Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen

New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America

The Washington Post reports: When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: A dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.

Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.

Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and down the West Coast.

But the mastodon relic turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting the blade was just as ancient.

Whoever fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here.

Its makers likely paddled from Europe and arrived in America thousands of years ahead of the western migration, argues Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Dennis Stanford, making them the first Americans.

“I think it’s feasible,” said Tom Dillehay, a prominent archaeologist at Vanderbilt University. “The evidence is building up and it certainly warrants discussion.”

At the height of the last Ice Age, Stanford says, mysterious stone-age European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting seals and seabirds.

The Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford argues, hauling their distinctive blades with them.

When Stanford proposed this “Solutrean hypothesis” in 1999, colleagues roundly rejected it. One prominent archaeologist suggested Stanford was throwing his career away.

But now, 13 years later, Stanford and Exeter University archaeologist Bruce Bradley lay out a detailed case – bolstered by the curious blade and other stone tools recently found in the mid-Atlantic – in a new book, Across Atlantic Ice.

“I drank the Solutrean Kool-aid,” said Steve Black, an archaeologist at Texas State University in San Marcos. “I had been very dubious. It’s something a lot of [archaeologists] have dismissed out of hand. But I came away from the book feeling like it’s an extremely credible idea that needs to be taken seriously.”

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On deep history and the brain

Alexander Star writes: Why do horses snort? Sometimes, at the approach of a stranger or the appearance of a plane high above the pasture, a horse will widen its eyes, flare its nostrils and send a stuttering column of air out into the world. On other occasions, horses have been known to snort for no reason besides their own boredom. By suddenly creating a sound, the slack-minded horse elicits an automatic “startle response” — flooding its brain with chemicals, delivering a jolt of excitement and relieving, at least for a moment, the monotony of a long day in an empty field. The horse has in effect fooled its own nervous system — and benefited from the self-deceit.

If horses can alter their own brain chemistries at will (and have good reasons to do so), what about human beings? In “On Deep History and the Brain,” Daniel Lord Smail suggests that human history can be understood as a long, unbroken sequence of snorts and sighs and other self-modifications of our mental states. We want to alter our own moods and feelings, and the rise of man from hunter-gatherer and farmer to office worker and video-game adept is the story of the ever proliferating devices — from coffee and tobacco to religious rites and romance novels — we’ve acquired to do so. Humans, Smail writes, have invented “a dizzying array of practices that stimulate the production and circulation of our own chemical messengers,” and those devices have become more plentiful with time. We make our own history, albeit with neurotransmitters not of our choosing.

Historians by and large take biology and the deep past for granted: natural selection endowed our ancestors with their impressive bodies and brains, and then got out of the way. These days, it’s chiefly nonhistorians like Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery who seek to trace the long arc of the species and write macrohistory in a scientific key. Smail, who teaches medieval history at Harvard, would like his peers to join their company. If historians have become accustomed to studying midwives and peasants, the marginal and often illiterate members of recent societies, why shouldn’t they extend their curiosity to the most peripheral human subjects of all — the prehistoric? Even today, Smail laments, the curriculum is shaped by the prejudice that history began only when our ancestors started to write or to farm or to think of themselves as actors in a grand pageant of historical change. The presumption is curiously convenient. In the schema of “sacred history,” history began with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden — that is, in Asia, a few thousand years before Christ. In the modern schema, history begins in much the same place, at much the same time. “The sacred was deftly translated into a secular key,” Smail writes, as “the Garden of Eden became the irrigated fields of Mesopotamia and the creation of man was reconfigured as the rise of civilization.”

Taking Paleolithic man seriously, Smail argues, requires us to understand that history and biology always shape each other — there is no ascent from the tyranny of brute instinct to the freedoms of civilization. Some evolutionary theorists stress that cultural innovation allows human beings to overcome the blind stumblings of natural selection: we deliberately solve a problem and pass on that solution to our descendants, who improve on it in turn. Smail takes a different tack. The imperfect copying of past behavior and small, often unconscious preferences can push a society in a new direction, even without anyone aiming toward a particular goal. It’s possible, for instance, that early men decided to make sharper spear points with the intent of drawing more blood from their prey; Smail would rather suppose that these spear points were created by accident, and then spread because the hunters who used them proved to be better hunters, even if they didn’t know why. Cultural evolution can be rapid and it can help human beings adapt to their environment, but it needn’t be intended or progressive. [Continue reading…]

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Music: Remembering Shakti

Remembering Shakti — English guitarist John McLaughlin, along with the Indian musicians, Zakir Hussain (tabla), U. Srinivas (mandolin), Shankar Mahadevan (vocals), and V. Selvaganesh (kanjira, ghatam, mridangam) — will soon be performing a concert in Ramallah where the group wishes to express their “personal affection for the Palestinian people.” McLaughlin and Hussain were members of the original band Shakti which performed and recorded three albums in the mid-70s.

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Are early agriculturalists to blame for Africa’s lost rainforests?

ScienceNOW reports: About 3000 years ago, Central Africa was a landscape in transition. Lush evergreen forests were gradually giving way to savannas and grasslands as regional climate change pushed the formerly humid weather patterns toward drier, slightly warmer conditions. But climate was not the only factor at play. According to a new study, an influx of humans into the region at this time may have helped drive some of the original rainforests into oblivion.

The paper’s results, published online today in Science, came as a surprise to the researchers. “To be honest, at the beginning we were not at all aware of this human issue,” says lead author Germain Bayon, a geochemist at the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea in Plouzané.

He and his colleagues originally set out to investigate the relationship between precipitation and chemical weathering, or the breakdown of soils and rocks. They analyzed marine sediment cores collected near the mouth of the Congo River, where thousands of years of runoff have accumulated. Because rocks are composed of different minerals, Bayon explains, those materials that are more susceptible to weathering will more readily erode away, eventually washing into the ocean and forming layers of clay on the bottom. By analyzing clay’s composition, scientists can reconstruct the intensity of past weathering and infer environmental conditions.

The researchers analyzed the cores for elements like hydrogen that leave distinctive signatures in sediment. These geochemical markers correspond with past precipitation levels, which influence weathering. They also examined ratios of aluminum and potassium, which indicate weathering intensity, because potassium is a highly mobile element whereas aluminum is one of the most immobile. As expected, the weathering patterns closely followed precipitation levels — that is, until about 3000 years ago. At that point, Bayon says, the pattern became completely different. The sediment appeared to have undergone intense chemical weathering, which the climate alone could not explain. So the team began suspecting another factor was responsible.

As it turns out, around this time Bantu farmers — an African ethnic group — had begun a large-scale expansion across Central Africa and settled in the rainforest. Linguistic studies and archeological evidence, such as stone tools and iron artifacts, support this event. Perhaps most importantly, archeologists have shown that the Bantu brought agriculture to the region, growing crops such as pearl millet and yams. But in order for pearl millet to grow, seasonality, or distinct wet and dry seasons, is necessary. In other words, climate shifts toward more pronounced seasonality paved the way for agriculture. To cultivate crops, the Bantu had to cut down stretches of forest, exposing the soil to weathering. Such intensive land use can lead to dramatically higher rates of chemical alteration, the researchers say, which would explain the sudden shift in weathering patterns 3000 years ago.

“Climate did play an important role in the arrival of agriculture,” Bayon says. “But what we show is that the impact of those people developing and introducing agriculture probably had a quite significant impact on soil erosion.”

“This is a very compelling study,” says Peter deMenocal, a marine geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, who was not involved in the work. Even when compared with the traces natural climate change leaves, he says, “the human footprint on the environment can be very large.”

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Remembering and forgetting

Jenny Diski reviews Memory: Fragments of a Modern History by Alison Winter: I was in my late thirties before it struck me that there was something odd about the tableau I have in my mind of a familiar living-room, armchair, my father in it, silvery hair, moustache, brown suede lace-ups, and me, aged six or so, sitting on his knee. The layout is correct – I have been back to the block of flats and sat in the living-room of the flat next door, with the same floor plan. Door in the right place; chair I’m sure accurate, a burgundy moquette; patterned carpet; windows looking out onto the brick wall of the offices opposite. My father looks like my father in pictures I have of him. I look like … well, actually I don’t have any pictures of me at that age. But I’m sure I looked pretty much like the memory I can call up at will. It’s not particularly interesting as a memory. Nothing special is happening. It could be a painting, or a photograph, except that I shift about as a child does sitting on her father’s knee. Here’s the thing, though: I can see the entire picture. I can, you may have noticed, see myself. My observation point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling, looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly, but what I can’t do is position myself on my father’s knee and become a part of the picture, even though I am in it. I can’t in other words look out at the room from my place on the chair. How can that be a memory? And if it isn’t, what is it? When I think about my childhood, that is invariably one of the first ‘memories’ to spring up, ready and waiting: an untraumatic, slightly-moving picture. It never crossed my mind to notice the anomalous point of view until I was middle-aged. Before then it went without saying that it was a ‘real’ memory. Afterwards, it became an indicator of how false recollection can be.

Memory has always been a worry to us. The thing we feel sure makes us ourselves (no memory, no me) is also something we know to be treacherous, overaccommodating, fugitive: delightfully and fearfully unreliable. We’re stuck inside our own heads with our recollections (or old photos and now videos that have become memories) and there is no way, except sometimes by trusting to the probably unreliable memories of other people, to be absolutely sure that we know what we think we know, or are who we think we are. That anxiety about the accuracy of our grasp of our past selves accounts for the way many other alarming aspects of being alive have become attached to the subject of memory; the theme changes and goes through cycles over time (law, war, politics, medicine, family, sexuality), but always serves to remind us to worry about the consequences of never being quite sure of what we and others remember. People have thrown all the expertise they can find or invent at the problem. We have asked shamans, clairvoyants, hypnotists, historians, scientists, surgeons, law-makers, artists and writers, social psychologists and psychoanalysts to investigate the truth, the facts, the interpretations, so to reassure us about the mechanism and reliability of remembering, but, as Alison Winter’s deft study of 20th-century memory controversies concludes, we haven’t come close to a definitive answer.

Yet, alongside our anxiety about the trustworthiness of remembering, there is an opposite pull, which is quite as powerful, towards the commonsense feeling that we can all know and trust our own memories; that we know our own minds. Memories when they rise feel reliable. Whatever scientists or other experts do in the laboratory, library or consulting room, individuals, including the experts themselves when off duty, proceed in their everyday lives as if their personal memories are a valid basis for action and interaction, just as physicists continue to walk on apparently solid floors while knowing that they are largely made up of empty space. We would be mad not to. Underlying the compelling feeling that we are our memories is a further common-sense assumption that our entire lives are accurately retained somewhere in the brain ‘bank’ as laid-down memories of our experience, and that we retrieve our lives and selves from an ever expanding stockpile of recollections. Or we can’t, and then that feeling that it’s on the tip of our tongue, or there but just out of range, still encourages us to think that everything we have known or done is in us somewhere, if only our digging equipment were sharper. It’s considered a fault not with recording, but with playback. I was in no doubt about that as a small child. I had a small deep-red memory stone lodged in my left temple, and when I was asked a question at school it moved slowly and steadily from one side of my forehead around to the other. Before it was at the midway point, I tried for the answer, knowing it was in my mind, available to me; but once the stone passed the centre line between my eyes, I stopped worrying about it: I knew I didn’t know the answer, it simply wasn’t ‘there’. I supposed it was how everyone knew what they did and didn’t know. Looking back, it was an efficient filing and retrieval machine that unhandily had vanished by the time I reached secondary school. I recall the memory stone with some nostalgia; these days it’s the inefficiency of my mind-machine that exercises me. [Continue reading…]

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Music: Bheki Mseleku

Just in case it isn’t already obvious: I select these music videos for the music — not the videos! This was a particularly uninspired and often irrelevant collection of images someone selected to run alongside Bheki Mseleku’s wonderful piece “Angola”. Mseleku died young at 53 and never achieved the fame he greatly deserved as a truly outstanding musician and composer. In his obituary, John Fordham wrote: “It was almost as if Mseleku wanted to become music itself, rather than a practitioner of it.”

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Music: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

I’m no serious scholar of religion, least of all of Islam, but I’m inclined to believe that herein lies Islam’s greatest gift to the world: that by refraining from any visual representation of God it forced human expression of the divine to become concentrated and distilled in sound — never more so than in the voice of one such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the King of Kings of Qawwali, one of the greatest singers who ever lived.

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