Anthropology.net

I have just returned from a presentation lead by UC Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim White. I must say, even as the paper came out, I had reservations about it all. I was once taught by my physical anthropologist to always accept new finds in paleoanthropology with a skeptical eye. Suffice to say, after hearing what White has said, I have a lot to say about the public relation hurricane spun by the new Nature publication, “A juvenile early hominin skeleton from Dikika, Ethiopia.”

After reading the paper, I immediately had beef with the claims from Zeresenay Alemseged et al. that this specimen has a “gorilla-like scapula.” To me, I didn’t see why and how, an australopithecine would have a scapula that is more similar to a more primitive ape than say a chimpanzee. Australopithecines are well documented to be bipedal, with a restructed lower limb morphology to support walking on two feet. Even this specimen shows a robust calcaneus (bone on the lower left of the image to the right) and a buttressed tibia (bone on the lower right of the image to the right) to support the weight of the organism on two limbs. Why then would it have a scapula of a gorilla, who is so outrageously robust, and specialized for a different mode of locomotion and ecological context? What is the evolutionary signifance of carrying such a hefty upper body when you are primarily bipedal? Let me remind you gorillas live in dense rain forrest, for the most part and are often arboreal… whereas all australopithecine fossils have been found in stratigraphic layers that represent savannah mosiac and marshland like ecosystems.

As I continued to read the paper, the authors showed the scapula from multiple angles. They showed a comparative anatomical lineup of the Dikika scapula to a human, gorilla, and chimpanzee one. In their analysis they documented that the scapula is proportionally similar to a gorillas, based on the infraspinatus to supraspinatus regions. But you have a look for yourselves, the image to the right is the picture the authors provided in their paper. To the top left (a) is Dikika, (b) in the top right is a gorilla’s scapula, and (c) and (d) are human and chimpanzee scapula respectively. Just eyeballing it, the regions above and below the spine of the scapula are equal in the gorilla. In contrast, Dikika’s portions looks similar to a humans… where the supraspinatus region looks about a third of the size of the infraspinatus region.

The authors specifically measured only an abstract angle and breadth of the infraspinatus region of the scapula and called it signfiicantly similar to African apes, specifically gorilla like. But! If you know anything about osteology, free floating bones such as the os penis (bacculum), hyoid, patellae, and scapula are highly variable. The shape and morphology of the bone is highly specialized to that particular inidividual’s life history. For example, as White pointed out, there are populations of native Americans on the Pacific coast, which have scapulae that are remarkably unlike modern humans. So how can you use this bone as a signficant marker of gorilla-ness?

I specifically noticed that the measurements of Dikika’s glenoid fossa do not quite match up with that of a gorillas, either. The glenoid fossa is the point of articulation of the scapula, the shoulder blade, and the humerus. In arboreal organisms, such as gorillas and other primates that spend some time up in the trees the glenoid fossa is a wide and deep joint. This is significant because a joint like that bears a lot of stress, force, and needs to be stable in order to support the organism. In humans, who are not arboreal as you may already know, the glenoid fossa is not as deep. It is a shallow joint that allows for flexibility at the cost of joint stability. That’s why people discolate their arms frequently and get so many rotator cuff injuries, while gorillas do not.

To me, the glenoid fossa is the most significant indicator on how gorilla-like the scapula is. I say that because the glenoid fossa is the point of interest in understanding how strongly the arm is connected to the body. While, I do not have an image of the glenoid fossa of Dikika, let me document that the supplementary information for the paper writes that the Dikika glenoid fossa size is 14mm which falls between roughly +/- 1mm standard deviation of human and chimpanzee scapula of the same age. In contrast a gorilla scapula is over 20mm in size! A 6mm difference is far too significant for me to call it only gorilla– so why then did Zeresenay Alemseged and Nature allow this to be published?

Listening to White, I was introduced to many other reasons as to why Alemseged, Nature, and the whole system behind this paper let a detail like this pass on by. I’m not a professional paleoanthropologist, to say the least, but I can smell a dupe just like anyone else… for example, what’s up with calling Dikika a female? Sexing a fossil is nearly impossible, especially with a immature juvenile, lacking the bones of the pelvic girdle. You need multiple specimens, erupted permanent molars… and this paper doesn’t even document the measurements of the “lower canine mesodistal diameter” that allowed them to define a sex.

Furthermore, A. afarensis is not a sexually dimorphic taxon… unlike A. boisei. And sexual dimorphism does not manifest in any primate skeleton, that I know of, until after puberty/maturation. A three year old, with unerupted permanent molars is too early to sex.

White also told us the tales meeting with other paleoanthropologists… like W. H. Kimbel and his research methods and ethics, in the 1990′s. I now wonder about the scientific authority of team Alemseged gathered up because of what I heard from White. See, Kimbel, is a famous paleoanthropologist, and worked with Donald Johanson ( “grandfather of Lucy”) back in the ’70′s, and he is a co-author for this new Nature paper. According to White, Kimbel was once criticsized, by him, on how he collected specimens from the various sites in Afar. Kimbel is known for his work in north (and some of south) Hadar, and that region is so prone to dramatic changes in geomorphology. After one rain, the run off from the sides of the hills really displaces fossils, but Kimbel seemed not to care when White told him he should pay attention to this detail… enough to become fairly hostile to him.

I now raise the question, influenced by White, “how much of this Dikika fossil is left in the field because of Kimbel’s sloppy collecting methods?” …One can assume, that as Alemseged’s mentor, and his past history of not being thorough in excavating they both neglected to fully search down stream for the rest of Dikika. Since the Dikika long bones clearly show post fossilization, 90 degree breaks, the specimen was not consumed by a predator; so the rest of the fossil is out there. Why then has such a rare spectacular specimen like this not be excavated with more care and attention? Could it be the nature of Kimbel’s researching, or was Alemseged pressured to excavated faster because of financial reasons?

White went through a lot more criticisms of this paper… but I want to clarify that he never questioned the impact and importance of Dikika. He only cited that there are a lot of details that are not well substantiated… and they, in his and my opinion, are not thorough enough be published in a paper like Nature as well as be marketed like a super-ultimate-fantastic paleoanthroloogical finding. In all reality, this finding has not taught us anything new about what we already know about australopithecines, for example we already knew that metacarpals of A. afarensis are curved less than apes but more than humans. That was established in the ’60′s! Alemseged could really have spent a lot more time teaching us more about what is signficantly different about this fossil!

If you take a look at the P.R. media blitz unleashed by this paper, and correlate it with the faulty scientific methods, I think you can begin to see that this Nature paper was released a little prematurely. Nature even devoted a damned video page for it, but overlooked key details! Perhaps pressure from the funders of the research, the National Geographic Society, who were itching for a find of the year, was a factor to consider. Last year we had the Hobbit, and so far this year we have had not a big paleanthropological finding. In my opinion, and should this be the case, I believe this is where big business has done a disservice to science and the scientific process.

This paper has been published in Nature, the cream of the crop of scientific publications, despite the gapping holes that I have outlined from Whites observations and my readings. Journals like this, set the standard for the whole discourse, and in all honesty this paper shows how flawed the peer review process is. It can be tainted and influenced to hastily publish papers that needed more time and in depth analysis, just for the sake of publicity.

If you want to read other criticisms of the paper, please check out Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University’s words in Kate Wong’s SCIAM OBSERVATIONS.

There’s news buzzing about the fossilized remains of a human-like child, from 3.3-million-year-ago. The remains have been unearthed in Ethiopia’s Dikika region and are believed to be of a female Australopithecus afarensis bones are from the same species as an adult skeleton found in 1974 which was nicknamed “Lucy.” As of now, these remains are the oldest known skeleton of young human ancestor. The skeleton was discovered in 2000 and the discoverers have spent five painstaking years removing what fossils they have now from sandstone, and the job will take years more to complete because there’s more in there.

Here’s a collection of the news sources running stories on this:

• BBC News’ “‘Lucy’s baby’ found in Ethiopia“
• CNN’s “Skeleton sheds light on ape-man species“
• Max Planck Society Press Release, “Meet the Earliest Baby Girl ever Discovered!“
• National Geographic News’ ““Lucy’s Baby” — World’s Oldest Child — Found by Fossil Hunters“
• Nature News’ “Little ‘Lucy’ fossil found“
• The New York Times’ “Fossil of Child, Age 3 Million, Offers New Insights“
• The New York Times’ “Little Girl, 3 Million Years Old, Offers New Hints on Evolution“

The discovery has been published in the September 21st 2006 issue of Nature… there are actually two reports in Nature, one that overviews the geological and palaeontological context and the other that overviews the anatomical and evolutionary implications of the finding. Here’s the link and abstract to the first paper:

“A juvenile early hominin skeleton from Dikika, Ethiopia“

Understanding changes in ontogenetic development is central to the study of human evolution. With the exception of Neanderthals, the growth patterns of fossil hominins have not been studied comprehensively because the fossil record currently lacks specimens that document both cranial and postcranial development at young ontogenetic stages. Here we describe a well-preserved 3.3-million-year-old juvenile partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis discovered in the Dikika research area of Ethiopia. The skull of the approximately three-year-old presumed female shows that most features diagnostic of the species are evident even at this early stage of development. The find includes many previously unknown skeletal elements from the Pliocene hominin record, including a hyoid bone that has a typical African ape morphology. The foot and other evidence from the lower limb provide clear evidence for bipedal locomotion, but the gorilla-like scapula and long and curved manual phalanges raise new questions about the importance of arboreal behaviour in the A. afarensis locomotor repertoire.

And here’s the details of the second paper:

“Geological and palaeontological context of a Pliocene juvenile hominin at Dikika, Ethiopia“

Since 1999, the Dikika Research Project (DRP; initiated by Z.A.) has conducted surveys and excavations in badlands that expose Pliocene and Pleistocene sediments south of the Awash River in Ethiopia, between surrounding hominin localities at Hadar, Gona and the Middle Awash region. Here we report our geological mapping and stratigraphic measurement of the DRP area, and the context of a remarkably well-preserved skeleton of the earliest known juvenile hominin at the Dikika DIK-1 locality. Our mapping of the DRP area permits a complete definition of the hominin-bearing Hadar Formation and provides a cohesive structural and tectonic framework defining its relationships to adjacent strata. Our findings reveal the basin-scale tectonic, depositional and palaeoenvironmental history of the area, as well as a clear taphonomic and palaeontological context for the juvenile hominin. Such data are crucial for understanding the environmental context of human evolution, and can be integrated into larger-scale tectonic and palaeoenvironmental studies. Our basin-scale approach to palaeoenvironments provides a means to elucidate the complex geological history occurring at the scale of temporally and geographically controlled fossil point localities, which occur within the rich tectonic and depositional history of the Awash Valley.

One of the authors of the paper, Fred Spoor a professor of evolutionary anatomy at University College London, describes with Zeresenay Alemseged (lead author) of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, the fossil,

• The lower body is very human-like while the upper body is ape-like.
• The shoulder blades resemble those of a gorilla rather than a modern human.
• The neck seems short and thick like a [non-human] great ape’s, rather than the more slender version humans have to keep the head stable while running.
• The organ of balance in the inner ear is more ape-like than human.
• The fingers are very curved, which could indicate climbing ability, “but I’m cautious about that,” Spoor said. Curved fingers have been noted for A. afarensis before, but their significance is in dispute.

If you don’t know much about A. afarensis there is much debate about its arboreal behavior and abilities, but there is a general concensus that entists it stood upright and walked on two feet. The ability to climb into trees and move about would require anatomical equipment like long arms, and A. afarensis had arms that dangled down to just above the knees. The question is whether such features indicate climbing ability or just evolutionary baggage.

Dienekes informs us of a French-Syrian archaeological mission discovery of decorated human skulls dating back to 9,500 years ago near Damascus, Syria. The find was located at a burial site near a prehistoric (actually Neolithic site of Tell Aswad, at Jaidet al-Khass village. The five skulls were found earlier this month in a pit resting against one another, underneath the remains of an infant, here is an image of three of the skulls in sediment still:

Discoveries like this are not uncommon the Middle East, death masks and decorated skulls are quite common in a lot of cultures. The Egyptians really solidified the ritual of death masks several thousand years after this finding, and the Phoenicians and Persians are known to have decorated their dead similarly. The significance of this finding is that the skulls represent a,

“regularity and the smoothness of their features.. The eyes are shown as closed, underlined by black bitumen. The nose is straight and fine, with a pinched base to portray the nostrils. The mouth is reduced to a slit… only to important individuals, chosen according to social or religious criteria.”

Danielle Stordeur is a CNRS Directeur de Recherche and Director of the El Kowm-Mureybet permanent mission. She heads the CNRS research unit, that assisted in this discovery, and is quoted from an AFP article, “9,500-year-old decorated skulls found in Syria.”

The New York Times is running an article announcing, “Writing on Stone May Be Oldest in the Americas,” as is the National Geographic News‘ “Oldest Writing in New World Discovered, Scientists Say.” Both articles are writing in reference to a brand new paper in the latest Science. The lead author, Maria del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez, is from the Centro del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, her paper’s abstract summarizes the important announcement of…

“A block (image to the right, click for a larger version) with a hitherto unknown system of writing has been found in the Olmec heartland of Veracruz, Mexico. Stylistic and other dating of the block places it in the early first millennium before the common era, the oldest writing in the New World, with features that firmly assign this pivotal development to the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica.”

The paper in Science is aptly titled, “Oldest Writing in the New World (DOI: 10.1126/science.1131492.)

According to the New York Times piece, the order and pattern of carved symbols warrant it to be a true writing system, and the [26 pound] stone slab is 3,000-year-old, making it the of the oldest script ever discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Actually, the tiny, delicate symbols are incised on the concave top surface of a block of soft stone that measures about 14 inches long, 8 inches wide and 5 inches thick. The stone slab was accidentally discovered in 1999, when road builders digging gravel came across it among debris from an ancient mound at Cascajal, a place the archaeologists called the ‘Olmec heartland.’ The village is on an island in southern Veracruz about a mile from San Lorenzo, where ruins have been found of the dominant Olmec city, which stood from 1200 B. C. to 900 B. C. I don’t know where the statement that the last discovery of its kind was the Indus Valley script, identified by archaeologists in 1924, because I can think of several examples such as this one, “symbols on 7,000 year old pottery may provide insight into the origin of Chinese characters” or “A is for Ancient, I is for Israeli, F is for Phoenician” that both document really recent discoveries of ancient written language artifacts. The New York Times article describes the artifact with some more detail,

“The inscription on the stone slab, with 62 distinct signs, some of them repeated, has been tentatively dated to at least 900 B.C., and possibly earlier. That is 400 years or more before writing had been known to exist in Mesoamerica, the region from central Mexico through much of Central America — and by extension, to exist anywhere in the Hemisphere.Scientists had not previously found any script that was unambiguously associated with the Olmec culture, which flourished along the Gulf of Mexico in Vera Cruz and Tobasco well before the Zapotec and Maya people rose to prominence elsewhere in the region. Until now, the Olmec were known mainly for the colossal stone heads they created and displayed at monumental buildings in their ruling cities.”

As usual, there is some confusion to the date of the artifact because as some other researchers have voiced out they are skeptical of the dating of the inscription because the stone was uncovered in a gravel quarry where it and other artifacts were jumbled and may have been out of their original context.

In response Maria’s discovery team said that ceramic shards, clay figurines and other broken artifacts accompanying the stone appeared to be from a particular phase of Olmec culture that ended about 900 B. C. But they acknowledged that the disarray at the site made it impossible to determine whether the stone had originally been in a place relating to the governing elite or to religious ceremony.

I was surprised to catch this article, from Ars Technica, in my RSS reader. Chris Lee, the author, reviews a very basic level of theory of altruistic behavior in humans. He uses a recently published paper in Nature, “Parochial altruism in humans” to support his opinion of the “inadequacies of current models to explain the detailed behavior of altruism.”

The Nature paper’s lead author, Helen Bernhard an economist at the University of Zurich, compares in-group altruism to out-group altruism amongst Papua New Guinean highland tribes. The abstract reads,

“Social norms and the associated altruistic behaviours are decisive for the evolution of human cooperation and the maintenance of social order, and they affect family life, politics and economic interactions. However, as altruistic norm compliance and norm enforcement often emerge in the context of inter-group conflicts, they are likely to be shaped by parochialism—a preference for favouring the members of one’s ethnic, racial or language group. We have conducted punishment experiments, which allow ‘impartial’ observers to punish norm violators, with indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea. Here we show that these experiments confirm the prediction of parochialism. We found that punishers protect ingroup victims—who suffer from a norm violation—much more than they do outgroup victims, regardless of the norm violator’s group affiliation. Norm violators also expect that punishers will be lenient if the latter belong to their social group. As a consequence, norm violations occur more often if the punisher and the norm violator belong to the same group. Our results are puzzling for evolutionary multi-level selection theories based on selective group extinction as well as for theories of individual selection; they also indicate the need to explicitly examine the interactions between individuals stemming from different groups in evolutionary models.”

Chris writes on how Bernhard studied two tribes in Papua New Guinea. He believes that Bernhard chose these groups because centralized (a.k.a western or foreign) social norms have not yet affect people’s cultures and personalities He writes, “inhabitants are thought to have a society and lifestyle that is as close as possible to that experienced by early modern humans”. I think that’s a bit naive to assume, as tribes in that region have been contacted by westerners for nearly all of the 20th century. Bernhard experimented on members of two tribes who had contact but were not in violent conflict with each other. The experiment setup was a basic resource allocation on. Bernhard established roles such as the dictator, the judge, and the victim. The dictator has some resources and he or she can choose to share some of them with the victim. The judge can then choose to punish the dictator if he or she feels that the sharing was not within the expected social norms. The participants were all informed of which tribe each actor was from so their actions reflect how they expect the in-group and out-group participants to behave.

Unsurprisingly, it was concluded that altruism was strongest when all participants were from the same tribe and the punishment meted out for sharing violations were harsher than for all other combinations except one. … A side-notes, I’m concerned that uninspiring cultural research like this is getting published into Nature, but then again it is coming from an economist… Chris summarizes what he got from the paper,

“In many ways this study agrees with how we intuitively understand intra- and inter-group behavior, which is to be expected, since we make many of our decisions based upon our own understanding of group response. We expect the group social norms to prevent behavior that is harmful to the group. This should also include protecting the group’s status by making a decision which benefits your group (e.g., the judge protecting victims when they are members of the same tribe). However, this study highlights the necessity for a more subtle theory, which can cope with more complex behavior patterns. The authors speculate that while group survival can describe human altruistic behavior in broad brush strokes, it fails when it is necessary to take into account cooperative inter-group behavior.”

Additionally, Chris remarks how he appreciates that Bernhard and troop “have tried to get outside the “hire college students to play a game” routine which is such a common way to study human behavior.” But that’s the whole nature of ethnography and studying core behaviors, like altruism. You must detach yourself from the culture and environments you are accustomed too, in order to observe more true behaviors that would be otherwise tainted by your background and biases.

Anyways, I am sharing these two articles with you because its always effective to see how anthropological methods, like studying altruism, are executed in other disciplines. Furthermore, Chris’ article in Ars Technica, a tech-centered website, elaborate how people with presumably non-anthropological background comprehend and digest this research.

The New York Times, BBC News, and Nature News have all published little articles reviewing an upcoming publication that shows Gibraltar may have been the last refuge of the Neanderthals. The paper is titled, “Late survival of Neanderthals at the southernmost extreme of Europe,” and the abstract,

“The late survival of archaic hominin populations and their long contemporaneity with modern humans is now clear for southeast Asia1. In Europe the extinction of the Neanderthals, firmly associated with Mousterian technology, has received much attention, and evidence of their survival after 35 kyr bp has recently been put in doubt2. Here we present data, based on a high-resolution record of human occupation from Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, that establish the survival of a population of Neanderthals to 28 kyr bp. These Neanderthals survived in the southernmost point of Europe, within a particular physiographic context, and are the last currently recorded anywhere. Our results show that the Neanderthals survived in isolated refuges well after the arrival of modern humans in Europe.”

Several hundred stone tools attributed to Neandertals in Gorham’s Cave (to the lower right), on the rugged Mediterranean coast near the Rock of Gibraltar were found after a six year dig. The tools and charcoal remains were dated to be 28,000 years old, meaning that Neandertal’s last known occupation was at this cave before being wiped out. An example of a tool found at the site is an image of a spearpoint located to the right.

The dig was lead by Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum, who anounced the findings to the public yesterday. Finlayson and his team of Spanish archaeologists started excavating the cave in 1999. By 2005, they had penetrating several layers with evidence of Neandertal occupation…specifically, “they had excavated more than 60 square feet of the cave floor”. The stratigraphic depth of the layers indicated that the cave was home to Mousterian toolmakers over a long stretch of time.

From the New York Times article,

“In an accompanying commentary in Nature, two paleontologists not involved in the research, Eric Delson and Katerina Harvati, agreed that the date of 28,000 years ago was ‘later than any other well-documented supposed Neanderthal occurrence.’They added a note of caution, saying that while Gorham’s Cave ‘might well pinpoint the newly extended end of a long lineage’ of Neanderthals in Europe, only ‘time will tell’ if the findings are correct.

Dr. Delson is a paleontologist at Lehman College of the City University of New York and the American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Harvati, an evolutionary scientist, is a specialist in Neanderthal research at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Delson said in an interview that the dates for the artifacts ‘appeared to be solid’ and that southern Iberia ‘was indeed a region where Neanderthals survived long after modern humans were dominant elsewhere in Europe.’

Recently revised dating shows that anatomically modern Homo sapiens migrated to Europe from Africa by 35,000 years ago and over time they displaced Neanderthals, who had lived on the continent for about 200,000 years.

Erik Trinkaus, a Neanderthal specialist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not a member of the discovery team, expressed reservations about the accuracy of 28,000-year date, noting that it was based on analysis of tiny pieces of charcoal, which often migrate from one layer to another in sediments.”

The BBC News article goes into a discussion on the hypothesis on Neandertal extinction. The article attributes climate change as reasons why Gibraltar was the last stronghold for Neadertals,

“Gibraltar’s climate was sheltered from many of these changes, but it did eventually deteriorate. Recent deep-sea core data show that temperatures dropped sharply around 24,000 years ago. This could have created drought-like conditions in the area which may also have reduced the number of prey the Neanderthals could catch.”

Check out John Hawks for more goodness.

I’ve always been interested in where words come from, such as door. To me, the word door seems like a word created from nothing — and maybe it is, I never took a class in linguistic anthropology nor do I fully understand the origins of words.

I do, however, continue to observe how some words transcend cultures and times. Take for example tea Tea originated in the Far East, and was actively traded down the Silk Trade route for millenia. Throughout the times and different groups of people, the word for tea got distored from the original Japanese Chinese saying “Cha” or “Chai” to “Chaii” in Hindu or “Cha-ie” in Farsi. I’m sure I am butchering up the official way to portray phonetics in written language, so I hope you can sound out the differences in syllables. By the time it reached Imperial Britain, it became tea, a phonetic derivation of “Chi.” There are more that I’ve observed, like sheriff in English is very similar to sharaf in Arabic/Farsi in meaning, but I’ll stop at this one.

Anyways, what I’m getting at is I’ve found a great page of explanations of the derivation and development of some popular English words. I would definately not call it an academically authorative source, but it is an interesting read for those that have a ear out for linguistic anthropology. The page is titled, “Krisstal: The Origin of Words and Names.”

Every society has outsiders. Among people whose economic systems are based on reciprocity, outsiders are often those who don’t reciprocate, or who try to take all the glory. In most societies, there are outsiders who don’t buy into the general religious or moral framework, or who display symbols (piercings in some circles, for example) that are considered renegade or inappropriate. In industrial and/or capitalist societies, class becomes like caste, resulting in class wars and various kinds of discrimination intertwined with racism and other isms. In the case of the United States, I would venture to say that homeless people could be referred to as our “untouchables”. This may at first seem like a useless generalization or zealously comparative statement, but I think it is a fairly accurate way to look at what it is like to be homeless, or even just dirt poor in America. Granted, I’m speaking largely from personal experience, so I’m a bit biased.One of the reasons I was attracted to anthropology is its humanistic elements, although I haven’t quite adopted the label “humanist” because it’s a bit too anthrocentric. Anyway, I wonder how this prerogative of humanism plays out in day to day life. Are most anthropologists philanthropists? When you see homeless people, do you wonder what it must be like for them? Do you think about their circumstances, the cultures of which they are a part and the mainstream culture of which they are outsiders?

I think there may be another element to anthropology, too: rumor has it that it’s an outsider’s discipline. It’s full of eccentrics, artists, people who aren’t happy with science, religion and the like as we know it. Liberals, progressives, and would-be revolutionaries. For all our studies of social norms and cultural traits, don’t we tend to identify with the underdog? Do you see a little of yourself in the panhandler?

Here’s a test of your humanism and/or your renegade self: what do you do when a homeless person asks you for money?

I have often heard people say that if you want to help someone who’s homeless, you should give the money to an agency that is responsible for delivering aid. The reasons behind this I suppose are that aid agencies are supposed to give handouts to those most in need; they usually give in the form of food, vouchers and housing rather than cash which could be used for addictive substances. That all makes sense — on the other hand, you’re paying for administrative costs, and the aid you want to give may not ever filter down to that person who is most in need, for various reasons, much less the person asking you for a dime right in front of you. Plus, you’re paying for whatever doctrines that agency wants to espouse. If it’s church-driven, the homeless people you sponsored might be attending mass or uttering prayers, regardless of what they believe — in order to obtain a place to sleep at night. (That really happens.)

It’s a strange dilemma for me, since I come from a very poor background myself, and panhandled as a kid. We received a great deal of help from food banks and the like, but I remember that individual generosity had a huge impact on me. Having been subjected to my share of ignorance and derision from the general public, it made all the difference in the world when someone would speak openly with me as if I merited human contact, or gave from a place of generosity and some degree of trust. On the other hand, those who showed a blatant lack of compassion had quite an effect as well. We always used the money for food, clothes or some other necessity; in my experience there were a number of people on the streets who were most interested in acquiring food. Alcohol was a popular commodity for some.

When I think about it, most of the compassionate and/or genuine human contact I experienced occurred through interactions with other poor or homeless people.

I try to give a dollar or so, and a genuine smile, to a few people who ask for it. I figure that no matter what, I can’t know what they’re going to spend the money on, and in many cases that very small symbol of compassion and personal interest, rather than the money itself, is what is most liable to make a difference in that person’s day. Very few people actually want to panhandle; it’s not exactly lucrative, in case you haven’t noticed by the kinds of clothes panhandlers wear. It’s not an act, as many people seem to think. Many homeless people aren’t equipped with the skills and resources to pull themselves out, and though many people would yell “get a job” at them, virtually no one will hire a dirty bum off the street.

Most striking for me, about my memories associated with this issue and my experience of the present, is the way I experience human contact compared to the way I did then. It’s a lot more abundant, now. People who would have spit some hateful remark at me or turned away from me-the-adolescent, are able now to look me in the eye and smile, or say hello. My co-worker doesn’t blink an eye at lending me a few dollars if I’ve forgotten my wallet one day, but she might feel very conflicted (understandably) about giving those dollars to someone on the street who obviously needs it a great deal more than I do. One thing I’ve learned with a resounding bang is that with class, comes privilege. I am sometimes astounded to find myself on the other end of the spectrum, the person being asked for change by the bum, who in turn looks at me and hasn’t the faintest inkling that I once did the same thing myself.

But am I somehow more human now, than I was then? Because I certainly feel less untouchable.

To this day — probably largely because of my own experiences — I cannot fathom how people can automatically behave so derisively as they often do toward homeless people. Turning a blind eye to others’ predicaments, ignoring them — that I can understand better. Sometimes another person’s suffering is just too overwhelming to look at.