"Generally speaking, innovation is what weaker individuals do in order to overcome their relative disadvantage."

"From a scientific perspective, female primates have more to gain—and more to lose. Most are smaller and more vulnerable than the males. Given that their bodies are the ones that have to build, birth, and nurse children, females also have more urgent food and safety needs than males. So if our female ancestors were also good problem solvers—as higher primates are—then it makes sense for them to have been inventors who adapted around their limitations.... Gynecology is absolutely essential for our species’ evolutionary fitness.... To invent gynecology, protohumans needed to be able to trust one another enough to be around one another at those crucial moments of vulnerability: labor, birth, and early nursing. That’s why the arrival of midwives is one of those moments in hominin history for which we can truly say, 'This is when we started to become human.' It would have required a profoundly cooperative female society and a social structure that rewarded helpful behaviors...."

Writes Cat Bohannon, in "The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity/The very reason we’ve managed to succeed as a species is gynecology" (The Atlantic). 

That article was adapted from Bohannon's book, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution."

"Today, nearly half a billion people qualify as Indigenous. If they were a single country, it would be the world’s third most populous...."

"Exactly who counts as Indigenous, however, is far from clear. A video for the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues begins, 'They were always here—the original inhabitants.' Yet many peoples who are now considered Indigenous don’t claim to be aboriginal.... Conversely, being first doesn’t seem to make you Indigenous. A handful of Gaelic monks and then the Vikings were the first people to arrive in Iceland (they settled there earlier than the Maori arrived in New Zealand), yet their descendants, the Icelanders, are rarely touted as Indigenous. Farther east, modern-day Scandinavians can trace most of their ancestry to migrations occurring in 4000 and in 2500 B.C., but it’s the Sami reindeer herders, whose Siberian ancestors arrived in Scandinavia closer to 1500 B.C., who get an annual entry in the 'Indigenous World' yearbook...."

Writes Manvir Singh in "It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the 'Indigenous'/Many groups who identify as Indigenous don’t claim to be first peoples; many who did come first don’t claim to be Indigenous. Can the concept escape its colonial past?"

How old is thought? I don't know. Maybe thought is so old, it's dying out.

It sometimes seems that way. Here's a headline on the front page of WaPo:



Click through and you get a headline that has one more word — "Ancient teeth show history of epidemics is much older than we thought" — a mere 2-letters without which you have a ludicrous second meaning.

From the article, presumably a worthy article by a man who surely didn't write the front-page teaser:

Scientists and archaeologists now believe... that the plague bacteria, which caused the medieval Black Death that killed up to half of Europe’s population, infected humans roughly 5,000 years ago in the Stone Age. The bacteria, after it had entered the bloodstream and likely killed the host, circulated into the pulp chamber of teeth, which kept its DNA insulated from millennia of environmental wear and tear. In the past decade, scientists have been able to extract and analyze that DNA. The Stone Age plague was, however, an ancestor with a slightly different genetic identity....

"I customarily killed old women. They all died, there by the big river. I didn't used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. The women were afraid of me."

Said "a man from the Aché, an indigenous tribe in eastern Paraguay," quoted in "What happens when we're too old to be 'useful'?" (BBC).

As another anthropologist, Jared Diamond, points out, the Aché are hardly outliers. Among the Kualong, in Papua New Guinea, when a woman's husband died, it was her son's solemn duty to strangle her. In the Arctic, the Chukchi encouraged old people to kill themselves with the promise of rewards in the afterlife....

Some think we'll need a more radical shift in our attitudes to old age. There's talk of retirement itself being "retired". Perhaps, like our ancestors, we'll be expected to work for as long as we're able. But the varied customs of ancestral societies should give us pause, because they appear to have evolved in response to some discomfortingly hard-nosed trade-offs....

Once we relied on elders to store knowledge and instruct the young. Now, knowledge dates quickly - and who needs Grandma when we have schools and Wikipedia?

That last line made me think of this article about Joe Biden I was just reading in The Washington Post, "Joe Biden unspools an endless supply of ‘Bidenisms’ on the campaign trail":

His expressions hark to a humble upbringing in Scranton, Pa., and Wilmington, Del., drawing attention to middle-class roots with sayings that anyone can live by: “Without your word, you’re not a man” (his dad); “As long as a person’s alive, they have the obligation to strive” (his mom).... “My dad had an expression... He said, ‘Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect.’ ” “My father used to say, ‘, the greatest sin of all is the abuse of power. And the ultimate sin, the cardinal sin, is for a man to raise his hand to a woman or a child’ ”... The family sayings are another iteration of Biden’s unique speaking style, one that is injected with a “folks!” here, a “not a joke!” there and a “here’s the deal” everywhere....

Maybe I need to hope the younger people feel a longing for that sort of folksy oldie thing.

"3D Printing and the Murky Ethics of Replicating Bones."

At Real Clear Science.

Is it obvious to you what "murky ethics" are involved in the 3D printing of bone replicas? Click through to the article and see how long it takes to figure out the answer. The murkiness in getting to the point of what's murky in the ethics is evidence of what a sensitive problem it is.

"With Venezuela in collapse, towns slip into primitive isolation."

A Reuters headline.

At the once-busy beach resort of Patanemo, tourism has evaporated.... These days, its Caribbean shoreline flanked by forested hills receives a different type of visitor: people who walk 10 minutes from a nearby town carrying rice, plantains or bananas in hopes of exchanging them for the fishermen’s latest catch....

“The fish that we catch is to exchange or give away,” said Yofran Arias, one of 15 fishermen who have grown accustomed to a rustic existence even though they live a 15-minute drive from Venezuela’s main port of Puerto Cabello. “Money doesn’t buy anything so it’s better for people to bring food so we can give them fish,” he said, while cleaning bonefish, known for abundant bones and limited commercial value....

“I haven’t been to the city center in almost two years. What would I do there? I don’t have enough (money) to buy a shirt or a pair of shorts,” said a fisherman in Patanemo who identified himself only as Luis. “I’m better off here swapping things to survive.”...

In the mountains of the central state of Lara, residents of the town of Guarico this year found a different way of paying bills - coffee beans. Residents of the coffee-growing region now exchange roasted beans for anything from haircuts to spare parts for agricultural machinery....

Inflation is more than a million percent. The "primitive isolation" is a barter economy. They have absolutely no money.

Here's an article from 2016 in The Atlantic, "The Myth of the Barter Economy/Adam Smith said that quid-pro-quo exchange systems preceded economies based on currency, but there’s no evidence that he was right."

The man who arguably founded modern economic theory, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, popularized the idea that barter was a precursor to money.

In Venezuela, barter is a successor to money, which is some evidence that barter was a precursor to money, but this Atlantic writer, Ilana Strauss, questions whether human beings really ever lived without currency:

[V]arious anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe.

That was back in 2016.

“No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”...

When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to.

So barter as a successor to money doesn't tend to show that barter was ever a precursor to money....

"Huge collections of feather work and masks from indigenous peoples of South America were also consumed in the fire..."

"... as well as pottery and artifacts of a culture that made shell mounds along what is now Brazil’s Atlantic Coast for thousands of years. While some of the biological collections may be replenished, this cultural history is simply gone. Carlos Fausto, a professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said this material memory of Brazilian history was 'just irreplaceable.'... 'What is the value of the cultural heritage of a country?... It is beyond value.'"

From "What Was Lost in the Brazil Museum Fire/Some items in the collection are irreplaceable to science, as well as the country’s national memory" (NYT). At the link, many photographs of things that are now reduced to ash.

"Cave Found in Kenya in Which People Lived for 78,000 Years/Unique discoveries in tropical forest cave show gradual development of weapons and other skills, negating the theory of sudden spurts of innovation."

Haaretz reports.

Panga ya Saidi is actually a network of caves about a kilometer long in limestone hills: the main chamber is about 100 square meters (1,076 square feet) co-author Prof. Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute tells Haaretz. It was used from the Middle Stone Age to this day, though people don’t live in it any more: now they use it for burials and rituals, he says. In any case, it was big enough to have supported hundreds of people....

At Panga ya Saidi, tools go back to the earliest occupation 78,000 years ago. But the occupants’ technology changed markedly 67,000 years ago, with smaller, finer implements appearing, reflecting changes in hunting practices and skills.

After that turning point, the archaeologists observed a mix of technologies rather than sudden changes. That argues against a series of cognitive or cultural "revolutions" theorized by some archaeologists, they write....

"What woes do not befall Chicago! That city has a debt of $6,000,000 which is increasing at the rate of a cool million each year."

"One Chicago newspaper gives a double-leaded opinion that the city has a 'prognathous City Council,' whose members accept bribes so quickly that Boss Tweed turns over in his grave," wrote the NYT on November 23, 1895.



By the way, $10,000 overcoat in 1895 corresponds to a $292,452 overcoat today.

Now, why am I reading this? It's not that I'm looking into Chicago's debt problems. Nor is it an interest in the word "prognathous." It means "Having projecting or forward-pointing jaws, teeth, mandibles, etc.; having a facial angle of less than 90°; having a gnathic index of 103 or more. Of jaws or a lower jaw: prominent, protruding." OED. I think the suggestion is that the Chicago City Council members are thugs. My Google image search on the word kind of freaked me out:



I was reading that 1895 article because I wanted to get a sense of when people started using the phrase "cool million" after trying to read this National Review article by Andrew C. McCarthy, "The Obama Administration’s Uranium One Scandal." It begins:

Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

I thought it was funny to say a "cool half-million." $500,000 is not an awesome amount of money in this context, even if it's 5 times $100,000. Was "cool half-million" supposed to be funny or supposed to impress us with why Uranium One needs more attention? I found it distracting. You can see I'm not paying attention.

I'd rather talk about whether "the worst is worse than wienerworst" was once an idiomatic expression. You see it there in the second-to-last paragraph of the 1895 NYT article, where the issue of legalizing the sale of horse meat comes up. Attempting to google my way to an answer, I found this mindbending sentence:

For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's 'Barr-Bag' which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2,163 pearl buttons; nor of – in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel – or Suing Sophie!

I love the "in short."

AND: What are "boodlers"? Chicago is "cursed by the reign of boodlers" and "the Man in the Moon turns up his nose as he sails over during a heavy wind." The OED defines "boodler" as "one who practises boodleism," and "boodleism" as "bribery and corruption, embezzlement of public funds." "Boodle" can mean counterfeit money or money acquired improperly, but it can also be a contemptuous way to refer to a group of people, as in this 1861 example (from the OED):

I motioned we shove the hul kit an boodle of the gamblers ashore on logs. 'Twas kerried.

We're more likely to say "caboodle" or "kit and caboodle," but "caboodle" is a corruption of the phrase "kit and boodle" — where "kit" is a kind of open tub used to hold water for washing or to carry something like milk or butter.

IN THE COMMENTS: Gabriel find this wonderful passage in "Great Expectations," by Charles Dickens (1860):

"Well, old chap," said Joe, "it do appear that she had settled the most of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why, do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand unto him? 'Because of Pip's account of him the said Matthew.' I am told by Biddy, that air the writing," said Joe, repeating the legal turn as if it did him infinite good, 'account of him the said Matthew.' And a cool four thousand, Pip!"

I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

That pushed me to check the history of "cool" as a way to stress the size of an amount of money (which might have to do with the idea of the counting the money with an attitude of calmness). The OED traces this usage back to the 18th century. It comes up in "Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding, from 1749, when you only needed 3 digits to get to cool: "He had lost a cool hundred, and would play no longer." So the expression had been around a while before Dickens made comedy out of taking it literally and talking about temperature.

"The Mashco had a ritual greeting: they hugged visitors, put their heads on their shoulders, and then felt inside their clothing, as if to ascertain their sex."

"For perhaps forty minutes, the two groups mingled: the Mashco touching and probing, and the Nomole team acquiescing, mostly in good humor. The Mashco women approached Flores and, as she giggled, touched her breasts and stomach... When I asked Flores about the women, she put a hand to her mouth in embarrassment. 'They felt my breasts and stomach and said to me, 'You’re pregnant, aren’t you?' When I said, ‘No, I’m not,’ they said, ‘Tell us the truth! Don’t you have milk?’ When I said no, Knoygonro squirted her milk in my face, to say, ‘I do.’ ”

From "AN ISOLATED TRIBE EMERGES FROM THE RAIN FOREST/In Peru, an unsolved killing has brought the Mashco Piro into contact with the outside world," by Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker.

"The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine."

"People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together."

Said Gloria Steinem, in an Esquire interview. That quote struck me, having just read an article by Jane Kramer in The New Yorker called "Road Warrior/After fifty years, Gloria Steinem is still at the forefront of the feminist cause," which shows how central this idiosyncratic anthropology has been to Steinem. Steinem went to India for a 2-year fellowship after college and says she did her "first organizing there." She returned to India in 1974 and:

She had trekked to villages cordoned off by the government because of caste riots, and watched, at night, as the villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles, lit by kerosene lamps, and tell their stories of burnings, murders, thefts, and rapes, “with fear and trauma that needed no translation” but with the relief that came from talking and being heard. In her road book, she calls it “the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of talking circles, those groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.”

Also:

[Wilma] Mankiller had been the first elected chief of the Cherokee Nation, and she and Steinem had been close ever since she joined the board of the Ms. Foundation. Over the years, Mankiller had become, for Steinem, a kind of spiritual guide.... It was Mankiller, she says, who continued her education in the “deep history” of matrilineality, and the communal talking circles that expressed it. “We have always started our ‘history’ with when hierarchy, patriarchy, and nationalism started,” Steinem told me. “But democracy did not come from Greece. It is much, much older, and it came from women and men together.” She added, “The Iroquois Confederacy had circles of consensus—it was matrilineal.”

Before Mankiller died in 2010, she was working on a writing a book with Steinem, and Steinem wants to continue the project:

“I want to contribute our idea that most of human history was very different from what we have today, with our monotheistic patriarchies and their ‘pyramid’ structures of authority from the top,” [Steinem] said. “Many peoples were—and some still are—not gender-based in their languages. And there was rarely a single chief. There was always a chief for peace, and a different one for war. Their societies were not polarized, and not violence-based.” The jury is out on that. Many archeologists and anthropologists would disagree. But, as an organizing principle for Steinem, and for the feminists she has brought together, the evocation of an ancient tradition of talking circles for sharing stories, bridging differences, and coming to acceptable common solutions has been a remarkably effective tool.

Many archeologists and anthropologists would disagree.... but it's not science, is it? It's mythology. Mythology is a different process. When Steinem says she "witnessed the ancient and modern magic of talking circles," we're witnessing the ancient and modern magic of mythology.

By the way, this fascination with the imagined better world of India and the Cherokee and the Iroquois is stereotypical of the 1960s. The hippies had the same dream. Steinem is not a hippie. Her cultural stream diverged from the hippie philosophy. I remember when that divergence occurred. At the time I thought the Ms. Magazine people were retro, missing the zeitgeist, the counterculture. If we were shedding "concepts of masculine and feminine," getting together and loving one another, why heighten the sense of the differentness of women, why talk about the oppression of the kinds of families our parents lived in — we were already free — and why go on and on about careers — when the point was to drop out?

ADDED: That line "the villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles" made me think of the old Camille Paglia lines: "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts" and "Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies."

There are 6 species of great apes alive today, so why is there only one species of human?

"Our own species appeared around 200,000 years ago, at a time when several others existed. Yet today, only we remain." Why?

For the first 100,000 years of our existence, modern humans behaved much like Neanderthals. then something changed. Our tools became more complex, around the time when we started developing symbolic artefacts.... For tens of thousands of years, before we developed these abilities, modern humans and other hominins were fairly evenly matched.... Any other species could have taken our place....

"Homo Naledi, New Human Species, Is Found in South African Cave."

"At a news conference on Wednesday, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a senior author of the paper describing the new species, said it was 'unlike any other species seen before,' noting that a small skull with a brain one-third the size of modern human braincases was perched atop a very slender body. An average H. naledi was about five feet tall and weighed almost 100 pounds, he said."

"How a history of eating human brains protected this tribe from brain disease."

A grisly but jaunty headline for a WaPo article that begins:

The sickness spread at funerals.

The Fore people, a once-isolated tribe in eastern Papua New Guinea, had a long standing tradition of mortuary feasts — eating the the dead from their own community at funerals. Men consumed the flesh of their deceased relatives, while women and children ate the brain. It was an expression of respect for the lost loved ones, but the practice wreaked havoc on the communities they left behind. That’s because a deadly molecule that lives in brains was spreading to the women who ate them, causing a horrible degenerative illness called “kuru” that at one point killed 2 percent of the population each year.

So brain-eating caused disease and the people who didn't die it but lived to propagate their genes passed on resistance. That's the kind of PR deadly diseases are always flogging.

If you get past the titillating native-rituals material, there's more to the story:

"And then there were the wife bonuses. I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a 'bonus.'..."

"A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a 'good' school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting. Women who didn’t get them joked about possible sexual performance metrics. Women who received them usually retreated, demurring when pressed to discuss it further, proof to an anthropologist that a topic is taboo, culturally loaded and dense with meaning...."

From a NYT op-ed about the Glam SAHMs (glamorous stay-at-home-moms) of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, written by Wednesday Martin, who is identified as a writer and "social researcher." She has a memoir coming out called "Primates of Park Avenue."

4 stray thoughts:

1. The illustration at the link is really good.

2. Don't confuse this topic with the more general subject of stay-at-home mothers (a topic I prefer to call single-earner household). This is about how very rich people structure things.

3. It made me think of that excellent Woody Allen movie "Alice."

4. The book title "Primates of Park Avenue" made me think of another title that it took me a long time to drag out of the 1980s canyon of my mind: "Slaves of New York." Remember that? Tama Janowitz. That was a big deal back in the days of "Bright Lights, Big City" and "Less Than Zero." Here's the NYT review of it from 1986, by Jay McInerney (the author of "Bright Lights, Big City"):

Eleanor longs for the good old verities of marriage, the kind of legal bondage under which she'd have a few enforceable rights... Heroically passive, Eleanor has half a mind to think about doing... something. ''If I ever get some kind of job security and/or marital security, I'm going to join the feminist movement.''

When a friend calls from Boston to say she's thinking of moving back to New York and living with her old boyfriend, Eleanor advises her not to do it. She'll be a slave. ''Your only solution is to get rich, so you can get an apartment and then you can have your own slave.''

Column bemoaning "human safaris" to photograph people of the Amazon who have lived beyond contact from the outside world...

... is illustrated by a photograph of people of the Amazon who have lived beyond contact from the outside world.

Why the earliest famers were willing to put more work into the effort...

... beer!

"[T]he earliest farmers expended way more calories in growing food than they did in hunting and gathering it."

So, why do it?

These societies had seen the value of owning stuff – they were already recognizing "private property rights," [said says Samuel Bowles, the director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico]. That's a big transition from nomadic cultures, which by and large don't recognize individual property. All resources, even in modern day hunter-gatherers, are shared with everyone in the community....

[And t]he early farmers had one advantage over their nomadic cousins: Raising kids is much less work when one isn't constantly on the move. And so, they could and did have more children.

"Isn’t it odd that the true enemy of society turns out to be that guy in the office down the hall?"

John Hawks extracts a juicy bit from that NYT article about the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon.

Hawks (who's a paleoathropologist) also has nice closeup of a museum reconstruction of Homo erectus (who seems to be an unusually nice person with lovely skin).

And: A story about a monkey midwife:

I think this is cool not because it shows that monkeys need midwives (they don't) but because it shows that the behavioral flexibility that may have enabled midwifery in early humans is very extensive among primates. A delicious placental incentive may seem inventive, but humans are mystifyingly strange in being among the few mammals who don't regularly consume the placenta after birth.

Note: don't regularly. Not: don't ever. I have Googled it. I know what people do.

"[O]ne of the rare intellectual vocations that do not demand a sacrifice of one’s manhood."

= What Susan Sontag said about anthropology in 1963.

Quoted in a NYT article titled "How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist."