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

Is it possible to discover the missing link?

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

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Can scientists draw firm conclusions from fossil finds?

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

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Neandertal communication must have been different from modern language. To repeat a point made often in this book, Neandertals were not a stage of evolution that preceded modern humans. They were a distinct population that had a separate evolutionary history for several hundred thousand years, during which time they evolved a number of derived characteristics not shared with Homo sapiens sapiens. At the same time, a continent away, our ancestors were evolving as well. Undoubtedly both Neandertals and Homo sapiens sapiens continued to share many characteristics that each retained from their common ancestor, including characteristics of communication. To put it another way, the only features that we can confidently assign to both Neandertals and Homo sapiens sapiens are features inherited from Homo heidelbergensis. If Homo heidelbergensis communicated via modern style words and modern syntax, then we can safely attribute these to Neandertals as well. Most scholars find this highly unlikely, largely because Homo heidelbergensis brains were slightly smaller than ours and smaller than Neandertals’, but also because the archaeological record of Homo heidelbergensis is much less ‘modern’ than either ours or Neandertals’. Thus, we must conclude that Neandertal communication had evolved along its own path, and that this path may have been quite different from the one followed by our ancestors. The result must have been a difference far greater than the difference between Chinese and English, or indeed between any pair of human languages. Specifying just how Neandertal communication differed from ours may be impossible, at least at our current level of understanding. But we can attempt to set out general features of Neandertal communication based on what we know from the comparative, fossil, and archaeological records.

As we have tried to show in previous chapters, the paleoanthropological record of Neandertals suggests that they relied heavily on two styles of thinking – expert cognition and embodied social cognition. These, at least, are the cognitive styles that best encompass what we know of Neandertal daily life. And they do carry implications for communication. Neandertals were expert stone knappers, relied on detailed knowledge of landscape, and a large body of hunting tactics. It is possible that all of this knowledge existed as alinguistic motor procedures learned through observation, failure, and repetition. We just think it unlikely. If an experienced knapper could focus the attention of a novice using words it would be easier to learn Levallois. Even more useful would be labels for features of the landscape, and perhaps even routes, enabling Neandertal hunters to refer to any location in their territories. Such labels would almost have been required if widely dispersed foraging groups needed to congregate at certain places (e.g., La Cotte). And most critical of all, in a natural selection sense, would be an ability to indicate a hunting tactic prior to execution. These labels must have been words of some kind. We suspect that Neandertal words were always embedded in a rich social and environmental context that included gesturing (e.g., pointing) and emotionally laden tones of voice, much as most human vocal communication is similarly embedded, a feature of communication probably inherited from Homo heidelbergensis.

At the risk of crawling even further out on a limb than the two of us usually go, we make the following suggestions about Neandertal communication:

1)  Neandertals had speech. Their expanded Broca’s area in the brain, and their possession of a human FOXP2 gene both suggest this. Neandertal speech was probably based on a large (perhaps huge) vocabulary – words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and emotions. We have shown that Neandertal expertise was largely based on long-term memory. Much of this store of information was in the form of procedures, but we suspect an equally large part of this ‘how to’ information existed as verbal knowledge in the form of terms.

2)  Many of these words also existed in stock sayings, also held in long-term memory, much like the idioms and adages in modern language (the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” variety).

3)  Speech depended heavily on environmental and social information to disambiguate word clusters. Clues from context can be very effective. U.S. readers may remember a television commercial in which four young men riding in a car each used only a single word, “dude”, and yet managed to have an intelligible conversation (for themselves and the listener).

4)  Neandertal speech regularly used questions, commands, exclamations, and perhaps directional reference (indicatives). The differences may have been marked via ‘aspect’ words, or morphological rules, or even grammatical rules. But the difference might also have been delivered through context or change in tone of voice, or even gesture.

5)  Neandertal speech was capable of describing new situations, as when they juxtaposed terms for animals and places that they had not combined before. So at least in this sense, their speech must have been able to express new thoughts, the linguists’ productivity. But given its likely heavy reliance on long-term memory, their productivity was probably limited to reshuffling a very large body of lexical elements and phrases.

This communication system would have been capable of delivering a very large amount of information in context, but would have been less capable than modern language of long range reference in the absence of appropriate cues. Neandertal language was direct and task relevant. It was capable of referring to events in the past, or future, or at distant places, but only in ways connected to a context shared with the listener. There is no reason to think that Neandertals created elaborate stories or myths. Recall that Neandertals appear not to have used fire in the same social way that modern humans do. Moreover, they had few interactions with neighboring territorial communities, and therefore no reason to have modes of speech that could be used to interact with strangers, or even acquaintances.

The picture of Neandertal speech we have just presented is a minimal one based on what we know about Neandertal life from the paleoanthropological record. Neandertal speech may have been more powerful and subtle than this picture suggests. It may have included features quite foreign to modern language that evolved in the Neandertal lineage since the time of Homo heidelbergensis. There just is no evidence that requires anything beyond the features we have presented.

The above post is an excerpt from the recently published How To Think Like a Neandertal by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge. Thomas Wynn is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Frederick L. Coolidge is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Wynn and Coolidge are co-authors of The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking and co-editors (with Sophie A. de Beaune) of Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Many people have been wrongly executed for practicing witchcraft — from ancient times to the present day. But were all of the accused innocent? Malcolm Gaskill addresses this question in the following excerpt from Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction.

In 2004, workmen digging in Greenwich, near London, uncovered a sealed stone bottle that rattled and splashed when they shook it. It was sent to a laboratory where X-rays revealed metal objects wedged in the neck, suggesting that it had been buried upside down, and a scan showed it to be half filled with liquid. Chemical analysis confirmed this was human urine containing nicotine and brimstone. When the cork was removed, scientists discovered iron nails, brass pins, hair, fingernail parings, a pierced leather heart, and what they believed might be navel fluff.

What had gone through the mind of whoever buried that bottle? Without a doubt it was a magical device, dating from the first half of the 17th century; less well preserved examples have been found throughout England. But whether it was intended as protection against witchcraft of the means to reverse a spell, we’ll never know. The heart-charm suggests other possibilities: perhaps love magic, or even that the user had wished harm on someone. Sticking pins in pictures and models is part of witches’ stock-in-trade. In 1962, parishioners at Castle Rising in Norfolk discovered human effigies and a thorn-studded sheep’s heart nailed to their church door. Presumably this was not just a blasphemous insult but a specific physical attack. If so, it belonged to an ancient tradition of popular maleficium — real in intent if not in effect, but hard to recover historically because of its covert nature.

We tend to see witchcraft as a delusion, a non-existent crime, because we reject its mechanics. This is why many believe executed witches to have been innocent. Yet we still punish those who attempt crimes but fail, and a legal distinction exists between mens rea and actus reus: the thought and the deed. Surely some early modern people must have tried to kill with magic; it would be incredible if they hadn’t. Seen in context, was attempted murder by witchcraft not a crime, just as a woman devoted to Satan was an apostate even if she had never actually met him? There was a lot of magic in our ancestors’ lives, and positive forces could be turned into negatives. Plus there is an exception to the rule that maleficium is hard for historians to recover: widespread counter-magic against malefic witches. The definition of witchcraft depended not on its inherent nature but on how it was applied. In 1684, one Englishman noted the irony that folk ‘often become witches by endeavouring to defend themselves against witchcraft’.

In the ancient world, too, aggressive magic was more than just something the virtuous suspected of the wicked: it was a recognized source of personal power, albeit unlawful if used against a blameless opponent. From Mesopotamia, not only do illicit antisocial spells survive, but descriptions of official ceremonies in which images of assailing witches were burned. Excavations at Greek and Roman sites turn up curses scratched on scraps of lead known as defixiones. Some contain cloth or hair; occasionally they were buried in graves to inflict a deadening effect on victims. An example from Messina targeted ‘the evil-doer’ Valeria Arsinoe; ‘sickness and decay attack the nymphomaniac!’, read the malediction. Dolls made of lead, clay, or wax were also used. Egyptian examples can be seen in the Louvre and the British Museum, the former a trussed woman spiked with nails, the latter a torso containing a papyrus curse.

So the counter-magical laws of antiquity, like their Dark Age and medieval successors, did more than symbolically defend religious orthodoxy or swipe superstitiously at a non-existent enemy: they addressed a real crime. The Canon Episcopi, which was actually sceptical of most claims made by witches, forbade sortilegium et maleficium — not just village magic but cursing. Pre-modern rulers were responding to the plain fact that ordinary people tried to wreak havoc using magic.

Malefic magic can be studied first hand. Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902-73), professor of social anthropology at Oxford, noticed the ordinariness of witchcraft among the Azande of the upper Nile; it was as uncontroversial as illness. Azande witch-beliefs included bagbudma: spiritual medicine that reversed bewitchment by attacking the witch. In the Roman spa at Bath, archaeologists found a lead curse deposited by a man whose cloak had been stolen; the Azande, too, had a spell for thieves: ‘May misfortune come upon you, thunder roar, seize you, and kill you. May a snake bite you so that you die. May death come upon you from ulcers’ — and so on. Such magic upheld positive social values. J.D. Krige described a ‘moral grading of magic’ among the Lobedu of the Transvaal, who condoned supernatural vengeance — or madabi — against witches but criminalized malicious usage. ‘The power is in itself neutral’, explained Krige, ‘it is the objective which makes it moral or immoral’. The Shona of Zimbabwe encourage sorcery against enemies while forbidding it in their ‘moral community’. In 1983, a student in Cameroon confessed to membership in a gang of night sorcerers — reminiscent of Siberian shamans or Ginzburg’s benandanti — who had symbolically eaten their teacher’s heart.

Malcolm Gaskill is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. An expert in the history of witchcraft, he has written extensively about beliefs, accusations, trials, and confessions, as well as modern Spiritualism. He is the author of three other books: Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (2000) — shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book of the Year prize; Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (2001); and Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (2005).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barry Blake is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University, and his books include Playing with Words, All About Language, and this most recently Secret Language: Codes, Tricks, Spies, Thieves, and Symbols. In the following piece he reveals the mysterious significance of the name in societies past. To read more from Barry Blake check out his piece on allusions that may have eluded you.

In Western Society we have at least two official names, a given name and a surname. Surnames carry some history in that they give an indication of our ethnic origins. Think of Zellweger, Banderas or Zeta-Jones, to take a few at random. Given names often have similar associations of ethnicity or religious affiliation; some tend to be associated with a particular generation, and a few such as Napoleon and Washington evoke particular historical figures. Occasionally we have to hide our ethnic or religious affiliation. During World War I the British royal family had to change their name from Battenberg to Windsor, but normally we have no fear about revealing our name, and right from when we start school we have to give our name to authorities. However, in many societies in the past, and still in some today, people tended to keep their name secret. This is possible in a small-scale traditional society where there are no authorities wanting to record your real name, and for most purposes you are called by a pet name, a nickname, or a kin name like ‘little brother’ or ‘nephew’.

The reason for keeping personal names secret is that one’s name can be used in sorcery. In a wide variety of cultures it is believed that if enemies know your name, they can place an effective curse on you. This belief in the power of a name is linked to a belief that a name is part of one’s being just like an arm or a leg. In English we can say ‘my arm’ or ‘my leg’ just as we might say ‘my dog’ or ‘my car’. We treat them all as possessions, though of course an arm or a leg is part of one’s body. In some languages you cannot speak of body parts as possessions. For example, in most of the indigenous languages of Australia words for ‘my’ and ‘your’ cannot be used with body parts. In the Kalkadoon language, for instance, although you can say, ‘There’s a spider on your blanket’ to say ‘There’s a spider on your arm’, you have to say, ‘There’s a spider on you, arm.’ In other words you say the spider is on the person and then specify what part of the person is involved. Names are treated like body parts. You can’t say, ‘He wrote down my name’, you have to say, ‘He wrote down me, name.’

Since a name was considered an integral part of a person, it could be an effective target for sorcery. In some literate societies mistreating a person’s name was thought to be able to produce an analogous effect on the person. In Ancient Egypt the names of enemy kings would be inscribed on pottery bowls and ritually smashed with the aim of bringing about the death of these rulers. Curse tablets from the Ancient Greek and Roman world have been unearthed in which the target’s name is written backwards or scrambled. In a few cases the reason for this is spelt out, ‘Just as this name is destroyed, let so-and-so be destroyed.’ The belief that harming a name can harm a person is analogous to the voodoo practice of sticking pins in a doll with a view to injuring or killing the person represented.

The power of names comes up in a number of traditional stories. Some readers will recall the fairy story of Rumpelstiltskin. He demands the queen give him her firstborn in return for his having given her the power to spin straw into gold, but he allows her a ‘get out’. If she can find out his name, she does not have to keep her end of the bargain. Opera fans will recall that in Wagner’s Lohengrin the knight of the swan who appears mysteriously to champion the heroine in trial by combat promises to love and protect her providing she never asks him his name. Unfortunately she does, and the knight is compelled to reveal that his name is Lohengrin and is compelled to leave her. In Puccini’s Turandot the successful suitor for the hand of the unwilling Turandot tells her that she does not have to marry him if she can find out his name. Personal names are important for us, but they do not have the mysterious significance they have had in many societies in the past.

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

Grandmothers and Reproductive Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”

[See post to listen to audio]

(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”

[See post to listen to audio]

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.”

Robert Sapolsky writes, in the foreword for Beyond War: The Human Potential For Peace, “…this book should be read. It is important.” Indeed, Sapolsky was correct. Douglas P. Fry’s 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? Below Fry answers some questions about his new book for OUP. Be sure to come back tomorrow to read Fry’s original essay.

OUP: You argue in Beyond War that human nature is not essentially warlike. What first inspired this hypothesis?

Douglas P. Fry: Well, my interest in this topic ultimately stems from a concern for the future of humanity. Although I was a small boy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, this event made a huge impression on me. My parents, like many people in the early 1960s, considered digging a fallout shelter in our yard. This got my young mind contemplating what a world filled with poisonous radiation would be like, as my family and I huddled in a cement pit underground, eating canned tamales, for months, maybe years. My initial flash of romanticized pioneer spirit faded fast. Where would we get water? What if the food ran out? What would happen to my friends that didn’t have fallout shelters? What if the shelter leaked radiation? What kind of world would we find when we went outside? How would we know if it was safe to come outside? I personalized this horror, asked a lot of difficult questions of my parents, and was very upset with the answers. Having a nuclear war was the scariest and stupidest idea I’d ever heard of.

Much later, when I discovered anthropology, I began looking at warfare from a macroscopic perspective that makes comparisons across cultures and over time. Anthropology widens our view beyond our own culture and beyond current day events. This broader perspective, I suggest in the book, can be very useful for understanding warfare and our potential for peace. One important anthropological observation is that nonwarring societies really do exist. If war were part and parcel of human nature, we would not expect to find nonwarring societies. They do exist, so this dents the “essentially warlike” presumption about human nature.

For a long time, I simply took for granted a war-plagued evolutionary past. I guess I got this idea by seeing how war ravages the planet today. Why would prehistory have been any different? Then about 10 years ago, I read an article by anthropologist Les Sponsel in which he concluded that warfare had been rare or absent for most of human prehistory, the nomadic hunter-gatherer stage of human evolution. I thought Sponsel had gone off the deep end! I’ve now reviewed the evidence myself and have arrived at two conclusions. First, Sponsel got it right. Archaeology provides another important line of evidence that humanity is not essentially warlike. Second, it can take a while to change one’s mind! We sometimes hold assumptions that we never consider questioning. Beyond War explores both these topics.

OUP: So are you arguing that humans aren’t violent? How do murder and individual violence differ from war?

Fry: Humans have the potential to be violent, but also the potential to be peaceful. Potentially, any of us might commit murder, but in reality, most of us never do. Beyond War makes the point that we tend to take our human potential for peace–our ability to deal with most conflict without violence–for granted. It has come as a surprise to some people that Beyond War” acknowledges the role of evolution in human aggression. I guess they are accustomed to hearing an anthropological mantra about the importance of learning and culture. Learning and culture do have huge impacts on human behavior, of course. What I attempt to do in Beyond War is to develop an evolutionary perspective on human aggression that is consistent with the evidence–and avoid an ostrich head-in-the-sand approach to the facts, in other words. The new angle is to focus on what nomadic hunter-gatherer societies can teach us, by analogy, about conflict management in the human past. The key finding is that this simplest and oldest form of human society tends not to be warlike. This is yet another line of evidence against the presumption of a warlike human nature. The disputes that do arise in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies tend to be personal and rarely resemble anything akin to warfare.

OUP: If there are so many nonwarring cultures, over seventy as you claim, why is it that economic leaders are all countries that regularly wage war?

Fry: Anthropologist Johan van der Dennen makes an observation that is apropos: “Peaceable preindustrial people constitute a nuisance to most theories of warfare and they are thus either ‘explained away,’ denied, or negated.” Van der Dennen is calling attention to the ostrich approach to contradictory information. In Beyond War, I advocate, modifying one’s theory to be consistent with the evidence rather than denying the evidence. I carefully document the existence of over 70 nonwarring societies because, unfortunately, I think van der Dennen is right about the eagerness, in some quarters, to deny that living without war is even possible. But the existence of nonwarring societies demonstrates that living without war is in fact possible.

If we look at warfare cross-culturally, we can see certain patterns. For instance, the chance of war increases along with social complexity. I discuss this pattern in the book. In today’s world, we are used to an international system composed of states, or countries. Obviously, some states go to war with regularity and others get sucked into trouble. States, though, are only one type of society, and they are a rather recent development in the story of humanity. In essence, it is a fallacy to look around the planet today at our nation-state system and then draw conclusions about the warlike nature of all societal forms, or about human nature for that matter.

OUP: What in your findings surprised you the most?

Fry: In fact there were several surprises, big and small. I’ve already mentioned that the worldwide archaeological evidence shattered my assumption that warfare was prevalent over humanity’s evolutionary past. In fact, the earliest evidence for war is within the last 10,000 years or so.

Another surprise involves the creativity through which hunter-gatherers (and other cultures) manage to resolve their differences without violence. I describe in Beyond War how two Netsilik Eskimo men will engage in a “battle of the bands.” I don’t mean that two hunting bands fight-it-out! Rather, the two rivals, with the help of their wives, try to best each other in a song contest.

I also should mention one more big surprise that involves a widely disseminated finding about the Yanomamö people of South America. Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has emphasized that Yanomamö men who have participated in a killing, called unokais, have three times as many children as non-killers of the same age. There is a hurricane of controversy swirling around Chagnon, but my discovery is specific: This unokai finding is just plain wrong.

The killers-have-more-kids finding has achieved “celebrity status,” being cited, quoted, and reiterated over and over again. For me, the puzzle revealed itself when I read an article by Brian Ferguson, who asked whether the killers and non-killers were really of comparable ages. I observed, with interest, that in his response to Ferguson, Chagnon dodged the age question. Age is one of several critical issues, because older Yanomamö men are known to average more children than younger men, whether or not they have participated in a killing. I thought: Can we check this mathematically? Any one who wants a great brainteaser should look at how data is presented in Chagnon’s original unokai article. Many pencils and a few calculator batteries later, it became clear that, mathematically, there is an average age difference of at least 10 years between killers and non-killers that simply was not controlled for in the original analysis.

My overall conclusion is that this famous “result” is, at a minimum, greatly exaggerated and in actuality may not exist at all. Meanwhile, this finding has become gospel. Steven Pinker, for example, cites it in his best sellers. When the beliefs of a culture hold that humans are naturally warlike, people socialized in such settings tend to accept such views without much question. Cultural traditions influence the thinking and perceptions of scientists and scholars as well. I suspect that one reason that retelling this erroneous finding is so common is that it supposedly provides “scientific confirmation” of the warlike human nature view.

OUP: What else should readers know about Beyond War?

Fry: The war in Iraq is very much on our minds these days. I was just reading a Time magazine article that attempted to spell out each presidential-hopeful’s view on escalation, de-escalation, troop increases, troop decreases, and so forth, all focused on Iraq. These are immediate important questions, but they also are too limited. Frankly, I became frustrated at the short-term focus voiced by the potential candidates. The broader question of critical importance, which no candidate is discussing, is how to provide genuine security for Americans and other people on this planet into the 21st century and beyond. Beyond War strives to take the discussion to a higher level.

I argue that in a nuclear age war is obsolete. A powerful arsenal no longer assures safety and security. War is risky and extremely costly. Military might does little or nothing to protect our families and country from the very real threats of environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, or terrorism. In fact, accepting and waging of war can contribute to these problems. How many future terrorists have we created by attacking Iraq? How many millions of dollars do we continue to squander on nuclear weapons that, assuming safety and security are the goals, could instead be used to tackle the urgent challenge of global warming? Our security responses are way out of synch with today’s realities.

I argue that war and a reliance on military muscle-flexing provide only a shallow illusion of safety and security. War is obsolete and alternative ways of handling conflict internationally must be implemented. A macroscopic anthropological view offers hope that we can abolish the institution of war and replace it with more viable ways of dealing with conflicts.

On Monday morning, January 15th, between 8 and 8:30 am, Rosanna Hertz, author of Single By Chance, Mothers By Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family will be on NBC’s Today Show. In anticipation of her morning fame we asked her to reflect on all the interviews she has gone on since the publication of her book. Below Hertz writes the answers to the three questions that pop up most in interviews.

First, I am often asked if I think single mothers are selfish for having children without a partner. The question makes me wonder if I would have had the courage to become a single mother? This was not a position I found myself in, but I imagine that I would have missed out a lot, on an important part of my life, had I not become a mother. The women in my study felt the same way when they made their decision. “Selfish” would have been to marry and divorce just to have a baby. They wanted to marry a soul mate forever even if that person came after the baby.

In that respect, single mothers taught me a valuable lesson. They had better support networks than I have ever had. They asked people for help (such as watching their child for a few hours) and didn’t feel they always had to do everything themselves (which I tended to do). These mothers made great use of extra space in their homes (finding roommates who would become important in their life with their child). They discovered that great childcare is essential and all of the women treated their childcare providers like family. Asking for male school teachers (we can all use more male teachers in our school systems), became an important request on behalf of their children. Their friendships with both women and men were stronger than mine, a key ingredient in their lives, because they expect more from friends and extended family. They knit together community in a way that is rare and I admire single mothers for that.

Second, I am asked about the future of marriage. Marriage will continue to exist (at least for heterosexual couples). I call the women in my study “reluctant revolutionaries” because they did not see their individual choices as part of broader societal changes. Families all over the world are undergoing change. Delaying marriage and remaining single long into one’s twenties (for both men and women) is quite common. This delay is beginning to bump up against women worrying about their ability to birth children.

Still, single motherhood is on the rise throughout the world. Last January I went to Japan to meet with university faculty to talk about families. I was surprised to learn that even in a more traditional country, where there is a lot of concern about the decline in births, single motherhood is on the rise. I don’t know if women in other countries would have preferred to be married when they became single mothers; however, the women in my book would have preferred what I am dubbing “Plan A” — to be married prior to having a child. Plan B – motherhood before marriage, was a reversal of a conventional life sequencing,to have a baby before time ran out. It was not a permanent way to live. Some did find partners and marriage and others did not.

And, in answer to the third most common question: no one regretted her decision to become a mom.

The New Faces of Christianity: Believing in the Bible in the Global South is the sequel to Phillip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom, which changed the way people think about the future of Christianity. In his new book, Jenkins looks more closely at Christianity in the global South, painting a clear picture of what it is like, and what it means for the future. Below is an excerpt from The New Faces of Christianity:

Preface

In my 2002 book The Next Christendom, I remarked on the different approaches to the Bible that prevailed in the churches of the global South, of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I observed that “Southern churches are quite at home with Biblical notions of the supernatural, with ideas like dreams and prophecy. Just as relevant in their eyes are that book’s core social and political themes, like martyrdom, oppression, and exile. In the present day, it may be that it is only in the newer churches that the Bible can be read with any authenticity and immediacy, and that the Old Christendom must give priority to Southern voices…Looking at Christianity as a planetary phenomenon, not merely a Western one, makes it impossible to read the New Testament in quite the same way ever again.” I also wrote of the new Christianity’s undergoing a “return to scriptural roots.” My thoughts on this theme developed further when I had the opportunity in 2004 to deliver the William Belden Noble lectures at Harvard’s Memorial Church, and this book grows directly from those presentations.

I will address a number of specific issues here. Though the term “global South” conventionally refers to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, in the present book I will touch on Latin American matters only in passing. This is because in matters of Bible reading and interpretation, many African and Asian societies have a good deal in common, especially in the relative noveltly of the faith and its recent emergence from non-Christian backgrounds. In terms of approaches to the Bible, similarities with Latin America certainly exist, but the differences are too marked to make possible any kind of meaningful generalizations…

Chapter One: Shall the Fundamentalists Win?

Our understanding of the Bible is different from them. We are two different churches.

Archbisop Benjamin Nzimbi (Kenya)

In recent years, gatherings of the worldwide Anglican Communion have been contentious events. On one occasion, two bishops were participating in a Bible study, one an African Anglican, the other a U.S. Episcopalian. As the hours went by, tempers frayed as the African expressed his confidence in the clear words of the scripture, while the American stressed the need to interpret the Bible in the light of modern scholarship and contemporary mores. Eventually, the African bishop asked in exasperation, “If you don’t believe the scripture, why did you bring it to us in the first place?”

Christian denominations worldwide have been deeply divided over issues of gender, sexual morality, and homosexuality. These debates illustrate a sharp global division, with many North American and European churches willing to accommodate liberalizing trends in the wider society, while their African and Asian counterparts prove much more conservative. These controversies are grounded in attitudes to authority and, above all, to the position of the Bible as an inspired text. Fifty years ago, Americans might have dismissed global South conservatism as arising from a lack of theological sophistication, and in any case, these views were strictly marginal to the concerns of the Christian heartlands of North America and Western Europe. Put crudely, why should the “Christian world” care what Africans think? Only as recently as 1960 did the Roman Catholic Church choose its first black African cardinal. Yet today, as the center of gravity of the Christian world moves ever southward, the conservative traditions prevailing in the global South matter ever more…

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These days there are all sorts of loving, supportive, unconvential familes. How did they emerge? What steps should a women take before raising a child on her own? These are exactlly the kind of questions Hertz sets out to answer in her new book. Below, Hertz answers some questions for OUP about Single By Chance, Mothers by Choice. Also, check out Rosanna’s live chat.

OUP:How did this topic, of single mothers having children, first come to your attention?

Rosanna Hertz: I’ve always been fascinated by how people manage to stitch together the fragments of their lives to make something whole. Work, family, friends, finding time for themselves, for their kids, for their brains, for their bodies. All those competing demands. When you have a shortage of time, who or what gets the short end of the stick? How, for example, is family even possible with all these conflicting pressures?

So, first I looked at how dual-career couples manage to satisfy employers’ demands, their own individual career aspirations, then each other’s needs, then their own individual personal aspirations, and then have families and be part of families.

I got very interested in how other families worked, especially new families, like single moms with jobs, careers, independent means.

OUP: How did you research this book?

Hertz: As I write in my book I saw an ad in the local paper which read “Is single motherhood for me? 9 sessions on decision-making for women whose biological clock is ticking. Explore single parenthood options vs. childfree living.” I called the number listed…

The social worker who had written the ad put me in touch with the local chapter of a single mother’s group. Since I was not considering single motherhood, I was upfront about the fact that I had a child and that I was married, but I also wanted to understand what was happening. I learned from these women about the often painful reality of coming to terms with marriage fading into the distance, while still wanting to become a mother. I then set out to find women who had selected different routes to motherhood in order to capture the diverse ways in which women were becoming moms: from adoption, to known and unknown donors, to chancing pregnancy by having intercourse. Most important I wanted to know about fathers, dads and other men in the lives of these new mother-child families.

OUP:What important lessons can single women who are considering having children on their own learn from your book?

Hertz: I highly recommend that women take stock of their life.

1. Keep a diary for a while of how you feel about becoming a mom, even if a partner doesn’t come along after you become a mom.
2. Think about what life will be like if you give up the dream of having a child, versus how your life will change to have a child on your own.
3. Assess your living situation. Think creatively, because housing can be turned into a way to cover part of your rent or mortgage (buy a two-family and rent out one apartment). Find a roommate and trade a room for some babysitting. Take a leap and buy a home in a neighborhood that is filled with other families. These other adults will be of economic or social help.
4. Talk to family, friends, and others in your circle (religious leaders, self-help groups) about the importance you place on having a child. Ask them to come aboard and support you in your journey to become a mom.
5. 4. Assess your job and if need be find one that offers you more flexibility, or don’t take the newest promotion. You want employment where you can be on auto-pilot for a while. This allows women to place family at centerstage while bringing home a paycheck.
6. Think about finding broader support networks outside of your family (through community organizations) which include other children at different ages so your child has “surrogate siblings.” While it may take effort to maintain these early relationships, as your child grows older it will provide a broader family experience.
7. Put away extra money so you can pay for a maternity leave, and if you can, take some extra time off, or start back to work slowly, increasing from 3 days, to 4 days, to 5 days. This extra time with your child will be invaluable, time which all mothers regardless of marital status should have.
8. Think about the route you select to motherhood. Ask yourself what tradeoffs are you willing to make to become a mother? Do you want to known the genetic father? If you can’t find a known donor do you want an anonymous donor who will agree to meet your child as an adult? Are you willing to adopt a child? If so, how important is it to you to adopt a child of the same race as you, or a child who is an infant, or a child from another country? What will each of these routes mean in the future when your child is old enough to ask about their genetic parent(s)?
9. It may relieve stress to know upfront that you do not need to have more than one child.
10. Recognize all the ways in which men are a part of your life and can become a part of your child’s life: relatives, teachers, athletic coaches, and babysitters. Men, even if they are not your child’s dad are necessary to develop important relationships.

OUP: Do you have children?

Hertz: I have a 15 year old daughter.

OUP: What was the greatest challenge you found in being a mother?

Hertz: I suppose feeling that it is okay to be “good-enough” at everything. I had to give up the idea that I had to do everything and be the best. I used to think if only I could become more organized than I’d be more efficient and I’d get it all done. Not true. There are just not enough hours in the day. I’m not so hard on myself anymore. I don’t have to be at every soccer game but I do have to be at the two parent-teacher conferences a year. I can miss an occasional meeting at work and I can turn off the email. No one will suffer. But I am never late to teach a class. Since I couldn’t become more efficient, I have made what I consider reasonable priorities as a parent and a professional. However, I still don’t carve out enough time for myself.

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