Alexandria as the Manhattan of the ancient world, Rome, writing (Rank 2 culture)

Tyler Cowen, Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization (Ep. 278), May 27, 2026.

Toby Wilkinson is one of the world’s leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, covers the 300-year Ptolemaic period — stranger and more modern-feeling than the Egypt of the pyramids, built around commerce and cosmopolitanism rather than divine kingship, and home to the greatest concentration of scientific talent the ancient world ever saw.

Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor’s visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, and much more.

After the preliminaries, the first of three segments from the whole conversation:

I. On intellectual activity of Alexandria

COWEN: How large was the library in Alexandria and how did they build that out?

WILKINSON: This is interesting because the Ptolemaic kings not only wanted to be wealthy economically, but they wanted to be renowned throughout the ancient world as great scholar leaders. They thought it was important that a new dynasty establish its credentials as a patron of the arts and of learning, not just as the head of a great commercial enterprise.

They invited all the leading scholars from the Greek-speaking world, from right across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, where they provided them with a library, with what was called a museum or a temple of the muses, a place where scholars could think great thoughts and be well looked after. The library was developed over centuries, really, as the greatest repository of learning that the world had ever seen up to this point. It is thought that maybe at its height, it contained half a million volumes, half a million manuscripts, mostly written on papyrus, but representing really the sum total of human knowledge at that time.

COWEN: Euclid and Eratosthenes are connected to this era?

WILKINSON: Almost any big name from ancient science has some connection with Alexandria. Euclid, the mathematician, studied there. Eratosthenes, who quite amazingly calculated the circumference of the earth, he carried out those calculations in Alexandria. There were leaders in the fields of astronomy, of anatomy and medicine, of geography, of philosophy, of literary theory. They were all active in Alexandria under the patronage of the Ptolemaic kings.

COWEN: Am I correct in thinking that the era was quite weak in philosophy in some ways? There’s no great name. Maybe it’s all lost manuscripts. It seems to be a bit like China, infrastructure intensive. They build amazing things. It’s commercial, but they’re not really thinkers.

WILKINSON: I think that would be a misrepresentation. Alexandria under the Ptolemies didn’t produce a Socrates or a Plato. It is true. What its scholars did was to synthesize strands of philosophy from ancient Greek thought, ancient Egyptian thought, Babylonian thought, ancient Hebrew philosophy and religion. It was a melting pot. It maybe didn’t throw up the big name, but it was a very fertile ground for the exchange and the interchange of ideas.

COWEN: Say I try to read Diodorus. There’s a lot of detail, but it’s not to me very interesting. It just seems much worse than Herodotus, who is profound and in a way a step back. Maybe that’s not representative.

WILKINSON: I think there are a lot more scholarly works, both surviving and lost, that were composed in ancient Alexandria that would be more surprising and more revelatory than those that you’ve just mentioned.

COWEN: What was it exactly that was so special about the intellectual, and scientific, and productive environment of Alexandria and environs? Was it that the Egyptians were there, or the mix of Greeks and Egyptians, or something else? What?

WILKINSON: I think there are three factors, really. One is certainly the Egyptian context. I don’t think those intellectual advances that were made in Alexandria could have been made anywhere else. Let’s take anatomy, for example. In the Greek world in general, there was a taboo on cutting up human bodies. Of course, ancient Egypt had a long tradition of mummification, which involved dissecting human corpses. If you were an anatomist and you wanted to make discoveries about how the organs functioned, the only place you could do that at this time was ancient Egypt. The same is true, actually, in many other branches of science. The Egyptian traditions of scholarship and of learning really laid the foundations for Greek thinkers to take them to the next level.

The second aspect was the wonderful infrastructure that was put in place by the Ptolemies to lure scholars to Alexandria. They were paid handsomely. They had access to the world’s best library. They had all of the facilities at their disposal. There was really no better place to be than Alexandria.

The third factor was really the kleptomania of the Ptolemaic rulers. They were not just bibliophiles, but they wanted to acquire a copy, preferably the original, of every book and manuscript circulating in the ancient Greek world. To that end, they indulged in downright thieving. They sent a word, for example, to Athens, which was one of the great centers of scholarship, a rival center of learning, and requested copies of books from Athens’ city library. The copies arrived in Alexandria. They were then seized by the Ptolemaic authorities and kept for Alexandria’s own library. They were only too happy to pay the fine because they had the books. It was a combination of factors that really led Alexandria to being the greatest center for scholars and for scholarship.

II. From the Ptolemaic Empire to Rome

COWEN: Given all the successes, what should I think of as the limiting principle behind rule here? It stretches as far as what we would call Cyprus today, but it never becomes a very large area, right? Now, it doesn’t become the next Roman Empire. Why doesn’t it?

WILKINSON: At its greatest extent, the Ptolemaic Empire includes much of the coast of modern-day Libya, certainly Cyprus, the Nile Valley, parts of present-day Lebanon, and Syria and Turkey, and some islands in the Aegean. It’s not as big as the Roman Empire would later be. What are its constraining factors? Partly, it’s a lack of ambition. Not a lack of ambition, moderate ambition.

The Ptolemies really want to rule Egypt, which is regarded as the jewel in Alexander the Great’s crown. It’s the most prosperous part of his empire. The other territories that they conquer in a ring around Egypt are really only there as a defensive buffer zone to protect Egypt. They have no particular ambition to create a world empire as Alexander the Great did. That was one constraining factor.

They are also not the only players in the ancient world. There are other powerful dynasties of kings in Asia and in the Greek mainland who have territorial designs of their own. It keeps these various powers in equilibrium, and it stops one of them becoming dominant, really, until the Romans upend the whole system. I suppose, yes, those are the two constraining factors, ambition and competition.

COWEN: Do you think the Romans had the ambition in a way Ptolemaic Egypt did not?

WILKINSON: Yes, I do. I think the Romans were motivated by a real desire to conquer. Ancient Roman military leaders were only as good as their last victory on the battlefield. You see that in the later days of the Republic and the beginning of the empire. Whereas in ancient Egyptian tradition, certainly, military success was not the benchmark of a successful reign. It was something that you needed to do in order to protect your own borders. There were other achievements—honoring the gods, building great temples, presiding over a glittering civilization—that were considered equally important.

COWEN: How is it that all this ends, or at least starts to decline? What’s the mechanism?

WILKINSON: It begins with the finances. The Ptolemaic Empire becomes overstretched. It has to invest hugely in its armed forces in order to fend off not just the growing predations of Rome, but actually its closer neighbors as well. That leads to higher taxes. There’s a series of climatic shocks, poor Niles leading to poor harvests. It’s a perfect storm. The economy goes south pretty quickly. The only solution that the Ptolemies can see is to go cap in hand to Roman moneylenders to bail out the Egyptian economy. That then really gives Rome leverage over Egypt.

That all gets bound up in the republican politics of Rome and in the rivalry between Caesar and his rivals, and then ultimately Octavian, who becomes the first emperor, Augustus. Egypt goes from being a great civilization, confident of itself, to being a pawn in other people’s power play. Ultimately, Rome is able to march into Alexandria, overthrow Cleopatra, and seize Egypt for itself. It’s a salutary lesson for our own time that a civilization can appear to the outside world to be magnificent, and wealthy, and successful, but actually the seeds of its own destruction are usually lying there somewhere just waiting for the conditions to germinate. [...]

COWEN: How important a figure is Cleopatra in this whole history? Is it just marketing, and Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Taylor, or was she really at the center of what was happening? Did she matter?

Digging deeper into the ancient Maya in Belize

Alan Yuhas, Maya Ruler’s Tomb Is Unearthed in Belize, With Clues to His Ancient World, NYTimes, July 11, 2025.

The archaeologists worked in the shadow of towering Maya ruins, piercing the floor of a structure they had searched years before.

Below, they found an even more ancient chamber, still holding a body and the treasures it was buried with: a rare mosaic death mask and jadeite jewelry, shells from the Pacific and elaborate designs on pottery and bone.

It was the 1,700-year-old tomb of a Maya ruler — the first ever found at Caracol, the largest Maya site in Belize — and it held clues to a Mesoamerican world where cities contended with one another from hundreds of miles apart.

“They’ve found a very early ruler, so that’s very important, and he’s claimed to be the founder of a dynasty,” said Gary Feinman, an archaeologist at Field Museum of Chicago who was not involved in the excavation. “That’s a major find.”

The founder of a dynasty:

Through hieroglyphics, the archaeologists identified the ruler as Te K’ab Chak, who took the throne in A.D. 331. He ruled Caracol as it was growing into a larger city, the Chases said, but centuries before its peak as a regional power with an estimated 100,000 people. Like other Maya cities, it had been abandoned by about A.D. 900.

The discovery “adds a whole new dimension” to the site, said Melissa Badillo, the director of Belize’s Institute of Archaeology, a longtime working partner of the Chases. “This is the first of its kind in that it’s a ruler, a founder, somebody so old, and in so good a condition, to be honest, because the humidity doesn’t lend itself well to preservation.”

Trade and diplomacy:

The evidence, the Chases argue, suggests that the early Maya had relations with the people of central Mexico decades earlier than previously thought, despite the great geographic distances between their cities. It is likely to have taken more than 150 days to walk from Teotihuacán to Caracol in the days of Te K’ab Chak. Even today it takes nearly 24 hours by car.

The artifacts show that these cities were not just aware of one another but also interacting, perhaps with envoys at the highest levels of society, the Chases said — a sign of what they called a “globalized” ancient world of trade and diplomacy.

There's more at the link.

Archaeologists Find Huge Tomb of Unknown Pharaoh

Alan Yuhas, Archaeologists Find Huge Tomb of Unknown Pharaoh in Egypt, NYTimes, March 27, 2025.

Archaeologists have unearthed the huge tomb of an unknown pharaoh at an Egyptian necropolis, a team of researchers said on Thursday, in the second discovery of a king’s tomb this year.

The team of Egyptian and American archaeologists found the tomb, which the researchers estimate is 3,600 years old, nearly 23 feet underground at Abydos, one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt. The city, about 300 miles south of Cairo, was a burial place for early pharaohs, and a necropolis developed at Anubis Mountain to the city’s south.

Researchers uncovered the tomb at the mountain, at the base of a high desert cliff where strong winds carry gusts of sand. In some places around the necropolis, sand has buried structures more than 16 or 19 feet deep.

The burial chamber features a decorated entryway, several rooms and soaring 16-foot vaults made of mud bricks. It dwarfs a tomb unearthed at Abydos over a decade ago, which was hailed at the time as the first material proof of a “lost” dynasty of kings there.

There's more at the link. 

* * * * *

Meanwhile, there's an essay at Snopes about those pyramid discoveries that have been making the rounds and that I reported here and here. It's not looking good:

Claims that researchers discovered previously unknown structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre — the pyramid situated in the center of the Great Pyramids of Giza — using radar technology circulated online in March 2025.

The purported discovery was that of "five identical structures near the Khafre Pyramid's base, linked by pathways, and eight deep vertical wells descending 648 meters underground." [...]

Despite the popularity of the claim, there is no evidence to support it. In addition, no credible news outlets or scientific publications have reported on this rumor.

Rather, this appears to be a spin on already questionable research conducted in 2022 that was subsequently embellished by a variety of right-wing content creators like conspiracy website Infowars contributor Greg Reese, who publishes The Reese Report, listed as a source for many of the claims pertaining to this topic.

Whoops!

Daily life in a New Kingdom fortress town in Nubia

I recently posted about some potentially spectacular, but currently controversial, results about the great pyramids. This referred paper reports more modest results about a different tomb complex that has the potential to change our understanding of just what these tomb complexes are.

Sarah Schrader, Michele Buzon, Emma Maggart, Anna Jenkins, Stuart Tyson Smith, Daily life in a New Kingdom fortress town in Nubia: A reexamination of physical activity at Tombos, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Volume 78, 2025, 101668, ISSN 0278-4165, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2025.101668.

Highlights

• A multi-method approach to better understanding physical activity and socioeconomic status in a colonial Egyptonubian space.
• Novel quantitative and qualitative assessment of points of muscle and ligament attachment.
• Bioarchaeological methods are bolstered by archaeological excavations, isotope analysis, and comparative Egyptian/Nubian contexts.
• Pyramid complexes, once thought to be the burials for the elite, were actually resting places for a socioeconomic cross section of this community.
• Illustrates the importance of reanalyzing data.

Abstract

Previous analysis of skeletal indicators of physical activity suggested that the population at Tombos, an Egyptian colonial town in Nubia, may have benefited from an imperial framework through occupations that were not physically demanding. With more than ten years of continued excavations, coupled with further biomolecular testing, we reanalyze entheseal changes at Tombos. We compare entheseal changes between the three areas of cemetery, which house drastically different tomb types. Additionally, we also assess burial position (Egyptian, Nubian) and we incorporate the results of previous strontium isotope analysis to better understand the mortuary, socioeconomic, and occupational landscapes of this colonial space.

Our findings suggest that pyramid tombs, once thought to be the final resting place of the most elite, may have also included low-status high-labor staff. We support this argument with comparative data from Egypt and Nubia. Other cemetery areas seem to include individuals whose activity levels were more moderate. Nubian-style burials have relatively low entheseal scores, suggesting that they may have had low-labor occupations during the Egyptian colonial period, despite possibly identifying as Nubian. Lastly, locals and non-locals appear to have similar levels of physical activity, suggesting that migration status was also neither an advantage nor disadvantage in such a multicultural community. This study speaks to the importance of reanalyzing data; with continued excavations, dating, and biomolecular analysis, interpretations of lived experience in the past can be completely altered.

More about those pyramids

Yesterday I published excerpts from an article in The Jerusalem Post about recent discoveries that may upend what we know about the pyramids at Giza. That article has now been amended with extensive pushback. For example:

Egyptian archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass vehemently denied the existence of columns beneath the tomb of King Khafre, calling such claims "baseless" and lacking any scientific evidence.

"The rumors that have spread about the Egyptian pyramids that there are columns under King Khafre's pyramid have no basis in truth, and there is no scientific evidence to support this claim, and there are no missions working in King Khafre's pyramid now," Hawass stated on his official Facebook page, according to Sabq. He emphasized that the Supreme Council of Antiquities has not granted any permits for work inside King Khafre's pyramid.

"No radar devices or modern technologies have been used to detect alleged structures beneath the Khafre Pyramid," pointed out Hawass, the former Minister of Antiquities, as reported by Asharq Al-Awsat. He described the claims as "an attempt to undermine ancient Egyptian civilization," adding that "these are failed attempts, and these rumors will go to the dustbin of history," according to Al Arabiya.

The claims made by Malanga and Biondi “fall within the realm of exaggeration and deception," said Dr. Hussein Abdel-Basir, Director of the Antiquities Museum at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, according to Asharq Al-Awsat. He stressed that "any real scientific discovery in the field of archaeology must be published first in a reliable scientific journal after careful review by independent experts."

And:

In the days following the announcement, the debate gained further attention as Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna shared a post about the findings on her X page, amplifying the claims on social media, according to the Daily Mail.

Scrutiny has been directed at Professor Malanga’s background, with critics highlighting his reputation as a UFOlogist known for appearing on programs discussing extraterrestrial life and promoting fringe theories about the pyramids.

I note that there is some doubt that SAR (synthetic aperture radar) is capable of detecting structures deep beneath the surface. I do know that a somewhat different kind of imaging technology (light-based remote sensing technology, LIDAR) has discovered “lost cities” in the Amazon. I assume, more or less on general principle, that there’s lots still waiting to be discovered.

I note as well that at the very end of the article we have this statement: "The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system." Unless otherwise informed, I assume that means AI of some kind. Note that I make extensive use of AI myself, so that's neither here nor there. I do, however, identify when the words are about ChatGPT or Claude.

This article in The New York Post has some renderings of what might be under the surface: There’s a ‘vast underground city’ below Egypt’s Giza pyramids, scientists’ wild theory claims — but experts debunk it as ‘fake news’.

What's up, umm, err, down with the pyramids? [“a vast underground city”?]

The Egyptian pyramids have been a scientific, historical, and mythological (if you will) puzzle since whenever. What are the for and how were they built? On the first, they are tombs for pharoahs. More or less. The second question has been the subject of endless inquiry and speculation, but as far as I know, we don’t yet have a definitive answer.

And now, the mysteries may have just gotten deeper and deeper. On March 23 The Jerusalem Post published this: Scientists using new radar technology find ‘vast city’ beneath pyramids:

Italian and Scottish researchers claim they found a major discovery beneath the Pyramids of Giza, potentially rewriting the history of ancient Egypt. Using radar technology, the team led by Corrado Malanga from Italy’s University of Pisa and Filippo Biondi from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland announced the findings of what they describe as a vast underground city stretching more than 6,500 feet directly beneath the pyramids.

“This groundbreaking study has redefined the boundaries of satellite data analysis and archaeological exploration,” said the project’s spokesperson, Nicole Ciccolo, according to The Sun. She elaborated that the discovery “could redefine our understanding of the sacred topography of ancient Egypt, providing spatial coordinates for previously unknown and unexplored subterranean structures.”

The researchers used a new radar technology known as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which combines satellite radar data with tiny vibrations from naturally occurring seismic movements. This method creates 3D images of what lies beneath the Earth’s surface without the need for physical excavation. Their study, still awaiting peer review, suggests that the complex is ten times larger than the pyramids themselves.

Whoah!

There is skepticism, as well there should be:

Several experts have expressed skepticism regarding these claims. Independent experts, including Professor Lawrence Conyers, have raised serious concerns about the study. “I could not tell if the technology used actually picked up hidden structures below the pyramid,” Conyers told Daily Mail, calling the claims of a vast city underneath the pyramids “a huge exaggeration.”

He acknowledged that while small structures such as shafts and chambers might exist beneath the pyramids, the idea of a vast underground city is questionable.

Well, OK, sure, why not? But I’m inclined to think that if there’s anything at all down there, anything at all, it’s important. There’s so very much we don’t know. Surely the universe is jam-packed with surprises. Why not have some of them under our noses?

“The megastructure they just found underneath the Giza Pyramids is probably the most important discovery to ever be made in our lifetimes,” one user posted, according to Marca. Others have shared similar sentiments, blending hard science with speculative theories.

Oldest matrilocal tribe in European prehistory dates to Late Iron Age Celts

Cassidy, L.M., Russell, M., Smith, M. et al. Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08409-6

Abstract: Roman writers found the relative empowerment of Celtic women remarkable. In southern Britain, the Late Iron Age Durotriges tribe often buried women with substantial grave goods. Here we analyse 57 ancient genomes from Durotrigian burial sites and find an extended kin group centred around a single maternal lineage, with unrelated (presumably inward migrating) burials being predominantly male. Such a matrilocal pattern is undescribed in European prehistory, but when we compare mitochondrial haplotype variation among European archaeological sites spanning six millennia, British Iron Age cemeteries stand out as having marked reductions in diversity driven by the presence of dominant matrilines. Patterns of haplotype sharing reveal that British Iron Age populations form fine-grained geographical clusters with southern links extending across the channel to the continent. Indeed, whereas most of Britain shows majority genomic continuity from the Early Bronze Age to the Iron Age, this is markedly reduced in a southern coastal core region with persistent cross-channel cultural exchange. This southern core has evidence of population influx in the Middle Bronze Age but also during the Iron Age. This is asynchronous with the rest of the island and points towards a staged, geographically granular absorption of continental influence, possibly including the acquisition of Celtic languages.

The NYTimes has an article reporting the find: Becky Ferreira, Celtic Women Held Sway in ‘Matrilocal’ Societies, Jan. 15. 2025.

The liberties of Celtic women have been a hot topic for thousands of years. Roman writers were scandalized by reports of their sexual freedoms, which insocicluded taking multiple husbands. Cartimandua and Boudica, early female leaders in Britain, demonstrated that women could reach the highest levels of power, commanding armies and heading tribes.

Archaeological evidence also hints at flexible gender dynamics that varied widely depending on local traditions. For instance, Celtic women were sometimes buried with luxurious grave goods, like jewelry and mirrors, a marker of high status. Patrilocality, whereby women live near their in-laws, is still far more culturally common, but female-centric societies are not as unheard-of as they were even a decade ago.

“It’s a generational paradigm shift,” said Rachel Pope, an associate professor in European prehistory at the University of Liverpool with expertise in matrilocality who was not involved in the study. “It’s partly a trend in archaeology more generally, where we have returned to data and material evidence to lead narrative, rather than imposing narratives that confirm our own biases.”

In other words, scientists are working on big data projects, such as genome analysis, to pin down patterns in social structures with a level of accuracy that cannot be obtained from other sources like the accounts of classical writers with their own agendas and biases

The role of clothing in cultural evolution [agriculture, Rank 2]

Sam Dresser, The clothing revolution, Aeon.

My recent work shows that clothing wasn’t just the unique adaptation of a more-or-less hairless mammal to the changing natural environments. The development of clothing led to innovations with many repercussions for humanity, beyond survival in cold climates. A need for portable insulation from the cold in the Palaeolithic promoted major technological transitions. These include stone toolkits for working animal hides and, subsequently, bone tools such as pointed awls and needles to make tailored garments. Later, during the coldest stage of the last ice age, Homo sapiens in middle latitudes devised multi-layered outfits with an inner layer of underwear. Equipped with effective protection from wind chill, our species could penetrate into the frigid Arctic Circle, further north than cold-adapted Neanderthals had managed to venture. From the northeastern corner of Siberia, modern humans strolled across an exposed land bridge to enter Alaska by 15,000 years ago, if not earlier, to likely become the first hominins to set foot in the Americas. At the Broken Mammoth site in Alaska, archaeologists have unearthed the fragile technology that made the journey possible: a 13,000-year-old eyed needle.

Until recently, the scientific study of clothing was largely the work of physiologists who have explored its thermal properties, which are now well understood. The physiology of clothing allows us to say precisely how much clothing people must wear to survive at sub-freezing temperatures and at differing wind-chill levels. Early hominins in Africa had begun to harness fire between 1 and 2 million years ago, perhaps for cooking more than warmth. Fire was utilised as hominins spread into Europe and northern China, where Homo erectus retreated into caves to escape wind chill. However, even if earlier hominins were more hairy than modern humans, whenever they found themselves in cold conditions beyond certain well-defined survival thresholds, they needed to carry portable insulation while out in the open. For modern humans, exposure times for frostbite can be less than an hour, and life-threatening hypothermia can develop overnight, even in cities. From a thermal perspective, two aspects of clothing are important. First is the number of layers, with each extra layer increasing the total insulation value. The second aspect is whether garments are fitted, or tailored, to enclose the body, especially the limbs. Fitted garments offer superior protection from wind chill, a major risk factor for frostbite and hypothermia.

Alas, clothing doesn't survive well over time and so the archaelogical record is poor.

All the evidence we have for ice-age clothing is indirect but, nonetheless, the available evidence shows that people had tailored clothes in the last ice age. The world’s oldest eyed needles are found in southern Russia 40,000 years ago, and one needle in Denisova Cave is said to be 50,000 years old. In the vicinity of Moscow at a site called Sunghir, 30,000-year-old human burials have thousands of beads neatly arranged on the skeletons.

But...

Scientific efforts to shed light on the prehistory of clothes have received an unexpected boost from another line of research, the study of clothing lice, or body lice. These blood-sucking insects make their home mainly on clothes and they evolved from head lice when people began to use clothes on a regular basis. Research teams in Germany and the United States analysed the genomes of head and clothing lice to estimate when the clothing parasites split from the head ones. One advantage of the lice research is that the results are independent from other sources of evidence about the origin of clothes, such as archaeology and palaeoclimatology. The German team, led by Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, came up with a date of 70,000 years ago, revised to 100,000 years ago, early in the last ice age. The US team led by David Reed at the University of Florida reported a similar date of around 80,000 years ago, and maybe as early as 170,000 years ago during the previous ice age. These findings from the lice research suggest that our habit of wearing clothes was established quite late in hominin evolution.

I love it! Piecing things together through an understanding of causal linkage. Sherlock would love it, too.

And then we've got complex clothing:

My work draws on the known thermal physiology of clothes to distinguish two basic forms of clothing: simple and complex. Simple clothing is loose, not fitted, and consists of just a single layer. Examples of simple garments include capes or cloaks draped over the shoulders, and loincloths. Simple clothes can provide a certain amount of insulation in cold weather, although these loose garments can offer only limited protection from wind chill. Simple clothes made from thick furs were probably sufficient when hominins began to occupy northern Europe during colder glacial stages from half a million years ago. Complex clothes are closely fitted around the body and can have cylinders attached to enclose the limbs properly; additionally, they can have up to four or five layers. Complex clothes were a more recent development, and represent a quantum leap in clothing technology, allowing humans to defeat wind chill and survive in the coldest places on Earth. [...]

Complex clothes required scrapers but also hide-cutting tools, called blades, to cut the hides into regular shapes and make the cylinders for sleeves and leggings. The separate shapes had to be sewn together carefully, hence we start to find more dedicated hide-piercing tools, called awls, later refined into the iconic ice-age clothing tool, the eyed needle.

Technologies come and go:

Another clue pointing to the role of climate change is how these technologies sometimes disappeared during warm climate phases. We see this happen in southern Africa, for example, where stone blades and bone awls appear during a cold climate phase around 75,000 years ago. With a return to milder environmental conditions 60,000 years ago, hide-cutting blade tools and hide-piercing bone awls disappear from the archaeological record, only to reappear later towards the coldest phase 22,000 years ago, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Apparently, Stone Age people wore clothes in cold weather, and went naked when clothes were not needed. Clothes became a social necessity for people more recently, perhaps after many generations of wearing clothes on a regular basis, mainly in the colder middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere from the LGM onwards. Once clothes replaced body painting for personal decoration and display, the need to wear clothes was uncoupled from climate.

Australia:

The pattern of clothing in Aboriginal Australia can challenge a number of cherished theories about the origin of clothing. For one, routine Aboriginal nakedness implies that humans didn’t invent clothes due to some inherent sense of modesty. Neither, as hunter-gatherers, did we need clothes for the sake of appearance. Along with African peoples such as the San who used antelope cloaks for warmth, habitually naked foragers relied on traditional techniques such as body painting, tattooing and scarification to dress themselves, and they got dressed up more elaborately for ceremonies and other special occasions, without clothes.

Australian evidence, or absence of evidence, is likewise pertinent to the origins of agriculture. It’s no coincidence that neither textile clothing nor agriculture featured in the traditional Aboriginal lifestyles.

Clothing and the Anthropocene:

When the Pleistocene ended 12,000 years ago, there was a new development with clothes. Global temperatures increased dramatically and, along with the melting of continental ice sheets and the rise in sea levels, environments became wetter and more humid. Adapting to these moist conditions, people shifted to making their clothes with fabrics woven from natural fibres such as wool and cotton. Compared with leathers and furs, fabrics are better at managing moisture. The woven structure is permeable to air and moisture and, in warm climates, wind penetration can help to cool the body. Moisture from higher sweating rates could evaporate more easily from the skin and also from the fabric, adding to the cooling effect. The warm and wet period after the last ice age, called the Holocene, coincides with a momentous transition, the beginning of the Neolithic era when people started to engage in agriculture.

The agricultural transition was a turning point in humanity’s relationship to the natural world, altering the environment profoundly and enabling the rise of cities and civilisations. My surprising suggestion is that there was a connection between the textile revolution and the agricultural revolution. By implication, this technological change in clothes led to the Anthropocene, a phase of humanly induced global warming that started with agriculture and was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution.

Paradigm shift?

The prevailing narrative in anthropology privileges food in the transition to agriculture, and the whole concept of hunting and gathering refers essentially, if not exclusively, to the food economy.

Nevertheless, anthropologists including Robert Kelly at the University of Wyoming have been saying for some time, and for a number of reasons, that the hunter-gatherer category has reached the end of its useful life. Yet we’re still encumbered with outdated food-focused terms such as foragers and hunter-gatherers to denote pre-agricultural lifestyles. By definition, the shift from foraging to farming must have begun in the food economy. Not necessarily so, in my view.

Aside from a paradigm shift, the textile hypothesis invites a critical re-evaluation of the evidence we have about early agriculture. Archaeological evidence for textile fibres in early agricultural contexts has been present all along but overlooked, and this evidence for fibres does provide food for thought. [...]

The popular notion of agriculture as a superior food strategy reflects anachronistic perceptions of foraging as a harsh, precarious lifestyle. In contrast, archaeologists have now recognised the serious risks of famine and malnutrition in the early farming communities, and confirmed the relative ease of traditional foraging lifestyles, even in marginal environments such as Australian deserts. Anthropologists realise that foraging for food has many advantages, including the flexibility and security that derives from exploiting a wide resource base. These benefits highlight another enigma, namely, that many Neolithic societies continued to rely on foraging for much of their food supply, sometimes for thousands of years after they adopted agricultural practices. Similarly, evidence from northern Europe suggests that forager communities were inclined to resist the spread of agriculture.

It just keeps going and going.

Directly and indirectly, textiles tipped the balance in favour of agriculture. Food production did become a dominant feature, with more plant and animal species domesticated to feed humans. Even then, as the archaeologist Brian Hayden points out, agricultural foodstuffs often served as surplus products for feasting on special occasions, not everyday food staples. As the main reason for agriculture in the first instance, food alone is insufficient and problematic. An alternative textile scenario might sound implausible, requiring a revolution in how we look at the agricultural revolution. Yet this scenario does echo the analogous role of textiles in the Industrial Revolution, a pivotal point in history when factory-style production of cotton textiles was an impetus for industrialisation. Ironically, if both agriculture and industrialisation were intertwined with clothes, this would mean a human adaptation to cold weather could ultimately make the whole world warmer.

Hey, GPT-3, analyze this!

The ancient roots of the anthropocene

Lucas Stephens, Erle Ellis, Dorian fuller, The Deep Anthropocene, Aeon.

ArchaeoGLOBE reveals that human societies transformed most of Earth’s biosphere much earlier and more profoundly than we thought – an insight that has serious implications for how we understand humanity’s relationship to nature and the planet as a whole.

Just as recent archaeological research has challenged old definitions of agriculture and blurred the lines between farmers and hunter-gatherers, it’s also leading us to rethink what nature means and where it is. The deep roots of how humanity transformed the globe pose a challenge to the emerging Anthropocene paradigm, in which human-caused environmental change is typically seen as a 20th-century or industrial-era phenomenon. Instead, it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles. As a consequence, trying to disentangle ‘natural’ ecosystems from those that people have managed for millennia is becoming less and less realistic, let alone desirable.

Somewhat later, after discussions of various kinds of evidence and techniques:

These transitions were not linear or absolute. It’s now clear that there was usually a long continuum of exploitation, translocation and management of plants, animals, landforms and ecosystems well before (and often after) domestication occurred. This makes it harder to draw solid lines between hunter-gatherer and farmer societies, or between societies who practised different subsistence strategies. Over archaeological timescales spanning hundreds to thousands of years, land use can be thought of instead as a tapestry of ever-evolving anthroecosystems with higher or lower degrees of transformation – more or less human-shaped, or ‘domesticated’ environments.

In 2003, the climatologist William Ruddiman introduced the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’: the idea that agricultural land use began warming Earth’s climate thousands of years ago. While some aspects of this early global climate change remain unsettled among scientists, there’s strong consensus that land-use change was the greatest driver of global climate change until the 1950s, and remains a major driver of climate change today. As a result, global maps of historical changes in land use, and their effects on vegetation cover, soils and greenhouse gas emissions, are a critical component of all contemporary models for forecasting Earth’s future climate.

Deforestation, tilling the land and other agricultural practices alter regional and global climate because they release greenhouse gases from vegetation and soils, as well as altering the exchange of heat and moisture across Earth. These effects reverse when land is abandoned and vegetation recovers or is restored. Early changes in agricultural land use therefore have major implications in understanding climate changes of the past, present and future.

3,000 to 10,000 years ago...

By 3,000 years ago, Earth’s terrestrial ecology was already largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists – with more than half of regions assessed engaged in significant levels of agriculture or pastoralism. For example, the Kopaic Basin in the Greek region of Boeotia was drained and converted from wetland to agricultural land in the 13th century BCE. This plain – roughly 1,500 hectares (15 sq km) in size – surrounded by steep limestone hills, had been a large, shallow lake since the end of the last Ice Age. Late Bronze Age residents of the area, members of what we call the Mycenaean culture, constructed a hydraulic infrastructural system on a massive scale to drain the wetland and claim it for agriculture. They channelised rivers, dug drainage canals, built long dikes and expanded natural sinkholes to direct the water off what would have been nutrient-rich soil. Eventually, when the Mycenaean civilisation collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, the basin flooded again and returned to its previous wetland state. Legend has it that Heracles filled in the sinkholes as revenge against a local king. The area was not successfully drained again until the 20th century.

These examples highlight a general trend we found that agriculture and pastoralism gradually replaced foraging-hunting-gathering around the world. But the data also show that there were reversals and different subsistence economies, from foraging to farming, operating in parallel in some places. Moreover, agriculture and pastoralism are not the only practices that transform environments. Hunter-gatherer land use was already widespread across the globe (82 per cent of regions) by 10,000 years ago. Through the selective harvest and translocation of favoured species, hunting (sometimes to extinction) and the use of fire to dramatically alter landscapes, most of the terrestrial biosphere was already significantly influenced by human activities, even before the domestication of plants and animals.

The pristine myth is wrong:

In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm from the natural sciences, as the geographer William Denevan called it, human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least disturbers, of a mostly pristine natural world. Denevan was reacting against the portrayal of pre-1492 America as an untouched paradise, and he used the substantial evidence of indigenous landscape modification to argue that the human presence was perhaps more visible in 1492 than 1750. Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster. Human changes to the environment are cumulative and were substantial at different scales throughout our history. The deep trajectory of land use revealed by ArchaeoGLOBE runs counter to the idea of pinpointing a single catalytic moment that fundamentally changed the relationship between humanity and the Earth system.

The pristine myth also accounts for why places without contemporary intensive land use are often dubbed ‘wilderness’ – such as areas of the Americas depopulated by the great post-Columbian die-off. Such interpretations, perpetuated by scientists, have long supported colonial narratives in which indigenous hunter-gatherer and even agricultural lands are portrayed as unused and ripe for productive use by colonial settlers.

The notion of a pristine Earth also pervaded the thinking of early conservationists in the United States such as John Muir. They were intent on preserving what they saw as the nobility of nature from a mob of lesser natural life, and also those eager to manage wilderness areas to maintain the trophy animals they enjoyed hunting. [...]

Humans have continually altered biodiversity on many scales. We have changed the local mix of species, their ranges, habitats and niches for thousands of years. Long before agriculture, selective human predation of many non-domesticated species shaped their evolutionary course. Even the relatively small hunter-gatherer populations of the late Pleistocene were capable of negatively affecting animal populations – driving many megafauna and island species extinct or to the point of extinction. But there have also been widespread social and ecological adaptations to these changes: human management can even increase biodiversity of landscapes and can sustain these increases for thousands of years. For example, pastoralism might have helped defer climate-driven aridification of the Sahara, maintaining mixed forests and grassland ecosystems in the region for centuries.

This recognition should cause us to rethink what ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ really are. If by ‘nature’ we mean something divorced from or untouched by humans, there’s almost nowhere on Earth where such conditions exist, or have existed for thousands of years.

See earlier posts: Sedentary hunter-gatherers built complex societies – "Recognizing this... has big implications for how we narrate history", and Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap.

Henry Rawlinson and reorganizing our understanding of historical time

Ali Minai, Henry Rawlinson and the Transformation of History, 3 Quarks Daily, August 31, 2020.

Rawlinson was a British civil servant who served in the Middle East in the 19th century, Iran in particular, and played a major role in deciphering ancient texts, thereby opening up a new world of archaeological and historical investigation which changed Europe's understand of the history.

Darwin’s ideas on evolution are often – correctly – seen as a critical factor in the transition to modern, secular thinking in the West, but the great archaeological discoveries which were happening in the same period (mid-19th century) surely played a significant role as well. They changed the whole horizon of our understanding of history. Indeed, the two things – the theory of evolution and the archaeology of ancient civilizations – can be seen as part of the same process: A process that suddenly extended the Western (and, ultimately, universal modern) view of time from a short period in the past that then disappeared into the mythical haze of Genesis or cosmic cycles to one where time stretches in a scientifically understandable way to billions of years, and where living things, peoples, civilization, and cultures emerge from physical – and, therefore, understandable – processes rather than by the handiwork of a deity or supernatural forces. The time-scales are different, but Darwin and the archaeologists eventually turned out to be fellow travelers in the journey towards a modern, scientific, materialistic view of the world that has ultimately enabled all the scientific and technological progress we see around us. Both changed history by changing history.

But it is also possible to turn this question around and ask: Why did it take so long for a scientific discipline of archaeology to arise? Why did the systematic rediscovery of ancient history in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran, India, and Central Asia have to wait until the colonial period? Great civilizations with erudite scholars and intrepid explorers ranged over these regions for millennia, surrounded by remarkable ruins, monuments, and inscriptions. True, some of these had been buried by sand and debris, but enough remained visible to have excited curiosity. Why did no one think to dig into mounds or decipher forgotten scripts?

There is anecdotal evidence of sporadic interest in ancient artifacts and ruins going as far back as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, but no systematic science of archaeology is apparent until the mid-18th century. Rulers did pay attention to the monuments of their predecessors – even those from long ago – with a view to emulating or outdoing them, but not with any desire for knowledge. Clearly, the civilizations of regions from India to Egypt did value knowledge: They made great contributions in astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, geography, and other disciplines. They did systematic studies of language, culture, recent history, and even the very processes of history. But, for some reason, the artifacts of the past did not interest them in the same way. [...]

The question is: Why? What was it in a diverse range of cultures that they remained content in their ignorance when history lay all around them? Was it disinterest in the past – an attitude that knowing more beyond what scripture and tradition said would be a waste of time, or that there was nothing to learn from vanished alien cultures except sic transit gloria mundi? Or was it something deeper – a different relationship with the world, and especially with time? Perhaps for some, it was a view of history as the work of God rather that the business of Man; for others, an inability to distinguish between history and legend. One may also speculate that the emergence of archaeology as a science required a transition from an eschatological view of history to a secular, material, and humanistic one – a view that was made possible by the same changes that made European colonialism possible, and that underlie the qualitative change in material progress since the Renaissance.

Whatever it was, something awoke in 16th century Europe that ignited a passionate interest in digging up and studying the past. Initially, it was an interest in “antiquities” unearthed all over Europe. Soon, pioneers like John Aubrey extended this to a larger scale study of megalithic sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury. The earliest European colonizers – the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch – showed little interest in history even as they marauded their way through lands rich in lost civilizations. It was with the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt that this changed, and the great age of European archaeology began. In the 150 years between Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the British departure from India and the Middle East, the great monuments of Egypt had been revealed In full; storied ancient cities like Babylon, Nineveh and Ur had been excavated; the Indus Valley Civilization had been discovered; Egyptian hieroglyphics and several cuneiform scripts had been deciphered and their languages understood; the initial family tree of the Indo-European languages had been drafted; and the understanding of history had been revolutionized utterly. What had been neglected for thousands of years was laid bare in little more than a century.

It is obvious that the scientific, rational revolution that swept Europe after the Renaissance transformed human understanding of the universe and Man’s place in it. One of the most profound transformations in this regard was a re-organization of time – ultimately at three levels: Human, geological, and cosmic. Before that, it was quite typical for an educated European to believe that the Universe, including the Earth, was created a few thousand years ago by an act of God and then populated with beasts and men. [...] There was little notion of a long human history, let alone a much longer prehistory. Distant times, like distant lands, were populated by fantasies akin to “here be dragons.” [...] And then, as mentioned earlier, came Darwin’s theory of evolution that not only stretched the age of the Earth by orders of magnitude but also linked humanity into the extremely ancient chain of life. [...] And here we are today, living with at least an abstract apprehension of billions of years in cosmic and geological time, and hundreds of thousands of years in human time.

Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap

I’ve been reading Mark Moffett’s new book:

Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.

It is at heart a work of natural philosophy, an old term not in much use anymore. Moffett is interested in what constitutes society: our do we differentiate between insiders and outsiders? To do so he surveys the animal world and the follows the distinction in the evolution of human societies from hunter-gatherer groups to the current day.

In this post I offer a few excepts and some occasional comments on them.

Conclusion

As is often the case, I didn’t start at the beginning. I started with the conclusion, from which I offer these excerpts:

357:

Markers are essential components in all societies of more than a few hundred individuals, whether mighty human or mere insect. At a certain point of growth, however, markers alone are insufficient to hold a society of humans together.

359:

As we look to the future, it may be illuminating to reframe the discussion around an idea cherished by people everywhere, and which I have brought up only I passing thus far: their freedom.

362:

Our misfortune has been, and will be always, that societies don’t eliminate discontent; they simply redirect it toward outsiders–which paradoxically can include the ethnic groups within them.

And then it was off to Chapters 8, “Band Societies”, 9, “The Nomadic Life”, and 10, “Settling Down”. I offer some excerpts and a few comments of my own.

Band Societies

103:

There are shelves of articles and books by anthropologists who write about hunter-gatherers based solely on what happened in bands, while ignoring how hunter-gatherer bands identified with a broader society.

Because the members of human band societies, as well as chimpanzee societies, rarely come together, finding out where a society stops and the next starts can be tough, but sharp separation in the memberships of societies are in place just the same. Numerous accounts tell how hunter-gathers of recent centuries felt secure in the presence of their “own kind.”

And I’ve read a few of those books and articles, so this was news to me. I’d thought that they just wandered about all year, spending weeks or perhaps months in one place and then moving on, the same little band. But no it isn’t unusual for a number of bands to gather together and participate in a single activity. Thus a bit latter he’ll mention that “every Autumn in North America, bands of certain tribes gathered to frighten herds of bison over cliffs” (125), something I’d read about when I was young.

This behavior motivates a distinction that is central to the book, that between a group and a society. In this case the group is the band of people who live and travel together year-round. The society, on the other hand, is the large collectivity, consisting of all those groups of individuals who recognize one another as being of the same people. The may not and generally will not know everyone in the society very well, but they recognize rights and obligations with respect to one another that they do not recognize with respect to those outside the society.

106:

Among the Bushmen, bands of the same society occupied contiguous spaces, whereas a no-man’s land lay between different societies. Similar unoccupied gaps separate the societies of other species, too–communities of chimpanzees, packs of wolves, and colonies of fire ants.

109:

For hunter-gatherers the signage of daily existence was understated. Each nuance about the natural world and the people in it filled their senses. Distinctions between their neighbors that to us would be slight would have stood out as plainly as grass blades bent by a passing antelope.

111:

After all, given the low density of most hunter-gatherers in antiquity, people would have encountered an infinitesimal fraction of the outsiders most of us are familiar with today.

And this, I might add, underlines one of the central themes of the book. We now live in societies where we are constantly meeting and interacting with people we do not know. We think nothing of it. And yet, in a broad context, it is very odd. How do we manage to do it?

The Nomadic Life

Moffett likens a hunter-gather band to a small factory. Everyone works, 112: "Few tasks in a band factory demanded multiple players."

113:

The rhythm of expeditions orchestrated by sex added a layer of complexity beyond that of the movements of almost all other animals.

That is, to a first approximation, with allowances from some differences between male and female worlds, every adult in such a society knows everything there is to know. With the exception of a ritual/medical specialist, a medicine man or shaman, there are no occupational specialists. Everyone must make everything they need for daily life and perform every necessary task.

114:

An upside of this factory life was that people weren’t occupied with raising crops or struggling to take in excess food. They ended up with leisure time–a commodity that earned these nomads the moniker “the original affluent society.” [...]

That, and the bare-bones nature of ownership, meant everything about their nomadic way of life pretty much had to fit inside each member’s head, even if peers, and especially the elderly, were useful at reinforcing what was correct. [...]

Otherwise the sole specialized line of work in a band was a medicine man. Even then, Aboriginal healers, whose training in that role could take years, were still expected to carry out life’s mundane tasks themselves.

I find that last very interesting and extraordinarily important. It isn’t hunters or weavers or cooks and so forth who are specialists, but medicine men, who are, in that role, story tellers and ritualists as well. Of course medicine is fundamental – we in the United States devote enormous resources to it ourselves (not always very wisely or effectively either) – but in simple hunter-gather societies the telling of mythic stories and the enactment of ritual was a part, indeed much of, the healing process. The medicine man was, in effect, in charge of the mythic worldview by which the society understands itself in the world.

I’m thus reminded of Shelley’s assertion: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Has it always been thus? Of course the medicine man doesn’t think of themselves as originator of the stories. They’re only passing on the stories as they’ve been handed down to them, ultimately from supernatural creatures.

115:

Still, evincing one’s talents was a delicate matter. Because of the intimacy of life around camps, band societies rarely tolerated a showoff. [...]

So without specialists or jobs, band societies offered opportunities for dexterous toolmakers, dazzling storytellers, skilled mediators of social conflicts, and thoughtful decision makers.

116:

Among other indications that life in the society completely expressed their worldview, the bands didn’t distinguish sacred beliefs (usually relating directly to nature) from other aspects of life. Likewise, rituals, entertainment, and education–all matters except family matters were part and parcel of their relationship to the society as a whole.

121:

In contrast to the rapport afforded by a band, the societies that hunter-gatherers belonged to were about identities–inclusion and exclusion. Even though each band carried out its quotidian chores alone, the society offered a security blanket, supporting reliable market and marriage relations beyond the local fireplace.

By 3,000 years ago the planet had been “largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists.”

James Gorman, Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought, NYTimes, August 29, 2019:

Humans substantially altered the planet much earlier than previously thought, a worldwide collection of archaeological experts reported Thursday. By 3,000 years ago, the experts wrote in Science magazine, the planet had been “largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists.”

People farmed, burned forests and grazed their goats, sheep and cattle. By about 1,000 BCE, with Mayan civilization on the rise in Mesoamerica and the Zhou dynasty beginning in China, what the authors describe as intensive agriculture, or continuous cultivation of the land, was “common in most regions where it is still practiced today.”

The results vary for different farming practices and different regions, said Erle Ellis, a geographer and environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, [...] But, he said, it is clear that the information pushes back the onset and spread of major human change to the global environment earlier than previously thought, sometimes by 1,000 years or more. [...]

The report seems to be a first. Archaeologists tend to be local or regional, devoted to particular sites and time periods. “There has never been a real effort to put together an empirical global land-use history,” Dr. Ellis said.

Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution

From the Preface to Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution, a special theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Volume 373, issue 1743, 5 April 2018.

Within the blink of an eye on a geological timescale, humans advanced from using basic stone tools to examining the rocks on Mars; however, our exact evolutionary path and the relative importance of genetic and cultural evolution in directing it remain a mystery. Our cultural capacities—to generate new ideas, to communicate and learn from one another, and to form vast social networks—together make us uniquely human, but the origins, the mechanisms and the evolutionary impact of these capacities are not well understood.

This special issue comprises studies that bring together perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, biology, computer science, ecology and psychology to help elucidate the cultural forces affecting human evolution. These studies explore avenues in which approaches and insights from different fields may inform one another or be brought together to generate novel interdisciplinary research agendas, with the goal of advancing the study of human uniqueness and its pre-hominid origins. The aim of this issue is to advance interdisciplinary discussion of the roles that culture plays in shaping the course of human evolution, exploring the mechanisms of cultural evolution from their cognitive underpinnings in individuals, through the behavioural ecology of learning from others, to the dynamics of transmission at the level of individuals and populations. The articles in this issue bring insights from disparate disciplines to bear on major questions in cultural evolution [1–11] and suggest broad-scale ways in which the study of cultural evolution can be synthesized with other disciplines [12–14].

Review Essays on the Origins and Evolution of Human Culture

I've placed another document in my SSRN page: Three Evolutionary Pieces. In consider the following books in three essay reviews:

(1) Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005.

(2) James L. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology, AltaMira Press, 2002.

David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, University of Chicago Press, 2002.

(3) Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso, 2005.

Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, Northwestern University Press, 2005.

Taken together they cover music, drawing and painting (on rock), and literature and cover periods from human pre-history, through the emergence of modern man, to contemporary culture and society.

The first essay looks at Steven Mithin’s book about music and language while the second considers two books, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind, which is about cave art and psychedelic drugs, and Darwin’s Cathedral, which is about religion and society. The third considers two books as well. One is an anthology of essays on Darwinian literary criticism, The Literary Animal, while the other is slim monograph about evolutionary processes at work in literary culture, Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees.

I have placed Mithin’s Neanderthals first because it is about music, which I have come to treat as my conceptual toucstone to the emergence of human culture. Mithen regards it as fundamental as well. After reviewing Mithen’s work I offer extentions to the work I began in Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001), giving particular attention to group intentionality, and using a discussion of symbols and norms to connect with Mithen”s discussion of a 400,000 year old site at Bilzingsleben.

Then I move to a discussion of visual art and altered states of consciousness in Shamanism and the Ancient Mind and the group-building function of religious belief in Darwin's Cathedral, from the noumenal to the institutional. Pearson is exploring the origin of the thoughts, feelings, and symbols that are the basis of the social institutions that Wilson investigates in a number of societies, including Protestant Christians in Early Modenr Geneva, the Nuer, contemporary Bali, and Korean Christian communities in contemporary Texas. Thus Pearson’s and Wilson’s rather different discussions complement one another.

I return to my home discipline, literature, in the last piece. By and large I am skeptical of the work on display in The Literary Animal. Though I do have some reservations about the evolutionary psychology, my deepest reservations are for its application to literature. On the evidence of the essays in this volume, it simply isn’t very interesting. In contrast, Moretti’s more direct use of evolutionary ideas is more interesting. As his title suggests, he is interested in the historical evolution at work in literary culture rather than using literature as a vehicle for examining a biologically-given human nature.

OOO Archaeology

Johan Normark is an archaeologist working with object-oriented ontology, among other ologies. He's goe some interesting stuff at his blog Archaeological Haecceities, which I've just begun exploring. What's interesting is that he's not a philosopher. He's interested in specific stuff, the Maya among others, and is using OOO as a way think about that stuff. So he's working  with real examples rather than philosopher's potted examples. Check it out.