Anthropology.net

From time to time, I like to take a moment to ask myself, “Why do I blog?”

I think this is a good time for me to be doing one of these type posts because as most bloggers know, after returning from a hiatus, it is hard to get back into the swing of things. Often you have to remind yourself you are doing this for such and such reasons to the point that it becomes a mantra again. Only when I fall back into the rigors of reading and writing for the blog, do I stop needing to ask and tell myself why I blog.

Jonathan Gitlin‘s post over at his Arstechnica blog Noble Intent reminds me of one of the reasons why I blog, the need to communicate science to the larger public. Far too frequently have I heard the argument from my non-science friends and family that scientists have created a big communication gap between themselves and the rest of the world. I listened to what they said and decided to pick up arms, fight the good fight, and help bring anthropology to the masses. So, to say that I totally agree with Gitlin’s argument that science is inundated with,

“too much use of jargon, and far too many research papers are downright painful to read. All of this puts a barrier between their research and those who want to know what it all means, and that’s bad both for scientists and society at large,”

is a bit of an understatement.

And that’s part of the reason as to why I blog. I know I wanna be in academia in some form or another for the rest of my life, and since I see the discord in communication between science and the rest of the world growing, I feel there’s a strong need to fill that gap. I decided to blog because I knew the rest of my life would be dedicated to reading and writing in some form or another. Also, I don’t consider my writing skills really top notch, so I continue to see and use blogging as an opportunity to spice up my style and structure.

But I digress… In the past, and present, science journalism has been filling the communication gap. Science journalists are trained writers and they have all the tricks under their sleeves to not only pick and choose the new hotness in science but also to translate it. News sources like National Geographic News and EurekAlert are a couple of the science journalist sources that I use to bring new papers and publications to me. I also use them so I can read and understand the gist of a paper before I decide to devote some time to seriously spending time to read and comprehend the first hand account. But as Gitlin points out, I too see that science journalism is becoming as shoddy as the latter form of communication that it tries to translate.

This is where I see blogging intervene. During the two plus year that I’ve been running this site, I’ve seen more and more academics approach blogging as a form of media and news. Even the academics that don’t yet have blogs have directly contacted me because of this blog or better yet commented back to posts I’ve written to clarify or criticize my thoughts on their papers. This is an awesome and remarkable change. I feel like we are seeing a change to the publish and perish mentality that has plagued academia for sometime. A commenter, Norton, to Gitlin’s post writes,

“Publish or perish actually works to make scientists worse at communicating — more more precisely, frequently makes them do it poorly.”

But with an online reputation to track and trace, academics can now easily see how the public feels about their research.

With all that said, I hope more and more scientists and researcher turn to blogging as a form of communication and discussion… especially anthropologists. I know most of ya anthrophiles out there have computers and the internets, but am bewildered as to why we have such a small representation out here on the web.

Anthropology and the internet is like a match made in Heaven, seriously. And, I’m not being entirely naive here… take for example the Hadzabe dilemma that’s been circulating around the anthro-blogosphere. This is a case-in-point situation where blogging is helping facilitate discussion and exchange ideas on how to confront a serious issue facing cultural anthropology and ethnoarchaeology. Already, in our circle of five or so blogs, we have started brainstorming up things to do and drafting up letters of protest to help out the Hadza. I’m pretty sure that this hasn’t been how things we done 10 years ago, and I’m even more sure that this will be more dynamic and fluid in 10 years time… and we’ve got blogging to thank for that!

In late May, I shared with you a paper that introduced us to the hypothesis of bipedalism originating in Orangutans. I thought it was a rather foolish hypothesis to make considering the wealth of comparative anatomical and physiological research done with chimpanzee to human gaits. Chimpanzees have more similar anatomy to us than Orangutans and Gorillas, and they walk bipedally a bit more than Gorillas and Orangutans. I was surprised that Science published it despite these well established facts.

Now, a new paper published in PNAS last week vindicates some of my concerns from the above publication. It is tilted, “Chimpanzee Locomotor Energetics and the Origin of Human Bipedalism” and comes from Herman Pontzer, from Washington University in St. Louis who collaborated with several other colleagues in studying energetics and biomecanics of adult chimpanzees and humans, using treadmills. A similar publication was conducted in 1973, but it was flawed in that it used juvenile chimps, which have a different gait compared to their adults. So this study is significant because it retests the same experiments done before, but under new conditions.

The team also took their analysis a step further, from EurekAlert,

“[they] also examined the early hominin fossil record, which they found to include predicted changes consistent with lower energy cost- longer hind legs compared to body mass and structural changes to the pelvic bone allowing for more upright walking.

Analysis of these features in early fossil hominins, coupled with with analysis of bipedal walking in chimpanzees, indicate that bipedalism in early, ape-like hominins could indeed have been less costly than quadrupedal knucklewalking.”

I’ve plucked one of the more enlightening figures from the PNAS paper, which clearly shows how human bipedalism exerts less tension than the chimpanzee form of bipedalism.

So, I consider this study more analytical than the several orangutans that swayed back and forth in trees. To end this post, if you aren’t convinced on what I’ve been arguing for then the following video should surely convince you:

I don’t know why this is the way it is, but linguistic anthropology seems to make it into my RSS headlines far less than any other sub discipline within anthropology. It is a very active field, with a lot of interesting research available for us to digest and learn from.  So I don’t know why it isn’t all over the press and in our blogs… but maybe I can help change that.

New news has come out about the work of a multidisciplinary team of linguists and scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. I’m hoping it may spark some discussion amongst us. Paraphrased from this USA Today article, these people are working toward finding and reconstructing the mother of all languages.

“Headed by Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the international Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project is developing a freely accessible etymological database of the world’s languages. Where possible, EHL linguists are attempting to reconstruct – and then compare – ancestor languages, moving ever closer to the first human language. Viewed by many linguists as a fringe movement, the project has attracted much criticism. Many linguists say that historical languages cannot be studied beyond an 8,000-year threshold; they change too much, they say. Some take issue with the project’s methods: A few words shared among reconstructed languages doesn’t prove a familial relationship, they insist, especially far back in time.”

I’ve bolded what I consider the heavy hitting clauses. Many languages are organized and categorized by the similarities they have with other languages. This shouldn’t be news to you… I hope we all understand that Latin based languages, like Spanish, Italian, and French share more in common than Spanish to Mandarin.

But what the paragraph addresses is that the rate of change in language is pretty phenomenal. Almost too rapid, dynamic, and organic to track effectively. Don’t believe me? Well, take Ebonics for example. This is a form of speaking derived from English. While the exact date Ebonics originated from haven’t been identified, some say it came from Pigdin during the slave trades in the 16th to 19th centuries, many of us recognize Ebonics fully catalyzed after the emergence of hip-hop and other subcultures in the late 1970′s and 80′s. Whatever the date it originated, many non-Ebonics speaking English speakers cannot understand Ebonics. It has come about far too quickly for culture to adapt too. To them it is like another language… so how can one say languages are related when they are by nature so prone to change?

The EHL has devised a way to discern relations between languages despite the overwhelming amount of change,

“Within languages, linguists think that because certain words – including the pronoun “we” and the number “one” – form the basis of a functional language, they are much less likely to change or be lost. EHL linguists begin by comparing this “basic lexicon.” They include “words that are thoroughly essential and must have been in human language before significant cultural advances were made,” writes EHL team member George Starostin, a linguist at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, in an e-mail.

Using this method, EHL has grouped all the world’s languages into 12 linguistic superfamilies. They’ve tentatively grouped four of these superfamilies, which include languages of Eurasia, North Africa, and some Pacific islands (and maybe languages of the Americas as well) into one super-superfamily dubbed “Borean.” An ancestor to a large share of today’s languages, Borean was spoken some 16,000 years ago when glaciers covered much of Europe and North America, they say.

EHL linguists use several methods. One – the most controversial, but not the most widely used, says Starostin – involves matching words and meanings across languages. For example, Ruhlen and Bengtson have noticed that a word roughly corresponding to “water,” which they render in proto-sapiens as “AQWA,” appears in many languages. In Latin it’s “aqua”; in Japanese, “aka” means “bilge water”; in Chechen, meanwhile, “aq” means “to suck”; in an African Kung dialect, “kau” means “to rain”; and in Central American Yucatec, “uk” means “to be thirsty.”

Genetic evidence indicates we originated from a population of humans no larger than 1,000 or so in number about 60,000 years ago. And so, the further one moves back in time, the EHL hypothesizes the more related languages should resemble one another… This small founding population may explain how the capacity for language spread so quickly.

The methodology the EHL has deployed has fired up a lot of debates, many say that it is far too common to find words that are similar to one another across languages, and that the EHL is too,

“loose with meanings and sounds, they say. And too many alternate explanations exist: Maybe the word was borrowed from one language and spread to the others. Perhaps it’s onomatopoetic, a word that sounds like what it is. (“Cock-a-doodle-doo” is an onomatopoetic word that appears in similar form in many languages, but that doesn’t prove relation.) Finally, the shorter the word – in some of the languages, just one syllable rather than two or three – the greater the possibility of a chance match.”

But I can’t think of any other way to study language relations and evolution. Can you?

Regardless of their methodology, I think what the EHL is doing is noble and very astute. Just as important as it is for us to identify the genes, archaeology, and fossils that ‘made us human,’ it is equally important to figure out the roots of our language — one of the primary forms of communication and expressions in humans.