Category: History

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Homo Sapiens is still evolving

Specifically, Europeans are still evolving, according to this recently published study by geneticists from Shanghai.

The Rise of Homo inferioris | The Genetic Link
Not all evolution is positive, of course.

So, what did they find? A whole bunch of stuff. They tested for 870 human traits in total, categorised in terms of the physical, the medical, the neurological, the behavioural and so on.

They cross-referenced their findings from contemporary European genomes against historical genomes of homo sapiens, including those from pre-neolithic hunter gatherers, early neolithic hunter gatherers, and near eastern farmers from the dawn of civilisation.

The study is dense, and it certainly helps if you are a trained geneticist, or at the very least a medical student, to read it. I am neither, but I was formerly a health correspondent, so I was able to pick out a few interesting discoveries.

Firstly, as might have been expected from the varieties of human skin tone among Europeans, this was one of the factors most prone to genetic selection over recent human history. Effectively, those in the south of Europe selected for ability to tan, while those at northerly climes selected for fairer skin. This was largely already understood to have happened.

Similarly, there is a positive selection for height. Gals have liked a tall guy throughout history, apparently. And there is also positive selection for blond and lighter hair colours, which again we could have deduced from the fact that these hair colours primarily exist among European populations.

Likewise already suspected, but perhaps less widely known, is the fact that Europeans positively selected for a predisposition to schizophrenia. It’s not clear why this is, given that schizophrenia is a debilitating mental illness. Nevertheless, the research indicates some positive selection for it, as well as, oddly enough, a predisposition towards anorexia.

Perhaps not so suspected are minor but yet statistically significant positive selections for a range of things, including raw vegetable intake and heavy alcohol drinking. Then again, Europe has a growing vegetarian and vegan population, and also tends to top the charts for excessive alcohol consumption worldwide.

The most significant evolved traits in recent history relate primarily to facial characteristics – not only hair colour but also things like nose shape and upper lip size. If this makes our ancestors seem somewhat superficial, more concerned with physical appearance than other traits, that may simply be because they are easier to immediately identify.

But much less easy to identify traits also show significant positive selection in recent times. Intelligence and insomnia have both been positively selected for in Europe in recent human history (by which I mean the past few thousand years). This makes sense of course, since it helps to be smart, and someone who stays awake at night is the first to notice nighttime dangers, but more generally this actually indicates that evolved traits go much deeper than the skin.

There’s a lot more in this study, and no doubt it will prove extremely interesting to other researchers. It certainly raises some questions, not only about the traits we have inherited from the neolithic period or our early farming history, but about the traits which seem to be subject to positive selection up to the present day.

One suspects these results can likely be extrapolated to other global populations by replicating the extensive work that went into this study. Or rather, perhaps not these exact results, but rather similar sets of results, indicating similar ongoing evolution in slightly different ways among different global populations.

It would be nice therefore to see similar studies for other global populations, in order to understand the extent to which, for example, the positive selections for schizophrenia and anorexia predisposition are universal or to what extent they’re merely European.

But the bottom line is this: we sometimes assume that recent history is not enough time for humans to have evolved much more than some few superficial variations, like skin tone. However, as this study shows, such evolved variegation is much more than skin deep, and reaches into our very behaviour and psyches.

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We don’t know them so well

I was somewhat surprised to learn this morning that one of the earliest chess world champions was a chap from Belfast called Alexander McDonnell, whose day job was lobbying in parliament on behalf of the slave owners of Guyana.

This job paid £1200 per year, the equivalent of £150,000 today, and allowed him plenty of time to practice chess when parliament wasn’t sitting. He held ownership of plantations himself, and was the author of such dubious tomes as “Considerations on Negro Slavery.”

Not a lot is known about McDonnell. There appears to be a few errors on the brief wiki page dedicated to him, including the name of his father. He was renowned as a surly and taciturn man who took up to 90 minutes per turn at the chess table, and would often later spend his evenings pacing up and down in his room replaying the games in his mind.

His opponent in his most famous match, a Frenchman called Labourdonnais, by contrast had lost all of his money in property speculation and was forced to make his living from chess. While McDonnell paced his room, the Frenchman would continue playing all-comers for a sixpence a game late into the evening, all the while fuelled by endless pints of brown ale.

Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais - Wikipedia
Labourdonnais, no doubt looking forward to a few beers. No image of McDonnell exists.

The match was abandoned with Labourdonnais leading, when the Frenchman had to urgently return to Paris to deal with his creditors. Alas, it never resumed, because McDonnell suffered from acute kidney disease and died soon afterwards. In fact, both men died young, and are buried in graves, now lost, in Kensal Green cemetery in London. ABBA should do a musical on that match.

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Talking Turkey about Hyperinflation

The British currency, the pound sterling, takes its name from the fact that, when it first issued, it was redeemable for a pound of silver. That was somewhen in the late 8th century Anglo-Saxon period.

If we do the maths, based on today’s silver spot price, that means that the pound today is worth approximately 1/210th of what it was worth nearly 13 centuries ago.By contrast, the French managed to devalue their currency by more in just 18 months during the early 1790s, as did Germany in less than a year during the Weimar period.

The worst affected ever were the poor Hungarians in the immediate post-war period in 1945. They suffered that level of devaluation in under 6 days at peak. Armenia, Zimbabwe and Argentina have experienced similar horrors.

Tour di 2 giorni in Cappadocia da Side
Beautiful country, beautiful people, ugly economic policies.

Why do I mention this? Because it still happens today. Last semester, in Turkey, I saw my wages collapse by more than half in two months. My colleagues there are still living through this. They suffer daily price hikes in fuel and food costs, with static wages. The Turkish people, like the Armenians, Zimbabweans, Argentinians, or the Hungarians, Germans and French of former times, have done nothing wrong. But they were the ones to suffer.

Hyperinflation is caused by only one thing – shitty governments implementing shitty policies. It destroys savings, commerce, and most importantly, lives. We don’t always think too much about Turkey in the West, but we should. Here is a country suffering a preposterously stupid government and massive devaluation of their economy, yet still accommodates 3.6 MILLION refugees.

It was a salutory lesson for me in macro-economics, and in human decency, to spend last semester in Turkey. My heart remains with them in their plight, and I hope to see them in better times soon. It is a beautiful nation with a beautiful people who deserve better.

A caveat: I am not, never have been and never will be an economist. But it doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to understand money.

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The cyclical nature of etymology

There is, sometimes, a weird cyclical pattern embedded in etymology, the linguistic science of what we might otherwise call the glacial process of Chinese Whispers. Allow me to offer one particularly colourful and occasionally literary example.

The (somewhat uncommon) Irish surname Prunty originates from an Anglicisation of the Gaelic Irish surname Ó Proinntigh, meaning ‘descendant of Proinnteach’, which in turn was an archaic Irish forename which meant literally a banqueting hall. The idea underpinning this is that of a generous person who feeds his neighbours and kin.

As often happens with surnames, pronunciation of vowels or consonants slides a little over time and usage. So Prunty also becomes Brunty in some cases. Brunty as a surname retains its Irish origins but is very rare indeed. Nowadays it is mostly found in the United States.

Probably the most famous Brunty in history is Patrick, an Anglican clergyman who was born as the eldest of ten children into a very poor family in Rathfriland, county Down, on St Patrick’s Day, 17th March 1777. Why is Patrick famous? Because of his immensely talented children, particularly his daughters Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who are all now renowned as famous Victorian novelists.

Patrick Brontë - Wikipedia
The Reverend Patrick Brontë

However, the sisters did not publish under the name Brunty. Rather, given the sexism of the era, they initially released their books under the male names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. In reality, their surname had become Brontë by then. How had this happened? It’s unclear why Patrick changed his surname, but a desire to distance himself from his impoverished Irish origins after his graduation from Cambridge no doubt is part of the reason.

bronte home
The Brunty homestead, now in ruins, still stands in county Down.

Another reason, it has been suggested, relates to a desire to honour Admiral Horatio Nelson, who had been given the title of Duke of Bronte by the King of Naples, whom Nelson had restored to his throne. Bronte is the name of an Italian estate in eastern Sicily, close to Mount Etna which was also granted to Nelson by the grateful King.

We now relate the name Brontë to his famous daughters, the authors of books like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall respectively. The parsonage Patrick oversaw for many years in Haworth in Yorkshire, which inspired many of the scenes in his daughter’s books, is now a museum in their collective honour.

The Brontë Sisters: How Emily, Charlotte & Anne Changed The World - HistoryExtra
The Brontë sisters

But Haworth is not the only location which honours the Brontë sisters. There are many such locations, given their collective fame. One such place is the little town of Bronte in northern Central Texas. Ever since an early oil boom subsided, it has been a relatively impoverished place, not unlike Rathfriland, with a stable population around the 1,000 mark.

Back in the early 20th century, this was one of the small Texas towns that was briefly home to Isaac Howard, a semi-itinerant doctor who wandered with his wife and son from town to town working as a medic, and occasionally losing his money on get-rich-quick schemes, much to his wife’s frustration. Isaac’s son was a big reader, and, encouraged by his mother, began writing his own stories from an early age. We now know him as Robert E. Howard, the progenitor of the ‘Swords and Sorcery’ genre of fantasy fiction, and author of the Conan the Cimmerian stories in particular. Howard was particularly interested in Irish and Scottish mythology, and many of his characters, including Conan, display this interest.

Professional photograph of Robert E. Howard wearing a hat and suit.
Robert E. Howard, author of Conan the Barbarian.

The Texan town of Bronte has had its pronunciation amended by new world accent to /bɹænt/, or ‘brant’, over time. This is of course a homophone for a genus of goose, the Brant or Brent goose, which migrates in winter to Ireland and Britain. The Brent oilfield in the North Sea takes its name from this goose.

It is a smallish bird by geese standards, but nonetheless, in the era before the new world turkey took primacy as the quintessential Christmas dining food, the Brant goose (whose name derives from the pan-Nordic brandgás, or ‘burnt’ goose due to its black colouring) would have been one of the more common feast dishes provided by generous hosts in Ireland at the midwinter feast.

Due to a widespread medieval myth, which persisted in Ireland into the 20th century, that these geese were somehow related to barnacles, they were permitted to be eaten by Catholics on a Friday, when meat other than fish was otherwise prohibited. In other words Proinnteach the medieval Irishman got his name due to feeding this bird to his friends and neighbours.

Such is the cyclical nature of etymology.

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Whose civilisation is it, really?

I carry Neanderthal DNA in my body. I am one of the modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, who are descended from hybrid cross-hominid fertilisation that likely occurred somewhen during the overlap of populations in paelolithic Europe.

Of course, that side of the family died out a long time ago, leaving my sapiens ancestors to colonise Europe and indeed everywhere else on the planet.

Neanderthal DNA Can Affect Skin Tone And Hair Color : Shots - Health News : NPR

I often wonder what we lost when we lost our hominid relatives – the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like Homo Floriensis and so on. What might a world of multiple hominid species be like? How might we have accommodated our stronger, carnivorous and less gracile Neanderthal population? What might our tiny cousin with grapefruit-sized heads, the Floriensis hobbits, have contributed to our world?

Anyhow, the more I ponder the roads not taken, the less impressed I have become with our own boastful claims and achievements. Not simply because human achievement increasingly has come at the expense of all other species (initially the large mammals, then our fellow hominids, and now basically everything else). But also because even those achievements, it seems to me, may not really be ours to claim.

Air flight, modern medicine, computers? For sure. We made those. But let’s go back upstream to the origins of civilisation to see whose civilisation is it really?

Neanderthals used fire. Indeed, probably homo erectus, the ur-granddaddy of hominids used fire. Fire is a major issue. No other animal uses it. Most run terrified from it. But hominids tamed it, and found ways to use it for cooking and heat. If there’s one development which most explains why hairless apes like us and not, say, the gorillas or big cats rule this world, it is probably the taming of fire.

Neanderthals also buried their dead. This is a sobering thought really. In some senses so do elephants, and other species also demonstrate evidence of mourning, loss and grief. We may feel that grief is one of the things which makes us human, but it’s not an exclusively human sentiment. Even taking it to the point of ritual behaviour – burial – is not exclusive to us.

But what of the other foundational components of human culture and society? What about clothing, art, science, religion?

Well, Neanderthals made jewellery from seashells and animal teeth. Neanderthals created artwork on cave walls. Neanderthals invented musical instruments, specifically bone flutes. We can presume they knew how to beat on drums or rocks rhythmically too. After all, they also had hand axes, which would have been made and used with such rhythmical hitting. Neanderthals built stone shrines, and where there are shrines, it is highly likely that ritualistic behaviour took place.

Neanderthals used lissoirs, and hence invented hide preparation, and hence clothing. They invented glue and string and throwing spears which they used to hunt large game. These hunts required collective action and collaboration. Recent evidence suggests that Neanderthals may even have learnt to count and actually recorded their counting by notching scratches on bones.

So perhaps this isn’t OUR civilisation at all, when you think about it. Perhaps we are thieves living in someone else’s house, whom we murdered, looking at their achievements and claiming them as our own.