 100x in the image you'll see if you click). Basically, the entire hedge is infested again, probably because I didn't treat it all, from end to end, in the past, only where the leaf curling and silvering were visible. This leaf and the others I looked at show no symptoms, yet!

I have a couple of jars of oil so I know what I'll be doing this morning, right after I get the archaeologist to his train.

What is it like to be a cave man?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, anthropology, archaeology, neandertals

A prefatory note: The moniker "Neanderthal Man" was coined in the late 1800s. In 1901 the Germans reformed the spelling of their language, and since then (111 years already), the appropriate term has been Neandertal. No matter how it is spelled, the word has never included a "TH" sound. In old high German, "th" was pronounced "T".

In a group sitting around a camp fire, would a Neandertal stand out? Would he or she seem odd in any way? Probably. Physically, the person might seem a little short and stocky, but not much out of the ordinary. The behavior, though, might eventually give the game away. He or she would probably quietly watch the fire, take no part in banter or storytelling, and simply look befuddled at most of the jokes. Let someone bringing a load of wood trip and drop it, though, and our friend just might erupt in the loudest laughter of the group.

In How to Think Like a Neandertal, Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge discuss in detail ten aspects of Neandertal life and what they reveal about the way they must have thought. Did they have language? Most assuredly. The common ancestor species, Homo heidelbergensis, is thought by most researchers to have had language and, most importantly, a "Language Acquisition Device", or syntax organ, in their brain, at a level not matched by any ape, even though it was probably less complex than the language and language learning facility in modern humans.

Let's compare us modernized Cro-Magnons with Neandertals, physically; not in detail but just gross anatomy. Average height and weight for Neandertal males would have been an inch or two (2-5 cm) shorter, but 30-50 lbs (14-22 kg) heavier, with a distinct barrel chest. A few "Mr Universe" types can lift one end of an automobile; the average Neandertal male could do so. Average height and weight for Neandertal females was very close to average female C-M height, but 20-40 lbs (9-18 kg) heavier. Whether a Neandertal female would have similar secondary sexual characteristics is not known (and this is not discussed by the authors); she may have had a flat chest when not lactating, and maybe not. Though the average Neandertal had heavy brow ridges and a somewhat receding chin, so do a goodly number of modern folk. In the last chapter, the authors speculate that C-M's were dark skinned and Neandertals more pale. Perhaps. Chimpanzee skin is usually pale under their pelt.

You'd be bored by their diet. "What, mammoth again? At least cook it a bit longer so I can chew it!" Neandertals did not have throwing spears, just thrusting spears. They seem to have fought mammoths close-up, skin-to-skin, where the mammoth could not make effective use of its natural weapons. They had to be fast; getting that last five feet closer is the most dangerous moment. The authors mention just once that many spears were sharpened at both ends. I suspect they were also rather long, perhaps two meters or more: You run in close, jab the mammoth to get it to rear up, and jab the butt into the ground so the mammoth will fall on the tip as it tries to come down on you (you gotta be fast!).

Neandertals, like their ancestor species, were expert flint knappers. This took a lot of repetition to learn, so they were probably more focused than most of us. The chapter on toolmaking has fascinating material that shows just how precise they had to be to strike of those big flakes from a "core". But once expertise is gained, making stone tools was cheap and easy, so the availability of good stone was the only thing that limited how many tools someone could make. They seem to have found it easier to make a new tool than to sharpen an old one. There are millions and millions of Neandertal and earlier tools held in museums and scientists' labs around the world.

Did they tell jokes? Could they understand a joke? Maybe, but it is unlikely. They were not innovators to the extent that we are. It takes an innovative mind to balance the incongruity of a typical joke or pun and see its humor. They'd more likely have appreciated physical humor (Three Stooges?). But their ability to focus and learn by watching would have made them formidable mechanics. If you were to raise a Neandertal baby in the modern world, he or she would probably excel at a number of skills that are learned by apprenticeship, including medicine! Calculus 101 might be a hurdle, though… Take someone with great focus, poor to middling social skills in groups larger than about five, and tremendous ability to learn from repetition: A Neandertal might make a very good computer programmer. Just keep them supplied with mammoth-meat pizzas!

Did they dream? Every other mammal does, so why not? But what did they dream? Probably similar dreams to ours: falling, being chased, forgetting something, looking for something. Many dreams seem to be rehearsals for coping with misfortune, or reminding us not to forget something.

I once read that when tribesmen in New Guinea meet in the forest, they first discuss whether they have any common relatives or powerful friends. They are trying to establish if they can afford to extend friendship, or must strive to kill one another. About half the time, there is a fight to the death. This is probably true of many societies called "primitive", for lack of a less pejorative word. Not all the world's cultures are as comfortable with meeting strangers as the typical Westerner. Neandertals would have been a bit more taciturn and xenophobic, suspicious of anyone outside a family group that seldom numbered more than fifteen. They had to have some tolerance for strangers, or some way of establishing trust, because it is likely that adolescents, either males or females but not both, left their home group to "marry out" into another group. There is little evidence that they carried a gift, which is more common among some modern societies (dowries and bride price customs).

Contrary to some depictions, the authors find no evidence that Neandertals had complex burial practices. They seem to have deposited a fresh corpse in a low spot, perhaps scooped out a bit deeper, and covered it with dirt and stones. More of an "out of sight out of mind" maneuver. They didn't always do so, and often lived among the bones of their ancestors, treating them like sedimentary stones, as they treated the bones of their prey; something to be kicked aside when you sit down. And there is no evidence they expected an afterlife.

Could a baby Neandertal learn a modern language? Could a baby C-M learn a Neandertal language (there were probably a great many languages)? Possibly with ease, in both cases, but more likely, with some difficulty. The brains of Neandertals and Homo sapiens sapiens were somewhat different shapes. So were their thought patterns. In either case, there would be concepts that could not be grasped. The authors think it likely that a Neandertal baby would do better growing up among us, than the opposite scenario.

Neandertal life may have been brutal, but they were not brutish. These were not knuckle-dragging ape-men. They were men and women, they stood upright, and in a suit of modern dress, one of them would not seem unusual. The authors have delivered a great contribution to our understanding of a cousin species, which may also have added a little to our genetic endowment.

When did human evolution stop?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, paleoanthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics, primatology, social anthropology, evolutionary psychology, population genetics, human origins, natural selection

The simple answer to this post's title: It hasn't. Among those who accept evolution of the human animal, it is common to think that we've reached some kind of pinnacle, and no evolutionary change has taken place in the last ten or twenty thousand—or perhaps 100,000—years (For those who don't, of course no evolution has ever taken place). The book Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade presents a synthesis of what is known and strongly inferred in the disciplines related to human origins. The picture is full of surprises.

Item: When did people begin to wear clothing? Fabrics are so rarely retained in "fossil" deposits, we can't begin to guess. Body lice provide the answer (yuck!). Head lice, equivalent to head-and-body lice in apes, live in the hair. Body lice live only in clothing, and move to the skin to feed, but lay eggs in clothing, because there is too little hair on most human bodies to reliably protect the nits. So when did body lice evolve? Genetic dating from modern head and body louse populations provides the surprising answer: about 70,000 years ago. Such dates currently suffer from large uncertainties, so the actual development of the body louse, shortly (a few thousand years) after clothing became common, occurred before 40,000 years ago, and most likely 80,000 or later.

Item: When did proto-humans lose their body hair? Both chimps and bonobos (once called "pygmy chimps") both have fair skin under that black hair. Only the face, hands and feet are dark, because of a permanent tan. Dark skin over the body probably arose as hair was lost, to protect the skin from the sun. "Black" Africans can be sunburned, but it takes a lot more sun exposure compared to lighter-skinned people. When did darker skin over the whole body evolve? Genetic dating again provides an answer, this time from the genes that produce skin pigments: about 1,200,000 years ago.

Strangely, I looked for information on the "first use of fire", but Wade doesn't mention it. A BBC News article of 22 March 2004 states that early African humans, possibly Homo erectus, seem to have had hearths as early as 1.5 million years ago. Another article, dated 29 April 2004, about H. erectus in Israel, has them using fire in sophisticated ways 790,000 years ago. It seems to me that nakedness arose primarily as a result of fire use. Other explanations, such as sexual selection, seem less compelling.

What is interesting, though, is the million or more years that passed between the loss of hair and the development of clothing. Production of textiles must require a change in thinking that didn't occur earlier. The Acheulian "toolkit" was used by at least three species of Homo from 1.7 million years ago until it was supplanted 250,000 years ago by Mousterian (H. Neanderthalensis in Europe) and Middle Paleolithic (H. Ergaster in Africa) technologies. These related technologies show two things: that there was contact between African and European species of Homo; and that one had attained sufficient brain power to greatly improve their use of stone tools, which the other quickly adopted (it takes less wit to copy than to invent). So, apparently, clothing other than cured skins was an invention later yet.

I've known the term "anatomically modern human" (AMH) for decades. I confess that I didn't think about it much. But later, the term "behaviorally modern human" (BMH) gave me pause. Is there a difference? Sure is, by tens of thousands of years. It seems AMH's, which arose in Africa 100,000 years ago, could pass for human today, as long as they didn't do anything. But they didn't live like BMH's, who lived like the hunter-gatherer groups of today, such as certain "primitive" tribes in South America or New Guinea. Evidence of BMH living appears just after 50,000 years ago in Africa, and about 45,000 years ago in Europe.

AMH living was by foraging and minor hunting. Family groups stayed together, in bands of related families that scattered and coalesced on a daily basis, numbering 50 or fewer. Few activities other than food gathering and preparation, procreation, and sleeping, occurred.

BMH living included much more hunting, of larger game, and specialized plant gathering. A great increase in the use of ornaments and artful trinkets arose. The stone toolkit, called Upper Paleolithic, was much more complex, with specific tools for specific uses, and complex tools made of bone, antler, and ivory. Musical instruments, such as bone flutes, are found for the first time in BMH leavings. The people ritualized burial. And they traded among groups, much more than AMH's, to obtain materials and products found far from their home ranges.

Add one item: About 50,000 years ago, BMH's from the "ancestral human population" (AHP) in Africa migrated beyond Africa, apparently for the first time since 1.8 million years ago, and established themselves eastward and northwestward to the limits of the Eurasian continent in a few thousand years. They seem to have supplanted and replaced Neandertals in Europe and "archaic Homo" people in Asia, in less than ten thousand years. During this time, some reached Australia, something the archaics didn't do.

When I saw all these together, I was convinced for the first time that the "multiregional" hypothesis, which requires persistent gene flow among the African, European, and Asian species of Homo, must be wrong. What was it that kept Africans from continuing to migrate to Eurasia, at least successfully, between 1.8 million and 50 thousand years ago? The most likely answer is that the land was occupied by Neandertals and archaics, who either drove out or destroyed invaders. In the same way, the AHP in Africa filled at least the Northeast part of that continent and kept the other species from invading.

Once the AHP developed BMH living, they could make better use of resources, had better weapons, and could stay together in larger groups, compared to the other species, and could successfully invade Eurasia. However, even with these advantages, it wasn't a simple walkover. The number of BMH's who became the ancestors of all non-African people was less than 500, and possibly as few as 150.

OK, so what happened since 50,000 years ago? Are we BMH's who have somehow adapted to settled life? Are today's remaining hunter-gatherer (H/G) groups BMH's? Not really. Although BMH's were anatomically very nearly the same as AMH's, there are differences between today's people, both in Africa and Eurasia, and the people of the African AHP. If you were to take a range of modern people, of all races, of various sizes and ages, and pair them up with AHP folks of similar size and age, you'd find the earlier people had thicker skulls and heavier bones at all ages. They were not as heavily built as Neandertals, but were definitely more like American Football players than like Soccer (European Football) players. The AHP's also stayed in smaller groups than members of modern H/G groups do.

The main reason is inter-group combat. There has been a strong tendency among anthropologists to understate the level of aggressiveness and prevalence of warfare among "innocent savages." An unbiased look at the record reveals that the greatest single danger to humans through all ages was and is other humans. Xenophobia is the natural state of the H/G mind, the BMH mind, and the AMH mind, as it was for all earlier species of Homo.

It is now known that groups of chimps engage in wars of extermination against neighboring groups, and that the leading cause of death among males is "chimpicide". Bonobos, with a female-dominated society, do not engage in such warfare...a good reason for turning over all politics to women!

The greatest single cause of both male and female death in most H/G groups is warfare and killing raids between groups. So, while trade arose at least 50,000 years ago, it probably occurred primarily among groups that couldn't exterminate one another, just as it does today among all the mutually warring tribes in New Guinea and South America, for example. "You aren't my brother or cousin, but unless I judge I can destroy you, I'll call you friend...for a while."

My father's cousin, while a missionary in New Guinea in the 1950s, saw frequent warfare and some cannibalism. Two groups of men might trade one day, and slaughter one another the next. A smaller village might have all its men killed, whereupon all their children would be killed, plus most of the women, and the rest taken as concubines.

Let's look at a few numbers. About a third of adult male chimps die in combat. The number is the same among the Yanomamo, a Brazilian tribe of H/G's. One study showed that a typical tribal society lost, on average, 0.5% of its population yearly to warfare (that's ~1% if the men and a smaller proportion of women; and among men, that's a 26% loss per thirty years). However, averages tend to hide incidents. Most inter-tribe warfare is carried out by small battles and raids a few times per year, or perhaps monthly. Pitched battles are much less frequent, but cause huge carnage: A 30% loss on both sides is typical. Modern societies prior to 1900 AD could produce similar death tolls: At the battle of Gettysburg, the Union side lost 21%, and the Confederates lost 30%.

However, the two World Wars of the 20th Century resulted in losses of less than 10% among the soldiery, and a percent or less of the engaged nations' total citizenry. Stalin's purges of the 1940s and '50s were actually worse than either World War in terms of pure carnage...they were wars of another sort. But in 2002, though a number of wars were in progress around the globe, including America's war in Afghanistan, 0.3% of deaths were due to warfare.

But these latter figures are comparing recent wars among settled societies, with wars among H/G societies, BMH societies...and apes! They are probably not entirely fair. Wade doesn't go into this, but by my own study, I find the following: History is full of war stories, from Troy to Sparta to Carthage and so on. But it seems the total toll of warfare among settled societies is typically about half that among H/G societies.

I wonder what is cause and what is effect? Did settlement and agriculture result in a preference for negotiation? Or did the development of more negotiation-prone people—perhaps first among those who profited most from trading—allow settlement to occur?

I'd say it is a coevolutionary change. Our skeletons reflect the fact that we have less reason to fear being bonked on the head some random night, compared to the AHP, and less need for face-to-face combat. Although today's H/G members live very similarly to the AHP, a Yanomamo or Dani person can be socialized to live in a city. I suspect a person brought in a time machine from 40,000 years ago would be unsocializable, or only partly so.

The brain has changed since that time. So far, two genetic changes that determine brain size, and probably size in specific areas, have been found and genetically dated. One occurred 37,000 years ago, the other 6,000 years ago. The people of 50,000 years ago were, from archaeological evidence, able to live in larger groups than earlier peoples. They were able to extend the idea of "kin" to a larger group than before. But each change to the brain seems to have increased the number of "others" a person could tolerate.

By 15,000 years ago, when settlement began, it seems people could tolerate even greater numbers, and additionally, accept direction from leaders. Both are required for a few hundred people to live in continuous close proximity. It seems strange that these first settlements were not primarily agricultural. They seem instead to have been "places to be" between hunting and collecting expeditions, and trade centers. Specialized skills proliferated; the best hunters got their spear and arrow points from the best stoneworkers, as the best clothing makers got needles and other tools from bone workers...and in turn traded clothing to those less skilled.

The later development of agriculture led to much larger settlements, about the time of the 6,000-year-ago bump in brain size. A larger brain adapts one to the need to remember a larger number of people. It was not much later than this that lactose tolerance evolved among those who kept herds of large mammals. To this day, lactose tolerance or intolerance indicates whether your ancestors were farmers or ranchers.

Now think, today an office worker can step out of an apartment and essentially vanish into a city of millions of strangers, and return safely hours later! Rather extraordinary, wouldn't you say?

What other genetic changes have arisen recently? Malaria resistance among those living in subtropical areas has evolved at least twice since 10,000 years ago (one such change causes sickle-cell disease). Our sense of smell is much reduced compared to just 15,000 years ago, because most of the olfactory gene set has become inactive. Whether this is because of the stench of early cities, of because of less need to smell out game, I forbear to speculate!

The changes to brain and body that occurred prior to 50,000 years ago are found in all humans. Those that arose later are found in larger or smaller numbers depending on where a mutation arose and how strong a benefit it ensured.

This leads us to the most visible differences among human populations, those that correlate best with the continent one's ancestors inhabited: we call them races. While skin color is often considered to be the main indicator of race, it is not really the best. The Caucasians in southern India are darker than some Africans; some Japanese (and I don't mean Ainu, which are very pale) are paler than most Caucasians; many Australians (aboriginals not Austro-Brits) are darker than most Africans or Indians. If you take almost anyone, and paint their skin white (or any solid color of your choice), most people can tell at a glance what continental type they typify, and often the subtype (pygmies and Inuit are quite distinctive, for example).

Regardless how extensive "racial" differences are, it seems they arose no more than 12,000 years ago. They reflect, as do many other indicators, that most people in history seldom moved far from the place they were born. The subtypes within continental groups emphasize this. So, rather than the "not politically correct" attitude toward any mention of racial genetics, it would be better to look upon the diversity of human types as a library of the history of humanity.

One thing is sure: We continue to evolve. We are more gracile than the AHP. Gracility may continue, but it has probably already reached it logical limit among East Asians. Even though Chinese fed a "Western" diet grow taller than their parents, they remain on average much slenderer than Europeans. The continually increasing complexity of modern life will, unless civilization collapses, lead to people with larger brains and more multitasking skills, first behaviorally, and over a few generations, genetically. We won't become the bare brains of science fiction, but we may become smaller, thinner, quicker, and less aggressive in the future. Should Homo sapiens survive another 50,000 years, no doubt our descendants will look back at us as quizzically as we look back at the people in Africa, 50,000 years ago, some of whom managed to escape that continent to colonize the rest of the planet.