The Trojan War may be well known thanks to movies, books, and plays around the world, but did the war that spurred so much fascination even occur? The excerpt below from The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction helps answer some of the many questions about the infamous war Homer helped immortalize.

By Eric Cline

The story of the Trojan War has fascinated humans for centuries and has given rise to countless scholarly articles and books, extensive archaeological excavations, epic movies, television documentaries, stage plays, art and sculpture, souvenirs and collectibles. In the United States there are thirty-three states with cities or towns named Troy and ten four-year colleges and universities, besides the University of Southern California, whose sports teams are called the Trojans. Particularly captivating is the account of the Trojan Horse, the daring plan that brought the Trojan War to an end and that has also entered modern parlance by giving rise to the saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and serving as a metaphor for hackers intent on wreaking havoc by inserting a “Trojan horse” into computer systems.

But, is Homer’s story convincing? Certainly the heroes, from Achilles to Hector, are portrayed so credibly that it is easy to believe the story. But is it truly an account based on real events, and were the main characters actually real people? Would the ancient world’s equivalent of the entire nation of Greece really have gone to war over a single woman, however beautiful, and for ten long years at that? Could Agamemnon really have been a king of kings able to muster so many men for such an expedition? And, even if one believes that there once was an actual Trojan War, does that mean that the specific events, actions, and descriptions in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, supplemented by additional fragments and commentary in the Epic Cycle, are historically accurate and can be taken at face value? Is it plausible that what Homer describes actually took place and in the way that he says it did?

In fact, the problem in providing definitive answers to all of these questions is not that we have too little data, but that we have too much. The Greek epics, Hittite records, Luwian poetry, and archaeological remains provide evidence not of a single Trojan war but rather of multiple wars that were fought in the area that we identify as Troy and the Troad. As a result, the evidence for the Trojan War of Homer is tantalizing but equivocal. There is no single “smoking gun.”

According to the Greek literary evidence, there were at least two Trojan Wars (Heracles’ and Agamemnon’s), not simply one; in fact, there were three wars, if one counts Agamemnon’s earlier abortive attack on Teuthrania. Similarly, according to the Hittite literary evidence, there were at least four Trojan Wars, ranging from the Assuwa Rebellion in the late 15th century BCE to the overthrow of Walmu, king of Wilusa in the late 13th century BCE. And, according to the archaeological evidence, Troy/Hisarlik was destroyed twice, if not three times, between 1300 and 1000 BCE. Some of this has long been known; the rest has come to light more recently. Thus, although we cannot definitively point to a specific “Trojan War,” at least not as Homer has described it in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we have instead found several such Trojan wars and several cities at Troy, enough that we can conclude there is a historical kernel of truth — of some sort — underlying all the stories.

But would the Trojan War have been fought because of love for a woman? Could a ten-year war have been instigated by the kidnapping of a single person? The answer, of course, is yes, just as an Egypto-Hittite war in the 13th century BCE was touched off by the death of a Hittite prince and the outbreak of World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But just as one could argue that World War I would have taken place anyway, perhaps triggered by some other event, so one can argue that the Trojan War would inevitably have taken place, with or without Helen. The presumptive kidnapping of Helen can be seen merely an excuse to launch a pre-ordained war for control of land, trade, profit, and access to the Black Sea.

In 1964, the eminent historian Moses Finley suggested that we should move the narrative of the Trojan War from the realm of history into the realm of myth and poetry until we have more evidence. Many would argue that we now have that additional evidence, particularly in the form of the Hittite texts discussing Ahhiyawa and Wilusa and the new archaeological data from Troy. The lines between reality and fantasy might be blurred, particularly when Zeus, Hera, and other gods become involved in the war, and we might quibble about some of the details, but overall, Troy and the Trojan War are right where they should be, in northwestern Anatolia and firmly ensconced in the world of the Late Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeology and Hittite records, in addition to the Greek literary evidence from both Homer and the Epic Cycle. Moreover, the enduring themes of love, honor, war, kinship, and obligations, which so resonated with the later Greeks and then the Romans, have continued to reverberate through the ages from Aeschylus and Euripides to Virgil and thence to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond, so that the story still holds broad appeal even today, more than three thousand years after the original events, or some variation thereof, took place.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University. He is Co-Director of the ongoing excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel and the author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for the Best Popular Book on Archaeology. His recent addition to the Very Short Introductions series is The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.

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Image Credit: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy 1773. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Via Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Science works in mysterious ways. Sometimes that’s even truer in the study of the origins of the human race.

Piltdown is a small village south of London where the skull of a reputed ancient human ancestor turned up in some gravel diggings a century ago. The find was made by Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur archaeologist, with an unusual knack for major discoveries. Shortly thereafter a lower jaw that fit the skull turned up and, voilá — the missing link between the apes and man had been found in the British Isles.

The Manchester Guardian headlined “The earliest man? Remarkable discovery in Sussex. A skull millions of years old.” The find was widely regarded as the most important of its time. The discovery of Piltdown Man made Europe, and especially Great Britain, the home of the “first humans”. The find fit the expectations of the time and resolved certain racist and nationalist biases against evidence for human ancestry elsewhere. Early humans had large brains and originated in Europe.

Piltdown Gang by John Cooke (1915). Back row: (left to right) F. O. Barlow, G. Elliot Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Front row: A. S. Underwood, Arthur Keith, W. P. Pycraft, and Sir Ray Lankester.

For 40 years this Piltdown Man was generally accepted as an important ancestor of the human race. Various authorities raised doubt and critiqued the evidence, but Piltdown kept its place in our early lineage until a curator at the British Museum, Kenneth Oakley, took a closer look. Oakley and several other scientists assembled incontrovertible evidence to the show that Piltdown was a forgery. The chemistry of the jaw and skull were different and could not have come from the same individual. The teeth of the lower jaw had been filed down to make them fit with the skull. The skull was human but the jaw came from an ape. The bones had been stained to enhance the appearance of antiquity. In 1953, Time magazine published this evidence gathered by Oakley and others. Piltdown was stricken from the record and placed in ignominy, a testimony to the gullibility of those scientists who see what they want to see.

Hoax, fraud, crime? Perhaps the designation is not so important, but the identity of the perpetrator appears to be. More than 100 books and articles have been written over the years, trying to solve the mystery of who forged Piltdown. Various individuals have been implicated, but the pointing finger of justice always returns to Charles Dawson. Dawson’s knack for finding strange and unusual things was more than just luck. His sense of intuition was fortified by a home workshop for constructing or modifying these finds before he put them in the ground. A recent book by Miles Russell, The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed, documents Dawson’s numerous other archaeological and paleontological “discoveries” that have been revealed as forgeries. As Russell noted, the case is closed. That fact, however, is not keeping British scientists from throwing a good bit of money and energy into the whodunit, using the latest scientific technology to try to unmask the culprit.

So, 100 years of Piltdown. Not exactly a cause for celebration — or is it? Science does work in mysterious ways. Although Piltdown misled the pursuit of our early human ancestors for decades, much good has come from the confusion. Greater care is exercised in the acceptance of evidence for early human ancestors. Scientific methods have moved to the forefront in the investigation of ancient human remains. The field of paleoanthropology — the study of early human behavior and evolution — has emerged wiser and stronger. The earliest human ancestors are now known to have come from Africa and begun to appear more than six million years ago. Evolution, after all, is about learning from our mistakes.

T. Douglas Price is Weinstein Professor of European Archaeology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Europe before Rome: A Site-by-Site Tour of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages; Principles of Archaeology; Europe’s First Farmers; and the leading introductory textbook in the discipline, Images of the Past.

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Try this experiment: Ask someone to name three tools, without thinking hard about it. This is a parlor game, not a scientific study, so your results may vary, but I’ve done this dozens of times and heard surprisingly consistent answers. The most common is hammer, screwdriver, and saw, in that order.

We seem to share a basic understanding of what tools are and how they’re used. This may be only natural; tools fill our lives. It’s hard to imagine going through your daily routine without them. You can’t brush your teeth or comb your hair; locked doors stay locked; mealtimes, in the preparation and the eating, are messy affairs. As Thomas Carlyle said, “Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.”

But what does it mean to use tools? This question is of special interest in the area of animal behavior–many non-human animals use and even make tools. In 1980, Benjamin Beck published a book on the subject, Animal Tool Behavior, which catalogues hundreds of examples. (The first edition is out of print and was for a time extraordinarily expensive; when I first started searching for a copy online, I found just one at a price of $626.43. This is sometimes the nature of classic texts.)

Defining tool use is trickier than it might seem. A crow stripping a leaf stem and using it to fish for insects in soft wood? Tool use. Nest making with leaves and twigs? Not tool use. A wasp pounding earth down into a nest with the help of a pebble? Tool use. An otter balancing a rock on its chest to use as an anvil for pounding open molluscs? Tool use. A chimpanzee pounding open a nut on rocky ground? Not tool use. A gorilla using a stick to test the depth of water it intends to wade through? Tool use. A chimpanzee waving a leafy branch to intimidate an intruder? Only ambiguously tool use… The examples go on.

Beck directly took on the issue of definition:

Thus tool use is the external employment of an unattached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself when the user holds or carries the tool during or just prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool.

It’s complex, in part because of the wide range of activities we interpret as tool use — and those we don’t. Notice that a definition purely in terms of physics won’t do. Using a rock held in the hand to break open an egg is tool use, but cracking the egg on a fixed hard surface is not, even if the forces are the same. And the intention of the tool user (Beck’s reference to responsibility) seems relevant as well. Incidental use of objects shouldn’t count. Sometimes a chimpanzee fleeing through the forest canopy might accidentally dislodge sticks that discourage a pursuer, but this doesn’t match our intuitions about tool use. Beck’s definition offers a reasonable compromise on a set of conditions for the behavior.

My students and I were interested in tool use because of its potential implications for robotics. Could the physical and cognitive abilities that enable animals (including humans) to use tools be translated into computational form? We worked with Beck’s definition for a time and eventually developed a simple software architecture that allowed a robot, which we called Canis habilis, to carry out a simple tool-using task.

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Our interest in the use of tools by animals remained. We read the literature. We talked with cognitive scientists, animal behavior researchers, and philosophers of mind. I exchanged a few email messages with Dr. Beck. Gradually we developed a new perspective on tool use:

Tool use is the exertion of control over a freely manipulable external object (the tool) with the goal of (1) altering the physical properties of another object, substance, surface or medium (the target, which may be the tool user or another organism) via a dynamic mechanical interaction, or (2) mediating the flow of information between the tool user and the environment or other organisms in the environment.

I won’t go into a detailed motivation for the new definition, but I’ll note that we weren’t able to produce one that’s less complex than Beck’s, and some of the terms we use are themselves hard to define precisely. Do wasps have “goals”? Does “the flow of information” encompass communication? Despite its limitations, the new definition appealed to us, and Thomas Horton (my Ph.D. student at the time) and I eventually placed our work in the journal Animal Behaviour. We were happy. Thomas and I are computer scientists, outsiders to the field of animal behavior, but we’d learned enough to say something interesting. We discovered how interesting by asking experts in the field; our article went through three cycles of peer review before it was accepted.

Just last year Robert Shumaker, Kristina Walkup, and Benjamin Beck published a new edition of his book, which includes a new, refined definition of tool use that supersedes ours. We’re still happy. In some ways, doing research means holding a conversation in the literature, and it’s exciting to play even a small part. It’s the way science moves forward.

Robert St. Amant is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, and the author of Computing for Ordinary Mortals, from Oxford University Press. You can follow him on Twitter at @RobStAmant and read his Huffington Post column or his previous OUPblog posts.

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By Philip Sheldrake

“Spirituality” is a word that defines our era. The fascination with spirituality is a striking aspect of our contemporary times and stands in stark contrast to the decline in traditional religious belonging in the West. Although the word “spirituality” has Christian origins it has now moved well beyond these – indeed beyond religion itself.

What exactly is spirituality? Unfortunately it’s not easy to offer a simple definition because the word is now widely used in contexts ranging from the major religions to the social sciences, psychology, the arts and the professional worlds of, for example, healthcare, education, social work and business studies. Spirituality takes on the shape and priorities of these different contexts.

However, in broad terms “spirituality” stands for lifestyles and practices that embody a vision of how the human spirit can achieve its full potential. In other words, spirituality embraces an aspirational approach to the meaning and conduct of life – we are driven by goals beyond purely material success or physical satisfaction. Nowadays, spirituality is not the preserve of spiritual elites, for example in monasteries, but is presumed to be native to everyone. It is individually-tailored, democratic and eclectic, and offers an alternative source of inner-directed, personal authority in response to a decline of trust in conventional social or religious leaderships.

If we explore the wide range of current books on spirituality or browse the Web we will regularly find that spirituality involves a search for “meaning” – the purpose of life. It also concerns what is “holistic” – that is, an integrating factor, “life seen as a whole”.  Spirituality is also understood to be engaged with a quest for “the sacred” – whether God, the numinous, the boundless mysteries of the universe or our own human depths. The word is also regularly linked to “thriving” – what it means to thrive and how we are enabled to thrive. Contemporary approaches also relate spirituality to a self-reflective existence in place of an unexamined life.

How is spirituality to be supported? The great wisdom traditions suggest the adoption of certain spiritual practices and it is this aspect of spirituality that attracts many contemporary people. Forms of meditation, physical posture or movement such as yoga, disciplines of frugality and abstinence (for example from alcohol or meat) or visits to sacred sites and pilgrimage (for example the popular practice of walking the “camino” to Santiago de Compostela) are among the most common. The point is that spiritual practices are not merely productive in a narrow sense but are disciplined and creative. A commitment to the regularity of a spiritual discipline like meditation gives shape to what may otherwise be a fragmented life. Many people also experience their creative activities in art, music, writing and so on as spiritual practices. Classic practices are all directed at spiritual development. Thus, meditation may cultivate stillness or attentiveness but the great religious traditions such as Buddhism or Christianity also relate such practices to personal transformation – whether in terms of personal ethics or increased social responsibility. Over time meditation may facilitate a growing freedom from destructive energies that inhibit healthy relationships. Such a growth in inner freedom makes us more available and effective as compassionate presences in the world.

It follows from this that, as the great traditions emphasise, spirituality is actually concerned with cultivating a “spiritual life” rather than simply with undertaking practices isolated from commitment. It offers a “value-added” factor to personal and professional lives. So, for example, in a variety of social contexts spirituality is believed to add two vital things. First, it saves us from being purely results-orientated. Thus, in health care it offers more than a medicalised, cure-focused model and in education it suggests that a holistic approach to intellectual, moral and social development is as vital as acquiring employable skills. Second, spirituality expands ethical behaviour by moving it beyond right or wrong actions to a question of identity – we are to be ethical people rather than simply to “do” ethical things. Character formation and the cultivation of virtue then become central concerns.

Finally, is spirituality simply a passing trend? Current evidence suggests a growing diversity of new forms of spirituality as well as creative reinventions of the great traditions. The language of spirituality continues to expand into ever more professional and social worlds – for example urban planning and architecture, the corporate world, sport and law. Most strikingly there are recent signs of its emergence in two contexts that have been especially open to public criticism – commerce and politics. Equally, the Internet is increasingly used to expand access to spiritual wisdom. So, on current evidence, spirituality appears to be less of a fad than an instinctive desire to find a deeper level of values to live by. As such, it seems likely not only to survive but to develop further into many new forms.

Professor Philip Sheldrake is currently Senior Research Fellow in the Cambridge Theological Federation (Westcott House), Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, and a regular visiting professor in the United States. He is also a member of the Guerrand-Hermès Forum for the Interreligious Study of Spirituality. For over twenty-five years he has been a leader in the field of spirituality as an interdisciplinary area of study. He is author of a dozen books, including Spirituality: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, November 2012).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credits: Yoga session at sunrise in Joshua Tree National Park – Warrior I pose. Photo by Jarek Tuszynski, 2008. Creative Commons License. (via Wikimedia Commons); Buddhist monks meditating on Vulture Peak. Photo by unknown Wikimedia Commons user. Creative Commons License. (via Wikimedia Commons).

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On HIV Testing Day, Gregory Barz and Judah M. Cohen, the American ethnomusicologists who edited The Culture of AIDS in Africa, reflect on the ways they came to their field research.

Saleh J’s 'Ice Ice Baby' Source: africanhiphop.com.

“In the late 90s I circumnavigated East Africa’s Lake Victoria to document drumming patterns in an effort to help prove historical migratory patterns in the area. Encountering a variety of women’s indemnity groups in Uganda who used music, dance, and drama to educate their peers about HIV/AIDS taught me not only to re-learn how to listen to music, but perhaps more importantly how to open my heart to possibilities that the West had much to learn from the response to HIV by African communities. Producing the first monograph on music and HIV/AIDS in Africa forced me to rethink academic boundaries as well as my own personal objectives.

Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Source: Smithsonian Folkways.

“As an openly gay field researcher, I have experienced personal and academic challenges in regards to institutional and individual agendas held by countries and collaborators. Each encounter reinforces for me the unique power of our human identities. Who we are as individuals may not appear on the surface (and perhaps it shouldn’t) as transparent, but acknowledging such issues may underscore not only what we do, but why we do it and motivate us all to move beyond our setbacks and continue to work in the next decade of HIV/AIDS.”
              – Gregory Barz, Vanderbilt University

“As with many Americans who grew up in the 1980s, I first faced HIV/AIDS before I could give the disease a name. It transfigured, and eventually took away, one of my first musical mentors. From third through fifth grade, Craig Jacobsen taught my music and violin classes at my suburban New Jersey public school. He provided a welcome contrast to my K-2 music teacher — male, young, energetic, and pedagogically innovative. Once, to teach us ‘improvisation,’ he spontaneously crumpled up pieces of paper and threw them into the air for several minutes, while we cluelessly tried to guess his motives.

“In fifth grade, he began to disappear. The substitutes for his classes mentioned only that he had fallen ill. My father, who taught in the school system, said that he had come down with a severe case of chicken pox — his second case, which defied everything I had known from my childhood experiences. It lasted for weeks, then months. Nobody knew why. One day in the winter of 1984, while running an errand for another teacher, I glanced Mr. Jacobsen hiding out in the school resource room. I went over to him, happy to see him. But he wasn’t himself: he had spots on his face and arms, and seemed deeply upset. With mixed emotions, he warned: ‘Don’t get near me. I’m contagious.’ I had not yet had chicken pox (I still haven’t) and confused I left.

“I would see him again, but rarely. Partway through middle school, his obituary appeared in the local paper. It stated (bravely for the time) that he had a male partner, but otherwise the account of his death remained characteristically ambiguous. Everything else had to be implied. He taught schoolchildren after all. My health classes had not yet added AIDS to the curriculum. It took me a while to bridge the gap in my understanding.

“I thought of Mr. Jacobsen twenty years later as I began to research HIV/AIDS and music formally. I finally made the conscious connection between my ten-year-old reality and the knowledge I had acquired since. I never saw my music teacher ‘sing his disease’ in the most literal sense. Yet the moment I faced him — scared, uncertain — stays with me. Through my work in Uganda and afterward, I learned to view that moment as desperate and also as vastly creative. I don’t know what Mr. Jacobsen did after I left, but he was a creative force to my young mind. His memory, now reconfigured, gave me a starting point for my journey into the ways people face, and express, what has since revealed itself as a global crisis.”
              – Judah M. Cohen, Indiana University

Gregory Barz and Judah M. Cohen are the editors of The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing Through Music and the Arts. Gregory Barz is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, Graduate Dept. of Religion, and African American Studies at Vanderbilt University. His publications include Singing for Life: Music and HIV/AIDS in Uganda; Performing Religion: Negotiating Past and Present in Kwaya Music of Tanzania; and Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, Second Edition. Judah M. Cohen is the Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish Culture and Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. He is the author of Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.

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It sometimes seems that childhood is one of those issues that everyone has an opinion on — whether it is a belief that today’s children have never had it so good in terms of wealth, health and education or the conviction that they have never been more at risk — from the evils of consumer society, predatory adults, traffic, the media etc. Still, serious academic study of childhood is a relatively new field.

I remember turning up on my first day as a junior academic in one of the older universities in the UK and proudly talking about my work as an anthropologist in Thailand working with young prostitutes, only to be met with the withering put-down that ‘it didn’t sound like anthropology — more like comparative social work.’ If it involved children, it couldn’t be a serious area of study. At the time I was totally deflated but today, such a comment would be nonsensical.

It is only very recently that childhood has become a source of academic interest and that anything like a discipline called Childhood Studies could develop. In the past, children, in the social sciences, were usually only seen when they became a problem — either a problem of childcare to their mothers or when they were delinquent and out of control and a problem to the welfare or juvenile justice systems. However, the twenty first century has seen an explosion of interest in the subject, reflected in the growing number of childhood studies courses and an increasing self confidence among academics that research on and with children is a worthwhile activity.

Yet childhood remains a tricky area to study — there is always a tendency to either canonise those who work with children or demonise them. Many of the researchers I know who have worked with children in difficult circumstances have been saddled with the epithet that they are ‘like Mother Teresa’ or ‘Princess Diana’ (not necessarily a bad reputation to have, of course, but studying children doesn’t necessarily make one a good person). On the other hand, studying children simply because you are interested can lead to suggestions of academic voyeurism. There is an enormous pressure to ‘do something’ when you work with children and to ensure that your research improves their lives in some way. Anthropologists who go off to study religious practices, or kinship systems, come under no such pressure to ‘do’ something about them, or change them in any way. Those of us who work on children almost always do.

One thing that has become apparent when focusing on childhood is that many of the problems associated with modern childhoods are not always problems for children themselves but for the adults surrounding them. A useful example here is childhood obesity. Described as an epidemic by some public health officials and accompanied by scary statistics about today’s children living less long than their parents, children’s bodies are a key site of interest and policing by parents, schools and the state. Yet many of the problems associated with being overweight do not come from being fat but from living in a culture which stigmatises certain types of bodies and blames particular individuals for their own perceived failings. Paul Campos, has written passionately about this and while he may not see himself as a childhood studies person, his work (and the comments beneath these articles) shows how powerful, and bitterly contested, ideas about children and their bodies have become – and how important a proper understanding of the role of childhood in the modern world really is.

Perhaps the most import thing that childhood studies can do is not to provide answers to the problems of childhood but to deflate some of the fears that surround contemporary childhoods and damp down some of the hysteria. Children’s lives can appear constrained and over structured and children themselves under ever greater surveillance, in schools and at home over how they act, but they still manage to remain children and still find ways of avoiding or undermining the adult gaze. As my colleague Mary-Jane Kehily has argued, perceptions that childhood is in crisis are now commonplace, and yet there is very little evidence to suggest this is truly the case. Parents might well be paranoid, children much less so.

Heather Montgomery is a Reader in the Anthropology of Childhood at the Open University and Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies. She is a social anthropologist who has focused on issues of childhood, adolescence sexuality and children’s rights. She has worked in Thailand conducting research among young prostitutes and published this work in Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand (Berghahn 2001). She also writes more generally on the role of children in anthropology, examining how children and adolescents have been portrayed and analyzed in ethnographic monographs over the last one hundred and fifty years. Her book An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives of Children’s Lives was published by Blackwell’s in 2008.

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In these videos, John Reader, author of Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins talks about the treasure hunt that is the search for the missing link.

Is it possible to discover the missing link?

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What is it like finding the remains of an ancient pre-humanoid?

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Can scientists draw firm conclusions from fossil finds?

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John Reader is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. A writer and photographer with more than fifty years of professional experience, his work has included contributions to major international publications, television documentaries and a number of books, including including The Untold History of the Potato, Africa, Pyramids of Life with Harvey Croze, and Rise of Life. His latest book, Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins, published in October 2011. John Reader has previously written about Australopithecus sediba for OUPblog.

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In Developing Destinies, Barbara Rogoff illuminates how individuals worldwide build on cultural heritage from prior generations and at the same time create new ways of living. Throughout Chona’s lifetime, her Guatemalan town has continued to use longstanding Mayan cultural practices, such as including children in a range of community activities and encouraging them to learn by observing and contributing. But the town has also transformed dramatically since the days of Chona’s own childhood. For instance, although Chona’s upbringing included no formal schooling, some of her grandchildren have gone on to attend university and earn scholarly degrees. The lives of Chona and her town provide extraordinary examples of how cultural practices are preserved even as they are adapted and modified.

In the video below, Barbara Rogoff talks about the themes in her book, and shows incredible rare photographs and footage from 1941 to the present day.

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Barbara Rogoff is UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Kellogg Fellow, and Editor of Human Development.

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A blaze of media attention recently greeted the claim that a newly discovered hominid species, Australopithecus sediba, marked the transition between an older ape-like ancestor, such as Australopithecus afarensis, and a more recent representative of the human line, Homo erectus. As well as extensive TV, radio and front-page coverage, the fossils found by Lee Berger and his team at a site near Pretoria in South Africa featured prominently in National Geographic, with an illustration of the three species striding manfully across the page. In the middle, Au. sediba was marked with twelve points of similarity: six linking it to Au. afarensis on the left and six to H. erectus on the right. Though Berger did not explicitly describe Au. sediba as a link between the two species, the inference was clear and not discouraged. The Missing Link was in the news again.

Ever since 1857, when the discovery of Neanderthal Man showed that prehistoric humans did not look like us; and 1863, when Thomas Huxley wrote that one day ‘some unborn palaeontologist [might find] the fossilised bones of an Ape more anthropoid, or a Man more pithecoid, than any yet known’ – for 150 years, the Missing Link has been a beacon of palaeoanthropological research.

For the first 100 years or so, the study of fossil humans was more of a debating society than a science, with its participants more numerous than the objects on which their interest was focused. Even in the 1950s there were fewer than a dozen fossils covering the several million years during which modern humans had evolved from an ape-like ancestor, with plenty of space (both temporal and morphological) between them for erudite speculation. Some practitioners managed to find (or even manufacture, in the case of Piltdown Man) specimens that filled the gaps with Missing Links.

Accumulating evidence (genetic as well as fossil) has shown that the ancestors who lived in Africa millions of year ago were not alone. They were one of several (perhaps many) primates whose evolutionary trajectories were similar to ours, and who lived at the same time. Untangling the fossil evidence to reveal our line of descent is a challenging task. Especially when the fossils are often so broken, distorted or incomplete that opposing interpretations of the same features can be proposed with equal validity, and the points distinguishing them may be so slight, or so ambiguous, that interpretation depends as much upon the proponent’s preconceived notions and force of argument as upon the evidence of the fossils themselves.

No surprise, then, that when a new fossil species attracts a blaze of publicity and Missing Link attribution, discerning observers are inclined take the history of the author into account as they appraise the relevance of the announcement. For instance, in the case of Australopithecus sediba, Science magazine announced the species in detail whilst also including a profile of the lead author himself, sub-headed: ‘After a career marked by controversy, Lee Berger hopes new hominin fossils will salvage his mixed scientific reputation.’

It is probably fair to say that Berger has had a chequered career, but the science on Au. sediba is sound. After all, it was good enough to convince anonymous reviewers and the editors at Science. Indeed, no one has questioned the specimen’s relevance to several important areas of palaeoanthropological research.

Interpretation is another matter, however, and here there is little expert approval of Berger’s claims, particularly in respect of the species’s transitional status. At root the issue is simple: if Au. sediba is to qualify as an ancestor of our genus, Homo, it must be older than any known Homo fossils. But, with an age of just 1.977 million years, it is appreciably younger than a 2.3 million-year-old specimen from Ethiopia which is widely accepted as the earliest known representative of our genus. Faced with that conundrum, Berger questions whether the Ethiopian specimen is, in fact, Homo. But even if it is, he says, his discovery could still represent a late surviving population of Au. sediba that led to Homo at another place and time.

This approach, seemingly offered principally to defend, not elucidate, a provocative interpretation, could be seen to diminish both its author and the science. Which is a pity, for instead of creating media hype, the discovery and study of Australopithecus sediba should focus on the study of our fossil ancestors and our greater understanding of human evolution.

John Reader is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. A writer and photographer with more than fifty years of professional experience, his work has included contributions to major international publications, television documentaries and a number of books, including including The Untold History of the Potato, Africa, Pyramids of Life with Harvey Croze, and Rise of Life. His latest book, Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins, publishes this month.

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Mark Littmann holds an endowed fellowship in science writing at the University of Tennessee.  Fred Espenak is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.  Ken Wilcox was a research chemist and an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at Bartlesville Wesleyan College.  Together they wrote, Totality: Eclipses of the Sun, which takes us to eclipses past, present, and future, and explains why people travel to the ends of the Earth to observe them.  In the excerpt below we learn about the connection between Stonehenge and eclipses.

Stonehenge was begun about 2800 B.C. by a people who had no written language, no wheeled vehicles, no draft animals, and no metal tools. To dig holes in the ground, they used the antlers of deer.

The initial Stonehenge consisted of a circular embankment 350 feet (107 meters) in diameter, four marker stones set in a rectangle, some postholes, and the Heel Stone. The Heel Stone was apparently the first of the great boulders brought to this site as construction commenced. But it may not have stood alone. A similar huge stone stood just to its left as seen from the center of Stonehenge. In that ancient time, the Sun at the beginning of summer probably rose between the famed Heel Stone and its now-vanished companion, and the alignment with sunrise at the summer solstice was probably exact.

For someone standing at the center of Stonehenge, the embankment served to level the horizon of rolling hills. Within the embankment, four stones- the Station stones- outlined a rectangle offering interesting lines of sight. The short side of the rectangle pointed toward the same spot on the horizon that the two Heel Stones framed, the position where the Sun rose farthest north of east, marking the commencement of summer. Facing in the opposite direction along the short side of the rectangle, an observer would see the place where the Sun set farthest south of west, signaling the beginning of winter.

In contrast, the long sides of the rectangle provided alignments for crucial rising and setting positions of the Moon. Looking southeast along the length of the rectangle, an observer was facing the point on the horizon where the summer full moon would rise farthest south. In the opposite direction, looking northwest, this early astronomer’s gaze was led to the spot on the horizon where the winter full moon would set farthest north. These positions marked the north and south limits of the Moon’s motion.

The structure of Stonehenge offers additional testimony to its builders’ efforts to understand the motion of the Moon. Evidence of small holes near the remaining Heel Stone strongly suggests that the users of Stonehenge observed and marked the excursion of the Moon as much as 5° north and south of the Sun’s limit.  This motion above and below this Sun’s position is caused by the tilt of the Moon’s orbit to the Earth’s path around the Sun.  Because of this tilt, the Moon does not pass directly in front of the Sun (a solar eclipse) or directly into the Earth’s shadow (a lunar eclipse) each month.

Because the builders of Stonehenge had discovered and accurately recorded the range in the rising and setting positions of the Sun and Moon and had built a monument that marked these positions with precision, they may have been able to recognize when the Moon was on course to intercept the position of the Sun, to cause a solar eclipse.  Perhaps they could tell when the Moon was headed for a position directly opposite the Sun, which would carry it into the shadow of the Earth for a lunar eclipse.  They almost certainly could not predict where or what kind of solar eclipse would be seen, but they might have been able to warn that on a particular day or night, an eclipse of the Sun or Moon was possible.

In the last phase of building at Stonehenge, two concentric circles of holes were dug just outside the Sarsen Circle – one with 30 holes and the other with 29.  These circles reinforce the evidence that astronomers at Stonehenge were counting off the 29 1/2 day cycle of lunar phases, from new moon to full moon and back to new moon again.  Eclipses of the Sun can only take place at new moon; lunar eclipses can only occur at full moon.  If indeed the lunar phasing cycle was watched carefully, perhaps some ancient genius noticed a periodicity in eclipses as well.  With a knowledge of that period, that early astronomer could have converted a mere warning of a possible eclipse into a prediction of a likely eclipse, especially for lunar eclipses, which are visible over half the Earth.

The builders of Stonehenge left no written records of their objectives or results, so we must judge from the monument and its alignments what they knew.  Whatever that was, the thought it so worth celebrating that the rulers and apparently the common people were willing to devote vast amounts of time, physical effort, and ingenuity to raising a lasting monument of great size, precision, and beauty.

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Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health written by Wenda Trevathan, Ph.D., a Regents Professor of Anthropology at New Mexico State University, we learn about a range of women’s health issues.  Trevathan’s hypothesis is that many of the health challenges faced by women today result from a mismatch between how our bodies have evolved and the contemporary environments in which we live.  In the following excerpt, Trevethan draws from Jane Goodall’s observations of primates to illuminate how grandmothers, by virtue of being present in the family, contribute to the growth of prosperity of the grandchildren and the family unit as a whole.

Grandmothers and Reproductive Success

Most long-lived, group-living mammals have in their social groups as many as three generations present at any one time. Examples include elephants, whales and many primates. For primates who live in matrilocal groups, that usually means three generations of females: Infants, their mothers, and their grandmothers. A famous example comes from Jane Goodall’s studies of a Tanzanian chimpanzee social group in which Flo, her adult sons Faben and Figan, and her daughter Fifi lived together. Flo was a high-ranking female and her presence had a number of positive effects on her offspring. For example, Fifi was able to stay in the troop into which she was born, whereas the more typical pattern among chimpanzees appears to be for young females to leave their birth troops at maturity. By staying with her mother, Fifi was also able to rise to a high status. She began reproducing much earlier than most chimpanzee females and not only set the record for reproductive success at Gombe, but one of her sons became the largest male ever recorded at Gombe. Two of Fifi’s sons rose to high status in the dominance hierarchy and her daughter began reproducing much earlier than Fifi did. There is little doubt that grandmother Flo’s status had an effect on her daughter’s (and thus her own) reproductive success. There is no evidence, however, that Flo contributed directly to the care and feeding of her grandchildren, although it is true that she was not in good health at the time Fifi’s first infant was born in 1971.

Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy notes that despite her reproductive success, Flo serves as a good example of why having offspring at later ages may not be a good way to achieve this success or why “stopping early” might be selectively advantageous. Flo reproduced for the last time when she was very old and in poor health, but that infant did not live long. Goodall proposes that this last pregnancy was so draining for her that she was unable to mother her other young offspring, Flint, and when Flo died, Flint died also, even though he as at an age when he should have been able to survive on his own. In fact, if Flo had stopped reproducing after Flint, he probably would have lived, perhaps going on to sire another offspring and increasing Flo’s reproductive fitness through her grandchildren.

Similar evidence that the presence of grandmothers has positive effects on reproductive success comes from observations of a number of other primate species. Again, it is not usually resources and direct care that older female grandmothers provide; rather, they help to defend the infants from other troop members (including infanticidal males) whose behaviors endanger them. In fact, observers report that grandmothers will often act even more vigorously in defense of infants than younger kin. Grandmother Japanese macaques make a significant difference in survival of their grandchildren through the first year of life. Furthermore, females have much greater reproductive success if they have living mothers, even when those older females are still reproducing. Similar reports have come from studies of vervets, langurs and rhesus monkeys, as well as elephants. On the other hand, African Lions and olive baboons, while showing extensive caretaking by adults other than the mother (known as allomaternal care), do not seem to have their reproductive success influenced by the presence of grandmothers.

These descriptions of primate social groups with three generations of females are not very different from what is seen in traditional human societies and even in extended family households in health-rich nations like the United States. What is different, however, is that in most cases the grandmother is not only helping her own older children but she also provides care and resources to her grandchildren.

Another view of menopause focuses not on the mother and early termination of reproduction (the “long-lived mother hypothesis”) but on the grandmother who maintains health long after ceasing to reproduce. Known as the “grandmother hypothesis,” this proposal assumes that termination of fertility at about age 50 is a given, but that natural selection favored a long postreproductive period in women’s lives because by ceasing to bear and raise their own children, postmenopausal women would be freed to provide high-quality care for their grandchildren. In this scenario, older women “trade” their diminished chances of successfully raising an infant for enhanced opportunities to help raise their grandchildren. This is simply the continuation of a behavior that women have practices for most of their adult lives: providing food and care for children who have been weaned but who are not yet capable of getting their own foods in sufficient quantity and quality to survive. This continuity-of-care hypothesis also explains why so much of the focus on older people as alloparents is on grandmothers.

When the grandmother hypothesis was first proposed by Kristen Hawkes and her colleagues, it included supporting evidence based on their studies of the Hadza, a foraging population in Tanzania.  Among these people, when a woman gives birth, her time providing food for her older children is severely curtailed and remains lower than usual for several months.  During this time, the grandmother increases her foraging to make up for the reduction by the new mother.  Certainly her success is increased if she is still in good health and able to travel widely gathering food.  Thus, the argument is that natural selection not only favors termination of reproducing at about ago 50 and provisioning of older infants by grandmothers, but it also favors continued vigor and good health in the grandmothers until their own daughters cease reproducing and become provisioning grandmothers themselves.  Notably, this argument also proposes that matrilineal proximity would be favored as well, calling into question the assumption that early human social groups were patrilocal and that females dispersed at maturity.  Older women who provision their sons’ children would also increase their fitness, although certainty of kinship is higher through matrilines than through patrilines.

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William P. Brown is Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and the author of The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder.  The book looks at the ongoing debate between religion and science which forces many people of faith to feel forced to choose between evolution and the Bible’s story of creation.  Brown challenges this division and argues for a new way of reading the Bible in light of current scientific knowledge.  In Brown’s argument, both scientific inquiry and theological reflection are driven by a sense of wonder, which unites the two paths. In the excerpt below Brown looks at the evolution of man.

One unavoidable collision between the biological account of humanity’s genesis and the Yahwist’s anthropogony is the order of appearance: in the biblical account the ‘ãdãm is created before the animals (2:7, 19).  From an evolutionary perspective, humanity is, so far at least, the endnote to the sweeping sage of life’s development, beginning with the microbial.  Yet credit is due this ancient narrator for recognizing the common ground of life.

The fact that all organisms we know share the same kind of genetic coding (DNA), with only slight variation, is itself testimony that life on Earth descended from the same group of primitive bacterium-like cells.  These rudimentary cells eventually evolved from simple prokaryotic cells to the more complex eukaryotic variety, which features a tightly organized nucleus contained within a porous membrane.  The next major evolutionary advance was the emergence of multicellular life, manifest in such forms as crustaceans and mollusks, each bearing sense organs and a central nervous system.  And, finally, “to the grief of most preexisting life forms, came humanity.”  One could say that the Yahwist conflates in one fell swoop the sweeping sage of evolution by claiming that humans, with their unmatched complexity, emerged from the ground up, whether one calls such “ground” primordial stardust, organically rich soil, microbial material, or simply “slime.”  By any name, the “ground” constitutes our humble beginnings, whether told by a Darwinian or by a Yahwist.

By claiming such a simple, bottom-up beginning, both the ancient narrator and the evolutionary biologist acknowledge the linkage of all life.  The basic biochemical and genetic unity of life suggests a single biological (specifically “monophyletic”) origin for all known living beings.  Gene counts between human beings and much simpler organisms such as “worms, flies, and simple plants” all fall in the same range, “around 20,000.”  Among primates, humans (homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are 96 percent identical at the DNA level, making chimps humanity’s closest non-human relatives.  While the human has twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, the chimpanzee (along with the gorilla and the orangutan) has twenty-four.  The difference lies in the fusion of two ancestral chromosomes shared by chimpanzees resulting in Chromosone 2 of Homo sapiens. Among the primates, the human is the genetic results of a simple fusion of two short chromosomes.

“Fusion” also pertains to humanity’s evolution in another way.  Recent DNA research conducted at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest a picture of human origins far more detailed than what the fossil record reveals.  When the ancestors of human beings and those of chimpanzees parted ways some 6.3 million years ago, it was by no means a clean break.  There was extensive interbreeding for more than a million years before going their separate ways for good.  As geneticist James Mallet comments: “We probably had a bit of a messy origin.”

The messiness of genetic kinship between humans and other primates extends into the social and perhaps even the ethical realm.  Chimpanzees, for example, exhibit a remarkable range of behavior and skills.  They employ and even build tools, hunt in groups, engage in violence (including a primitive form of warfare), form alliances, and reconcile after quarrels.  They are by nature social creatures and appear to exhibit empathy, self-awareness, cooperation, planning, and learning.  The linage between humans and chimps includes far more than just expressive faces and opposable thumbs.

Behavioral similarities, however, are not limited to chimps.  Rhesus macaques exhibit what primatologist Dario Maestripieri playfully describes as “Macachiavellian” behavior, the primatological counterpart to Machiavellian conduct: everything from nepotism to competitive politics.  “For most of our evolutionary history we probably acted a lot like rhesus macaques, and we still do in our everyday lives,” Maestripieri observes.  Frans de Waal of the Yerkes Primate Research Center, however, sees more than just self-centered social maneuvering among primates.  The antecedents of human morality, he claims, can be found in nonhuman primate behavior.  Consolation, for example, is universal among the great apes.

De Waal has observed several common forms of ethical behavior among certain primates: cognitive empathy (empathy combined with appraisal of the other’s situation), reciprocity, and fairness.  They are, in his words, “moral sentiments.”  With regards to empathy, the bonobo exhibits more affinity to humans than the chimp.  De Waal is convinced that the evolutionary origin of the ape’s ability to take another’s perspective is to be sought not in social competition but in the need for cooperation and community concern, the results of group living and social pressure.  To be sure, the capacity for moral judgment applies only to humans, but as de Waal rightly notes, such abstract reasoning is not all that definitive for Homo sapiens in practice.

Recent experiments have shown that when faced with a dilemma requiring a moral decision, we tend to act situationally or emotionally rather than logically.  The rational mind is used sparingly in situations that call for a quick decision.  Reasoning typically comes after the decision is made, “as the brain seeks a rational explanation for an automatic reaction it has no clue about.”  In situations of argumentation, the brain is like a lawyer: it “wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.”

To sum up: “While it is true that animals are not humans, it is equally true that humans are animals.”  To deny this is to commit “anthropodenial,” de Waal’s term for a species-centric hermeneutic that is equally careless as unchecked anthropomorphism.  “Even if human morality represents a significant step forward, it hardly breaks with the past.”  For the Yahwist, the past points to the common ground of all life.

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Douglas Cazaux Sackman is a Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound.  His newest book, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America, looks at Ishi, “the last wild Indian” and one of the fathers of anthropology, Alfred Kroeber. When Kroeber and Ishi came face to face, it was a momentous event, not only for each man but also for the cultures they represented.  In the excerpt below we learn about some of the media hoopla that surrounded their meeting in 1911.

Headline, San Francisco Bulletin, 5 September 1911, evening edition: “BIG CITY AMAZES CAVE MAN.  PRIMORDIAL MAN BLINKS AT CIVILIZATION’S GLARE.”  Ishi had just arrived late the night before; when we woke up he saw San Francisco, and San Francisco, through the eyes of several reporters, saw him.  The Bulletin’s lede was typical: “The lusty civilization of the twentieth century that is typified by San Francisco upon this shore of the Pacific was viewed today by a primordial man, brought to town from out of the furthermost savagery.”

Reporters had gathered that morning at the Affiliated Colleges of the University of California on Parnassus Heights to get their first glimpse of the city’s newcomer.  They used as much ink describing the man’s perceptions of “civilization” as they did describing the man himself.  That made a certain kind of topsy-turvy sense: their descriptions of the other were really descriptions of themselves, using the man they beheld as a kind of measuring stick for the “lusty civilization of the twentieth century.”  Five years after the earthquake and four years before it was to host the grand celebration of progress called the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco was at once proud of itself and anxious.  That anxiety was reflected in the Ishi reporting that was, by turns, serious and silly.

The reporting recapitulated the exchanges of material items that had characterized Ishi’s stay in Oroville.  Reporters wanted to see, or stage, his initial encounters with civilization all over again.  First, they wanted to get a picture of the man in his native attire.  The anthropologists obliged by bringing a fur cape from their collection (though not one of Yahi manufacture, as they would be collected by the museum only later.)  When asked to undress for the photograph, Ishi, keenly observing his cultural surroundings, objected.  He liked his overalls and his necktie, he said through Batwi.  Besides, he didn’t see anyone else wearing these kinds of clothes.  He’d keep his on, thank you very much.  He did agree, however, to put the fur cape pm over his other clothes, and the photographers rolled up his pant legs to hide them.  By nipping and tucking away the Western clothes, they finally succeeded in getting the staged shot they wanted.  Six photographers began shooting away, while Waterman told Batwi to tell Ishi, “White man just play.”  But being shot by a camera is still being shot.  As Mary Ashe Miller described the scene from the Call, Ishi “stood with his head back and a half smile on his face, but his compressed lips and dilated nostrils showed that he was far from happy.

Ishi’s refusal to return to a pure state of nativity became part of the story.  Bemused and incredulous, reporters wrote that in his natural state he had gone about naked, “as God made him.”  Never mind that he had been wearing some amalgamation of whites’ manufactured clothes and the traditional garb of the Yahi all his life.  The Los Angeles Times headline read, “SHY, LAST YANA DONS PANTS, REFUSES TO POSE IN NATURE’S GARB.”  The reporting thus became self-reflexive, exposing the staged nature of this man’s identity as it might be manifested (or not) in the clothes he wore (or not).

Ishi had been set up in a publicity trap, but he found ways to wriggle free, way to shape how he was seen and portrayed.  After he was handed a bow and arrows from the museum’s collection, the reporters wanted to see hi m shoot.  A photographer put his new felt hat on a stick one hundred feet away.  Thinking the Indian would not be able to hit the mark, he urged Ishi to make an attempt.  His arrow flew true and hit the hat.  Next up was a newspaper as a target; Ishi shot an arrow straight through the rag.

The reporters were impressed, not just by what they saw but by what they heard from Kroeber.  They readily picked up what the anthropologist said about the man’s being “uncontaminated.”  The journalists called him a “human document” and a “treasure” and “the great anthropological find of the twentieth century”; they also likened him to a “specimen” put under the “microscope,” and wondered what secrets of the aboriginal past the man might reveal.  San Francisco newspapers were filled with the story of Ishi, and soon newspapers around the country were carrying stories about the wild man’s arrival in the big city of the West.

As in Oroville, a great variety of things were pressed into Ishi’s hands.  A government Indian inspector who happened to be there that day and who gave his approval for Ishi to remain with Kroeber, gave the man a knife as a keepsake.  As Mary Ashe Miller reported, “His newly acquired pockets…are as keen a delight to him as are those of a small boy, and he has a great collection of odds and ends in them already.”  (She might have said the same of Kroeber’s pockets, for his were always full of this and that as well.)  miller wanted to give the man something too, but all she had was a cheap “white bone police whistle.”  But Ishi took delight in it, blowing into it, making the sound of authority.  Reporters and anthropologists alike looked at him, listened, and noted the incongruity.  The little whistle had captured his imagination, but the vast infrastructure of the modern city barely seemed to make an impression.

From the grounds of the museum on Parnassus Heights the reporters and Ishi could take in a view of the city stretched out before them, and beyond they could see the waters of the Pacific.  Ishi asked Batwi from which direction they had come the day before.  Batwi gestured toward the San Francisco Bay.  Miller asked what he thought about this place and his journey here.  Batwi explained, “First, yesterday, he frightened very much, now today he think all very funny.  He like, it tickle him.  He like this place here.  Much to see, big water off there, plenty of houses, many things to see.”

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Douglas P. Fry’s book Beyond War looks at the essential nature of humans and suggests that there may be a way out of our current cycle of violence. What could be more important?  In the article below he looks at the North Korean nuclear crisis as an opportunity for change.  To read more OUPblog posts by Fry click here.

The North Korean nuclear crisis may be a blessing in disguise if it re-awakens not only concerns about nuclear war but also action to disarm the nuclear time bomb. The North Korean tests can serve as a somber reminder of the ever-present danger of Armageddon, as long as nuclear weapons exist on our planet. If we are wise, we will treat the current nuclear crisis as a wake-up call. Nuclear weapons in the cellar do not make the house secure.

Most of us, leaders included, go out of our way “to forget” about nuclear weapons and the horrific threat they pose every person on the planet. As an anthropologist, I have learned that sometimes a person from afar who does not share the same worldview can go directly to the heart of the matter. I once was working in a rural village in southern Mexico, and one day a dirt-poor farmer asked me whether it was really true that my country had bombs so powerful that one explosion could destroy an entire city. I answered “yes” and explained that if one of these bombs was exploded 20 miles away over the state capital, we also would be incinerated even at this distance—or wish we had been. The man mused: “Why would anybody ever make a bomb like that?”

Ask this man, or for that matter your local extra-terrestrial, about the logic of having over 8,000 nuclear warheads on a planet of this size, and the answer will certainly be that Homo sapiens are not showing much sapience. How, exactly, are nuclear arsenals contributing to our safety and security? How, again, does nuclear proliferation make the world a safer place? In the name of true security for the people of this planet, it is time to outlaw, globally, these suicide devices.

Aside from putting us in the gravest peril, the care and maintenance of nuclear weapons also takes money away from true security needs. Millions suffer from medically treatable diseases and extreme poverty. We share a planet that is suffering ecologically from global warming, loss of biodiversity, and pollution of the oceans. No individual country or region can address these global challenges alone. We’re all in this together. Rationally, we have a huge incentive to cooperate and work together to solve these problems that threaten every nation’s and every person’s safety and security.

The Mardu people of Australia offer us a parable. Living in small bands that are spread out over the Western Desert, the Mardu are very aware that they need each other. The desert has little rainfall and moreover the rain is sporadic. One area may get rainfall one year and a different area may receive the precipitation the next year. The Mardu know their climate and realize that it makes no sense whatsoever to carve out a territory and try to exclude other groups. Instead, they reciprocally share access to food and water resources over time. They do not war or feud. They recognize that such fighting would be detrimental to long-term survival.

It’s a parable for the planet. Now that the North Korea nuclear crisis is rousing us from our slumber, it is time to take action for true security. We must rise to the challenge of getting rid of nuclear weapons–and ultimately do away with the practice of war itself. We also must work together to solve shared problems such as global warming, terrorism, poverty, and disease. These challenges threaten all of us. The Mardu would urge us to cooperate rather than fight, not merely because fighting is disruptive and harmful, but because it will not lead to security in an interdependent world.

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In Notebooks from New Guinea, author Vojtech Novotny colorfully illuminates life in the rainforest. Novotny provides an engaging look into the natural history, people, and cultures of one of the last wild frontiers in the world, as he studies and researches the local biodiversity.  Today Novotny has provided a visual component to his fascinating anecdotes and experiences. The images below are a collection of photos from Novotny’s remote research station in the rainforest and on site, as Novotny and his team studied the environment and culture of New Guinea. Read other posts in this series here.

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Vojtech Novotny is Professor of Ecology at the University of South Bohemia and the Head of the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology at the Biology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. Novotny is currently directing the New Guinea Binatang Research Center, in Papua New Guinea, where an international team of scientists is studying the relationships between plants and insects in tropical rainforests. In the original post below, translated by David Short, Novotny looks at how tradition can cause epidemics.  Be sure to check out the other posts in this series, which will continue all week, here.

Today Mr. P. of the Fore tribe is a university student, but his grandfather was a great warrior. His aggression had earned him numerous enemies among the neighboring tribes. They had failed to kill him in battle, so it was the turn of magic. But even this has its technical limitations, since the magician’s task calls for some material from the body of an intended victim – uneaten bits of food contaminated by saliva, a snippet of hair, a nail trimming, some feces or blood; in modern terminology a DNA sample.

Grandpa was well aware of the magicians’ interest and kept a close eye on all his bodily waste products. Of course, his wife was incautious, as all women are, and so the magicians were able to obtain some biological material at least from her. They wrapped it in a rolled-up leaf, which they then buried in a secret spot. As the leaf gradually degraded, so the woman began to ail, losing her muscular coordination until she lost all control over her movements and died. Thus, Grandpa lost his first wife, then his second, and finally the third as well. Only the fourth survived the snares of the magicians and lived to a ripe old age, caring for fifteen children, her own and those of her three less fortunate predecessors.

The machinations of the magicians survived into the next generation. Mr. P.’s father died in middle age and of no apparent cause, so it must have been through magic. Ten years later, in 2006, his uncle also died. As one of the guests, already suspect, arrived at the funeral, the coffin took to shaking and so the deceased provided evidence of the culprit’s guilt. The others were ready for such an outcome and using a home-made rifle put a bullet through the magician’s head without ado. His brother made to flee the feast, but the person sitting closest to him wasted no time and slashed his Achilles’ tendon with a machete while another of the guests shot him through the chest with an arrow.

In the 1950s, a time when Mr. P.’s grandmothers were being bewitched one after another, the land of the Fore was reached by doctors from the Australian colonial administration, who discovered that the tribe was dying out from a previously unknown neurodegenerative disease, known locally as kuru. Further research showed that this is an infectious disease caused by prions, defective proteins that gradually accumulate in the patient’s nervous system.

Prions used to be transmitted through cannibalism, especially through eating a dead person’s brain. Within the Fore tribe, this was reserved to the womenfolk, which is why the disease spread preeminently among them. The brain of a dead man would be eaten by his sister, maternal aunts and daughter-in-law, a woman’s by her daughter-in-law and her sisters-in-law. It was usually mixed with the leaves of ferns, which are to this day used as a vegetable, and steamed over a fire inside hollow bamboo canes.

Kuru remains an incurable, fatal illness, though its single known epidemic ended spontaneously once the Fore gave up their cannibalistic funeral rites. This came about under pressure from the Australian colonial administration, though the people themselves never believed in the link between cannibalism and the disease and continued to hold black magic uniquely responsible for kuru. A headcount of patients carried out in 2004 revealed that there were now a mere eleven with the disease, all of whom had been infected way back in childhood, some as long as fifty years previously or more. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the identification and description of the disease a monothematic issue of the Transactions of the Royal Society came out in 2007 under the optimistic theme The End of Kuru: 50 Years of Research into an Extraordinary Disease.

The rapid spread of prions among the Fore fifty years ago brought about a change in the entire tribe’s thinking, which centered on black magic. The only way they could account for the large numbers of people affected and their unhappy demise was a massive and merciless application of black magic. While perhaps only the last dozen brains on the planet are now infested with actual kuru prions, the stereotypes they gave rise to, which would see some magician responsible for each and every death, live on in the heads of successive generations of hosts with far greater resilience.

Seen from the perspective of modern medicine, of which there are barely any exponents at all among the Fore, this tribe has been through a major, almost fatal epidemic, from which it has now fully recovered. The Fore people themselves, however, see the event in different terms, as a crazy episode of mutual mass murder, the course and consequences of which are still being resolved. The seeking-out and punishment of those held responsible, and the never-ending chain of reciprocal acts of retaliation go on and on.

The post How Cannibalism Caused a New Guinean Epidemic appeared first on OUPblog.

In Notebooks from New Guinea, author Vojtech Novotny colorfully illuminates life in the rainforest. Novotny provides an engaging look into the natural history, people, and cultures of one of the last wild frontiers in the world, as he studies and researches the local biodiversity. The Q & A below kicks off our week-long series on Novotny and the adventures he has faced as a Czech scientist living and working in Papua New Guinea so be sure to check back throughout the week.

OUP: How focused is your research on New Guinea’s environment in comparison to your focus on the people of New Guinea?

Vojtech Novotny: Although a few of my colleagues prefer the solitary pursuit of biological knowledge in the seclusion of their study, a majority of contemporary research is rather a socially intense undertaking. Our research explores the extraordinary diversity of rainforest trees in New Guinea pollinated, attacked, and protected by an array of often intriguing insects, many of them still unknown to science. This research can also be seen as an interesting social experiment, where remote rainforest villages are unexpectedly visited by an improbable ensemble of Papua New Guineans and expatriates, speaking as many as ten different mother tongues and with education ranging from six years of primary school to a PhD degrees, all of them inexplicably interested in apparently worthless plants and insects in the villagers’ backyard. It is no coincidence that many researchers who originally focused only in New Guinea biodiversity, have gradually broadened their interest also to social and cultural themes. It is such an obvious thing to do here on this, biologically as well as culturally fascinating, island.

OUP: Has working in a remote lab with fewer amenities than other scientists have access to, affected your quality of work?

Novotny: Nowadays it is easier to obtain access to a high-tech laboratory than to an undisturbed ecosystem available for ecological studies and experiments. Our New Guinea laboratory is in the best possible position for our research. It is surrounded by the island’s vast rainforests, while the research gadgets of the latest fashion can be always accessed through overseas collaboration. A bigger problem is the lack of intellectually exciting milieu, since your colleague working on some unrelated, yet a stimulating problem is rarely able to pop into your lab since the nearest such colleague is hundreds of kilometers away. No Skype conversation can fully replace those informal discussions during tea breaks over coffee, or in the evenings over vast amounts of beer.

OUP: How has your Czech heritage influenced your research, your writing, and your overall experience in New Guinea?

Novotny: Coming from a small, strange tribe with a language and culture nothing like those of your neighbors is an advantage in New Guinea, as it helps to blend in the crowd of similarly afflicted citizens. Moving to live in Papua New Guinea is perhaps easier from a small country, such as the Czech Republic, where you can expect that the random impacts shaping your life trajectory will sooner or later propel you beyond your country’s borders anyway. Why then not to take life in your own hands, pack you bags and leave for New Guinea immediately? Leaving a big country is a bigger decision than leaving a small one. I am curious myself whether my thinking about New Guinea is influenced by the fact that it is being done in the Czech language, but this question is probably best left for the English speaking readers to answer.

OUP: As a speaker of the English language, why do you choose to use a translator for your written works?

Novotny: My English is good enough to report on bare facts of life, as I do in my research papers on rainforest ecology. Writing essays is different, as their form is as important as substance. Somewhat ironically, my translator David Short can reproduce my Czech writing style in English better than myself. Inexplicably, speaking perfect Czech is a rare skill among native English speakers. A lot of interesting writing in Czech, as well as in other small languages, thus never makes it to the English speaking audience without being seriously damaged in the process.

OUP: What role have the indigenous people of New Guinea had on your research?

Novotny: Our research is being done in a large part by Papua New Guineans. While some research teams gain competitive advantage in their field of research by owning for instance a particularly large DNA sequencing machine, or having a particularly bright theoretician in their midst, our secret weapon is a team of 18 indigenous research technicians, able to stage research expeditions in the most remote corners of Papua New Guinea’s rainforests. Our research is thus shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of our New Guinea staff. We have been promoting indigenous researcher teams for ecological studies in tropical forests for many years, but with a limited success. This is probably because while a brand new DNA sequencer can be easily bought off the shelf in your local supermarket, and a bright theoretician obtained from the nearest university, assembling a research team from rainforest dwellers is not an entirely straightforward exercise.

OUP: What other books should we read on this topic?

Novotny: Alfred Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago remains, almost 150 years since its publication, one of the best accounts on biological field work. Peter Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall is an excellent record of traditional life in New Guinea, while Paige West’s Conservation Is Our Government Now and Bob Connolly’s Making ‘Black Harvest’ has updates on this lifestyle coping with modern influences. Saem Majnep’s and Ralph Bulmer’s Animals the Ancestors Hunted is a unique first-hand account of local animal lore written by a New Guinea villager. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel was partly inspired by New Guinea. And, as a final non-sequitur, James Watson’s The Double Helix is still perhaps the best description of how science is being done, whether in USA or New Guinea.

OUP: What do you read for fun?

Novotny: My eclectic tastes include travel writing by Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapuscinski, fiction by Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Douglas Adams as well as by my compatriots Bohumil Hrabal and Franz Kafka, and, last but not least, Max Cannon’s Red Meat Cartoons. Most recently, I have enjoyed Michael Frayn’s novel Headlong.

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Most of us know people who have a tattoo or two; they have more or less become an accepted part of fashion and culture. However, in the Pacific areas of Polynesia tattoos are much more meaningful and have a long and interesting history. Publishing next week in the UK is The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia (part of the Oxford History of Art series) by Adrienne L. Kaeppler. Adrienne is the Curator of Oceanic Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Here she tells us more about the traditional tattoos found in Polynesia.

Unlike contemporary tattoo, which is often an individualized statement of modernity, traditional tattoo in Polynesia not only enhanced the beauty of the human body, but marked social status, conveyed symbolic hidden meanings, and proclaimed its maker’s artistic ability. The Polynesian term, tatu/tatau, is the origin of the English word tattoo. It was carried to its Polynesian high points in the Marquesas Islands, where high-status men were completely tattooed, and among the New Zealand Maori, although considerable portions of the body were also tattooed in Samoa, Tahiti, Hawai`i, Easter Island, and elsewhere. Many Polynesian tattoo designs are descendants of designs found on archaeological pottery, and its antiquity in Polynesia is unquestioned.

Except for Maori facial tattoo, which appears to have been done more like chiseled woodcarving, Polynesian tattoo was done by dipping into a black dye a prepared tattooing implement – made of bone, turtleshell, or seashell hafted to a stick somewhat like an adze. The tattoo artist placed the instrument on the skin and struck it with a mallet. This broke the skin and implanted the dye. It also caused the blood to flow, giving considerable pain.

In the Marquesas, tattoo seems to have been intimately associated with gender, wealth, and status, marking social identity, ability to pay, and the ability to endure pain. Tattoo marked one’s association with a particular group of warriors, graded associations, “chief’s banqueting societies,” and groups of entertainers called ka`ioi. Acquisition of tattoo in honor of special events such as chiefly rites of passage, victories in battle, or participation in feasts, commemorated the event and symbolically represented it. Women were tattooed on the hands, arms, wrists, feet, ears and lips. In organizing the tattoo designs, the body was divided into zones which were then divided into smaller spaces. Patterns, often named, were fitted into these spaces. There was an overall symmetry in the zoned composition on each side of the body, but within the zones the designs were often asymmetrical.

Maori tattoo (moko) has fascinated outsiders since the voyages of Captain James Cook, when Cook’s artists depicted several. Men’s body tattoo was between the waist and the knees, but facial tattoo was especially sacred for high-born men of chiefly rank. Maori designs were divided into zones and these further divided, giving an overall symmetry. The design elements and their organization within the zones was often asymmetrical, giving it an autographic quality and Maori chiefs drew their facial tattoos as signatures to sign documents during the 19th century. Tattooing styles varied from tribe to tribe and region to region, as well as over time. Although the classical curvilinear style of tattoo predominated during the nineteenth century, both vertical and horizontal parallel lines were also found, sometimes overlaid with curvilinear designs. Women’s tattoo was limited to the lips and the chin.

The association of Maori tattoo with carved figures can be seen in the carved houseposts of meeting houses, where the buttocks of the ancestral figures have tattoo designs, echoing the tattooed buttocks of important men. The tattoo of this area of men’s bodies is also found in Samoa, where tattoo generally extends from above the waist to the thighs. Tattoo is publicly exhibited when a man accompanies a high-ranking female dancer – tucking up his wrap-around skirt to show the tattoo above and below it. In Tahiti, tattoo was applied to the buttocks of both men and women, sometimes blackening the buttocks completely. This emphasized the underarching crescent shape of the lower buttocks, and other crescent designs were placed above the blackened areas. In both Samoa and Tahiti tattooing was associated with puberty – it was universal in Tahiti, but was found in Samoa only on men of certain status.

In Hawai`i tattooing was decidedly asymmetrical. The term for the technique was kakau i ka uhi, literally, “to strike on the black,” and the organization of the designs had names. A tattoo that made the right side of the body solid black was pahupahu. The Maui chief Kahekili, descendant of the thunder god Kanehekili, had this tattoo as did his warrior chiefs and household companions. In addition, Kahekili’s head was shaved on both sides of the central hair crest and tattooed with hoaka, crescent designs. Elaborate tattoos were applied to one arm or one leg. Women were tattooed on the back of the hands, sometimes on an arm or leg, and occasionally the chest. Tattooing the most tender parts of the body, for example the tongue, was practiced to commemorate the death of an important chief. It is likely that Hawaiian tattooing was a protective device, applied in conjunction with chanted prayers, capturing the prayer in the tattoo, thus offering permanent protection. The right arm especially needed sacred protection and help, as it was this bare arm – raised in a crescent – that threw spears. Tattooing a row of dots around an ankle was a “charm” against sharks. In pre-European times, tattoos were protective genealogical devices. In post-European times, at least some of them became decorative and symmetrical, and included introduced motifs – hunting horns, goats, and lettering.

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