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.

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.

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.

Vojtech Novotny is a Czech tropical biologist who established a research station in a remote part of Papua New Guinea, where he involves local tribes-people in his work. In Notebooks from New Guinea, his latest book, we find inspiring descriptions of the rainforest and its peoples alongside bemused and affectionate accounts of his fellow-scientists, and of Western tourists. In the original post below, he describes a medical emergency in the village where he was researching. Be sure to check out the other posts in this series, which will continue all week, here.

Exotic peoples strike us as exotic chiefly because of their differences in taste, as exemplified to perfection in the morning process by which one finally decides whether to wear one’s Adidas baseball cap to work, or one’s coronet of cassowary feathers. We are fascinated by differences of opinion as to the ideal morphology of headgear and other such frivolities and they have become the driving force of the tourist industry.

However, our fascination with cultural diversity in no way prevents us from expecting that on such graver questions as life, health, sickness or death we will be more at one with our exotic friends than when it comes to choosing a hat. We take it for granted that, deep inside, each and every one of us is furnished with that universal mental organ known as ‘common sense’.

A fellow tribesman falling seriously ill and needing to be helped is such a basic crisis scenario that even in our multicultural world there should be little room for misunderstanding. Speedy medical assistance is also organised in much the same way all over the world – you dial a particular number and in next to no time an ambulance or helicopter shows up to whisk the patient to hospital.

We have instituted the same principle at the New Guinea village where, alongside the natives, we are researching the ecology of the tropical rainforest. Admittedly, the patient has first to be conveyed fifteen kilometres through the jungle to the nearest passable road, but once there, we can summon an off-roader by satellite phone and have the patient taken to Madang, which is all of 100 km away, but it does have a hospital. To our surprise, even this apparently simple system may be vitiated if the ambulance and the patient happen not to come from the same tribe or continent.

Our village headman, Jason, asked for the urgent transfer to Madang hospital of his first wife, Mary, after she fainted from the pain of a neglected breast cancer. Our car promptly deposited her there, but Mary, fearful in a strange environment, took herself off to a rural mission hospital instead, where they weren’t equipped for complicated cases. After several days when no one took a look at her and she herself started feeling better, she returned to the village.

We learned of the failure of the hospital mission only after Mary fainted again, her cancer having advanced further and the pain being now even greater. Jason suggested waiting until she felt better and capable of making it to the road herself. We were far from certain that this situation would materialise, so we proposed she should be stretchered to the road then taken on to hospital by car. Jason hesitated, and finally came up with the excuse that the village didn’t have enough willing porters. So we suggested that porters be paid our standard rate of 25p per kilo of load.

Only then did Jason admit, with some reluctance, that tribal custom made the carrying of a woman by men taboo. Allegedly, his own father had once broken the taboo and had died shortly thereafter. This is a generalisation of a rule that states that anything that a woman steps over is unclean for men. Thus the men of the village, including Mary’s own husband, would not carry Mary to the road even if her life were placed at risk by their refusal.

The territory of the village is also home to incomers of the Simbai tribe. They recognise no such transport taboo and so were prepared to carry Mary to the road, yet not even that proved doable. Not only must men not carry a woman, but a woman must not be carried by men, without the risk of some catastrophe of cosmic proportions.

The taboo does not apply to women porters, so if Mary were to be borne along by local women, the order of the universe would not be jeopardised. There was no technical problem to the exercise either, since the women, hung about with several children of various sizes, regularly haul heavy loads of firewood, sweet potatoes or other agricultural products. Our suggestion that they might, by way of an exception, swap their habitual loads for a woman on a stretcher was treated as utterly absurd and the women refused to contemplate it for a single second as even a hypothetical possibility. Nothing of the sort had ever happened in the village, so in principle the whole thing must be impossible. We were not in the least surprised by this attitude, since we already had first-hand experience of the extreme conservatism of the women of the village and their total resistance to any kind of innovation. This included several years of vainly attempting to teach them to cook such exotic things as rice for our staff.

There could finally be no doubting that the only way to get Mary out of the village was on her own two feet. This was eventually achieved and we could deliver her to the hospital. The very next day she was visited there by the village magician, who tried to persuade her to leave the hospital, since hospital treatment and other such extravagances would only bring all manner of disasters down on her village. The magician had been sent in by Jason’s youngest, that is, his third, wife. We the bystanders, whether Papua New Guinean, European or American, were united in believing this move to be a wily attempt by the third wife to be rid of the first. Mary obviously thought as much herself, since she sent the magician packing and underwent an operation the very next day.

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.

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.

I first learned the Donner Party story as a teenager hiking over Donner Pass and their harrowing fight for survival has always stayed with me. So you can imagine how excited I was to read Ethan Rarick’s Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West. Rarick provides an intimate portrait of the Donner Party and their unimaginable ordeal in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We were lucky enough to have radio host Dorian Devins interview Rarick and two clips from that interview appear below. Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for more audio clips from Rarick’s interview.

“The Basic Story”

(transcription after the jump.)

Rarick: When I started I knew the story in the way that most Americans do. They were trapped in the West, they eventually had to resort to cannibalism, some survived. But I didn’t really know the details and one thing I didn’t realize is how long the entrapment continued and how long the rescue efforts continued. In fact there were multiple rescue parties that came in and took people out and as the rescue parties came in the only way to get out, of course, was to walk out, you had to hike out. Obviously you couldn’t bring in a MedEvac helicopter the way we would today. And so there were constantly decisions being made, in effect triaging and deciding “well, this person can make it out, this person can’t, they’re gonna have to stay and wait for another party or they may just stay and die,” which certainly happened as well. And, those moments of division of families, people deciding which children will go and which will stay, or a husband or wife will go and one will stay, those are just incredibly gripping moments of the story to me.

“Cannibalism”

Dorian: Was it difficult for you to read and/or write about the actual act of cannibalism?

Rarick: I must say that I don’t find the cannibalism to be morally difficult. It’s obviously not something one wants to think about. To me these people were doing exactly what they had to do. They had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. There were people who blamed them later, but looking back at it now, I can’t blame them. I think that that’s a logical thing to do. And I’ve thought about this and if I were in that circumstance I hope I would actually have the courage to do that if I had to. And if I had died, I’d hope that people would, if necessary, use my body so that they could live. I think it’s just a logical, practical thing. I don’t think they had any choice. And one of the interesting things I learned is that this was sort of the 19th century view of cannibalism. Cannibalism was, I don’t want to say common, but it was not unheard of amongst sailors in that era because sailors’ ships would sink and they would be out in lifeboats and they would be there for months and obviously there was no GPS, no radio, no way to rescue them. So they’d float around for months, and cannibalism was understood to be a necessary act of survival and usually there was no great shame or no great later condemnation attached to it. It was just seen as what people had to do, and as I wrote about it I came to see it in the same way. I don’t blame the members of the Donner party for resorting to cannibalism at all. In fact I think, in a lot of ways, it showed a lot of courage. It showed they were willing to do what they had to do to survive.

Aaron Filler, MD, PhD, FRCS is the author of Do You Really Need Back Surgery?, and an evolutionary biologist who studied under Stephen Gould, Ernst Mayr, David Pilbeam, Russell Tuttle, and Irven DeVore.  Filler is now a medical director at the Institute for Spinal Disorders, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles. In the article below he looks at what makes humans- “human.”

OED: “Human”– Adjective – Of, belonging to, or characteristic of mankind, distinguished from animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright posture.

It’s easy enough for anyone to tell the difference between a human and an ape today, but how easy would it have been six million years ago, around the time of the split between the lineage of modern humans and the lineage of the chimpanzees. If you were to see the common ancestor would you think “human” or would you think “ape?”

Over the past 50 years there has been an understanding in the scientific community that the common ancestor would look somewhat like a knuckle-walking chimpanzee and that the various descendant lineages on the human side would more or less gradually begin to stand upright and walk bipedally on two legs. The common ancestor was a lowly quadrupedal ape, but our direct predecessors then gloriously stood upright on their two legs and eventually strode their way across the border between animality and humanity.

For many years, there was no solid fossil evidence to support this understanding. Now we have dozens of relevant fossils but they all seem to show that this scenario is wrong. In fact, the common ancestor may well have looked much more like a human than like an ape.

This sharpens the question, – is there a quintessential aspect of an animal that makes it a human? Can this be identified on a discreet biological basis so that the relevant critical gene changes can be spotted by genome researchers?

This year, it has become apparent that a new morphogenetic basis for defining humanity may have become known (Homeotic Evolution in the Mammalia… a Morphogenetic Basis for Human Origins – PloS ONE 2007). It is a dramatic restructuring of the lumbar vertebra that inverts the mechanics of the spine and undoubtedly underlies our upright bipedal posture. The problem is that the new definition reveals that some of the apes appear to have descended from upright bipedal (human) ancestors.

To some extent, we can dodge the issue of what to call these bipedal ancestor species by the use of terms like: “proto-human,” “early human,” “ancestral human,” “hominine,” or “hominid.” This doesn’t really help very much since we still want to know if the common ancestor six million years ago looked more like an ape or more like a “proto-human.” Terms like hominine and hominid have increasingly been rendered unusable for this purpose because they are based on formal systematic family and sub-family names and their usage is in constant flux – they have both been used recently to describe groups that include apes. Therefore, whether “proto-“, “ancestral” or “early” many of the upright bipedal ancestor species get to be called some kind of “human.”

When we learn about the stress on the lumbar curvature in pregnant australopithecine females who must walk bipedally with their growing abdominal weight and girth we understand that these creatures share a quintessentially human problem with our modern species (see Evolutionary Origins of Back Pain, and also Lumbar Lordosis in Pregnancy). Understanding a human as a type of animal with our body plan (bauplan) is what underlies this perception.

If you could see Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) walking along 3.2 million years ago with her chimp-like head, but upright bipedal body – many of us would think “human!” But when did the human body plan first appear and is the body plan alone sufficient to win the sacred moniker of “human?”

The OED definition requires articulate speech and superior mental development to identify a human. It is not too surprising that the spine could hold the keys to upright posture, but what about the rest of what makes us human? It is now completely clear that species such as Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) had brains and skulls little different from some modern apes, yet there is universal agreement that australopithecines are not apes.

Video from a recent study showing that chimpanzees consistently outperform human college students on a complex computer based eidetic memory task shows that the common ancestor’s intellect was at least respectable. However, despite being “human,” australopithecines almost certainly did not have articulate speech or “superior” mental development.

It seems that we are unavoidably forced to abandon articulate language and superior intellect as requirements for our critical definition of a human. If Homo erectus or Homo habilis couldn’t engage in ‘articulate speech’ are they species of apes? What about Australopithecus africanus? The search for the essence of our humanity now focuses upon the anatomy and genetics of the spine.

We are all interested in our spine when we suffer from back pain – but it is increasingly also clear that vertebrae are more important than anything else in defining humanity.

It is not surprising that human lumbar vertebrae are radically different in architecture and function than the lumbar vertebrae of a monkey. What is surprising is that all of the major transformations that underlie the uniqueness of the human lumbar vertebrae first appear in the fossil record 21.6 million years ago in a fascinating hominoid species Morotopithecus bishopi.

Recently, I have pointed out that a critical single change in one of our hominoid morphogenes could have generated our unique human body plan. This body plan appears to be almost entirely a consequence of this single morphogenetic evolutionary event. It generated the unusual vertebral structure first seen in Morotopithecus that is still preserved in its original primitive form in modern humans. The article is published in PLoS ONE (the brash new online competitor to Science and Nature).

As I outline in Do You Really Need Back Surgery – the spine is a structure made up of repeating segments and those segments have an incredibly ancient origin in the history of animal biology. Modern genetics has revealed that vertebrae are distant echoes of the grand evolutionary events of the Cambrian Explosion that took place some 522 million years ago. A major new sub-field in genetics analyzes the morphogenetic homeotic genes that organize the shape and growth of body segments and this sub-field has grown explosively over the past twenty years. It is moving relentlessly towards the very center of evolution biology.

The importance of segments in biological structure first entered the scientific mainstream in the biological writings of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the 1790s and reached a first pinnacle of attention at the great academy debate between Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and George Cuvier in 1830 (see my recent books “The Upright Ape” – New Page Books 2007 with a foreword by David Pilbeam, Dean of Harvard College, and Axial Character Seriation in Mammals, and also see Toby Appel’s “The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate” – OUP 1987). “Homeotics” is a term that describes the study of how the segments of the animal body are differentiated from one another by their genes.

Only a tiny fraction of our DNA is concerned with organizing the physical shape of our bodies, but these “morphogenes” are very important in evolutionary biology. For one thing, their effects are virtually all we can see when we look at a fossil. Two other aspects of morphogenes are quite stunning relative to many other genes – firstly, they are spectacularly conservative across time – the gene complexes that determine the organization of insect segments have an astonishing level of similarity with the ones that control the organization of mammalian vertebral segments. Secondly, a very small change in a single morphogene can have astonishing effects on the appearance of the resulting adult animal. A single DNA base-pair changes and a fruit fly has fully formed legs on its face, etc.

This second issue pertains to the fact that morphogenes control the organization of complex body modules. The result is that a small single genetic change can generate an entirely new type of animal in a single generation. For this reason the role of sudden change in biological evolution and the evolution of morphogenes have become bedfellows. In our new definition of humans, I propose that our body plan arose through a small change in a Pax morphogene and that the upright bipedal body form arose suddenly in a single generation rather than gradually under pressure from natural selection across millions of years.

Within biology there has been an epic intellectual debate that has persisted unabated across the 148 years of our post-Darwinian era. Is all of evolution painted out in gradual shifts of small details or are there sometimes sudden transforming events in which new kinds of animals arise? This debate carried Stephen Jay Gould onto the front cover of Newsweek in 1982 and lay behind decades of conflict between Gould and Ernst Mayr. Most recently, the rising primacy of morphogenetics has made Sean Carroll one of the leading voices in evolutionary theory (The Making of the Fittest, From DNA to Diversity) putting him at the opposite end of the biological spectrum from devout traditional gradualists such as Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene ).

Is Darwinian gradualism best suited for fine tuning little details such as the shape of the beaks of finches, or is it so powerful that all change in biology are always an accumulation of a large number of small gradual alterations? Goethe was the first to point out striking evidence that animals and plants were assembled from repeating elements. Geoffroy suggested a fundamental similarity between insect segments and vertebrae – an outrageous idea that more or less ruined him academically, but an idea we now know to be not only true, but extremely fundamental to understanding change in animal form. Today we call these biological modules and their proper study is through Modularity Theory (Modularity in Development and Evolution – Univ. of Chicago Press 2004).

In The Upright Ape I point out two convincing examples of sudden “non-Darwinian” evolution. The first of these concerns the origin of a group we now call the Bilaterians because of their bilateral symmetry – this includes the insects and the vertebrates and a wide variety of other groups and phyla that have right-left paired limbs and sense organs. Prior to the Bilaterian origin there were animals with no particular symmetry (unicellular), branched animals (sponges) and radially symmetric animals (jellyfish). No one really argues that the original “Ur-Bilaterian” arose gradually, across millions of years as a unilaterally structured animal lineage gradually grew a right side attached to its already fully formed left side. No – as I show in my PLoS ONE paper, our morphogenes are subject to duplication and mirroring. The first bilaterally symmetric animal in the Bilaterian lineage was one individual born with a right-left body duplication. Suddenly, without any roll for variation, natural selection, shifting gene frequencies etc – we had the first Bilaterian. The ancestor of all the bilaterally symmetric phyla including insects and us. This is the proto-typical non-Darwinian sudden evolutionary event. Darwinian evolution then engages to optimize, fine tune and diversify the results of this major innovation.

The second major event I point to is the origin of vertebrates (technically – deuterostomes). In most Bilaterians, the nerve cord is along the front surface of the animal and the digestive tract is along the back. Geoffroy argued that vertebrates emerged from invertebrates by being flipped 180 degrees. We now know that the ‘dorso-ventral read out gradient’ in the embryo was indeed inverted at the time of vertebrate origins. It was not a matter of gradually shifting a few degrees every million years until 180 degrees were reached. No, a single offspring was born with a small morphogenetic gene change that resulted in an upside down animal – natural selection played a role in that this “hopeful monster” survived and founded a lineage.

In this way, not only Bilaterians, but then Vertebrates came to be through non-Darwinian events. Like Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics – these two modes of biological change appear to co-exist. Most of the time we see only Darwinian evolution, but this is just an approximation of the fine tuning effects of natural selection upon the body plan generating capabilities of the morphogenes.

In human origins, I have pointed out that the fundamental mechanical architecture of the lumbar spine in most primates underwent a 180 degree flip in Morotopithecus bishopi in the Early Miocene of 21.6 million years ago. Technically speaking this “septo-neural transposition” (SNT) is the fundamental synapomorphy (shared derived feature) that defines the hominiform (human shaped) lineage.

This appears to be a non-Darwinian event leading to the first ape child with a human body plan – standing fully upright in a family of “proconsulid” apes that were fully quadrupedal. In my recent video “Hominiform Progression” I show that in one of the earliest groups of hominoids to branch off after Morotopithecus, the infants do the same thing that human infants do – they teach themselves spontaneously to walk bipedally as their primary form of locomotion. Since all of the hominiformid hominoids that descend from the lineage of Morotopithecus share the same vertebral transformation and since the two widely separated groups have infants that spontaneously walk bipedally, I have pointed out that the Morotopithecus babies of 21 million years ago probably did the same thing – taught themselves to walk bipedally.

I have categorized hominiform species as being “eubipedal hominiforms” if their principal means of locomotion on the ground or large branches is bipedalism (humans and hylobatids) and as being “metabipedal hominiforms” if they only occasionally use bipedalism but have primarily replaced this with knuckle walking or fist walking in a diagonal or horizontal posture when traveling on the ground (chimps, gorillas and orangutans) (see the Hominiform Progression video).

Among the eubipedal hominiforms, the hylobatids have diverged to take on brachiation (arm swinging) as their primary means of travel – even though they are better bipeds than humans when walking on vines and branches (see figure above). However, any eubipedal hominiform that does most of its locomotion via bipedalism should probably be called a human. This may well include Morotopithecus (apparently not all that well adapted for arm swinging) as well as other hominoids from before the chimp-human split such as Oreopithecus, Pierolapithecus, Orrorin and Sahelanthropus.

On this basis, I suggest that there has been a continuous lineage of species that are primarily bipedal with the human body plan from 21 million years ago to today. The various lineages leading to chimps, gorillas, and orangutans will have branched off and evolved their unique types of diagonal and horizontal body posture millions of years after the emergence of their human ancestors. The relatively great success of the “human” hominiforms is suggested by the fact that all of the fossils we find appear to be from upright bipeds.

Among the most interesting of the apparently upright bipedal fossil hominoids is Sahelanthropus from seven million years ago (The First Human). It appears to meet the criteria for being called a human just as Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) does. However it seems to have lived before the chimp-human split at 6 million years ago as suggested by molecular projections. On this basis I have argued that there appears to be a human ancestor for the chimpanzees (anthopology.net).

So far, all of the fossils of hominiforms predating the chimp-human split that have been found are from upright, hindlimb supported species – this includes Morotopithecus, Oreopithecus and Pierolapithecus based on vertebrae, Orrorin based on the femur and Sahelanthropus based on the skull. No fossil evidence of knuckle-walking ancestors has been discovered. Many of these “pre-split” hominiform species appear to meet a new definition of a human – a hominifom hominoid having the SNT spinal trait that retains bipedalism as its primary mode of locomotion. Therefore all of the lineages of apes alive today may have descended from human ancestors.

Aaron Filler, MD, PhD, FRCS is an evolutionary biologist who studied under Stephen Gould, Ernst Mayr, David Pilbeam, Russell Tuttle, and Irven DeVore and who is now a medical director at the Institute for Spinal Disorders, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles

Martin Jones, author of Feast: Why Humans Share Food is the George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Cambridge, and specializes in the study of the fragmentary archaeological remains of early food. Feast reconstructs the development of the meal from chimpanzees at a kill to university professors at a formal feast. Jones has a knack for explaining how food has affected both our society and ecology. In the excerpt below he shows how the instinct to share is more biological than we realize.

Food and sex
Parental care quite often displays features in common with courtship. It is as if the parental behaviour in caring for a young child is ‘borrowed’ by courting couples. This is certainly true of the meeting of mouths or beaks during food-sharing. A very wide range of birds, from ravens to parrots, herring gulls to woodpeckers, pass food from beak to beak, not just from parent to offspring, but between courting couples. In courtship, the actual transfer of food may have disappeared, and affection be communicated by the meeting of mouths alone. A sea lion will rub snouts with its young offspring, and employ the same behaviour during courtship. A female shrew will allow saliva to be licked from its mouth, by its young offspring, or alternatively by a courting male. In some human societies, the kiss-feeding of infants is known, and the behaviour may also occur without the actual transfer of food. In other human societies, mouth to mouth kissing becomes the sole reserve of courtship.

The intimate relationship between feeding and courtship may be understood in the evolutionary context of reproductive success, but sexual encounter is not invariably connected to courtship and mating. Food and sex may also come together in a more immediate way, through the sensual pleasure that each provides. Indeed, the one may be implicitly or explicitly traded for the other. We can observe this in our own species, and in another of our close relatives, a species in the same genus as the chimpanzee, and sometimes referred to as the ‘pygmy chimpanzee’. It is better known as the bonobo.

This diminutive primate, firrst mistaken for an immature chimp, was only recognized as an independent species in 1933. Since then, its study has revealed a number of similarities to humans in terms of sexual behaviour. Females are sexually receptive throughout their cycle. A number of sexual positions are adopted, involving both same-sex and mixed-sex unions, and are used pleasurably to relieve tension and generally socialize. Not surprisingly, many bonobo activities, including the sharing of food, involve some aspect of sex. Field researchers in the Lomako forest of central Zaire carried their dictaphone, camcorder, portable balance, and tape measure to the feeding grounds of the Eyengo community of bonobos. They watched closely and recorded as these animals sought out and then shared breadfruits, the occasional catch of squirrel or some other small prey, and charted the associated behaviour, which was frequently sexual. The most common behaviour was the rubbing of genitals between two females as a prelude to sharing the breadfruit’s tasty orange seeds. Copulation was also a recurrent element of negotiations over food, though not always on equal terms. One of their records describes the sustained sexual activity between a vigorously begging female, and a male in possession of food. After seven successive copulations, he still would not give her a bite of his breadfruit.

This may all seem a long way from the Cambridge college feast, but that meal too displays an intimate association with sex, not by way of its engagement, but conversely of its prohibition. Acts of sex are commonly excluded from contemporary human meals, and for several centuries Cambridge college meals placed certain limits on such possibilities by excluding one sex altogether. When in the 1960s Jane Goodall arrived in Cambridge to undertake her doctoral research, she was not eligible to enrol at the college of her supervisor, and certainly not to join him at the feasts of his own college. Had she lived half a century earlier, she would not have been eligible to join the Cambridge academic community at all. Half a century earlier still, the fellows dining at college feasts would have been expected to abstain from sex and matrimony altogether.

Meals that are as strictly bounded by moral code are by no means confined to these rather rarefied circumstances, but are widespread among human societies around the world. Indeed, human meals of all kinds are framed within moral codes about sex, age, rank, and ethnicity, and the diners do not typically sense that these rules are negotiable. They are set at some other time, by some other authority, part human and part divine. The rules of conduct are passed down from each generation to the next.

This seems to mark us apart from our closest relatives. Chimps and bonobos clearly have a social structure and a mutual sense of rank. They evidently move and feed in groups that are broadly single sex from time to time. Our general sense, nonetheless, is of a series of strategies that are negotiable, that can be constantly reassembled in different ways in different places. It may normally be the case that 3 year-olds feed with their mother, but the ‘lightly parented’ Pom may nonetheless wander off to join a ‘power feast’. It may generally be true that the males do the hunting, and share the kill widely, while the female chimps fish for termites and gather, eating in intimate groups of kin. However, such females as Passion also hunted occasionally, and some plant foods have been shared beyond the family. The lives of chimps and bonobos are framed by two interwoven strands of social norm and ecological reality. Within that Xuid frame, they inhabit their bounded ecosystems amply and Xexibly, and with far less instruction from the previous generation. Contemporary humans inhabit a much more open and global ecosystem, but through the bounds of a more rigid social ‘architecture’. The use of the word ‘architecture’ emphasizes that these bounds have a permanency, and a source beyond those who move within them, and passed down in detail from one generation to the next. The architectural spaces of the modern human world separate our activities into different types. In some spaces, we are social persons, listening to each other’s words and music, creating and consuming cultural artifacts. In other spaces, we are biological organisms, taking care of bodily needs sleeping, defecating, washing, and recovering from illness. Elsewhere we are economic beings, turning the soil, working the machine, creating the wealth that underpins our existence as social persons or biological organisms. However, some of our activities refuse to be thus compartmented, to be removed to separate realms of existence. These are activities in which person and organism remain intimately connected within a common whole. For all their social shaping and ritualization, they remain as gateways that interconnect our compartmented selves, points at which social person and biological organism inextricably combine.

Yesterday we did a Q & A with Douglas P. Fry author of Beyond War: The Human Potential For Peace. Fry, a renowned anthropologist and a leading authority on aggression, conflict, and conflict resolution, weighs in on judicial systems below.

Today, we take the courts, police, and prisons for granted. As citizens of nation-states, we accept that the administration of justice lies in the hands of the justice system and rarely “take justice into our own hands.” This dramatically reduces the amount of violence in society. Thus a homicide in a modern state rarely leads to a revenge homicide. When it does, the judicial system treats the act of vengeance as a new crime. States claim the right and duty to deliver justice.

A cross-cultural comparison of justice-seeking–one of the many topics explored in Beyond War–reveals that self-redress is most common in societies that lack a strong centralized authority. An anecdote recounted by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon highlights the difference between seeking justice via revenge and the adjudicatory mechanisms typical of states. “A particularly acute insight into the power of law to thwart killing for revenge was provided to me by a young Yanomamö man in 1987. He had been taught Spanish by missionaries and sent to the territorial capital for training in practical nursing. There he discovered police and laws. He excitedly told me that he had visited the town’s largest pata (the territorial governor) and urged him to make law and police available to his people so that they would not have to engage any longer in their wars of revenge and have to live in constant fear. Many of his close kinsmen had died violently and had, in turn, exacted lethal revenge; he worried about being a potential target of retaliations….”

Anthropologist E. Adamson Hoebel studied justice-seeking among the Comanche. As a society lacking a central governing authority, the Comanche system also relied on each aggrieved individual pursuing his own justice. Hoebel draws a parallel between this self-redress system and international relations. Comanche justice-seeking is “…exactly comparable to that observed among nations which recognize certain practices of international law, but which reserve to themselves the sovereign right to resort to force if things don’t suit them. Then, in the words of [a Comanche man named] Post Oak Jim, ‘Lots of trouble, lots of people hurt’.”

A major problem with a self-redress system is that one person’s, or one county’s, “justice” may be perceived by the recipient as “un-just,” as an unwarranted or over-zealous attack. This is one reason why self-redress can lead to the escalation of conflict between individuals or between nations. Consider the following example from anthropologist Jan Brögger’s fieldwork in southern Italy. To make charcoal, Domenico cut down some trees along the property line he shared with Guiseppe. Guiseppe requested some of the charcoal, thinking he had partial claim to this common resource, but Domenico refused to give him any. As a result of an ensuing argument, Guiseppe became furious and stole some of Domenico’s rabbits. Domenico retaliated by cutting down Guiseppe’s vineyard late one night. Ultimately, an enraged Guiseppe killed Domenico. It is easy to predict the occurrence of similar escalation scenarios between nuclear powers in the future–with much graver consequences–if we continue on the path that accepts international self-redress.

Anthropology shows that with increasing authority and leadership, adjudication of disputes in court becomes feasible, largely eliminating justice seeking through self-redress. Herein lies one lesson with potential for moving humanity beyond war: The types of judicial principles currently used within nation-states could be applied among nation-states to create institutions for resolving disputes and assuring international justice that do not rely on each nation’s self-claimed right to use force. This judicial solution has been implemented repeatedly within nation-states as an alternative to self-redress. As explored in Beyond War, applying this tested principle at the international level offers a viable alternative to the global self-redress war system that continues to result in “lots of trouble, lots of people hurt.”