I will be in Ann Arbor next week visiting the University of Michigan. For those in the area, I'll be giving a seminar next Wednesday, February 15.
Title: "Behavioral implications of archaic human genomes"
Time: 5:00pm, Wednesday, February 15.
Place: East Hall, Room 3048
Looking forward to seeing all my friends there!
I'm in Bordeaux for the rest of this week, taking part in the meetings of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris. The city is just as beautiful as I remember!
Today I visited Down House, Charles Darwin's home southeast of London. Mark Pallen, my gracious host from the University of Birmingham, brought us to the house, where we met Randal Keynes. Also on the trip were Brown University biologist and author Kenneth R. Miller, and Captain Ben Kirkup of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
Keynes is a great-great grandson of Charles and Emma Darwin, and the author of the book, Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution, which became the basis for the movie, "Creation". Hearing from a true family expert on Darwin's life, family and experiments made this trip truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me.
The house is quite lovely. It sits on bedrock of chalk, and locally flint nodules are such common fieldstones that they've been built into walls -- and memorably, the church in the nearby town where the Darwins attended. The house was owned by the family until 1909, became a school for several years, and was then converted into a privately held museum. It was acquired by English Heritage in 1996.
At the time of its restoration, family members gathered together the original furniture of the lower floor, and the museum used photographs to restore these rooms to their appearance during Charles Darwin's lifetime. Here is the drawing room:
The flowerpots on the piano recollect the experiment in which Darwin demonstrated that earthworms do not respond to sound from musical instruments (note the nearby bassoon), but do respond to vibrations in the soil (when the pots were placed upon the piano itself).
There are several rooms on this floor. The most notable is Darwin's study:
Darwin used the single lens microscope for dissections. I wish I'd gotten a picture of the short wheeled stool that he used here. The billiard room is full of portraits, including this famous one:
The column here is on the veranda, and as Keynes noted to us, the plant trailing up in the photograph was Virginia creeper, now planted outside and showing its beautiful autumn red color:
The upstairs of the house contains several interpretive exhibits, including some original manuscript pages, artifacts from the Beagle and from Darwin's life at Down House, and a display remembering the death of Charles and Emma's daughter, Annie, at age 10. Adjoining the original house is a small tea room, with an outdoor patio and modern toilets.
Like the downstairs, much of the grounds has been maintained in its appearance during Charles Darwin's life. Several of his ongoing experiments are being replicated -- a patch of unmown grass where Darwin counted species of plants; a millstone in the ground with a device for measuring the compaction of the soil by earthworms. Fresh worm castings were all over the lawn:
The kitchen garden is still planted, although in this season not especially lavish in its growth. Flanking the garden is a zoned greenhouse, with various tropical plants including a room full of carnivorous ones.
At the rear of the property runs the famous Sandwalk, where Darwin walked five laps around the gravel path on a typical day, marking his laps by nudging stones. Keynes' descriptions of the childrens' experiences with their father in the yard, some conveyed through the family, others hinted by Darwin's writings, were joyful.
Tonight I am in Malvern, where Charles took both himself and his daugher Annie for the water treatments. Annie died here, and after a late supper we walked through the darkness to visit her grave in the town.
But I'll leave remembering a happier note, with many more stories to tell than I can share here:
I'll be in the U.K. the rest of this week. The University of Birmingham has invited me to give a lecture for their "Great Read" event as they begin the new academic year. If you're in the area, the talk is at 3:30 on Thursday, September 22, in the Concert Hall of the Barber Institute. I'll be appearing after Ken Miller, widely known for his work in evolutionary biology and his advocacy of evolution education in the U.S.
As for myself, I'll be talking about Neandertal and Denisovan DNA and what they tell us about human evolution. All my talks have new, unpublished stuff in them, and this is no exception.
I notice that the topic of evolution education has really hit the news this week in the U.K, as a group of 30 prominent scientists, including Paul Nurse and Richard Dawkins, have signed a letter protesting lax evolution education standards ("David Attenborough joins campaign against creationism in schools", "Scientists demand tougher guidelines on teaching creationism in schools"). Looks like I'll be going there just in time.
My host has planned some exceptional activities later this week for us, and I'll plan to report back when I can.
On July 3, around 20 scientists left Novosibirsk by van to drive out to the permanent field camp at Denisova Cave in the low Altai mountains. The place is 520 km from Novosibirsk, which turned into a total travel time of around 9 hours. I'm posting compilations of my tweets along with some description and photos.
Novosibirsk airport: tweeting via Kindle free wireless. Yea, Amazon! Looks like Kansas out there.
This is a running joke for me: Everywhere looks like Kansas. Here's a shot of the south Siberian plain, looking out from atop the first foothills.
What do you think?
Kansas actually has a historical link to Siberia: during and even before the Dust Bowl, people were introducing many Siberian-derived trees and plants into Kansas to try to stabilize the soil and form windbreaks. So the texture of the area around Novosibirsk is actually a lot like my hometown in Western Kansas -- even down to the fading brick buildings.
Of course, Kansas does lack Soviet-era engineering projects, and the fields are a whole lot smaller.
Rest stop. Every road sign in Cyrillic is a puzzle for me to find cognates.
...Like the very strange looking word with the exotic letters that just turned out to be plain "cement"...
OK, "cement" isn't all that strange, I guess, but it does start with an exotic-looking letter. Many words are much more fun to work out. As I pointed out later, the fact that "Hawks" becomes "XOKC" caused me endless delight.
If you see a white Mercedes van rolling toward Biysk blaring Europop..well there must be fifty of those..but one has me in the back.
The restaurant in Biysk was fun: Cafe "Siberian Hunt"!
Debating whether to count it as a chicken fried steak or not. At lunch with good borscht I'm starting to really like this country.
Those who know me well will appreciate this. Or, for that matter, those who don't know me so well but happen to live in cities with seriously good chicken fried steak options (hello, Austinites!). Now, if I can just get my friends in San Antonio to invite me down there (hint).
I really shouldn't count this Russian one at all, since it was ground meat. Probably more like a salisbury steak without the gravy. But hey, it was my birthday after all!
Kindle wireless still going strong, now on gravel ascending into the Altai. Starting to look like Neandertal country.
Once we got into the Altai foothills I began to realize that the wireless just wasn't going away!
What an incredible thing. In fact, I had wireless access for the entire trip using my Kindle 3G and phone coverage when I needed it. The Kindle is not a very good device for e-mail (and the Wisconsin webmail client didn't work at all). But it is perfectly suited for Twitter.
Also, as you can see, the Altai doesn't look much like Kansas. More like Montana.
The low Altai are really not very high, but they are rugged. The traditional log or wood Russian homes (pictured here) begin to give way to an Altai style, with decorated sills and a round yurt-like "summer house" in each yard.
Just loved the green rolling hills. Much horse country in these parts.
We've arrived at Denisova base camp. Beautiful cabins and river nearby. Window view: sheer 300 foot cliffs.
This is the most luxe archaeological camp I've ever seen. Part is used for conferences by other institutes in Novosibirsk.
I can't really say enough about the facilities at Denisova. The Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography has put a lot into the area, and the cabins are quite modern with hot water and electricity.
No wifi, unfortunately. But the mess hall served very good food, never duplicating a main dish of Russian fare.
Nice steady rain, lovely conversation, only one shot of vodka. Tomorrow we get some first-hand stratigraphy.
I'm visiting at the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand this week. Lee Berger has been a really wonderful host and among other things he very kindly took me out to the Malapa field site. As you can imagine, I'm pretty busy this week and haven't even had time to properly work up my thoughts on my Siberia trip. But I thought it would be fun to quickly share some impressions and photos of Malapa.
Malapa is a short drive from Johannesburg, but it takes only a short drive to really be in almost total wilderness. The site lies in what is now called the Malapa Nature Reserve (after the site) and adjoins the John Nash Nature Reserve. We arrived at the gate around 7:00 am, just after the orange full moon set in the west, and as the sun was rising in the northeast. It was a beautiful morning, no question.
We met Zach Cofran, a graduate student at Michigan, as well as a local painter that Lee has contracted to document the landscape before they construct a temporary shelter and begin systematic excavation at the site. This made for a pretty great opportunity to take in the surroundings, as we scoped out various overlooks on the area. Here's an overlook above the Malapa site itself:
Those rocks foreground are masking a steep pitch down, we were on a pretty tall hill.
The valley winding into the background is the Malapa drainage. Most of the dark green patches of trees are associated with some kind of karstic feature, either current caves or old ones that have largely eroded out. The landscape is really alive with cave formation processes -- the streambed itself drains into an extensive cave system and eventually emerges on the opposite side of the near hills.
We drove down from here along the track into the valley. Lee showed us the ranch house that will house a field school, and took us down the river track (sometimes actually in the streambed) to the site.
I would describe Malapa itself as a former cave. There is still a deep pit element, enhanced or largely created by blasting in the early twentieth century. Miners went prospecting for flowstones and other calcium carbonate features in caves, which they could reduce into lime by burning it in kilns. To get the stuff out, they had to blast through a lot of breccia -- essentially cemented sediments and debris that collect inside of caves. The breccia often contains bones of ancient animals, including in some cases hominins, sometimes very densely. At Malapa, the breccia is exposed at the surface, partly obscured by the miners' activity creating a road track along which the exploited other caves further up the hill.
Here's the existing pit:
That's Zach Cofran on the opposite side there.
The skeletons recovered thus far were found in surface blocks of breccia blasted out of this pit and in the edges of the pit itself. The breccia however extends over a much greater surface, making this an incredibly promising site for further excavation and discovery.
Well, it may not look like much in photos, but in terms of hominin fossils, it may end up being the most important fifty square meters in the world.
I'm almost ashamed to admit that after much turning over of blocks, I didn't find any hominins. At least not any that haven't already been found by somebody else first. But we had plenty left to see. A drive up a further track would take us to some other very interesting places. Lee drove us to the spot where the river comes welling back up out of its cave system -- as he described it, the water exits 75 years after it first enters. Here he is with his ridgeback companions:
After some geology I won't describe, along with an empty leopard den, we continued onward encountering many of the other species of large mammals on the nature reserve. Luckily, I use a Canon body so I could borrow the 400 mm telephoto lens to get some great shots. There were plenty of wildebeest:
And some giraffes (for Goodwin!):
And a kudu bull with a wonky horn:
Now, in my ordinary life I really have few occasions when a long lens would be very useful, but I could get used to having one for these situations.
Near the end of this little safari, we hit Gladysvale Cave, which has a very impressive large upper gallery and two lower ones we didn't enter. Lee worked Gladysvale for many years finding a handful of hominin remains but endless antelope bones.
It's a problem with field sites -- the hominins are only a part of an ancient landscape which was occupied by many species. Our relatives were patchily distributed, but they did end up in caves sometimes due to several different causes. The skeletons in Malapa are remarkably complete, suggesting a distinctive history of formation of the site. Large sites may be made up of many such episodes.
As for Gladysvale, it is still actively used by large herbivores, whose tracks go right into the cave. They may be seeking minerals, as there is no water pool inside.
This was near the end of our drive, and so I'll stop the story. Again, I've got lots to see ahead of me this week, but hopefully I'll have some Denisova news typed up soon.
By the miracle of Amazon, I have been using my Kindle 3G to tweet from the Altai. It is far from an ideal blogging tool, so I will keep this to a short update. The device is perfectly matched to mobile Twitter, with free Whispernet coverage. I have to say I am really liking this device.
This morning I was tweeting live from inside the south gallery of Denisova Cave. At present I am bouncing in the back of a military surplus truck on the way to Okladnikov Cave. You can follow me on Twitter at @johnhawks.
And let me say, constructing tha link on a chiclet keyboard with no symbols is more than I can take. So don't expect more blogging! I will keep tweeting for the duration.
I have now reached Novosibirsk and will be offline for a bit more than a week. In the interim, this may be interesting: "ScienceOnline2011 – interview with John Hawks"
The web has made it possible to share data on a wide scale — as we see today in genetics, astronomy, and other data-intensive fields. The human fossil record is a drop in the bucket compared to the data that will be collected every night by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. And those astronomical data will all be open. What is stopping us from making the human fossil record available to schoolkids all over the world?
Our Lady of Eternal Osteology:
In S. Francesco a Ripa, Rome.
From the lapidary of a medieval cloister hidden in a forgotten corner of Rome.
