The Caveman’s Corner

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Doing it in Your Sleep

I’ve found myself doing a fair amount of reading in the history of paleontology recently, and I’ve come across two interesting cases of paleontologists dreaming up reconstructions of their fossils. The first involves the famous Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz. While he was still in Europe working on his monumental Researches sur les poissons fossiles, he came across a particular fossil fish that was so encased in rock he was unable to bring it to any recognizable form. Well,

For two nights in dreams he saw the fish, fully restored, but could not recapture its form the next day. On the third evening, he went to bed with paper and pencil near him, and, when the image returned again, half-awake he sketched it. Returning to the museum the next day, he soon managed to separate the fossil from the stone, discovering as he did so that here was the original, exactly as he had sketched it.

Lurie, Edward. Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science, 1960. p. 58.

The other story is about an American Agassiz protege, Edward Drinker Cope, while he was working in the Montana badlands in 1876. He and his men were working a strip of Cretaceous fossiliferous deposits on a perilously high cliff above the Missouri River, with threat of the Sioux impending. Apparently the stress was getting to old Cope:

In his dreams, the ancient beasts he was exhuming would come to life and torment him. ‘Every animal of which we found traces during the day played with him at night, tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling upon him,’ Sternberg [his associate on the expedition] wrote.

Jaffe, Mark. The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science, 2000. p. 179. What make’s Cope’s imagination the more remarkable was the fact that he was mostly only finding teeth.

I’d be interested to find more stories like these.

More on Louis Agassiz and probably a review of The Gilded Dinosaur later.

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Art on the Walls?

The blog’s new banner is of a scene in Lascaux Cave, a complex of caverns painted with some of the most beautiful animal imagery of the Upper Paleolithic, as well as enigmatic geometric figures and a single possible human. The caves and their imagery were considered so important they were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 and a complete replica of the more important chambers, Lascaux II, has been constructed to protect the original from degradation.

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Review: A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah

This review is also doubling as an (remarkably poorly written) essay for college. The book is a memoir by Ishmael Beah of his time as a refugee and then child soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone from around 1992 to 2003. Sorry the text has been so weird on my last few posts, but they’ve been copied in from Word and the font is different. I don’t suppose it’s very professional of me not to figure out how to integrate it better.

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Anthropoid Origins, somewhat.

So this is probably all you’re going to get of my promised great series on anthropoid origins. Basically, I ran out of confidence that I could handle the material intelligently and am now out of time. So, I only got about two pages in to the Adapoid Theory. Just so that work isn’t a total waste, I’ll share it with you here. It’s unfinished obviously.

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Hawks on Humanity

I should really blog on other blogs more, because I read some things that I immediately admire a lot in some of the ones I frequent and that I think would benefit my two or three readers and the random people that find this site through a Google Images search for one of the pictures I’ve poached off somewhere else on the Internet, but get higher ranked on my site for some reason. Maybe because I label them better.

Anyway, I’ll start with this article I read on one of my favorites, John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, back on my birthday, June 18:

Don’t ask the experts if they can’t agree on the question

The post is about a conference convened as part of the World Science Festival to discuss “what it means to be human.” Predictably, most of the discussion centered around this trait or that trait, but as Dr. Hawks points out, no one trait can really include all humanity while excluding all other animals we wouldn’t call ‘human.’ What makes us human?

One thing is shared by all humans, and cannot be taken away: our evolutionary history. Each of us bears some — but none has all — of the marks of this history.

It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close relative like a twentieth cousin, there is a decent likelihood that you will share no genes at all because of your shared kinship from your most recent common ancestor. By the fiftieth generation, it is a virtual certainty. You are a genetic stranger to your ancestors.

Within the span of fifty generations, a selected gene may completely transform a species, going from less than one percent to ubiquity. Indeed, a single genetic mutation may make you radically different from the rest of humanity, perhaps by restoring a thick coat of body fur, or making your tissues age at many times the average rate — both characters that some people would make part of the definition of “human.” Indeed, many such changes actually have happened in the past few thousand years.

Only history defines humanity, and will continue to define us no matter what we become in the future. We have not severed the genetic links between maize and teosinte, but they are tenuous enough to make the relationship difficult for the layman to see. We have intertwined several inbred strains, more than doubling grain production in a few decades. We regularly add genes from other organisms to our maize, subtly changing its phenotype. Yes, a good part of our corn now shares a history with Bacillus thuringiensis. But that does not deny its shared history with teosinte, or its unique history as a human domesticate. History is additive, inclusive — not subtractive.

Read the whole essay, it bears it.