Loren Eiseley on Archaeology

"Archaeologists, during the course of their lives, see and hear may strange things, but the fact that they are scientific men keeps them for the most part silent.  They have good, if not superior, rationalizations for the things they do.  No layman would dare impugn their motives.  I, for example, have a certain number of skulls in my possession  As I write I can see four on the shelf above me.  At least two are hidden in my filing cabinet, and there is a beautiful fragment on my desk which is often fondled by visitors who are unaware of its human significance.

Now as it happens I am fortunate.  I practice a trade which enables me to keep these objects about in a perfectly logical and open manner.  I have not murdered to possess them, and if one or two were acquired in dark and musty places, my motives, as I have hinted, are beyond reproach.  As an archaeologist I can be both a good citizen and a frequenter of graveyards."

Human remains and the associated objects reminds me of another passage:

"It struck me that every ruined civilization is, in a sense, the mark of men trying to be human, trying to transcend themselves….none of them has quite made it, but they have each left artifacts. 

The archaeologist, it is said, is a student of the artifact.  That harsh, unlovely word, as sharply angled as a fist ax or a brick, denudes us of human sympathy.  In the eye of the public we loom, I suppose, as slightly befuddled graybeards scavenging in grave heaps.  We caw like crows over a bit of jade or a broken potsherd: we are eternally associated in the public mind with sharp-edged flints and broken statues.  The utter uselessness of the past is somehow magnificently incorporated into our activities. 

No one, I suppose, would believe that an archaeologist is a man who knows where last year’s lace valentines have gone, or that from the surface of rubbish heaps the thin and ghostly essence of things humans keeps rising through the centuries until the plaintive murmur of dead men and women may take precedence at times over the living voice.  A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally.  He will be wounded by what other men call trifles.  It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth-century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one’s head like a hall clock.  This is the price one pays for learning to read time from surfaces other than an illuminated dial.  It is the melancholy secret of the artifact, the humanly touched thing."

Quotations are from The Night Country, by Loren Eiseley

Traditional Chinese Medicine

"The logic underlying Chinese medical theory - a logic that assumes that a part can be understood only in its relation to the whole -- can also be called synthetic or dialectical.

The character for Yin originally meant the shady side of a slope.  It is associated with such qualities as cold, rest, responsiveness, passivity, darkness, interior, downward, inward, decrease, satiation, tranquility, and quiescence.  It is the end, completion, and realized fruition.

The original meaning of Yang was the sunny side of a slope.  The term implies brightness, heat, stimulation, movement, activity, excitement, vigor, exterior, upward, outward, and increase.  It is arousal, beginning, and dynamic potential.  

All things have Yin and Yang aspects....and any Yin or Yang aspect can be further divided into Yin and Yang.  

Yin and Yang mutually create, control, and transform one another.  Although Yin and Yang can be distinguished, they cannot be separated.   Yin and Yang are always subtly supporting, repairing, and transforming into one another.  This constant transformation is the source of all change.  Organic transformation can occur harmoniously in the normal course of events or sudden ruptures can occur. If Yin and Yang are unbalanced for prolonged periods of time or in an extreme manner, the resulting transformation can be drastic.  

Lao Tzu says:  

In order to expand, it is necessary to first contract.  In order to stregthen, it is necessary to first weaken.  In order to create, it is necessary to first destroy.  In order to give, it is necessary to first take.

In Chinese thought, events and phenomena unfold through a kind of spontaneous cooperation, an inner dynamic in the nature of things.  The key word is Pattern - people and things behave in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulses, but because their position in the cyclical universe and their endowment with intrinsic natures. 

The Chinese assume that the universe is continuously changing.  The cosmos itself is an integral whole, a web of interrelated things and events.  The desire for knowledge is the desire to understand the interrelationships or patterns within that web, and to become attuned to the unfolding dynamic.

A traditional Chinese landscape painting captures the essence of nature in balance and in flux.  The paiting is like the Taoist symbol, containing Yin and Yang in their proper proportions but constantly interacting and transforming into each other.  

The scene depicts a vast range of elements, from the towering mountain to the little trickling stream.  Nature is shown as a balance of the yielding Yin (foliage, water) and the unyielding Yang (rock, trees).  There are the dynamic (water, people) and the quiescent (mountains, houses); the slow (trees) and the fast (mist); the dark and the light; the solid and the liquid.  All things contain both Yin and Yang.  The water, for instance, is both yielding (Yin) and dynamic (Yang).

The picture is a totality, and each detail takes on meaning only as it participates in the whole.  The mountain is immense by virtue of its smaller foothills; the people are small by virtue of the vastness of nature.  All things are imbued with interactive qualities and dynamics in their relationships to the things around them.

The painting depicts a time and place that through their correspondence with the cosmos become timeless and placeless.  It rediscovers the elemental and continuous course of the cosmic pulsation through the figurative representation of a landscape...The tension created by the correlation between the lines and the washes, the visible and the invisible, fullness and emptiness, endows the landscape with a power to suggest more than the merely visible and open it to the life of the spirit. " 

(from p. 7-17 The Web That Has No Weaver by Ted Kaptchuk)

A Disturbing History of Nutrition Science

What is the biggest mistake scientists have ever made?  Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise, a wonderful history of the awful state of nutrition science, suggests that science's worst mistake may well be the idea that saturated fat is unhealthy.  She makes a convincing case that nutritional guidelines over the last half century, by focusing on fats rather than sugars, have resulted in the premature deaths of millions of Americans and others around the world.

Even more interesting than turning conventional wisdom on its head, this book is an eye-opening journey into how an entire field of science can be hijacked by special interests and strong personalities. Moreover, this book holds important lessons about how the process of science is still susceptible to the same biases and group-think as the rest of society.

Nina Teicholz sums up the story of how nutrition science went wrong:

"Well-intentioned experts, hastening to address growing epidemics of chronic disease, simply overinterpreted the data. Scientists hypothesized that dietary fat was to blame...  This hypothesis became accepted as truth before it was properly tested.  Public health bureaucracies adopted and enshrined this unproven dogma.  The hypothesis became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health.  And the normally self-corrected mechanism of science, which involves constantly challenging one's own beliefs, was disabled.  While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. ...Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them."  

"What I found, incredibly, was not only that it was a mistake to restrict fat but also that our fear of the saturated fats...has never been based in solid science.  A bias against these foods developed early on and became entrenched, but the evidence mustered in its support never amounted to a convincing case and has since crumbled away."

Let the sorry story of nutrition science be a lesson for the scientists and promoters of scientists in other fields.  We like to think that science is independently and objectively building a tower of knowledge for the ages, one rock at a time, but the reality is that our science is a product of our society, our beliefs, our biases, and our assumptions.

Paleo Diet Reading List

Reading about human origins can be fascinating, and informative.  It has been said that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution, and the same could be applied to diet. I originally wanted to understand the physiological biochemistry of digestion, but several textbooks later I had lots of facts but very little understanding.  While strolling at the zoo, I realized I needed textbooks that described the differences between animal digestion -- a comparative physiology textbook, perhaps.  But again, after reading all of the most popular titles, I had only scattered facts and no theory of the differences between human and animal digestion, or even between carnivore, omnivore, and vegetarian modes of sustenance.

Luckily, two Harvard professors have written books on human evolution with particular emphasis on how dietary changes made us human.  In the process, they provide the best, although somewhat contradictory, source of information on comparative dietary physiology.  Daniel Lieberman's The Story of the Human Body (2013) is a more traditional telling of human evolution, but it is written in an attempt to answer the question of how our paleo bodies have adapted (or not) to modern lifestyles.  Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009), is an extended argument concerning the importance of cooking to human evolution, but he does deal extensively with the comparative behavior and anatomy of humans, proto-humans, chimps, and other primates.  Only at the end of his book does he tackle the problem of modern dietary choices for humans, and then only as a parting shot.  John Hawkes, at the University of Wisconsin, is often mentioned as an authority on human evolution, and I would include his Great Courses lecture (2011) in this triumvirate of human evolutionary tales.

The above works often reference modern accounts of extant hunter-gatherer tribes to understand what life might have been like during the Paleolithic era.  The most notable of these books are Lee's account of the !Kung San, and I would also suggest Weston A. Price's classic Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diet and their Effects.  A modern synthesis and review of the same subject matter can be found in Lindeberg (2009).

It is interesting to compare the literature on human evolution with the diet book literature making use of ideas in human evolution.  The originator of the "Paleo Diet", Loren Cordain has several books specifying his interpretation of the evidence.  While his 2002 book specifies a diet that seems more restrictive than what I've read in Lieberman and Wrangham, I haven't had a chance to read his 2012 book yet.

1. Lieberman D. The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; 2013.
2. Wrangham R. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Profile Books; 2009.
3. Price W. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects (Hardback). Benediction Classics; 2010.
4. Lindeberg S. Food and Western Disease: Health and Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective. Wiley; 2009.
5. Lee RB. The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge University Press; 1979.
6. Cordain L, Friel J. The Paleo Diet for Athletes: The Ancient Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance. Rodale; 2012.
7. Cordain L. The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat. J. Wiley; 2002.

Paleolithic Nutrition compared to Modern American Diet

From: Lieberman D. The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; 2013.

Don't Spike Your Blood Sugar

There have been a number of scientific papers in the last couple years, and now a number of high-profile articles (like last week's Time Magazine article "Ending the War on Fat") that have found no correlation between fat -- even saturated fat -- and Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer, or heart disease. The idea that cholesterol and saturated fat are the cause of heart disease is no longer supported by the best available science.

However, there is still broad consensus among health professionals that we need to avoid processed, sugary, and high-glycemic foods. High-glycemic foods are energizing for an hour or two but then cause sleepiness and craving for more (usually high-glycemic) snack foods. These foods are dangerous because they raise blood sugar, leading to a crash afterwards, a "roller-coaster" blood sugar dynamic that promotes over-eating and a variety of diseases.

Gary Taubes, in Good Caloreis Bad Calories, explains how sugar metabolism makes you fat:

"Glycerol phosphate is produced from glucose when it is used for fuel in the fat calls and the liver, and it, too, can be burned as fuel in the cells. But glycerol phosphate is also an essential component of the process that binds three fatty acids into a triglyceride. It provides the glycerol molecule that links the fatty acids together. In other words, a product of carbohydrate metabolism --i.e. burning glucose for fuel-- is an essential component in the regulation of fat metabolism: storing fat in the fat tissue. In fact, the rate at which fatty acids are assembled into triglycerides, and so the rate at which fat accumulates in the fat tissue, depend primarily on the availability of glycerol phosphate. The more glucose that is transported into the fat cells and used to generate energy, the more glycerol phosphate will be produced. The the more glycerol phosphate produced, the more fatty acids will be assembled into triglycerides. Thus, anything that works to transport more glucose in the fat cells -- insulin, for example or rising blood sugar, will lead to the conversion of more fatty acids into triglycerides, and the storage of more calories as fat."

"So yes, dietary fat is responsible for fat accumulation, but it is carbohydrates that mediate the accumulation, and the energy balance of the body as a whole. Don't spike your blood sugar, and your body will continue burning fat, not storing it."

Wendell Berry on the Problem of Private Land Ownership

"We share a common health....

....If we have the "right to life" as we have always supposed, then that right must stand upon the further right to air, water, food, clothing, and shelter.

It follows that every person exercising the right to hold private property has an obligation to secure to the rest of us the right to live from that property...an obligation to use it in such a way as to not impair or diminish our rightful interest in it.

 But --and here is the catch-- that obligation on the part of the landowner implies a concurrent obligation on the part of society as a whole. If we give our proxy to the landowner to use-- and as is always implied, to take care of -- the land on our behalf, then we are obliged to make the landowner able to afford not only to use the land but also to care properly for it.

This is where the grossest error of our civilization shows itself. In giving a few farmers our proxies to produce food in the public behalf for very little economic return we have also given them our proxies to care for the land in the public behalf for no economic return at all. This is our so-called cheap-food policy, which is in fact an antifarming policy, an antifarmer policy, and an antiland policy.

We hold the land under a doctrine of private property that in practice acknowledges no common health."

---from Another Turn of the Crank.  Essays by Wendell Berry.

Extinctions in Australia

Australia has one of the worst extinction records, not just recently but over the last 50,000 years. Why? And would answering that question shed light on species loss around the globe? Telling a believable history based on paleontology, paleoecology, anthropology, and natural history is crucial to understand the patterns in dynamic ecological processes. Tim Flannery presents a very readable attempt in Future Eaters (1994) but the science at that time was not conclusive and too much of this book is conjecture. Chris Johnson, Professor at University of Tazmania , has finally succeeded with his Australia's Mammal Extinctions: A 50 000 Year History (2006).

Dr. Johnson describes tree major waves of extinction and concludes that new keystone predators caused every one:

1. Human Arrival ~46 Kyr
2. Aboriginal Intensification and Dingo Arrival 5 Kyr
3. White Arrival with Sheep, Rabbits, Fox, and Cats 0.2 Kyr




Australian megafauna that went extinct around 46,000 years ago. A human hunter is shown for scale in the middle.


First Wave Extinctions
46,000 years ago the first humans entered an Australia that would be unrecognizable today: lowered sea levels in the middle of the last glacial (110,000-14,000 years ago) had revealed a vast continent almost twice as large as the one on maps today. It wasn't just the land that as bigger. Dozen of species of giant kangarooos and other marsupials filled every niche from large giraffe-like creatures to marsupial hippos, elephants, and even marsupial lions. On top of all that there were marsupial tapirs and a giant 500 pound burrowing wombat. Not to mention a super-lizard that would dwarf modern komodo dragons.


Extinct Australian Megafauna: A Marsupial Lion, Thylalaceo, attacking a mega-Kangaroo. credit

Dr. Johnson explains the pattern of extinction by noting that these animals all had low birth rates while the remaining animals were fecund enough to tolerate increased human predation.

Figure 6.3 From Johnson (2006). Much smaller and lighter animals went extinct in Madagascar and Australia than in North and South America, but this discrepancy can be explained by showing that all three extinction events had similar Fecundity to Extinction relationships.

Survivors included possums, gliders, koalas, bandicoots, and billabies, the numbat, marsupial moles, and the thylacine (AKA Tazmanian Tiger) and the Tazmanian Devil. All of these species continued to cohabit Australia with early humans up until...

Second Wave Extinctions
In the middle of the Holocene, about 5,000 years ago (and 5,000 years after the end of the last Ice Age), both the thylacine and the Tazmanian Devil went extinct on the Australian mainland. What changed? Perhaps the end of the ice age brought shrinking coastlines and increased crowding of Aboriginals onto less and less good land ("Intensification"). Or perhaps it was the arrival of another keystone predator, the dingo. More info.


Figure 11.4 from Johnson (2006) showing populations of rat-kangaroos and foxes in a) southern, b) central and c) northern New South Wales. Rat-kangaroos solid lines, foxes dashed lines.


Third Wave Extinctions
Whatever the causes of the first two extinction waves, they left humans and dingos as the only keystone predators. When Europeans arrived 200 years ago and began a program of dingo eradication and Aboriginal resettlement, many prey species populations (such as kangaroo and emu) exponentially increased. Unfortunately, at the same time, two new predators were introduced: the fux (Vulpes vulpes) and the house cat. Without keystone predators to control these "mesopredators", the fox and cat swept over the Australian countryside, extincting any native animals that fit into their mouth (key size was about 500g-5kg). Especially hard hit were ground-dwellers in open habitats. The added environmental changes wrought by widespread clearing for sheep ranching and the invasion of rabbits breeding like, well, rabbits, was enough to bring Australia's ecosystems to their knees. Dr. Johnson describes this process as "hyperpredation", when a generalist predator (like fox or cat) can build up to high population levels eating common prey (rabbits) but then turns to rarer species when rabbit population fluctuates.


Figure 12.3 From Johnson (2006) showing interactions that led to Hyperpredation on native mammals.

In general, predators can exert huge effects on ecological communities: "The devastating impact of new predators and the pervasive effects of shifts in the balance of existing predator-prey interactions are the themes that underline the whole history of extinctions in Australia for the last 50,000 years." The surprising conclusion: dingoes control should be stopped so that dingoes, the last remaining top-predator, can control foxes and cats. According to Dr. Johnson, increased dingo population may be Australia's last hope for a balanced ecosystem.

Addendum
Dr. Johnson considers environmental (climate) change hypotheses, but I wish he had dealt more with the concomitant changes to vegetation communities and ecosystem processes. For example, Loreau and Schmitz both emphasize how changes in herbivore populations can have large indirect effects on nutrient cycling that then feed back into increased changes in vegetation communities. Dr. Johnson does note that people did not seem to change fire frequency/intensity until Aboriginal Intensification, but the data for this seem weak. His Figure 7.1 shows that megafauna extinction removed more than 75% of animal biomass from Australian ecosystems. This must have had a huge effect. But, even today, it can be difficult to document the interactions and feedbacks between herbivores and plants, so the failure to find evidence of this 45,000 years ago is not surprising.

Example of how megafauna are still relevant in Australia today.