Coffee Break: Never Underestimate What People Can Do As Members of Community

Part the First: Whalers in Brazil 5,000 Years Ago.  Whaling rightly has become anathema in this modern world, except in certain, very limited, circumstances.  But the historical origins of whaling remain an interesting question.  It turns out that whalers were active in southern Brazil 5,000 years ago: Some of the oldest harpoons ever found reveal Indigenous people in Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago.  As the friend who sent me this article put it, these humans had brass:

Harpoons crafted from the bones of humpback and southern right whales show Indigenous groups in what is now Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago.

The discovery, which included 118 whale bones and crafted artifacts, reveal that prehistoric whaling was not confined to people in temperate and polar climates in the Northern Hemisphere, according to a study published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications (open access).

“Whaling has always been enigmatic,” because it’s difficult to distinguish bone tools made from actively hunted and stranded animals in the archaeological record, study co-author André Carlo Colonese, a research director at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science.

From the Nature Communications paper:

The hunting of large whales has shaped the lifeways of many coastal communities for millennia, yet its origins remain debated, often associated with postglacial cultures in Arctic and subarctic regions dating to approximately 3500-2500 years ago.  Here, we present evidence that large baleen whales were likely hunted 5000 years ago by Indigenous groups in southern Brazil.  We analysed museum collections of cetacean bones and artefacts from archaeological shellmounds, known as sambaquis, in the region of Babitonga Bay.  Zooarchaeological, typological, and molecular analyses of bone remains and artefacts indicate that Sambaqui people exploited southern right whales (Eubalaena australis), humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and dolphins in coastal waters.  The abundance of whale bone remains, the presence of specialised marine hunting artefacts, and the importance of whales in funerary contexts are consistent with archaeological and ethnographic evidence of whaling societies.  Our results also illuminate species distributions prior to commercial exploitation, providing insights for conservation strategies.  Whale exploitation was an element of Indigenous maritime knowledge in southern Brazil long before European contact; an unwritten history preserved in museum collections and in the sambaquis that have survived the impacts of modern human activities.

…

Related Indigenous knowledge seems to have vanished sometime prior to European contact, as there appears to be no record of it in European accounts from the 16th century AD.  Unfortunately, much of this unwritten history has been lost due to escalating anthropogenic impacts on sambaquis and other archaeological sites over the last centuries.  The limited evidence that survives has reached us thanks to the efforts of those who strived to preserve this invaluable Indigenous cultural heritage.  We suspect that there are many more such objects sitting in archive boxes in museums, unseen and untouched for decades, just waiting for their stories to be rediscovered.  Our study highlights the crucial role these institutions and their collections play in addressing fundamental questions about the origins and evolving nature of past human coastal adaptations.

But what we do know is that these Indigenous peoples were ingenious and unmatched craftsmen.  We could learn much from their example, while leaving the whales to themselves this time around.  Be sure to click through to look at the figures.  They are impressive.

Part the Second: Stone Tools that May Have by Hominins Who Were Not Us.  In another article from LiveScience. 160,000-year-old sophisticated stone tools discovered in China may not have been made by Homo sapiens, or “Archaeologists have found the oldest known evidence of hafted tools in East Asia, and they challenge a previously held assumption about stone tool use.”

“This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period,” the research team wrote in a statement about the discovery.

At the site of Xigou, discovered in 2017 in Henan province in central China, the archaeological team found the remains of more than 2,600 stone tools and determined that some of them were “hafted,” or attached to a piece of wood or other form of stick.

From the Abstract of the Nature Communications paper: Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000–72,000 years ago:

Technological innovations in Africa and western Europe in the later part of the Middle Pleistocene signal the behavioural complexity of hominin populations.  Yet, at the same time, it has long been believed that hominin technologies in Eastern Asia lack signs of innovation and sophistication.  Here, we report on technological innovations occurring at Xigou, in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region, central China, dating to ~160,000–72,000 years ago. Technological, typological, and functional analyses reveal the presence of advanced technological behaviours spanning over a 90,000-year period.  The Xigou hominins used core-on-flake and discoid methods to effectively obtain small dimensional flakes to manufacture a diverse range of tool forms.  The identification of the hafted tools provides the earliest evidence for composite tools in Eastern Asia, to our knowledge. Technological innovations revealed at Xigou and other contemporary sites in China correspond with increasing evidence for Late Quaternary hominin morphological variability, including larger brain sizes, such as demonstrated at Lingjing (Xuchang) in central China.  The complex technological advancements recorded at Xigou indicate that hominins developed adaptive strategies that enhanced their survivability across fluctuating environments of the late Middle Pleistocene and middle Late Pleistocene in Eastern Asia.

There was nothing “primitive” about these ancestors of ours, and they must have been part of a cooperative society and culture.  That, of course, is essential for human life and human flourishing.  We would do well to remember this a bit better.  Again, click through the links.  The figures striking.

Part the Third: Even Older Hominins Also Made Tools.  As shown in this paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), published earlier this week: Evidence for the earliest hominin use of wooden handheld tools found at Marathousa 1 (Greece).  This paper is behind a paywall, which is ridiculous.  From the Abstract:

Evidence for the earliest hominin use of wooden handheld tools found at Marathousa 1 (Greece) The Middle Pleistocene (MP; ca. 774 to 129 ka) marks a critical period of human evolution, characterized by increasing behavioral complexity and the first unambiguous evidence of plant-based technologies. Despite this, direct evidence for early wooden tool use remains exceptionally rare. Here, we present the earliest handheld wooden tools, identified from secure contexts at the site of Marathousa 1, Greece, dated to ca. 430 ka (MIS12). Through a systematic morphological, microscopic, taphonomic, and taxonomic analysis of the sampled wood macroremains, two specimens were securely identified as modified by hominins: one small alder (Alnus sp.) trunk fragment bears clear working and use-wear traces consistent with a multifunctional stick likely used in digging at the paleolakeshore; and one very small willow/poplar (Salix ßspecimen, a large alder trunk segment, shows deep, nonanthropogenic striations interpreted here as claw marks from a large carnivoran. The wooden tools were excavated together with butchered elephant remains, small lithic artifacts and debitage, and worked bone, underscoring the diversity of engagement with a variety of different raw materials for technological purposes at Marathousa 1. These finds extend the temporal range of early wooden tools. They represent both the use of expedient larger handheld tools as well as a much smaller, likely finger-held wooden tool, which is uniquely small for the Pleistocene, expanding known functional purposes of early wood technologies. Moreover, they highlight the Megalopolis Basin’s exceptional preservation conditions and its role in understanding the evolution of hominin behavior.

The authors conclude that “these finds significantly extend our framework for understanding the development and use of technologies and materials in human evolution. Our findings further highlight the importance of the Megalopolis Basin (in Arcadia) not only as a crucial glacial refugium, harboring hominin populations through MP glacial cycles, but also as a flagship region, whose exceptionally long and largely continuous stratigraphic sequence and preservation conditions shed light on human adaptations, habitats, and evolution in Europe.”

Thus, we can probably expect additional discoveries in this part of Greece.  The figures in this paper are not as “photogenic” as those in Parts First and Second, but the principal artifacts can be seen here, hidden among the ads, in Greek Reporter.

Part the Fourth: How Can the Consciousness Required for Parts One, Two, and Three Be Explained?  Good question, perhaps unanswerable.  I have been reading the literature on consciousness and mind off and on since the mid-1970s.  As I have mentioned here before, the open stacks of the libraries of a research university are the wonder of the modern world, but I wonder how long they will last (and the key to a usable library is open stacks – more often than not the book you really want is beside the one you thought you were looking for).

Progress on the nature of consciousness has been, well, halting seems to be the best description.  After all these years Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949, reprinted with an introduction by Daniel C. Dennett in 2000), while not exactly addressing the question of consciousness, remains a good place to rest (especially with his description of Descartes’s mind-body dualism as a category error.  Category errors bedevil us still.  But that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain is obviously true, and emergent properties are the most interesting in biology.

This long article in Scientific American, Why Consciousness Is the Hardest Problem in Science, covers the field.  The subtitle is “Will brain science deliver answers about consciousness or hit another wall?”  I would bet on the wall, but scientists continue to work on the question, just as some scientists still work on the origin of life.  The origin of consciousness is much the more interesting and tractable problem.  The opening of the article is inviting to the biology nerd:

Until half a billion years ago, life on Earth was slow.  The seas were home to single-celled microbes and largely stationary soft-bodied creatures.  But at the dawn of the Cambrian era, some 540 million years ago, everything exploded.  Bodies diversified in all directions, and many organisms developed appendages that let them move quickly around their environment.  These ecosystems became competitive places full of predators and prey. And our branch of the tree of life (which is more of a bush without a root) evolved an incredible structure to navigate it all: the brain.

We don’t know whether this was the moment when consciousness first arose on Earth. But it might have been when living creatures began to really need something like it to combine a barrage of sensory information into one unified experience that could guide their actions. It’s because of this ability to experience that, eventually, we began to feel pain and pleasure. Eventually, we became guided not just by base needs but by curiosity, emotions and introspection. Over time we became aware of ourselves.

This last step is what we have to thank for most of art, science and philosophy—and the millennia-long quest to understand consciousness itself. This state of awareness of ourselves and our environment comes with many mysteries. Why does being awake and alive, being yourself feel like anything at all, and where does this singular sense of awareness come from in the brain? These questions may have objective answers, but because they are about private, subjective experiences that can’t be directly measured, they exist at the very boundaries of what the scientific method can reveal.

This question has become more urgent in the minds of many because “We’ve built talking machines able to imitate consciousness so well that we can’t always tell the difference. Sometimes these artificial-intelligence models claim outright to be sentient. Faced with an existential unknown, the public is turning to the field of consciousness science for answers. ‘The tension, you know, it’s palpable,’ says Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist at the University of Milan.  ‘We’re going to be looking back at this period.’”

There is not space here to consider the details further, but the article is very good, and the associated illustrations are suggestive, when you have a lazy day to try to make sense of it all.  And these theories do make much more sense than string theory.  They seem much more falsifiable than string theory, at least to this non-physicist.

Part the Fifth: The Death of a World Hero Who Just Happened to be an American.  Hero is a word we hear much too often these days, but they do exist.  William Foege of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has died at the age of 89.  He was a hero, along with his colleagues on the team that lead the eradication of smallpox.  The last case of the disease was recorded in 1977, when Jimmy Carter was President.  Some of us remember the jubilation at the announcement as we searched for large the smallpox vaccination scar on our upper arm.

Foege headed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Smallpox Eradication Program in the 1970s. Before the disease was officially eradicated in 1980, it killed around one in three people who were infected. According to the CDC, there have been no new smallpox cases since 1977.

“If you look at the simple metric of who has saved the most lives, he is right up there with the pantheon,” said former CDC director Tom Frieden to the Associated Press. “Smallpox eradication has prevented hundreds of millions of deaths.

”Foege went on to lead the CDC and served as a senior medical adviser and senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2012 then President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Foege was a vocal proponent of vaccines for public health, writing with epidemiologist Larry Brilliant in Scientific American in 2013 that the effort to eliminate polio “has never been closer” to success. “By working together,” they wrote, “we will soon relegate polio—alongside smallpox—to the history books.” Polio remains a “candidate for eradication,” according to the World Health Assembly.

The photograph of him at the link, along with J. Donald Miller and J. Michael Lane, is poignant for more than one reason.  The plaque on the wall reads “United States Public Health Service – 1798.”  I wonder.  How much longer will the USPHS last in MAHA World?

See you next week!