Anthropology

Rewriting the story of horse domestication

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 21:41:20 +0000

Rewriting the story of horse domestication Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/03/2024 - 15:41

William Taylor

Domesticating horses had a huge impact on human society—new science rewrites where and when it first happened

Across human history, no single animal has had a deeper impact on human societies than the horse. But when and how people domesticated horses has been an ongoing scientific mystery.

Half a million years ago or more, early human ancestors hunted horses with wooden spears, the very first weapons, and used their bones for early tools. During the late Paleolithic era, as far back as 30,000 years ago or more, ancient artists chose wild horses as their muse: Horses are the most commonly depicted animal in Eurasian cave art.

Following their first domestication, horses became the foundation of herding life in the grasslands of Inner Asia, and key leaps forward in technology such as the chariot, saddle and stirrup helped make horses the primary means of locomotion for travel, communication, agriculture and warfare across much of the ancient world. With the aid of ocean voyages, these animals eventually reached the shores of every major landmass—even Antarctica, briefly.

In his new book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, William Taylor, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology, draws together new archaeological evidence revising what scientists think about when, how and why horses became domesticated.

As they spread, horses reshaped ecology, social structures and economies at a never-before-seen scale. Ultimately, only industrial mechanization supplanted their near-universal role in society.

Because of their tremendous impact in shaping our collective human story, figuring out when, why and how horses became domesticated is a key step toward understanding the world we live in now.

Doing so has proven to be surprisingly challenging. In my new book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, I draw together new archaeological evidence that is revising what scientists like me thought we knew about this story.

A horse domestication hypothesis

Over the years, almost every time and place on Earth has been suggested as a possible origin point for horse domestication, from Europe tens of thousands of years ago to places such as Saudi Arabia, Anatolia, China or even the Americas.

By far the most dominant model for horse domestication, though, has been the Indo-European hypothesis, also known as the “Kurgan hypothesis.” It argues that, sometime in the fourth millennium BCE or before, residents of the steppes of western Asia and the Black Sea known as the Yamnaya, who built large burial mounds called kurgans, hopped astride horses. The newfound mobility of these early riders, the story goes, helped catalyze huge migrations across the continent, distributing ancestral Indo-European languages and cultures across Eurasia.

But what’s the actual evidence supporting the Kurgan hypothesis for the first horse domestication? Many of the most important clues come from the bones and teeth of ancient animals, via a discipline known as archaeozoology. Over the past 20 years, archaeozoological data seemed to converge on the idea that horses were first domesticated in sites of the Botai culture in Kazakhstan, where scientists found large quantities of horse bones at sites dating to the fourth millennium BCE.

Other kinds of compelling circumstantial evidence started to pile up. Archaeologists discovered evidence of what looked like fence post holes that could have been part of ancient corrals. They also found ceramic fragments with fatty horse residues that, based on isotope measurements, seem to have been deposited in the summer months, a time when milk could be collected from domestic horses.

The scientific smoking gun for early horse domestication, though, was a set of changes found on some Botai horse teeth and jawbones. Like the teeth of many modern and ancient ridden horses, the Botai horse teeth appeared to have been worn down by a bridle mouthpiece, or bit.

A Kazakh man on horseback with a golden eagle in an image made between 1911 and 1914. (Photo: public domain)

Together, the data pointed strongly to the idea of horse domestication in northern Kazakhstan around 3500 BCE—not quite the Yamnaya homeland, but close enough geographically to keep the basic Kurgan hypothesis intact.

There were some aspects of the Botai story, though, that never quite lined up. From the outset, several studies showed that the mix of horse remains found at Botai were unlike those found in most later pastoral cultures: Botai is evenly split between male and female horses, mostly of a healthy reproductive age. Killing off healthy, breeding-age animals like this on a regular basis would devastate a breeding herd. But this demographic blend is common among animals that have been hunted. Some Botai horses even have projectile points embedded in their ribs, showing that they died through hunting rather than a controlled slaughter.

These unresolved loose ends loomed over a basic consensus linking the Botai culture to horse domestication.

New scientific tools raise more questions

In recent years, as archaeological and scientific tools have rapidly improved, key assumptions about the cultures of Botai, Yamnaya and the early chapters of the human-horse story have been overturned.

First, improved biomolecular tools show that whatever happened at Botai, it had little to do with the domestication of the horses that live today. In 2018, nuclear genomic sequencing revealed that Botai horses were not the ancestors of domestic horses but of Przewalski’s horse, a wild relative and denizen of the steppe that has never been domesticated, at least in recorded history.

Next, when my colleagues and I reconsidered skeletal features linked to horse riding at Botai, we saw that similar issues are also visible in ice age wild horses from North America, which had certainly never been ridden. Even though horse riding can cause recognizable changes to the teeth and bones of the jaw, we argued that the small issues seen on Botai horses can reasonably be linked to natural variation or life history.

This finding reopened the question: Was there horse transport at Botai at all?

Leaving the Kurgan hypothesis in the past

Over the past few years, trying to make sense of the archaeological record around horse domestication has become an ever more contradictory affair.

A re-enactment of Botai hunter-herders (Photo: Niobe Thompson)

For example, in 2023, archaeologists noted that human hip and leg skeletal problems found in Yamnaya and early eastern European burials looked a lot like problems found in mounted riders, consistent with the Kurgan hypothesis. But problems like these can be caused by other kinds of animal transport, including the cattle carts found in Yamnaya-era sites.

So how should archaeologists make sense of these conflicting signals?

A clearer picture may be closer than we think. A detailed genomic study of early Eurasian horses, published in June 2024 in the journal Nature, shows that Yamnaya horses were not ancestors of the first domestic horses, known as the DOM2 lineage. And Yamnaya horses showed no genetic evidence of close control over reproduction, such as changes linked with inbreeding.

Instead, the first DOM2 horses appear just before 2000 BCE, long after the Yamnaya migrations and just before the first burials of horses and chariots also show up in the archaeological record.

For now, all lines of evidence seem to converge on the idea that horse domestication probably did take place in the Black Sea steppes, but much later than the Kurgan hypothesis requires. Instead, human control of horses took off just prior to the explosive spread of horses and chariots across Eurasia during the early second millennium BCE.

There’s still more to be settled, of course. In the latest study, the authors point to some funny patterns in the Botai data, especially fluctuations in genetic estimates for generation time – essentially, how long it takes on average for a population of animals to produce offspring. Might these suggest that Botai people still raised those wild Przewalski’s horses in captivity, but only for meat, without a role in transportation? Perhaps. Future research will let us know for sure.

Either way, out of these conflicting signals, one consideration has become clear: The earliest chapters of the human-horse story are ready for a retelling.

William Taylor is an assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Domesticating horses had a huge impact on human society—new science rewrites where and when it first happened.

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The case for employee-ownership education in business schools

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:40:00 +0000

The case for employee-ownership education in business schools Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/13/2024 - 14:40

Andrea Steffes-Tuttle

Employee ownership is a proven answer to known problems; I saw it in my own research

In the 2024 Legislative Session, House Bill 24-1157 codified the Colorado Employee Ownership Office and established a new $1.5 million annual tax credit program to support Colorado businesses that are in their first seven years of employee ownership. Why? Because there is proven power and possibility in shared ownership.

Andrea Steffes-Tuttle

The impact of shared ownership is well-documented but often overlooked as a governance model. Academic studies show that companies where at least 30% of the shares are broadly owned by employees are more productive, grow faster, and are less likely to fail. Recent research by the National Center for Employee Ownership indicates that employee-owners have higher wages and net worth, receive better benefits and are less likely to lose jobs to cuts and outsourcing compared to workers without ownership stakes.

We are in a moment of serious inequality. Wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top, and businesses have an important role to play in distributing that wealth. However, governance models like employee ownership aren’t often taught in business-school curricula. As a result, business schools aren’t preparing future business leaders to address one of the primary crises of our time.

A job market in flux

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, there was a national reckoning about work. More than 4.4 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in September 2021 as part of “The Great Resignation,” in response to poor labor conditions and burnout. For a moment, the power was in the hands of workers, and wages were rising, but that power has swung back to corporations.

The rise in wages has been followed by economic strain, and droves of workers have been laid off, creating a crowded labor market. This forces workers to accept employment at reduced wages and in a weaker position. The insecure footing of today’s workers, combined with wealth inequality is the source of significant stress and puts people’s health and lives at risk. The job market needs to be stabilized, but how?

A proven solution

Employee ownership is a proven answer to these issues. I saw it in my own research. I was drawn to my research by my experience as a worker and a business owner. When running a company, I felt trapped by the norms for managing and rewarding workers. It felt imbalanced that one person, the business owner, should receive almost all of the benefits of the work of others.

Through my study, as part of my graduate work in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder, I researched alternative ways of managing a business that might offer more equitable environments for workers. My research focused on B Corp-certified companies. B Corp certification is a designation that verifies that a for-profit company meets standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency according to the certification requirements of the nonprofit B Lab.

In interviews with 50 employees across 15 B Corps in the United States, I found that while the certification influences company policies and creates a community of companies that want to do good, it falls short of truly improving working conditions and worker equity.

Instead, the employees I encountered who were most satisfied and engaged worked at companies that had adopted shared ownership models of corporate governance. One of the companies in my study, Namaste Solar, operates as a worker cooperative. The employees at this firm were highly engaged, clearly communicated the organization's mission and purpose, and expressed high levels of job satisfaction.

They participated in professional and team-development activities, and many acknowledged they could find higher-paying jobs elsewhere but preferred to stay at Namaste Solar. This engagement and satisfaction were largely attributed to the ownership, agency and respect inherent in the worker-cooperative governance model. This was one of the most meaningful findings in my research.

Shared ownership models as core business curriculum

One of the barriers to corporate adoption of shared ownership is awareness. I attended a graduate business program at CU Denver and participated in several leadership trainings as a professional. And yet, when I started my own business, I didn’t consider setting up a shared-ownership model because it wasn’t something I’d been taught.

As far as I can tell from my own graduate studies across the Leeds School of Business, the concepts of employee ownership are barely discussed. The solution of shared ownership is proven to be a powerful lever in redistributing wealth, increasing financial security and stabilizing families and communities. Why isn’t it a core part of business school studies?

A few universities offer curricula on employee ownership, including Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, the Beyster Institute at UC San Diego's Rady School of Business, and the Baker Center of Excellence for Employee Ownership and Business Transformation at Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania. However, at most institutions, individual faculty decide whether and how to introduce the concept.

As far as I can tell from my own graduate studies across the Leeds School of Business, the concepts of employee ownership are barely discussed. The solution of shared ownership is proven to be a powerful lever in redistributing wealth, increasing financial security and stabilizing families and communities. Why isn’t it a core part of business school studies?"

In a time of deep inequality and climate crisis, the prevailing business-school teachings that prioritize status-quo business governance have the potential to exacerbate these issues. Higher education needs to holistically incorporate diverse business approaches. Future leaders need to know their options. Many young leaders are seeking tools, models and guidance for creating a better future. Shared ownership is a powerful tool.

The government is starting to support and incentivize the adoption of shared ownership, both in Colorado and at the federal level. Universities should pay attention and seize the opportunity to rethink their curricula and incorporate education and training on more equitable governance models. The benefits are well documented, unlike many new policy proposals or novel ESG models.

Widespread adoption of employee ownership could have profound effects. If universities are truly committed to equity, they must include wealth distribution in their efforts, and a proven method for distributing wealth is through ownership. The adoption of shared ownership starts with awareness, and business schools are central to this awareness chain.

Andrea Steffes-Tuttle, who holds an MA in anthropology from CU Boulder, is an anthropologist of work, an entrepreneur, and an organizer for economic justice. She has 20 years of professional experience starting in nonprofit event management and fundraising, moving to marketing leadership in software startups, and on to entrepreneurship and business ownership. Most recently, she completed an anthropological study focused on worker satisfaction and corporate accountability.

Employee ownership is a proven answer to known problems; I saw it in my own research.

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Horsepower: Professor unveils a new history of horses

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 19:10:30 +0000

Horsepower: Professor unveils a new history of horses Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/11/2024 - 13:10

Doug McPherson

In his upcoming book, ‘Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History,’ William Taylor writes that today’s world has been molded by humans’ relationship to horses

Nearly a million years ago in what is now southern England, human ancestors called Homo heidelbergensis were creating tools from horse bones. Fast forward to about 30,000 years ago, and humans across Europe and northern Eurasia were regularly painting horses on cave walls and carving their likenesses from bone and ivory.

“The connection between people and horses is among the most ancient connections that we have with the animal world,” says William Taylor, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder and curator of archaeology for the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History.

But Taylor says it’s what happened about 4,000 years ago that really changed things. That’s when people living in the grasslands near the Black Sea first domesticated horses.

William Taylor, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology and curator of archaeology for the CU Boulder Museum of Natural History, notes that "the connection between people and horses is among the most ancient connections that we have with the animal world.”

And when that happened, Taylor says the effect on the world and the centuries that followed was not a gradual development “but a sudden jolt, a shock to the system” that influenced nearly every aspect of human life―revolutionizing things like transportation, agriculture and warfare.

“After domestication, horses spread like wildfire, stampeding into new societies, creating new partnerships with people that shook up the structure of the ancient world almost everywhere they went,” he explains.

It’s just one of the many insights in Taylor’s new book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, available Aug. 6. Taylor’s book also has received the spring 2024 Kayden Book Award from the CU Boulder College of Arts and Sciences, with a $5,000 award given annually to a book representing excellence in history and the arts.

In the book, Taylor offers a broad swath of the horse-human connection along with new findings based on more than a decade of researching horse domestication and archeological fieldwork around the globe―in places like the Eurasian steppes, the mountains of inner Asia, the pampas of Argentina and the Great Plains of North America.

“These are places and cultures that have had a tremendous impact on human history, but factors like low population densities, tough weather, difficult fieldwork, lack of written records and bias from written records that do exist have all helped keep that story from being properly integrated into the bigger picture,” Taylor says.

Breaking new ground

Taylor is helping break new ground with his scientific perspective on horse domestication, the timing and origins of which scholars have argued over for decades. Taylor says his book tells “a very different narrative” about the origins of horse domestication, one that’s grounded in interdisciplinary science.

One of the book’s main threads, he says, is to understand that nearly all of the most important facts about horses can be told well only by combining other kinds of information with archaeology.

William Taylor's book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History has received the spring 2024 Kayden Book Award from the CU Boulder College of Arts and Sciences.

“The book relies first and foremost on the archaeological record, and to pair the most cutting-edge and up-to-date scientific information with all the other insights we gain from things like ecology, evolutionary biology, oral traditions, historical records and everything in between.”

The book connects this new understanding of horse domestication with new insights into the timing of key innovations, including the origins of horse cavalry and equipment like the saddle and stirrup, which seem to be “closely intertwined with cultures from the steppe,” Taylor says.

One of Taylor’s newest findings is the role ancient people in Mongolia played in innovating the saddle and the stirrup, two technologies that Taylor says most people take for granted today, but which really revolutionized what people could do while mounted.

“Saddles and stirrups allowed folks to do all sorts of things on horseback that were harder before, like staying mounted with heavy armor, bracing for impact with heavy weapons like lances or standing in the saddle for archery. Our recent collaborative scholarship shows that Mongolian cultures were doing this by the 4th or 5th centuries.”

To understand Taylor’s interest in horses, he says it helps to look at his own history. “I first became interested in the human-horse story as a way of understanding my family and their own past,” he says.

His grandfather was a cowboy, and Taylor’s dad grew up with horses, too. Taylor is from the first generation in his family that didn't grow up with horses.

“So, when I started studying the ancient world, I was immediately drawn to understanding horses. One of my first experiences as a student was getting to study the skeleton of a 2,500-year-old horse. That’s when I became really curious about all the things we could learn about people through the study of horse remains. Living in places like Montana or Colorado today, we are still in a legacy horse culture.”

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In his upcoming book, ‘Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History,’ William Taylor writes that today’s world has been molded by humans’ relationship to horses.

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Six decades later, scholar locates site of secret CIA-Tibet training camp

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 14:20:54 +0000

Six decades later, scholar locates site of secret CIA-Tibet training camp Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/03/2024 - 08:20

Clint Talbott

Carole McGranahan, a CU Boulder anthropology professor who has long studied the Tibetan perspective of China’s invasion and occupation of Tibet, joins the Tibetan community to commemorate the location on June 9 at Camp Hale, Colorado

For decades, the CIA’s training of Tibetan soldiers to fight Chinese invaders was a state secret, but even after the U.S. government formally acknowledged the CIA-Tibet effort, the exact location of the Tibetan camp remained a mystery.

With the dogged research of anthropologist Carole McGranahan, the precise location is now known. McGranahan, a University of Colorado Boulder anthropology professor who’s been studying the Tibetan perspective on the resistance to China for more than three decades, will soon join Tibetans from Colorado and beyond to commemorate the camp, six decades after it was closed.

The memorial gathering, which is titled “Dumra/The Secret Garden–Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Program at Camp Hale,” will take place at noon on June 9 at Camp Hale National Monument.

Carole McGranahan, a CU Boulder anthropology professor, has studied the Tibetan perspective on the resistance to China for more than three decades.

Members of the Tibetan community from around the world and several members of parliament of the Dalai Lama’s exile government in India are scheduled to attend, as is one of his cabinet ministers.

McGranahan said finding the training camp’s actual location now is meaningful for two reasons. “One is that most of the veterans and retired (CIA) agents have passed,” and the other is that the history of the operation had been suppressed and concealed for decades—a condition McGranahan calls “arrested history.”

Tibetans, for instance, have been unable to “celebrate and honor these soldiers in a way that they deserved,” she said. “This service, not just to Tibet but to the Dalai Lama, was the defining moment of their lives.”

For the Tibetan community to know the actual location, she added, “is meaningful in a way that even as a scholar I hadn’t fully appreciated.”

Fraught history

McGranahan’s work adds detail to the history of Tibet and China, which has long been fraught.

In 1949, Mao Zedong won the civil war in China, defeating Chiang Kai-shek. Mao, the first leader of the People’s Republic of China, promised to “liberate” Tibet, which was then an independent country headed by the Dalai Lama, the country’s political and spiritual leader.

Within a year, the Chinese army invaded Tibet and marched on the capital, Lhasa. For the next decade, the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s government sought to negotiate—under military duress—with China. Meanwhile, Tibetan citizens facing Chinese invaders from the east began fighting back.

Initially, they fought with whatever they had from wherever they were. Later, the Tibetans formed a citizens’ army called Chushi Gangdrug, whose mission was to defend the Dalai Lama, Tibet and Buddhism.

If you go

What:Dumra/The Secret Garden–Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Training Program at Camp Hale

When: 12 p.m. June 9

Where:Camp Hale National Monument

The Tibetans’ resistance caught the attention of the United States. “This is during the Cold War, so this was roughly 1956, and the Tibetans were on their own, fighting communists,” McGranahan noted.

The U.S. Department of State got involved, as did, secretly, the CIA, which launched a program to train Tibetan soldiers. That program landed in Colorado in 1958 at Camp Hale, near Vail, Colorado, the widely known training ground of the 10^th Mountain Division fighters who served in World War II.

About 300 Tibetan soldiers were trained at Camp Hale from 1959-64. The CIA kept a tight lid on information about the program, and closely guarded entrance to and from the site. The camp closed in 1964, but the CIA continued to support the Tibetan resistance until 1973.

McGranahan began researching the Tibetan resistance in 1993, when she was working on her PhD in history and anthropology at the University of Michigan.

“One of the things I wanted to do was to understand and tell the story of the Tibetan resistance to China from the Tibetan perspective, because in the English language, it had been told almost exclusively as a story about the CIA,” McGranahan noted recently.

That approach clearly left out the Tibetan perspective, which, “frankly, to me, was more interesting and needed to be told,” she said.

In her doctoral research, McGranahan interviewed more than 100 Tibetan veterans, including many who had trained at Camp Hale. She noted that the 300 Tibetans who were trained in Colorado were a small portion of the thousands of fighters in the Tibetan Chushi Gangdrug army.

Though she focused on the Tibetan perspective, she also interviewed about 10 retired CIA officers who had been stationed at Camp Hale. At the time, the CIA operation was still top secret. “Protocol didn’t acknowledge the operation," she said. "There was nothing public about it.”

A view of Dumra from across the valley.

That changed on Sept. 10, 2010, when the U.S. government installed a plaque at Camp Hale formally acknowledging that the CIA had trained Tibetan officers there.

One day prior, on Sept. 9, 2010, Duke University Press released McGranahan’s book, Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War.

The public announcement stemmed from the efforts of Ken Knaus, a retired CIA agent, who enlisted the help of former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo. Together with Roger McCarthy, Knaus had been in charge of the CIA-Tibet operation, and it had been the lifelong mission of both men to tell the story of the operation and to install a plaque at Camp Hale.

Searching for the garden

McGranahan, who describes herself as the group’s “resident scholar,” joined the dedication ceremony in 2010. After the ceremony, the Tibetan veterans and the CIA officers wanted to find the site of the CIA camp, which CIA officers called “The Ranch” and Tibetans called “Dumra,” meaning garden.

But the group’s desire to see the Dumra location was thwarted by the fact that the CIA had demolished and obscured any trace of the facilities. “The site was made to look as if nothing had been there,” McGranahan observed.

“And to the dismay of the veterans on both sides, they could not find the camp,” she added. “The very camp they had lived in, they couldn’t find. This was very distressing to everyone.”

It’s also understandable. Camp Hale encompasses 53,804 acres, and landmarks that were clearly seen six decades ago could easily be obscured.

Last fall, McGranahan contacted a CU alumnus, Tracy Walters, who lives in the Vail Valley and who does a lot of hiking, camping and bike-riding through Camp Hale. She told him the story of the lost CIA training site, and he offered to help.

Using photos of the CIA site from the early 1960s and comparing them with satellite images, Walters determined where he thought the location was.

She and Walters visited the site in February, strapped on snowshoes to navigate the four feet of snow there, “and we snowshoed out, trying to match up the photographs of the camp with the current landscape, basically 60 years later,” she said.

McGranahan emailed the photographs of the site, new and old, to the one still-living CIA officer, Bruce Walker, who had been stationed at the camp. “He wrote back immediately, ‘Yes, that is the site, and I am the one who took those photographs you’re holding up in the picture.’”

Carole McGranahan holds up an old photo of Dumra to find its precise location in Camp Hale National Monument.

It turns out that U.S. Highway 24, which is near the CIA training site, was not heavily used in the early 60s, and the site couldn’t be seen from the highway. Also, the CIA agents and Tibetan soldiers entered from Colorado Highway 91, near the Climax molybdenum mine at Fremont Pass.

Having found the location, McGranahan contacted members of Chushi Gangdrug or their descendants, who said, “We need to do a ceremony there.” Former agent Walker, now 91, also plans to attend June 9.

McGranahan underscores the significance of identifying the precise location of this chapter of history:

“You can feel the resonance, the poignancy of it, of what it means to be on the place where there was a hope, there was a camaraderie, there was a commitment. Certain aspects of that did come to fruition, certainly the camaraderie, and there’s a hope that remains.”

China still controls Tibet, but the two groups—CIA agents and Tibetan fighters—remain committed to each other.

The June 9 ceremony is organized by the CU Department of Anthropology and Tibet Himalaya Initiative together with the Colorado Chushi Gangdrug and Vail Symposium. Co-sponsors for the event are the CU Boulder College of Arts and Sciences, the Departments of Communication, Ethnic Studies, Geography, History, Linguistics, Religious Studies and Sociology, the Center for the American West, the Center for Asian Studies, the Institute for Behavioral Science and the Museum of Natural History. It is also co-sponsored by Nova Guides, Polar Star Properties and 10th Mountain Whiskey

Additionally, on June 7 at the Vail Symposium, McGranahan, India-based filmmakers Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin, and retired CIA officer Bruce Walker will present a research talk "Dumra at Camp Hale: The CIA's Tibetan Resistance Program" about the secret CIA training camp for Tibetan resistance soldiers at Camp Hale that operated from 1958-1964.

This presentation is the basis for a book they are co-authoring about Camp Hale’s Tibetan history. Their presentation will be live-streamed.

Top image: Tibetan and CIA colleagues at the Dumra training site in the early 1960s. (Photos courtesy Carole McGranahan)

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Taking archaeology beyond big discoveries and bullwhips

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Taking archaeology beyond big discoveries and bullwhips Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/29/2024 - 00:00

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder archaeologist Sarah Kurnick addresses some common myths about archaeology at the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of China’s terracotta warriors

March 1974 was particularly dry in China’s Shaanxi Province, so at the end of the month a farmer named Yang Zhifa and several brothers who lived near Xi’an began digging a well.

For two days they hacked into the hard, red earth, and on the third day, March 29, Yang struck something terracotta in the soil. It would eventually be discovered as one of the greatest archaeological finds of the century, and arguably of the modern era: the ancient tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi, China’s first emperor, guarded by thousands of life-size terracotta warriors and horses.

In the 50 years since its discovery, the terracotta army has captivated visitors to what is now an archaeological complex in Xi’an and, perhaps less thrillingly, contributed to one of the enduring myths about archaeology: that the main goal of the field is to make huge discoveries like the terracotta warriors.

Like many archaeologists, Sarah Kurnick, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology, often encounters common myths about the field and science of archaeology. (Photo: Conrad Erb)

“I think it’s common for people to assume we’re only interested in the very distant past and only interested in things that occur in exotic locations—deserts and jungles or in places like China or Egypt,” says Sarah Kurnick, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of anthropology and an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in ancient Mesoamerica. “What you tend not to hear as much about are historical archaeologists—people who are studying plantation sites in the American South, for example—or even projects where people are doing archaeology of the contemporary world.”

Thanks to swashbuckling characters like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft and the broad attention given to just a small handful of archaeological discoveries—the terracotta warriors, King Tut’s tomb and Machu Picchu, for example—archaeology has become a field in which myth and reality often dramatically diverge.

At the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of the terracotta army, Kurnick addresses some of the most common myths about the field and science of archaeology.

Myth: If you’re not hacking through jungle vines with a machete, you’re not doing archaeology

People don’t really think of archaeologists teaching classes or doing research in libraries, doing data analysis. There’s the idea that it’s all field work and that field work is entirely excavation. I don’t think it’s commonly known how much technology has changed and advanced the field. There’s ground-penetrating radar—which doesn’t work in all environments, but it can find anomalies—and a whole bunch of aerial survey methods. LIDAR is a big one. The idea is to rent a plane and fly over a survey area back and forth in straight lines while you’re sending a laser down. That creates what are almost photographs of the topography, and it’s a way of looking at large swaths of land and getting rid of levels of trees, essentially.

But field work, if you’re a field archaeologist, is just part of it. Archaeologists work in labs, they write code to analyze data, they do text-based research. Unfortunately, that’s not very glamorous.

Myth: Archaeology is for men

I do think there’s a common misconception that archaeology is this masculine endeavor—that archaeologists are men and it’s all hardship and ruggedness and strength and alcohol. There’s a famous archaeologist, Alfred Kidder, who said in the early 1940s that there are two types of archaeologists in popular imagination: the hairy chested and the hairy chinned. You’ve got the hairy chested, rugged explorer with his shirt unbuttoned, with the pith helmet and bullwhip—the Indiana Jones type—and then you think of his father, an older gentleman with a beard and a jacket with elbow patches, decoding ancient texts. Those are the two types—or myths—of archaeologists people think of, and they’re both men.

Sarah Kurnick, left, and colleagues hike to the Punta Laguna archaeology site in Mexico's Yucutan Peninsula. (Photo: Conrad Erb)

Although much has changed since the 1940s, women in archaeology still deal sometimes with this macho, masculine feel to archaeology—this sense that archaeologists are the cowboys of science and it’s not a field for women because we can’t carry buckets of dirt or cut vines down with machetes, which is obviously not true.

Myth: Archaeologists deal in the supernatural

There’s a lot of pseudo-archaeology stuff out there—this notion that the past was significantly influenced by aliens or people from the lost city of Atlantis. If I meet a random person on a plane sitting next to me and they ask what I do and I say I’m an archeologist, a lot of the time they’ll start talking about something related to pseudo-archaeology. Almost everybody gets information about archaeology from television and movies, and if you look at the types of movies and TV shows, you’ve got things like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, and on TV there’s “Ancient Aliens” and “America Unearthed.” You’ve got “Ancient Apocalypse” listed as a documentary on Netflix.

There’s this disconnect between what archaeologists are saying and what people want to know. In some instances, I do think people might be geared toward the wrong questions, but on other hand, I think archaeologists do a pretty poor job of communication and are not really meeting people where they’re at.

For archaeology, like most science, it’s still the 'publish or perish' model, and generally the peer-reviewed publications are considered much more important than public outreach. There’s still sometimes a stigma associated with public outreach. But it’s important not to turn people off. We need to do a better job of engaging people in the science in a way that’s interesting and relevant.

[video:https://youtu.be/W59CV66z9lQ?si=5Umhwxvagh6QzZGU]

Myth: Archaeologists are treasure hunters

Unfortunately, this is something that’s still being perpetuated by the History Channel, National Geographic and other organizations. There was a documentary several years ago that was all about LIDAR—which makes sense because LIDAR is awesome and the images it produces are amazing—and they interviewed real archaeologists who work in Central America. But whoever wrote the narrative for the documentary kept talking about LIDAR-facilitated treasure hunting and about how you have a map and X marks the spot and LIDAR shows you where that X is.

Also, I think there’s not a great understanding of what happens to artifacts once they’ve been excavated—how complicated and difficult and ethically fraught the next steps are. The notion of who owns the past is a huge question. I also think people assume that archaeologists pocket some things they find, or that they’re insisting everything belongs in a museum. Archaeology has historically been a colonial endeavor, and we’re doing things very differently now than in the past. I’m on the Society for American Archaeology Decolonization Task Force, and part of our work is recognizing that yes, our past is problematic, but we’re working to do things differently now.

Sarah Kurnick (seated left, blue shirt) discusses the Punta Laguna archaeological project with residents who live near the site. (Photo: Conrad Erb)

Myth: All archaeologists want to work in Egypt

Ancient China, Egypt, ancient Maya—these are the things that people assume archaeologists should do and want to do. But it would be so disappointing if that was all we wanted to do. There’s so much exciting historical archaeology and contemporary archaeology happening. There’s a famous archaeologist named Bill Rathje who said we should be looking at trash to learn about ways of life and suggested excavating landfills in the present. Because of his work, we learned all sorts of insights about consumer habits, about what people recycle and don’t recycle, what does and doesn’t degrade in a landfill.

There are really cool historical projects in Colorado—one that Bonnie Clark and her colleagues are leading is learning more about a Japanese internment camp at Amache, and I don’t think people commonly think of doing the archaeology of World War II. Another project by Dean Saitta and his colleagues is looking at some of the early labor movements and the violent interactions between labor and capitalists in the region, and an aspect of that is looking at the Ludlow Massacre and the history of miners.

One thing that’s really exciting about archaeology is it’s in many ways democratizing. If we look at history, oftentimes the people we know the most about are the most elite—the 1%. When we have the extraordinary finds—the terracotta warriors, King Tut’s tomb—we’re learning about the top echelons of those societies. But for a lot of archaeologists, we’re interested in the 99%. Finding these aspects of daily life in households can be just as exciting, if not more exciting, than the huge discoveries. We’re finding out about how things were for most people, rather than just the upper echelons. There’s an emerging field of household archaeology that’s excavating houses and figuring out what daily life was like, how did people interact. We’d be getting a really warped picture of the world if the only things we knew about our past came from royal tombs.

Myth: Archaeologists look for dinosaur bones

No, that’s paleontologists.

Top image: Terracotta army in Xi'an, China (Photo: iStock); Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones (Photo: Paramount/Everett Collection)

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CU Boulder archaeologist Sarah Kurnick addresses some common myths about archaeology at the 50th anniversary of the discovery of China’s terracotta warriors.

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‘Missing’ houses offer a new perspective on Britain’s Roman period

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 23:37:24 +0000

‘Missing’ houses offer a new perspective on Britain’s Roman period Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 16:37

Blake Puscher

A population estimate considering now-decomposed wooden houses suggests that Silchester, England, may have been typical of towns across the Roman Empire, CU Boulder researcher finds

A rough site plan for the Roman-era village of Silchester in south-central England, now a ruin, has existed since antiquarians excavated it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though extensive, these efforts used techniques that are now outdated and, modern researchers note, represent only the most well-preserved structures.

Accordingly, the popular estimates of Silchester’s residential population, which suggest around 4,000 people at its peak in the Late Roman period, may be inaccurate, new research suggests.

This seems particularly likely considering more recent excavations of the site and other sites nearby, which have shown a large proportion of timber houses relative to stone ones. Newer studies have provided evidence along the same lines through a combination of geophysical survey and aerial photography.

Scott Ortman, a CU Boulder associate professor of anthropology, found through his research that previous population estimates for the Late Roman-era village of Silchester in south-central England have been too low.

In recently published research, Scott Ortman, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of anthropology, and John Hanson, formerly a CU Boulder postdoctoral researcher and now a University of Oxford associate professor of Roman archaeology and art, were inspired by these developments to make a new estimate of Silchester’s peak population. Their final figure of about 5,500 people has implications for not only the history of Silchester, but also Roman Britain and, potentially, the entire Roman Empire.

Silchester and greenfield sites

Many Roman towns in Britain fell apart around 400 A.D., when the Roman period ended, leaving behind a layer of “dark earth” in the archaeological record from decomposing organic materials in the abandoned buildings.

The town that is the focus of Ortman and Hanson’s research is technically called Calleva Atrebatum, but is referred to as Silchester for simplicity, although the site is about a mile from the modern village of Silchester. The distinction between modern Silchester and Roman Silchester is important because many of the towns and cities established across the Roman Empire continued to be built over until the present. So-called greenfield sites like Silchester, however, were abandoned at the end of the Roman period and never reoccupied.

“There are a lot of towns that didn’t survive, but then new towns grew up on top of them later,” Ortman explains. “So today, it’s very difficult to get access to the remains from the Roman period, and you only see it in little, tiny windows that happen to be cleared when there’s some kind of modern redevelopment project.”

When a site isn’t built over, though, “the Roman remains are the uppermost level of the remains that are there, so it’s much easier to observe what the Roman town looked like overall.”

Changing viewpoints

Like the evidence and archaeological techniques available, scholars’ views on towns like Silchester have changed. Ortman notes that “perceptions of the Roman period of Britain have evolved over time as … the more recent history of Britain has proceeded. In the early 20th century when archaeology was first developing, my impression is that scholars of the time thought about the Romans as a sort of civilizing force.”

While the idea of Rome “civilizing” Britain parallels the history of Greece contributing to Roman culture (“Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium,” as Roman poet Horace described), this attitude may have flourished because Britain had an empire of its own at the time, Ortman says. “Scholars today are more mindful of the negative aspects of colonialism and empire-building.”

This viewpoint may be a reason that the apparently low residential density of Silchester was interpreted as evidence that the town was atypical, functioning as a sort of outpost from which Roman officials could manage the Britons.

A plan map of Silchester created with data from the Silchester Mapping Project of the Archaeology Data Service.

“The studies that have suggested that the Roman towns were primarily places where a transplanted administrative elite lived and consumed the product of the local Britons are based on real patterns that people have found,” Ortman says. “There is more fancy pottery found in the bigger towns, there is more evidence of imported stuff from other places, and the coins are more dense in the deposits of those sites.”

However, he is not entirely convinced: “One of the things our paper comments on with regard to that is that one would expect consumption rates to be higher in larger, more urbanized settlements just as a byproduct of there being more people there. So, the fact that you see those patterns in the early urban settlements, as compared to the rural ones, is something you would see with any urban system with towns in the countryside, even if it wasn’t in a colonial context.”

Leveraging scaling relationships

In a 2017 paper, Hanson and Ortman proposed a population of around 6,800 people for Silchester, based on excavations in an area of the site called Insula IX (“insula” means a building area surrounded by four streets in this context). These excavations found that there were about twice as many buildings as previously thought. Hanson and Ortman’s 6,800 number came from extrapolating the residential density of Insula IX to the rest of the town. However, they recognized that this methodology was not optimal, as it relied on a single line of evidence.

Unsatisfied with drawing conclusions from the Insula IX data alone, Ortman and Hanson remained interested in the idea of “missing” houses in Silchester. They say it was justified by evidence from throughout the region; for example, of the buildings discovered by excavations at Neatham, a nearby town, only 8.3% were stone.

To make a better estimate of Silchester’s population, Ortman and Hanson began by attempting to determine the number of residences. They ultimately decided to use the scaling relationships that have been observed in different Roman cities between the areas of public works and the number of residential buildings.

“What we did in the paper was think about the different civic features of Silchester and say, in the context of other Roman towns, how many people would be implied by the size of those civic features,” Ortman explains.

Excavation work being done at the bathhouse site in ancient Silchester. (Photo: Philip Pankhurst/Geograph Britain and Ireland)

They examined the forum, the amphitheater, the streets, the gates and the total site area. They used linear regression—the kind of analysis that produces lines of best fit—to describe the statistical relationship between the qualities of the different features and the number of residences.

Ortman and Hanson estimated the number of households five times using the five different civic features, then averaged the results to a total of 1,115 residential buildings, which is more typical of a Roman town its size. They then multiplied the average number of people per household to determine the population. Given that recent scholars tend to agree on a number between three and seven people per household, the researchers chose the middle value of five and reached their result of about 5,500 people overall.

Future studies and implications

Ortman and Hanson made another interesting discovery in their research beyond a refined estimate of Silchester’s population: The newer civic features were larger.

“In a sense, the different features of Silchester are scaled to different implied population sizes,” Ortman says. “That led us to wonder whether the population of the town had not grown over time rather than stayed very small. I would say the paper just raises that as a possibility to be investigated in other studies.”

So, other archaeologists could use this method of connecting the dates of construction of different features to population to reconstruct at least a bit of the demographic histories of Roman cities. This method could prove helpful because, while it is hard to determine the ages of houses in ancient towns and cities, the construction dates of buildings like the forum are often known.

This research has implications for the study of the Roman Empire more broadly, Ortman says. The data on British settlements are especially abundant because laws there require the excavation of archaeological sites impacted by new development. So, “if the results of those investigations are about the specifics of how Britannia worked and it doesn’t really apply to the rest of the Empire, well, that’s fine, but that’s what it means,” Ortman says. “On the other hand, if the Roman world of Britannia was typical of other areas of the Empire, then the things that we learn about it are potentially applicable to the broader Roman world, which of course would increase the scope of their significance.”

Top image: Walls at Silchester site (Photo: Historic UK)

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A population estimate considering now-decomposed wooden houses suggests that Silchester, England, may have been typical of towns across the Roman Empire, CU Boulder researcher finds.

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Anthropologist finds that South American cultures quickly adopted horses

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 18:25:43 +0000

Anthropologist finds that South American cultures quickly adopted horses Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/14/2023 - 11:25

Doug McPherson

CU Boulder Assistant Professor William Taylor’s new study offers a telling glimpse into the lives of humans and horses in South America

A new study from a University of Colorado Boulder researcher, conducted with colleagues in Argentina, sheds new light on how the introduction of horses in South America led to rapid economic and social transformation in the region.

William Taylor, an assistant professor of anthropology and curator of archaeology in the Museum of Natural History at CU Boulder, says this research shows that the story about people and horses in the Americas is “far more dynamic” than previously thought.

CU Boulder researcher William Taylor has found that once horses were introduced to South America, horse-based ways of life spread rapidly across the continent.

“Our findings from Patagonia show that the spread of horses, the emergence of horse-based ways of life in the southernmost areas of South America, was both rapid and largely independent of European control,” says Taylor, who has studied horses since 2011. “From almost their first arrival on the shores of the Americas in the 16^th century, horses had an impact at a continental scale.”

Juan Bautista Belardi, a professor of archaeology at the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral in Argentina and Taylor’s research colleague, and his team in Patagonia conducted all the field research at a canyon site called Chorrillo Grande 1 in southern Argentina. They unearthed the remains of an Aónikenk/Tehuelche campsite (people of the Indigenous Tehuelche nation traditionally used horses for hunting, transportation, warfare and food) that included horse bones, artifacts and metal ornaments.

Belardi says he believes the Chorrillo Grande 1 camp is just one of the many archaeological sites spread across the canyon.

“As far as we can tell, the human occupation of the canyon started at least around 3,500 years ago,” Belardi says. “This is very important, because it allows us to model how hunter-gatherers used the landscape.”

An introduction to horses

Taylor and his colleagues at CU Boulder then used DNA sequencing, radiocarbon dating and isotope analysis on the items Belardi’s team uncovered.

“The use of genetic and isotopic data showed a life history of the horses, where they were raised and their mobility between valleys,” Belardi says. “Horses changed the way hunter-gatherers used the landscape and, of course, this has had great influences on social and ideological life.”

Artifacts found at the Chorrillo Grande 1 site include Venetian glass beads (top), horse bones and teeth (middle) and metal artifacts including nails and ornaments (bottom). Photos: Juan Bautista Belardi

Taylor and Belardi say that when hunter-gathers first encountered horses, they were quick to begin using them.

“The advantages clearly showed up as soon as people had horses—the chance to save energy riding them, to extend the radius of hunting parties, less time needed to find prey and the ease to transport things, among others,” Belardi says. “Plus, horses could be consumed and their hides used. It was a great change that impacted all economic and social aspects of life in Patagonia.”

Taylor says horses reshaped the landscape of the ancient world by connecting people across vast distances; by transforming the grasslands into thriving cultural, economic and political centers; and during colonization, they helped maintain sovereignty for many peoples around the world.

“Even in 2023, these roles and impacts are still visible just under the surface of the world around us,” Taylor says.

Taylor first became interested in studying what he calls the “human-horse story” as a way of understanding his family and its past.

“My grandfather was a cowboy, and my dad grew up with horses, but I'm from the first generation in my family that didn't,” Taylor says. “So, when I got into the study of the ancient world, I was immediately drawn to understanding people and horses.”

One of his first experiences as a student was studying the skeleton of a 2,500-year-old horse. “After that, I became curious about everything I could learn about people by studying horse remains. Living in places like Montana or Colorado today, we’re still in a legacy horse culture.”

He also has a book coming out later this year from the University of California Press, telling the global history of the human-horse story called Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History.

Taylor says he views this latest research as “not yet completed” and hopes that the study will serve as a platform for launching researchers toward a wider investigation of the role of horses in ancient Argentina and South America.

“We hope to build on this work to continue to collaboratively explore the role of horses in shaping life in Patagonia and Argentina,” he says, “and connect this record with our research in other parts of the ancient world.”

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Assistant Professor William Taylor’s new study offers a telling glimpse into the lives of humans and horses in South America.

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Museum creates science teaching tools for deaf students

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 22:11:37 +0000

Museum creates science teaching tools for deaf students Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/24/2023 - 16:11

Katie Langford

CU Museum of Natural History launches pilot for science-education tools using American Sign Language

A team at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History is working with education and disability advocates to create science-education resources for deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

Funded through a $22,800 grant from the CU Boulder Office for Outreach and Engagement, university staff are collaborating with educators and experts to develop free archeology, paleontology and biology lessons in American Sign Language, Spanish and English available to the public online.

“The COVID-19 pandemic drove home in a relatively immediate and urgent way just how serious the impact is on all communities that are losing access to education resources,” says William Taylor, assistant professor of anthropology and curator of archeology at the CU Museum of Natural History.

William Taylor, curator of archaeology in the University of Colorado Boulder Museum of Natural History, is part of a team creating educational resources for children who are deaf or hard of hearing.

“I think we observed that some of the communities that are hardest hit by the impact are those that are underserved to begin with.”

Creating inclusive science education

The idea to create science education tools in ASL, as well as Spanish and other languages, was a long time coming for Taylor and Cecily Whitworth, project co-directors and siblings.

Taylor and Whitworth, a former linguistics professor who now works in advocacy with Montana Family ASL, each brought a distinct perspective to the project.

Whitworth, who is deaf, says her approach to the project has roots in seeing how inadequate education resources affect deaf children in rural communities.

It’s not unusual for there to be only one deaf child in a rural town or school district, and with resources far away or otherwise inaccessible, language deprivation is “a huge problem,” Whitworth says.

While newborn-hearing screenings are the norm, deaf children can still miss out on weeks, months or even years of language acquisition before and after they’re identified.

“If the family lives a far distance away from a big city or maybe decides they don’t want to rely on ASL, the infant continues to miss out on a lot of typical language acquisition milestones, and that causes permanent problems throughout their life,” Whitworth says.

Rural communities may not have ASL classes or a deaf community to support families, Whitworth adds. That’s where online education resources for deaf children can start to bridge the gap.

Taylor says Whitworth’s experience is the reason he enters museums thinking about whether the content is being shared with the deaf community.

Cecily Whitworth, who works in advocacy with Montana Family ASL and who is deaf, created illustrations for the ASL educational materials, including the ASL words for archaeology (left) and hat (right).

“The truth of the matter is that at most museums, especially smaller museums that struggle with funding, that are understaffed and reactive rather than strategic with their planning, the folks that get the short shrift with content, accessibility and science education are the disabled community,” Taylor says. “That’s true at every museum, but it’s also true at our museum.”

Highlighting excellence

The program’s first lesson, “Let’s Talk About Archeology,” is aimed at children ages 4-7 and introduces them to Amelia Dall, an archeologist who is deaf, who talks about what archeologists do and what tools they need in the field. Dall uses ASL, and the video includes English captions.

�鶹��Ժ can also learn ASL archeology vocabulary and fill out a worksheet.

Taylor and Whitworth developed the materials along with the museum’s archeology team, Montana Family ASL and other public-education experts, who met to decide what core concepts to introduce through the lesson and how to make it accessible for young children.

“One of the things about the project is we want to have it not just be an archeologist talking in ASL translation. We want deaf scientists and educators to present directly to kids, because there’s something special about learning it in their language,” Taylor says.

Archaeologist Amelia Dall, who is deaf, explains archaeology in ASL for the video "Let's Talk About Archaeology."

While the concepts being taught are simple, the lessons give kids a chance to encounter deaf scientists, Whitworth says.

“I think that’s where the potential long-lasting impact is of a project like this, to show people excellence and show them you can do this. Those hopes and dreams can get hard-wired when you’re really young,” Whitworth says. “Deaf, hard-of-hearing youth and other minority children often don’t think they can achieve those goals or do those jobs.”

In the coming months, the team plans to launch similar lessons for biology and paleontology, offer lessons in Spanish and potentially expand into other areas of study.

“Our hope with this project is we get other folks excited to develop resources for things like planetary sciences, engineering—there’s a whole diverse range of exciting academic fields and sciences,” Taylor says. “We want for folks to come forward and say, ‘We want to add our voice to this project.’”

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CU Museum of Natural History launches pilot for science-education tools using American Sign Language

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Research & Innovation Office names newest Faculty Fellow cohort

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 18:13:09 +0000

Research & Innovation Office names newest Faculty Fellow cohort Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/09/2022 - 11:13

The Research and Innovation Office has announced the 2023 RIO Faculty Fellows cohort, which includes 17 faculty members from departments and research institutes spanning the campus.

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Doctor’s diagnosis for the Earth: a terminal human malignancy

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 22:02:54 +0000

Doctor’s diagnosis for the Earth: a terminal human malignancy Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/08/2022 - 15:02

Clay Bonnyman Evans

In Homo Ecophagus, physician with CU Boulder ties sees humanity devouring itself—and the planet

“At the moment,” writes Warren Hern, “we are the most misnamed species on the planet: Homo sapiens sapiens—‘wise, wise man.’ Not.”

Hern, 84, physician, long-time abortion-rights advocate and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder, thinks the name he coined for his new book provides a much more accurate description of humanity in the 21st century.

“I propose that the new scientific name of the human species be Homo ecophagus … ‘the man who devours the ecosystem,’” he writes in Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth (Routledge, 2022). “Homo ecophagus is a rapacious, ubiquitous, predatory, omni-ecophagic species that is a malignant epiecopathologic process engaged in the conversion of all plant, animal, organic and inorganic planetary material into human biomass or its adaptive adjuncts and support systems.”

At the top of the page: A pelican covered in oil, reminiscent of Homo Ecophagus' cover (Louisiana GOHSEP/Flickr). Above: Warren Hern.

Hern (Spch, Anth, Chem’61) traces the roots of the book all the way back to 1952, when he was working as a 14-year-old gravedigger in Englewood, south of Denver.

“I was standing on the hill, doing my thing and looking out north of the cemetery. Something was wrong. All I could see was the Capitol and the (Montgomery) Ward building through the brown cloud” of smog, he recalls.

Throughout his long and varied career, from his Peace Corps work in Brazil to public health work in Washington, D.C., graduate school in North Carolina and medical school at CU, he slowly came to see humanity’s unfettered population growth and voracious demand for resources as a kind of global plague, an affliction that is mindlessly, inexorably killing its host, and thus, itself.

“Maybe we are not god’s gift to creation, the flower of the universe,” Hern muses. “Maybe we are something much, much worse: a malignant process on the Earth.”

Homo Ecophagus is wide-ranging, deeply researched, full of citations—not to mention some lovely color photographs—impassioned and, despite its stark thesis, persuasive.

The first third of the book serves as a kind of mini-autobiography and roadmap to Hern’s eventual identification of what he sees as a truly existential problem. In the second third, he describes example after example of the kind of destruction being wrought on the planet from pole to pole.

Finally, he renders his grim diagnosis: humanity is a cancer, and that’s neither hyperbole, metaphor nor analogy, he argues. Hern notes, for example, that cities, like cancer:

Invade and destroy adjacent normal tissues (i.e., ecosystems);
Metastasize to ever more distant locales;
Are progressive (i.e., growing); and
Resistant to death.

The cover of Homo Ecophagus.

Citing several further similarities, he concludes that, “Human communities and human activities in general are ecophagic: they devour the ecosystem.”

“Rapid, uncontrolled growth is the sine qua non of cancer. As long as the human population is growing at all, there is no hope of solving these major ecological problems,” he says. “All the rest is secondary stuff.”

He notes that while the rate of global population growth has dropped from about 2% a year in the mid-20th century to 1% per year in the third decade of the 21st century, even at half the rate, humanity continues to grow along a “logistic, or asymptotic curve, which is the same growth curve seen in malignancies” and that (italics in original) “the declining growth rate of cancer occurs just before death of the host organism.”

“We are conducting the Anthropocene Extinction Event, and we are on our way to becoming casualties of it. Soon,” he writes. “Is that our goal?”

What, then, must we do? Hern admits he is not optimistic.

“Speaking as a physician, I would say the prognosis is not good, at least for the biosphere and the web of life as we know it, and that means extinction for us,” he writes.

But he notes that there is one key difference between humanity and cancer: “We can think and decide not to be cancer,” he says. “Right now, we are choosing extinction. But we can change what we are doing and no longer be a cancer on the planet.”

In keeping with his long-time advocacy for reproductive choice and population control, Hern suggests those concerned about human destruction of the planet vote for candidates who “don’t force women to have babies they don’t want,” who promote an “efficient economy based on good ecological principles, resource conservation instead of the next guy who wants to drill for oil in national parks” and take climate change seriously.

“We have choices to make,” he says. “We can choose to change what we are doing and not be a cancer on the planet, stop changing the biosphere irreversibly. But the longer we wait, the harder that choice is to make.”

In "Homo Ecophagus," physician with CU Boulder ties sees humanity devouring itself—and the planet.

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