Daniel Lieberman

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“A Girl Born To a French Farmer In 1789 Had A Life Expectancy Of Just Twenty-Eight Years”

July 27, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One final post referencing Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body, this one a brief passage that explains how farming was never truly drudgery until it became hierarchal:

“The very first farmers certainly had to work hard, but we know from archaeological sites that they still hunted animals, did some gathering and initially practiced cultivation on a modest scale. Farming pioneers certainly had challenging lives, but the popular image of the incessant drudgery, filth, and misery of being a farmer probably applies more to later peasants in feudal systems than to early Neolithic farmers. A girl born to a French farmer in 1789 had a life expectancy of just twenty-eight years, she probably suffered from frequent bouts of starvation, and she was more likely than not to die from diseases such as measles, smallpox, typhoid fever, and typhus. No wonder they had a revolution. The very first farmers of the Neolithic had demanding lives, but they were not yet beset by plagues, such as smallpox or the Black Death, and they were not oppressed by a heartless feudal system in which a handful of powerful aristocrats owned their land and appropriated a large percentage of their harvest.” 

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“The Visitors Raised Cries Of ‘Hoax’ And ‘Fairy Tale'”

July 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hoaxes that work do so because they play upon a deep-seated fear or satisfy a psychological want–a need, even. That’s why we’re able to suspend disbelief about something that seems ridiculous in retrospect. When I published the post about a passage from Daniel Lieberman’s recent book, The Story of the Human Body, it reminded me that he (briefly) touches on the story of the Tasaday people, a “stone-age” tribe discovered in 1971 in Philippine caves, which was untouched by wars hot and cold, threats of nuclear disaster, and trends in which clans–families–were unable to stay together. It was a sensation that National Geographic granted a cover and a 32-page story, and, of course, it was a hoax. But it had a good, long run, with Charles Lindbergh himself spending some of his final moments of life writing the foreword for a popular book about this make-believe people. The opening of a 1986 New York Times article by Seth Mydans, written when the work finally began to stop working:

“MANILA, May 12— After more than a decade, scientists and reporters have returned to visit a remote Stone Age tribe called the Tasaday, and found that its earlier contacts with the outside world have set it on what appears to be an irreversible road to change.

The new visits have also reopened a debate on the authenticity of the Tasaday, who have now been found to possess bits of clothing, knives, bows and arrows, a mirror and domesticated dogs.

In interviews, two anthropologists who recently revisited the tribe said these new possessions, which had aroused the scepticism of Swiss and German reporters who saw them recently, were an expectable product of the tribe’s first contacts with outsiders in the early 1970’s.

Discovered in 1971

The scientists said they now feared that, if new protective measures were not taken, an influx of researchers, journalists and tourists would destroy their fragile way of life, already imperiled by the approach of loggers, slash-and-burn farmers and the armed insurgencies that share the forests of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

The Tasaday, a group of fewer than 30 people, were discovered in 1971 and drew international attention as a cave-using tribe of hunter-gatherers who dressed in orchid leaves and bark, knew no enemies and had no words for war, for ocean or for other peoples.

When two groups of journalists trekked into the jungle recently, they found the tribe members wearing bits and pieces of clothing and displaying other signs of outside influence, and the visitors raised cries of ‘hoax’ and ‘fairy tale.’

The two anthropologists who visited soon afterward, however, in the company of John Nance, author of a book on the tribe, and a television crew, said the changes were not surprising, and indeed enhanced the scientific interest of the group.

‘Textbook Case of Change’

‘We’re seeing a textbook case of social change, compressed in time,’ said one of the anthropologists, Jesus Peralta, who is curator of anthropology for the National Museum of the Philippines.

The other anthropologist who visited, Carlos Fernandez, said, ‘Before we first met them, they were purely forest gatherers.’

‘Then they learned to use a blade, to set traps and now they are learning to hunt,’ he went on. ‘Before long they will try their hand at planting.

‘This is one of the most exciting subjects for an anthropological investigator.’

Mr. Nance, the author of The Gentle Tasaday, who traveled last month to Mindanao with the two anthropologists, said the Tasaday’s preference for T-shirts and other articles of clothing was only natural. ‘If leaves were better, we’d all be wearing leaves,’ he said. Brides From Another Tribe

The scientists said the question of a hoax had always been present and remained a possibility. But they said such details as the stone tools and the language used by the Tasaday would be extremely difficult to fabricate.

‘Unless another anthropologist produces conflicting data, then the literature stands,’ said Mr. Peralta.

Many of the changes were thought to be the result of two outside influences: a tribal hunter named Dafal, and the marrying of women from a nearby tribe called the Blit.

A small group of primarily male cousins, the Tasaday’s main request of the scientists who discovered them was for brides. Mr. Peralta said that, in the years since then, 15 Blit women and two men had married into the tribe.

Trapping and Weapons

Dafal and the Blit spouses brought with them clothing, beads, knives, rice and cigars, the scientists said.

They also said they taught them to trap and use bows and arrows to supplement their traditional diet of yams, the hearts of palms and rattan, and fish, frogs and tadpoles.

‘They were already in transition when we first met them,’ Mr. Nance said, referring to their earlier contacts with Dafal. ‘Scientists worked to reconstruct what their life had been like before that, and people took the reconstruction as the current reality.’

He said this had led to misconceptions and to the recent accusations of a hoax.”

 

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“Most Creatures Are Almost Always Hungry”

July 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The majority of creatures on Earth are hungry most of the time, every single day. That’s true of almost all of them and some of us, too. A change by a degree or two in the temperature could mean a world of difference in how many creatures are able eat, us included. A brief passage from Daniel Lieberman’s excellent book, The Story Of The Human Body:

“Are you worried about rapid global climate change today? If not, you should be, because rising temperatures, altered rainfall pattern, and the ecological shifts they cause imperil our food supply. Yet, as we have already seen, global change has long been a major impetus in human evolution because of its effects on the age-old problem pf ‘what’s for dinner?’ It turns out that getting enough food in the face of global climate change also triggered the age of humans. 

Getting dinner (or, for that matter, breakfast and lunch) probably does not dominate your list of daily concerns, yet most creatures are almost always hungry and preoccupied with the quest for calories and nutrients. To be sure, animals also need to find mates and avoid being eaten, but the struggle for existence is often a struggle for food, and until recently the vast majority of humans were no exception to this rule. Consider also that acquiring food is even more taxing when when your habitat alters dramatically, causing the foods you normally eat to vanish or become less common.”

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Great 2012 Nonfiction Pieces Online For Free

December 4, 2012 in Misc. | Permalink

A bunch of my favorite articles from 2012. (A couple of pieces from December 2011 are included since I do these lists before the absolute end of the year.) All ungated and free.

  • “Pedestrian Mania” (Brian Phillips, Grantland): Beautiful piece about world-famous 1870s long-distance walking champion Edward Payson Weston, subject of the book, A Man in a Hurry.
  • “Brains Plus Brawn” (Daniel Lieberman, Edge) Incredibly fun article about endurance, which points out, among many other things, that as quick as Usain Bolt may seem, your average sheep or goat can run twice as fast.
  • “A New Birth of Reason” (Susan Jacoby, The American Scholar): Great essay about Robert Ingersoll, the largely forgotten secularist who was a major force in 19th-century America, taken from the writer’s forthcoming book, The Great Agnostic.
  • “One’s a Crowd” (Eric Kleinberg, The New York Times): Great Op-Ed piece about the increasing number of people living alone.
  • “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” (Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, The New York Times): A deep and penetrating explanation of the complicated forces at play in job outsourcing.
  • “The Power of Habit“ (Charles Duhigg, Slate): An excerpt from the author’s bestseller of the same name which explains how Pepsodent became omnipresent.
  • “We’re Underestimating the Risk of Extinction” (Ross Andersen, The Atlantic): I didn’t necessarily agree with the premise (or conclusions) of this interview with philosopher Nick Bostrom, but I enjoyed its intelligence immensely.
  • “Hustling the Cloud” (Steven Boone, Capital New York): Wonderful piece about a bleary-eyed, middle-of-the-night search for free Wi-Fi–and anything else that would seem to make sense–in a time of dire economic straits.
  • “Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World” (Wil S. Hylton, The New York Times Magazine): Fascinating examination of the titular biologist, who wants to make breathing bots that will cure the world’s ills.
  • “The Machine and the Ghost” (Christine Rosen, The New Republic): The author riffs on how the rise of smart, quantified gizmos and cities necessitates a new “morality of things.”

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“Whenever It’s Hot, The Humans Actually Beat The Horses”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Pushing the human body beyond what seems normal might not be healthy but it is fascinating, whether we’re talking about professional pedestrians in the nineteenth century or today’s ultramarathoners. Harvard evolutionary scientist Daniel Lieberman has an excellent post at Edge about the origins and development of endurance in humans. An excerpt: 

“We have this notion that humans are terrible natural athletes. But we’ve been looking at the wrong kind of athleticism. What we’re really good at is not power, what we’re really phenomenal at is endurance. We’re the tortoises of the animal world, not the hares of the animal world. Humans can actually outrun most animals over very, very long distances.

The marathon, of course, is a very interesting example. A lot of people think marathons are extraordinary, and they wonder how many people can run marathons. At least a million people run a marathon every year. If you watch any major marathon, you realize that most of those folks aren’t extraordinary athletes, they’re just average moms and dads. A lot of them are charity runners who decided to raise money for some cancer cause or diabetes or something. I think that proves that really your average human being can run 26.2 miles without that much training, or much ability to be a great athlete. Of course, to run a marathon at really fast speeds is remarkable, but again, it just takes some practice and training. It’s not something that’s really extraordinary.

We’re actually remarkable endurance athletes, and that endurance athleticism is deeply woven into our bodies, literally from our heads to our toes. We have adaptations in our feet and our legs and our hips and pelvises and our heads and our brains and our respiratory systems. We even have neurobiological adaptations that give us a runner’s high, all of which help make us extraordinary endurance athletes. We’ve lost sight at just how good we are at endurance athleticism, and that’s led to a perverse idea that humans really aren’t very good athletes.

A good example is that every year they have races where they actually compare humans and horses. In Wales, this started a few years ago, I guess it started out as a typical sort of drunken pub bet, where some guy bet that a human couldn’t beat a horse in a marathon. They’ve been running a marathon in Wales for the last, I think 15-20 years. To be fair, most years, the horses beat the humans, but the humans often come very close. Whenever it’s hot, the humans actually beat the horses. They also have now ultramarathons in Arizona, where humans race horses. Again, most years, the horses beat the humans, but every once in a while, the humans do beat the horses. The point is not that humans are poor athletes, because the horses occasionally beat us, but humans can actually compete with and often beat horses at endurance races. Most people are surprised at that.”

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“These Interactions Affect How Our Faces Grow”

August 24, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman is decribed wryly as a “hoof-and-foot man” because he studies the extreme ends of the human body–head and feet. In a smart interview in the New York Times conducted by Claudia Dreifus, Lieberman discusses how the bodies we’ve inherited are mismatched for the modern world we’ve created:

“For example, impacted wisdom teeth and malocclusions are very recent problems. They arise because we now process our food so much that we chew with little force. These interactions affect how our faces grow, which causes previously unknown dental problems. Hunter-gatherers — who live in ways similar to our ancestors — don’t have impacted wisdom teeth or cavities. There are many other conditions rooted in the mismatch — fallen arches, osteoporosis, cancer, myopia, diabetes and back trouble. So understanding evolutionary biology will definitely help my students when they become orthopedists, orthodontists and craniofacial surgeons.”

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A face growing in Brazil:

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