Scarlet Macaws, Hero Twins, and Pueblo Ancestors

The American Southwest may be the most intensely studied archaeological zone in the world. Because so much work has been done at such a high level, in a desert zone where there is often good preservation of bone and wood, and there are descendant communities (Hopi, Zuni, Pueblo) who preserve many ancient traditions, marvelous things can sometimes be done with the data.

Consider one fascinating sidelight, the importance of parrots and especially the scarlet macaw in southwestern myth, ritual and art.

Scarlet macaws are native to the central American jungle, and their food is tropical fruit that can't be found in the desert. Yet thousands of parrot skeletons have been found on southwestern archaeological sites, most of them probably scarlet macaws. Their feathers are still treasured for key rituals associated with the sun, as they certainly were in ancient times. The Hopi and Zuni both have Macaw Clans.

These strange structures from the site of Paquime or Casas Grande in northern Mexico were dubbed "macaw pens" by their excavator and some archaeologists still think that is what they are.

Just the other day I dug out a 2014 issue of American Antiquity for a different purpose but found myself distracted by an article on scarlet macaws in the Mimbres region. The Mimbres is a river in southwestern New Mexico. In its valley, around 1100 CE, arose a culture called the Classic Mimbres  most notable for its amazing pottery. Mimbres pottery is not abstract like most other southwestern wares, but figural, and among the figures depicted on Mimbres pots are macaws.

Many, many macaws.

Where did all these macaws come from? Because their food was not available in the desert, it would have been very difficult to keep them alive and healthy. Finds of macaw egg shells, especially around the macaw pens at Paquime, show that some macaws laid eggs in these desert towns. But they cannot have reproduced themselves very well and the population would have needed constant replenishment with new birds from the jungle. Besides, most of the bird skeletons seem to represent young adults who had been sacrificed when they had just reached maturity, quite likely at the spring equinox.

The macaws were not the only connection between the southwest and the Maya. I wrote here back in 2011 about the trade of southwestern turquoise for Maya chocolate. Besides the macaw pens, Paquime also has two central American-style ball courts (above).

Much Mimbres pottery depicts what appear to be scenes from myth, in particular the myth of the Hero Twins. Heroic twins are known in many parts of the world, but the Hero Twins of the southwest have too much in common with those of the Maya to represent 10,000-year-old memories. Somebody, it seems, carried stories about the twins back and forth between the Maya jungles and the southwestern deserts. Macaws and their feathers, incidentally, feature prominently in many Maya tales of the Hero Twins.

So how did the southwestern macaw thing get started? Most likely, around the year 1100 some pilgrim from Mimbres walked to the Maya heartland to be initiated into their esoteric lore. He or she then walked back to Mimbres, bringing along new stories of the hero twins, new knowledge, and a scarlet macaw in a cage. Other pilgrims followed, perhaps dozens, perhaps hundreds. In Mimbres, the people abandoned the underground shrines known as Great Kivas where they had worshiped and moved their rituals to new outdoor plazas. (To archaeologists, a change in the buildings used for worship is the most dramatic evidence of religious or ideological change.) Macaw feathers became the symbols of initiates into a new cult of the hero twins and their avatars, the sun and the moon. Those pioneering pilgrims were remembered, and in a garbled way their stories still survive – several Indian tribes and clans have tales of people who traveled far to the south, to the land of the sun, and returned with new rituals and lore.

The bird bones, the pottery, the lore – it all fits together in an amazing way.

Patricia Gilman, Marc Thompson, and Kristina Wyckoff, Ritual Change and the Distant: Mesoamerican Iconography, Scarlet Macaws, and Great Kivas in the Mimbres Region of Southwestern New Mexico. American Antiquity 79(1) 2014.

Clever People and the SunEdison Bankruptcy

SunEdison was a corporation that specialized in building clean energy plants around the world and then selling them off as free-standing companies. It just filed for bankruptcy after failing to make payments on debt it took on to buy a series of solar firms.

Which seems almost routine in the modern world of business. The amusing thing is that the owners of now worthless SunEdison stock include several of the biggest and most respected hedge funds. At one point it was two-thirds owned by hedge funds. Hedge fund stock pickers were drawn to the company partly because it liked to structure its business deals in such an opaque way that it was very hard to figure out what was going on. Matt Levine:

SunEdison was beloved of hedge fund managers, who revelled in the idea they had spotted a lucrative opportunity hidden in the weeds of its financial filings. David Einhorn, the founder of Greenlight Capital, who has invested $243m in the company, hailed its prospects at the Robin Hood investment conference in 2014. He told the audience in New York that SunEdison’s “complicated” financial statements “make it challenging to decipher the economic value of the company from a cursory review of the balance sheet or income statement”, but that leads the market to “undervalue” the shares.

I just love this image of hedge fund gurus who think they are so clever being fooled by a business model that more sober analysts called a "magic money machine." Such are the wages of vanity.

Suicide, Inequality, and Hope

Another study out today confirms what all the other recent studies have shown, that suicide is rising in America, especially among the middle aged. This study found that from 1999 to 2014 the suicide rates for both men and women 45-64 rose by about 50 percent. This study did not consider race, but others have found that the increase in concentrated entirely among white people, which means that the rate for whites must have risen by at least 60 percent.

The obvious reaction is the one voiced by liberal Harvard professor Robert Putnam:

This is part of the larger emerging pattern of evidence of the links between poverty, hopelessness and health.

Economists argue non-stop about how real the decline in median income has been, but whatever their numbers show the sense of decline is real, and it is killing people. I think that both liberal and conservative interpretations of this malaise have something to be said for them. The economic decline of the working class must be a major factor. But it may be that the decline in religious practice is another, and perhaps the increasingly disorienting nature of life with more freedom but fewer certainties.

Where the Whales Died

Famous fossil bed in the Atacama Desert.

Why Finance has Taken Over the American Economy

One of the puzzles of the American economy over the past generation has been the rise of the financial services industry, which grew from less then 5 percent of the economy in 1950 to more than 8 percent in 2008, Even more impressive is finance's share of corporate profits, which has at times topped 45 percent. In this little column Noah Smith gives a very clear answer to the first half of that question, why finance has grown.

First, why did finance grow so much as a percent of output since 1980? And second, how did it keep being so profitable even as its size ballooned?

Let’s start with the question of why finance has grown so much in recent years. We can get some clues to this by considering which parts of finance have grown. Financial economists Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein took a look at this back in 2013, and found that the acceleration since 1980 has come from two sources: 1) asset-management fees, and 2) lending to households.

Asset-management fees are middleman costs that all kinds of players in the finance industry charge to move money around. These fees are usually charged as percentages of the assets being managed. The amount of wealth in the U.S. economy has soared since 1980 -- just think of the rises in the housing and stock markets over that time -- meaning that the middlemen in the finance industry have been taking their percentage fees out of a much larger pool of assets. That has increased finance’s share of national income. People also started to put more of their money in asset markets -- where money managers charge percentage fees -- instead of keeping it in banks or government bonds, which don’t.

That certainly makes sense. And then:

The other big piece of finance’s growth has been household credit, with a lot of it going for big ticket items like houses and cars, U.S. households have been borrowing more and more since 1980 -- as Greenwood and Scharfstein report, household credit soared from 48 percent of GDP in 1980 to 99 percent in 2007. Mortgages were by far the biggest piece of this. When people borrow more, the finance industry makes money by collecting interest, and also by charging middleman fees on lending transactions.

I confess that this connection never occurred to me, but it now seems pretty obvious. Why are banks bigger? Because Americans borrow more money. Why are banks a bigger share of the economy? Because as we borrow more money we end up paying more of our incomes in interest on loans and less to buy stuff.

The question of why banking is so profitable remains obscure, although Smith has some suggestions. But I remain awed that the question of why the financial sector has gotten so big has such a clear and simple answer.

The New Populism: Jackson Out, Tubman In

The new plan to remove Andrew Jackson from the front of the $20 bill and leave Alexander Hamilton on the $10 perfectly represents a historical shift within the American progressive movement. Back when the Roosevelts were its leaders and Arthur Schelsinger its historian, the progressive movement identified with Jefferson and Jackson because they stood up for small farmers and tradesmen against "the moneyed interests." But back then, as now, the nation's worst racists were mainly poor whites. Ordinary American farmers loved Jackson's ethnic cleansing of Indians out of the southeast, since it freed up more land for them and gave them what they saw as a victory over their historic enemies. Then, as now, many of the white people most interested in helping blacks and Indians were rich city folks like Benjamin Franklin, or cultural elitists like Emerson and Thoreau. So the leaders who were most popular with poor whites mostly had terrible records when it came to Indians and blacks.

These days it means something very different to be a progressive. These days respect for the rights of women and minorities is the absolute standard, and while progressives all say they favor the poor over the rich their actual economic policies fall on a wide spectrum from Bernie Sanders to Bill Clinton. In our America financier Alexander Hamilton can be the hero of a hip-hop musical because he opposed slavery and fought against southern white slave owners, never mind that his policies amounted to a sweet deal for financial speculators and a raw one for many poor veterans.

Personally I never liked Jackson and will be happy to see the last of his face. But it would be misrepresenting American history to portray Hamilton as some kind of progressive, or to forget that Jackson really was a great hero to millions of poor and middle class whites.

Crusader Graffiti

Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem

The Hand of Homo Naledi

The most complete hand ever recovered from an ancient hominid. More on Homo naledi here.

Primaries and Democratic Legitimacy

I have seen several columns lately worrying over the state of the nomination process. Frank Bruni and Ezra Klein and others fret that winning the nomination seems to be mainly about gaming the caucuses or courting key blocks in key primaries, not winning over the most voters, and they note that many people in both parties have complained that their will is being frustrated by a rigged system. Klein:

Behind all these disputes lurks a deeper critique of the primaries — one that threatens to tear apart both parties as we head toward the convention. And that critique, put simply, is that the primaries are neither fair nor democratic, and as such their results are illegitimate.

I would certainly love to see a major reform of the primary system, but I think these worries are overblown. After all, the system survived Florida's hanging chad disaster. A splintered convention would be a short-term blow to the Republicans and might usher in a great two or four years for Hillary and the Democrats, but in 2020 the Republicans would be back.

Hillary Celebrates her Big Win in New York

Trying out the fall stump speech, perhaps:

There's no place like home. You know, in this campaign we have won in every region of the country. From the north, to the south, to the east, to the west. But this one's personal. New Yorkers, you have always -- you have always had my back, and I have always tried to have yours. Today, together, we did it again — and I am deeply, deeply grateful. I want to thank everyone who came out and voted and to all of you across New York, who have known me and worked with me for so long. . . .

And to all the people who supported Senator Sanders: I believe there is much more that unites us than divides us.

You know, we started this race not far from here, on Roosevelt Island. Pledging to build on the progressive tradition that's done so much for America, from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. And tonight, a little less than a year later, the race for the nomination is in the home stretch, and victory is in sight. And I want to — I want to say to all of my supporters, and all of the voters: You have carried us every step of the way, with passion and determination that some critics tried to dismiss. Because of you, this campaign is the only one, Democrat or Republican, (which has) won more than 10 million votes.

Under the bright lights of New York, we have seen that it's not enough to diagnose problems. You have to explain how you actually solve the problems. That's what we have to do — for our kids, for each other, for our country.

So I want you, with me, to imagine a tomorrow where no barriers hold you back — and all of our people can share in the promise of America. Imagine a tomorrow where every parent can find a good job and every grandparent can enjoy a secure retirement. Where no child grows up in the shadow of discrimination or under the specter of deportation. Where hard work is honored, families are supported, and communities are strong. A tomorrow where we trust and respect each other despite our differences. Because we're going to make positive differences in people's lives. That is what this is supposed to be about. Actually helping people and each other

We all know too many people who are still hurting. I see it everywhere I go. The great recession wiped out jobs, homes, and savings, and a lot of Americans haven't yet recovered. But I still believe, with all my heart, that as another great Democratic president once said: "There's nothing wrong with America that can't be cured by what's right with America." That is after all what we have always done. It's who we are. . . .

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are pushing a vision for America that is divisive and frankly dangerous. Returning to trickle down economics. Opposing any increase in the minimum wage. Restricting a woman’s right to make her own health care decision. Promising to round up millions of immigrants. Threatening to ban all Muslims from entering the country. Planning to treat all American Muslims like criminals. These things go against everything America stands for, and we have a very different vision. It’s about lifting each other up, not tearing each other down. So instead of building walls, we’re going to break down barriers. . . .

The motto of this state is Excelsior — ever upwards — so let's go out and win this election, and all rise together.

Incidentally, that great Democratic president she quoted was her husband.

So it was a great night for Hillary, and also for Trump, who showed that he is still the favorite on the Republican side. On the other hand, there is this:

A poll released by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal on Sunday showed that 68 percent of American voters couldn’t imagine themselves casting a vote in the general election for Trump, while 61 percent said the same about Ted Cruz and 58 percent about Clinton.

Laurits Andersen Ring

Laurits Andersen Ring (1854-1933) is a famous painter in Denmark, but apparently not so much in the English-speaking world; I never heard of him until last week, and his online presence is pretty thin. I was moved to look him up by this painting, A Rye Field Near Ring Village, 1887. I like the way the visible texture of the paint becomes, with a slight change in perspective, nodding heads of grain.

Born Laurits Andersen, he took he name Ring after his home village when he started painting professionally and didn't want to be confused with all the other painters named Andersen. (I remember an Olympic hockey team from some Nordic country with three Andersens: Andersen passes to Andersen, who passes to Andersen. . . .) This might be my favorite Ring painting, Trunks of Alders, 1893.

In the Garden Doorway, The Artist's Wife (1897), which won a bronze medal at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris. My reaction to this is that it is nice enough but I can't see giving it a medal. In 1900 the art world was on the verge of cubism and so on, but it seems that what many people really liked was pleasant domestic scenes with women and flowers. You can find versions of this picture online with the colors pumped up and the contrasts enhanced, but the more reliable sites have flat, muted versions like this one.

This painting, Summer Day by Roskilde Fjord (1900), is a National Treasure of Denmark, which probably means it can never be sold abroad or some such nationalist thing. Again I find this an odd choice to make a big deal over; perhaps it perfectly captures a sort of summer evening light that everyone in Denmark recognizes.

Ring painted several images of lone men waiting by railroad tracks; I find the bottom one very evocative, like a scene from a film noir.

At Breakfast, another very pleasant image of Ring's wife. I posted a large image so you can zoom in and see the details of dishes and so on in this fine sociological record of upper middle class life in Denmark. c. 1900.

More Danish landscapes.

And one more painting I really like, Herman Kähler in his Studio (1890). Kähler was a friend of Ring's, and  I see real admiration in this portrait.

The National Gallery of Denmark has dozens of works by Ring in their collection, including numerous drawings; here a rather nice one.

Biomedicine Crisis Looming

Why is it, do you suppose, that for all the billions and billions spent on research that is directly or indirectly supposed to cure cancer, we so little in the way of cures? Skeptical scientists have long been saying that throwing more money at the problem won't solve it, because there is only so much good research to be done and only so many people qualified to do it. Now these voices are getting louder:

The deeper problem is that much of cancer research in the lab—maybe even most of it—simply can’t be trusted. The data are corrupt. The findings are unstable. The science doesn’t work.

In other words, we face a replication crisis in the field of biomedicine, not unlike the one we’ve seen in psychology but with far more dire implications. Sloppy data analysis, contaminated lab materials, and poor experimental design all contribute to the problem. Last summer, Leonard P. Freedman, a scientist who worked for years in both academia and big pharma, published a paper with two colleagues on “the economics of reproducibility in preclinical research.” After reviewing the estimated prevalence of each of these flaws and fault-lines in biomedical literature, Freedman and his co-authors guessed that fully half of all results rest on shaky ground, and might not be replicable in other labs. These cancer studies don’t merely fail to find a cure; they might not offer any useful data whatsoever. Given current U.S. spending habits, the resulting waste amounts to more than $28 billion.

The underlying problems are well understood: the need to spend huge amounts of time and effort competing for and then administering grants; the refusal of journals to publish negative findings; the huge pressure to get publishable findings quickly, so as to secure one's job and win more grants; the career-ruining consequences of not finding something publishable, which leads people to massage their results until something publishable pops out; the great danger of trying something really novel and risky, since if you fail your career may be over. Because these problems are so well known, various actors have tried to somehow short out the grant-investigation-publication-more grants circuit. This is the idea behind Obama and Biden's "cancer moonshot" and billionaire Sean Parker's $250 million pledge for immune system research, that by acting outside the flawed system they can achieve dramatic results.

But the system doesn't exist for no reason; it exists because it is the best one people have come up with. The only serious proposal I have heard to get away from it is to give out grants randomly, and somehow reformers never find that appealing. Once you start saying that the money will only go to the most promising radical ideas, you are back in the trap of review boards who want to see publication records etc. Plus, why would anyone expect that $250 million will revolutionize a field that by the count above is already wasting billions every year?

One problem that nobody wants to talk about is that with so much money is being spent on biomedical research all over the world, researchers simply can't keep up. Huge amounts of time and money are being spent solving problems that someone else has already solved, or going down the same blind alleys others have thoroughly explored. The more money you spend, the more likely it is that the solution you want has already been found but nobody knows it, or that the solution would involve putting together two pieces of work done by labs on opposite sides of the world.

I don't know what else to do, really. I continue to hope that since our biomedical knowledge really does seem to be growing, we will eventually arrive at real understanding of how our bodies work and fail to work. And maybe an error rate of 40% or even 50% is just what you have to expect when you undertake such a massive and open-ended endeavor. But I have grown very skeptical of calls for more and more and more money from the backers of scientific research; the system is failing in fundamental ways, and right now it seems to me that feeding the system with more resources is as likely to make things worse as better.

Young Racists and the Internet

Interesting long essay by Dylan Matthews on the "alt right," covering everything from the Pat Buchanan campaign to internet monarchists. I don't take most of  this very seriously; most of what Matthews describes seems to me like angry young men mouthing off. One thing that interested me was something that I have written about before as it relates to my 19- and 23-year-old sons. This is the use of racism and sexism as ways of rebelling against the "religion" of liberal niceness within which most middle class Americans are raised.

This is professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and co-author Allum Bokhari:

Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish "Shlomo Shekelburg" to "Remove Kebab," an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide. Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents … Young people perhaps aren’t primarily attracted to the alt-right because they’re instinctively drawn to its ideology: they’re drawn to it because it seems fresh, daring and funny, while the doctrines of their parents and grandparents seem unexciting, overly-controlling and overly-serious.

And the internet monarchist who calls himself Mencius Moldbug:

If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything – an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest f***ing thing in the world. Because it is.

This is also my impression; when the main piety impressed on young people is tolerance, many young rebels will flout their impiety through stereotyping. Racist and sexist jokes have become the new blasphemy.

On the other hand this sort of thing can have real world effects. Consider Gamergate, which erupted when some women who work in the video gaming industry complained online about sexism in the gaming world. This produced an outpouring of abuse from young male gamers who were basically just mad that feminists had invaded their playground. The controversy was not really resolved, but the angry male gamers never backed down and that feels like a victory to some of them. Yiannopoulos:

GamerGate is remarkable — and attracts the interest of people like me — because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.

So the anger of these "racists" and "sexists" is not really directed toward blacks and women, but toward scolds who don't find their ranting funny. But where does telling racist jokes blend over into racism? If the anti-feminism of gamer culture makes it hard for female designers to do their jobs, "boys will be boys" may not be much of a comfort to them. As for the racism of American police, we all know where that leads.

There is, I believe, nothing more important in our society than tolerance; a diverse nation cannot be fair to its people without a very large dose of it. And yet purity is an impossible demand, in tolerance as in anything else. The harder we try to teach tolerance, the harder certain contrarians will push back, and the more delight young rebels will take in mocking its pieties.

There is no simple, absolute solution to this conundrum any more than there is to most deep problems. Freedom means nothing if it does not include the freedom to give offense; and yet no society will be worth living in if all we do is go around offending each other. We all have to strive for balance, in our own actions and in our reactions to provocateurs. We must work hard to draw lines between what we can wave off, which to me is the vast mass of all this online nonsense, and what we need call out and oppose. We need more equanimity, less in-the-moment anger or excitement, more real tolerance of different kinds of people and less outrage at anyone who disagrees with us. In the words of my favorite Old English poem,

Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg.

That passed, and so will this.

Bamboo Slips Revolutionizing China's Ancient Past

In 221 BCE, the famous emperor Qin Shi Huang unified China politically. He also set out to unify China ideologically, and from the various competing philosophical schools selected Legalism as the best system for his new empire. He ordered that all books from competing schools be burned and all scholars begin to teach Legalism. When Confucian, Daoist and other scholars resisted, he had them slaughtered; according to tradition he had 10,000 nonconforming scholars buried alive in a ravine. That's the emperor above in a much later painting, overseeing the burning and burying.

Once the burning and burying were over and the emperor safely dead, China's scholars set about trying to reconstruct what had been lost. Obviously nobody in 221 BCE could actually achieve the destruction of every Daoist or Confucian manuscript in China, so much remained. Confucian scholars in particular mounted a major effort to assemble surviving manuscripts into an agreed-upon set of master texts. Most modern scholars believe that the ancient Chinese classics as we have them, notably the Confucian Analects and Mencius and the Daoist Daodejing, were assembled in this period. But the question has long lingered: how much were they altered? Did they really resemble the originals, or had they been rewritten to suit the needs of a later age? Had they really existed before 221 BCE at all? Chinese scholars have taken just about every possible position on these questions. Most of their arguments have hinged on the details of paleography and word use, since there were simply no texts from before 221 BCE they could use as comparison. (The endless debate over when the Old Testament was written down and what earlier religious documents looked like is a good parallel.)

But now things have changed:

As Beijing prepared to host the 2008 Olympics, a small drama was unfolding in Hong Kong. Two years earlier, middlemen had come into possession of a batch of waterlogged manuscripts that had been unearthed by tomb robbers in south-central China. The documents had been smuggled to Hong Kong and were lying in a vault, waiting for a buyer.

Universities and museums around the Chinese world were interested but reluctant to buy. The documents were written on hundreds of strips of bamboo, about the size of chopsticks, that seemed to date from 2,500 years ago, a time of intense intellectual ferment that gave rise to China’s greatest schools of thought. But their authenticity was in doubt, as were the ethics of buying looted goods. Then, in July, an anonymous graduate of Tsinghua University stepped in, bought the soggy stack, and shipped it back to his alma mater in Beijing.

The Tsinghua manuscripts are the largest such collection, 2,000 slips, but there have been others, notably 800 strips from a tomb in central China and 1,200 looted strips that were eventually purchased by Shanghai University. These manuscripts include many philosophical treatises or collections of quotations from such treatises. All three major finds date to around 300 BCE, the era when both the terrible warfare of the Warring States Period and the bitter philosophical debate that accompanied it peaked.

The slips have varying degrees of preservation and the writing includes lost characters, so interpretation has been difficult. This has been a cooperative effort; images of the strips have been posted online and scholars have debated their readings in online discussion groups. As a result, some passages have actually been published in English before an official version has come out in Chinese.

If you are curious about what is in these strips, I recommend Ian Johnson's essay in the New York Review. Two points interested me: first, the Daodejing  or Book of Changes seems actually to be very old, since the fragments from the bamboo slips line up very closely with later manuscripts. Second, our versions of the Confucian classics do indeed seem to be cleaned up, almost sterilized renderings of what was a great, ongoing debate before Qin Shi Huang Ti's time. Since the current Chinese government likes to quote those sterilized classics in justifying its rule, the discovery of dissenting voices within the Confucian tradition is causing quite a stir in certain Chinese circles.

But how wonderful that our knowledge of the distant past can be enlarged in such a dramatic way.

Millions of Stray Dogs

All over the world, wherever there is garbage, human settlements are haunted by untamed dogs. There are millions of such dogs; the estimate cited in this Times story is 750 million, but I would take that with a grain of salt. Most of these dogs are not recent escapees, but feral animals that have bred themselves back into a sort of generic dogginess:

They argue in their new book that these dogs “are not mongrels or strays,” as is often assumed. Some lost pets do wander into groups of village dogs. But by and large, these dogs are much the same around the world, whether in Africa, Mongolia, China or the Americas.

Dr. Coppinger said he was once told by a Navajo sheep herder that a good herding dog was “not too big and not too small,” which perfectly describes village dogs, too. They are larger in colder climates, but in the tropics, he said, a 30-pound, lion-colored dog is the norm.

During their time as human companions, these dogs acquired a key trait that allows them to survive as scavengers: they can eat our food. So they can live where wolves cannot, in fact wherever there is garbage to feast on. Their scavenging lives contribute to other behavioral differences from wolves:

They are completely polygamous. “There can be as many fathers to a litter of puppies as there are puppies to a litter,” Dr. Coppinger said. And after about 10 weeks, the puppies fend for themselves. Most of the pups don’t survive, as is the case with many wild animals. . . .

They don’t need to be big and strong to bring down prey. They don’t need the kind of parental care and hunting instruction that wolf pups get. As Dr. Lord said, dog pups don’t need to catch and kill anything. “They need to walk up to a rotten melon and eat it, which they can do at 10 weeks.”

Puppies, after they are weaned, cannot compete with adults, so unless disease or dogcatchers have put a dent in the adult population, most of them starve. They have a true superpower in reserve, however, that can help them escape their fate. They can convince a human to feed them.

Fascinating.

Monkey Inequality

Capuchin monkeys, it seems, do not take it kindly when one monkey has more than the others:

Punishment of non-cooperators is important for the maintenance of large-scale cooperation in humans, but relatively little is known about the relationship between punishment and cooperation across phylogeny. The current study examined second-party punishment behavior in a nonhuman primate species known for its cooperative tendencies—the brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella). We found that capuchins consistently punished a conspecific partner who gained possession of a food resource, regardless of whether the unequal distribution of this resource was intentional on the part of the partner. A non-social comparison confirmed that punishment behavior was not due to frustration, nor did punishment stem from increased emotional arousal. Instead, punishment behavior in capuchins appears to be decidedly social in nature, as monkeys only pursued punitive actions when such actions directly decreased the welfare of a recently endowed conspecific. This pattern of results is consistent with two features central to human cooperation: spite and inequity aversion, suggesting that the evolutionary origins of some human-like punitive tendencies may extend even deeper than previously thought.

So the monkeys go after any other monkey who stumbles onto a food windfall until the extra food is shared. And they don't do this because they are hungry or angry, but just because that is what capuchin monkeys do.

Certain human hunter-gatherers do the same thing; a hunter among these people who doesn't want to share his catch evenly with everyone has to eat it before he comes back to camp.

I think about this whenever I ponder human inequality. If we really want a more equal world, we have to stop rewarding people who get rich with adulation and attention and start snubbing them until they share more.

Georgetown's Slave Sale

The Jesuits were prominent in the Maryland colony from its beginnings. Maryland was founded in part as a Catholic refuge and several Jesuit priests sailed on the first voyage, eager both to serve their white congregants and evangelize the Indians. They set up several plantations, which they called "manors", divided in the European style into a demesne worked by the priests and their servants and other tracts leased to tenants. Two of those manors are now Navy bases, which is why I know so much about this.

Over the course of the eighteenth century the Jesuits came to own hundreds of African slaves. I am not sure how this happened, since some prominent Jesuits were very much opposed to slavery. I imagine slavery was just such a fact of life in the Chesapeake that it came to seem as natural to the Jesuits as it did to most of their neighbors, and after all the church had not yet condemned slavery.

One of the things the Jesuits did with the money they earned growing tobacco was to found, in 1789, Georgetown University. So this noble institution was from its beginnings paid for by the labor of slaves on Jesuit plantations.

In 1838, as the nation's banks collapsed like dominoes and a severe recession settled on America, Georgetown found itself on the edge of bankruptcy. They decided to solve their financial problem by selling off their most valuable movable asset: the human beings they happened to own. Like most big Chesapeake planters, the Jesuits had sold off a few slaves before. As tobacco declined in the Tidewater and its place was taken by wheat fields and tree plantations, Tidewater planters needed fewer workers. Meanwhile their slaves kept having children, and many planters had more workers than they knew how to use. So they sold them south and west, to the newly opening lands from Alabama to Texas. Hundreds of thousands of people were sold in this way, traveling by sea to New Orleans, or trudging overland to the Ohio River to be floated down to Natchez. How this was done varied. Some planters worked hard to keep nuclear families together and find buyers with good reputations and so on, but others just went for the highest profit. It was a grim business and even slavery's most ardent proponents worried about it; some of them tried to shift the blame from the planters to northern bankers whose evil machinations had forced good southern people to such drastic acts. When Georgetown's president, Father Thomas Mulledy, got permission from Rome for the sale, he promised that families would be kept together and all the slaves would be able to keep practicing Catholicism. But in the end he did none of that; he simply sold 272 people as a lot to slave traders who shipped them to New Orleans and sold them individually to the highest bidder.

The current leaders of Georgetown are feeling very guilty about this. They have launched a major project to study what happened to the people they sold and identify their descendants. They have even identified some, and shared with them what the university's researchers have learned about their ancestors. They have also posted online all the documents they can find related to the sale and to the lives of the victims before and after they were sold.

It's a very interesting sort of atonement, perhaps appropriate for a university: to honor the victims by learning all that can be learned about them and spreading that knowledge far and wide, especially to the descendants of the wronged.

The Climate Change Hiatus and the Weird Presentism of Political Debate

Lots of chatter this week in climate science circles because of a new note published in Nature Climate Change arguing that the "hiatus" in global warming over the past 15 years is real. They call it the "warming slowdown." After applying gobs of statistics to the global temperature data, they conclude that the rate of temperature increase has in fact slowed since 2000.

But if you're like me, you looks at the above graph and ask, what about this hiatus? I mean, given the vast number of pixels that have been spewed over the internet about the recent "hiatus", you might think it is some kind of unusual event. But it is not, and in fact it is a lot less important than the big pause we had from 1945 to 1980. The authors of this paper in Nature recognize that, and they offer an explanation that they think explains both slowdowns: that these are phases when the oceans were warming, and therefore soaking up heat, and in between came a phase when the oceans were cooling and therefore accelerating the change. (You have to remember that most, as in almost all, of the heat in the climate system is actually in the oceans, not the atmosphere.)

The climate change debate is a good example of a big problem with human thinking in general, a problem that makes it very difficult for us to deal with problems like global warming. Our thinking is far too short term. Both people terrified of climate change and people who dismiss the whole thing as a hoax spend way too much time and effort arguing over whether the world was warmer in 2010 than in 2000, when the only serious answer is, who cares? What matters is the trend since 1850 when we really began pumping CO2 from fossil fuels into the atmosphere, and that trend is up.

And the question that matters, and that we cannot answer, is why the global temperature, which seems to track the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, has gotten decoupled from it in recent decades. As you can see in the graph above, the CO2 level has soared in recent decades while the plant has warmed only a little. Is that because some other mechanism cancels out the effect of all that greenhouse gas? Or is it because the change is just taking some time to work its way through the system? Most scientists are betting on the latter, and if they are right we are in for terrible trouble.

And one thing we know about the climate is that it does not generally warm or cool in smooth curves, but like a flight of stairs, with periods of rapid change separated by periods of stasis. So even if we are in a pause, that in no way implies that we won't start warming rapidly in a year or two.

HGA Architects: Lakewood Cemetery Garden Mausoleum, Minneapolis

I was perusing the list of this year's AIA Institute Honor Awards, full of buildings either boring or awful, when I found myself staring at this. This is a mausoleum, the sort of depressing place where one's loved ones rest in drawers, but I like it.

It is just the sort of building that I would like to see more of: not brutalism or Bauhaus or bland postmodernism, nor just a copy of some past style. It has enough decoration to be interesting in a clearly modern form. At least in these photographs it has the quiet, meditative feel one would like to see in such structures.

The inside is nothing special, but neither is it offensive, and the designers worked hard to get natural light into every space.

A strange choice for a blog post, I know, but I so rarely see anything I like win an architecture award that I wanted to bring it up. See, I don't hate all contemporary architecture.

The Crisis in Social Science Continues

This roundup of recent happenings in the ongoing crisis of replication, bad statistics and outright fraud in social science is full of sad news: more famous results retracted, whole classes of results invalidated by poor statistical controls. The debate over Australia's experiment with gun control continues, with a new study arguing that the earlier studies that concluded the reform did reduce violence were wrong and there was no effect. One recent article which looked at why experimental results can't be replicated concludes that

the influence of questionable research practices is at the heart of failures to replicate psychological findings, especially in social psychology.

But the worst part is an account of social scientists who found serious errors in their own published work and tried to retract it. One journal told an author that they charge $10,000 to publish retractions. Another was told, by the American Sociological Review, that they had no mechanism for retractions, but the authors were welcome to submit their new findings as a separate paper. They did so, but the new paper was rejected with the usual form letter saying the ASR "publishes only the very best submissions." Which was grimly amusing to authors who have realized that the paper the journal did publish contained an invalidating error.

It's disheartening.

The Battle of the Harzhorn, c. 235 CE

In 2000, some amateur archaeologists were exploring a wooded ridge called the Harzhorn in Lower Saxony, searching for a medieval fortress. Instead they found a Roman horseshoe called a hipposandal and some other Roman artifacts. In 2008 they notified the state archaeologists, and an effort was mounted to explore the site.

That effort produced an amazing array of artifacts, mostly Roman military gear, along with a few Germanic spearheads and the like.

German spear head.

The most common artifacts were nails from Roman military shoes,

which is not really surprising, given that a single caliga had 80 to 100 nails.

Also very common were the heads of Roman ballista or scorpio bolts; more than 170 of these were found, as compared to about 50 spear and arrow points.

This is an important find because while Roman writers mentioned that ballistas were sometimes used as mobile field artillery, those writers gave no indication of how this was actually done, and there was little archaeological evidence. Some of the bolts at the Harzhorn were found deep in the soil and a few were found wedged into cracks in the limestone bedrock, thus apparently lying right where they struck, showing the direction from which they were fired. We'll come back to this later. (Above, a modern ballista of the mobile type.)

Coins found on the site date the battle to around 235 CE. The emperor would either have been either Severus Alexander, the last of the Severan emperors (208-235), or Maximinus Thrax (235-238, above), the Thracian soldier who overthrew him. Both are recorded as having campaigned in Germany. These campaigns had various purposes: to punish tribes that had raided the empire too often or too destructively, to break up powerful coalitions of potential enemies, and generally to protect the empire by taking the fight outside its borders.

This dolabra or entrenching tool is scratched LEG IIII F, apparently the Fourth Legion Flavia Felix, which was based in Belgrade. So this Roman force had men from at least one legion, not just auxiliaries.

Photographs of the Harzhorn. The Harzhorn is the eastern end of a long ridge. This ridge is within a gap in the mountains that allows passage from southern Germany onto the North German Plain; the little river valley just east of the Harzhorn is the easiest way through this mountain gap. The general idea is that the Romans must have been marching through this gap, perhaps returning from a raid, and the Germans tried to block them by taking a position on this steep-sided ridge.

In the way of modern battlefield archaeologists, these Germans have made a precise record of where each object was found. For all missiles they have also recorded which direction it was facing. The maps published so far are not complete or very well annotated, but they give a good idea of what has been found. A professor who is a friend of mine is teaching a course on ancient military history this term, and one of the paper assignments he offered his students was to use this evidence to reconstruct a narrative of the battle. He graciously made all the material he assembled for this assignment available to me. I find this assignment irresistible, so I here offer my own attempt. Above, the general map of finds from 2008.

Close up view of the core area. The symbols are as follows:

Red dot: hobnail from a Roman military shoe.
Yellow circle: location of a modern hole from illegal excavation.
Cross: close combat (not otherwise explained)
Blue circle: German spearhead.
Blue diamond: piece of equipment from a horse or beast of burden.
Blue square: piece of a Roman wagon.

The large isosceles triangles mark the locations of missiles. The arrowhead or ballista bolt was found at the point, and the rest shows the orientation, that is, the direction from which the bolt might have been fired.

Pink cone: missile from a large torsion engine (certainly Roman).
Purple cone: missile from a lighter torsion engine (certainly Roman).
Green cone: an arrowhead (German or Roman not indicated).
Blue cone: a spearhead (not indicated whether this is Roman or German, but since German spearheads are marked with blue circles—see above—might this be Roman?).

Of course any particular bolt might have been moved by a badger or an uprooted tree, so there is some doubt as to which are in their original positions. The excavators say the one thing they are certain of is that the center of the area above was fired on by Roman ballistas from the north; one assumes that this is the orientation of the bolts they found embedded in the bedrock.

The presence of Roman wagon parts is confusing, since the Romans did not take wagons into combat. It has been speculated that perhaps these Germans had attacked the Roman baggage train and seized part of it, and that perhaps this is how the battle began. But then again perhaps these German had stolen these wagons months or years ago and pressed them into service as shields when they found themselves under ballista fire.

The area just west of the map above. Here there are fewer ballista bolts but many more hobnails, perhaps suggesting hand-to-hand combat.

The obvious inference from these maps is that the battle had at least two phases. In the first, the Romans focused their attack on the eastern end of the German line. They used ballista fire to soften up this position. No doubt the Germans here had formed a shield wall and the Romans could see that storming uphill into that wooden wall was not going to be easy. The advantage of a ballista over an arrow was that ballista bolts could go through wooden shields and kill the men behind them. Perhaps the Germans tried to protect themselves by bringing up some wagons and sheltering behind them. The Romans attacked the German position from the north at least, but quite likely from the south as well. Either with missile fire alone, or by bombardment followed by an infantry advance, the Romans drove the Germans off the low-lying eastern part of the ridge. The Germans fell back up the ridge toward the west. But the Roman infantry kept up close pursuit and, after a short, sharp fight at the spot marked by all those hobnails, the Germans gave way again and continued to retreat up the ridge with the Romans in pursuit.

One of the problems with this battlefield is that the place that might well have been the key, the low-lying stream valley east of the ridge, is crossed by two modern roads and is generally messed up, so we have no idea if there was any fighting there. (The valley is to the left in the Lidar map above, which faces south.) In ancient times the area was marshy, but it was certainly passable, since the route through here goes back to Neolithic times. So if the Germans left the low-lying valley undefended, the Romans could easily have sent men through it to attack the end of the ridge from both sides. Or perhaps the Germans defended the low ground with cavalry, which the Romans drove off; or perhaps actually the key part of the battle took place by the stream and what survives is a side show. We simply don't know.

Not only that, but it seems that since the maps I posted above were made, the archaeologists have continued working and they have found more artifacts west of the maps above. The map above was published in 2011, and it seems to show that the fighting extended some distance to the west along the southern slopes of the ridge. (That's a big file; click to enlarge). The excavators have assumed in their publications that the Romans attacked from the north, but I find that hard to reconcile with the western section of the map above.

So I reconstruct the battle like this. The Romans are moving along that road from the southwest when the Germans appear on the ridge above them. The Roman commander – after pausing to deliver a suitable speech in which he points out that these barbarians are afraid to fight the Romans man to man on open ground, thus they hide behind trees and rocks in the cowardly way of their people –deploys half of his men facing north. But they do not charge the ridge, just apply enough pressure to keep the Germans in place. Meanwhile the other half of the Roman force, including the cavalry, moves to the east toward the stream valley.

After brushing aside whatever force the Germans have stationed by the stream, the Romans push to the west, into the rear of the German position. They identify a key point at the eastern end of the steep ridge and position most of their artillery to fire there. Perhaps this is where the German king has set up his standard, surrounded by his household men. As the ballistas do their damage, the men of the legion slowly work their way forward. Then the signal is given, and the Romans roar their deep-throated battle cry and sweep up the ridge from both sides. The Germans remind each other of the oaths they have sworn, of the boasts they have made around the fire in the mead hall. They take up their spears and axes and stride forth to meet the invaders.

But the Romans outnumber their remaining enemies, and outgun them. The eastern end of the ridge is overrun. Around the upended wagons the king's sworn men make a brave stand, but the Romans are advancing from every side and they are in danger of being cut off. Deciding that this is not the day the gods have chosen for him to die, the king signals a retreat west up the ridge. The Romans shout again and follow, and another sharp fight follows; more men go down, and the ridge is strewn with corpses. To the west the Germans had held their position bravely, but as the Romans seize the high ground behind them they panic and flee, some even casting away their shields. The Romans bury their dead, leave the stripped German bodies for the crows, and march on to continue their mission of destruction.

Wikipedia; the web site (in German) of the excavation; an English summary.