john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

tv

  • Into the belly of the whale

    Mon, 2012-02-06 22:21 -- John Hawks

    Carl Zimmer profiles anatomist Joy Reidenberg, who has scored a coup for public communication of science on the BBC show, Inside Nature's Giants: "From Inside Lions and Leviathans, Anatomist Builds a Following". Joy is well-known in paleoanthropology circles:

    For her Ph.D., she came to Mount Sinai Medical School to work with Jeffrey T. Laitman, an expert on the anatomy of the head and neck.

    Since the 1970s, Dr. Laitman has been looking for anatomical clues to the evolution of human speech. Dr. Reidenberg expanded the scope of his work to look at the vocal anatomy of mammals, from moose to rabbits. In 1983, she began teaching at Mount Sinai, and she has focused much of her research on the most remarkable of all mammal voices: those of whales and dolphins."

    Can't wait until the show gets going here.

    Tags: 
    tv
    teaching
    profile
    anatomy
    cetaceans
    language evolution

  • La Cotte de St. Brelade profiled

    Thu, 2011-09-01 23:11 -- John Hawks

    The BBC is running a nice article about the ongoing excavations on the island of Jersey at La Cotte de St. Brelade. "Neanderthal survival story revealed in Jersey caves".

    La Cotte's collapsed cave system contains intact ice age sediments spanning a quarter of a million years, revealing a detailed sequence of Neanderthal occupation and occasional abandonment, against a background of changing climate.

    "The site is the most exceptional long-term record of Neanderthal behaviour in North West Europe," says Dr Matt Pope from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.

    It's a neat site and the Beeb are doing an episode of "Digging for Britain" about it this month.

    Tags: 
    England
    Europe
    Neandertals
    Late Pleistocene
    paleoclimate
    tv

  • Bigfoot movies and pseudoscience TV

    Tue, 2011-06-28 13:10 -- John Hawks

    One of the people responsible for the Blair Witch Project is now making a movie about Sasquatch:

    Titled Exists, the movie is described as following “a group of twentysomethings who take a trip to a cabin deep in the wooded wilderness and are methodically hunted by a Bigfoot-like beast.” Produced by Amber films and written by Sanchez and frequent collaborator Jamie Nash, he said that this is the first movie in a trilogy “exploring and reinventing the Bigfoot myth.”

    A trilogy! Like in the second one, the people could find the video from the first one? Or maybe, it's like "Bride of Bigfoot"?

    Personally, I'd like to see something more along the lines of that Animal Planet show gone horribly wrong. You know, Finding Bigfoot:

    From small towns in the South to remote areas of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, four eccentric but passionate members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) embark on one single-minded mission: to find the elusive "creature" known as Bigfoot or the Sasquatch.

    It would be awesomely bad television if Finding Bigfoot just turned out to be a setup for a fictional ending where the principals get smashed up by Sasquatch in a Blair Witch-like way.

    Because as it is, Finding Bigfoot is just plain bad television. Last week, the show informed us that "skunk apes" (a southern U.S. term for Sasquatch) get their smell by absorbing methane as they hide in underground alligator dens.

    I kid you not. It's not even good camp. It's rotten, absorbing-methane-from-the-alligator-dens camp.

    Pseudoscience TV programs like Ghost Hunters and movies like Paranormal Activity are basically using the same cinematic vocabulary to tell fictional stories. All of them draw on Blair Witch as a forerunner of the genre. I remember before Blair Witch was being shown in theaters, parts of it were actually run on local-access cable channels. I think it was some kind of viral marketing scheme. Like, "Who are these scared kids running around in the woods?" Today's shows are just capitalizing on the same approach.

    There's more to it than playing on the assumption that shaky and grainy video are "raw" and "unedited." That's not enough in today's reality-infused TV spectrum. The pseudoscience programs draw from the timing and visual angles from horror movies, much of it grifted from classic Hitchcock. There's humor -- another Hitchcock element. Every one of these shows has a cocky "team leader" who might be a casting double for one of Steven Spielberg's casting doubles of the classic Hitchcock characters. Especially the perfect archetype of the genre: Jimmy Stewart's droll photojournalist from Rear Window. Several pseudoscience programs have a cast of young "apprentice" hunters, whose fumbling with the equipment helps explain the imperfect nature of the "evidence", and whose portrayal of fear allows the program to portray suspense while maintaining the apparent authority of the "experienced" hunters.

    What freedom they've unleashed! They've trashed the usual conceit that some "rogue scientists" are going against the mainstream consensus.

    I think that tells us quite a lot about the media environment. Ten years ago, the pseudoscience TV scene was dominated by programs that used a traditional documentary approach. Talk to "experts", go on at great length about "mysterious evidence" such as grainy photographs, bring in document analysts and authors of "investigative books". Above all, no main character, only a disembodied narrator holding the story together.

    That kind of storytelling is intrinsically dull. I write that with some sadness, because this boring "high documentary" model is what passes for mainstream science documentary filmmaking. The style was designed to sell Polident and Depends to an aging audience who tuned in to the History Channel for Hitler documentaries. Probably the style was at apex when NBC was doing Noah's Ark documentaries on prime time broadcast TV in the mid-1990's. Today, the "high documentary" can still get ratings in the pseudoscience TV world -- History Channel's Ancient Aliens is one prominent example, National Geographic's recent Bigfoot film is another.

    But beginning in the early 2000's, a more reality-TV-influenced style of pseudoscience programming started to show up, first in late night syndication and later as regular prime-time cable network offerings. Now it's dominant: Get a crew of nobodies together, call one of them the "leader" to uphold some Ghostbusters-derived evidentiary standard, and shoot video in a dark place. Don't run cheap ads for Polident and commemorative coins, instead run expensive ads for movies and internet dating services.

    I still think it would be genius if one of these shows actually followed through by becoming a scripted horror program. Mainly, I'd like to see Sasquatch smashing these punks like the evil gorillas from Congo.

    Tags: 
    movies
    tv
    Bigfoot
    pseudoscience
    Synopsis: 
    Why can't they make a Bigfoot program where the "investigators" are in real jeopardy?

  • "Gutless" TV science

    Mon, 2011-01-31 02:37 -- John Hawks

    Martin Robbins last week posted a column with a great title: "Return to the Silence: Is theatre exposing the gutlessness of TV science?" In it, he discusses some innovative storytelling approaches, not only in the theatre but also beat poetry and science comedy. Sounds to me like London is a great place to be a science fan.

    His complaint about television is that science shows are too formulaic. Seems to me he's got the formula down:

    Pick a topic that people love, like space, dinosaurs, cavemen, sex, or preferably cavemen on dinosaur-back having sex in space.

    Find an athletic, easy-on-the-eye presenter in their 30s or 40s (or one with an amusingly-distinctive facial feature like Robert Winston's moustache).

    Send them to to a series of increasingly improbable locations based on the slimmest premise you can imagine. For example, if the presenter is talking about the element lanthanum, send them to Los Angeles, because the symbol for Lanthanum is 'La.'

    Once there, get them to resort to increasingly desperate uses of nearby objects to explain concepts. Force Brian Cox to steal fruit from Indian market stall owners to explain an eclipse. Make Robert Winston shave off his moustache as a metaphor for the effects of cliff face erosion.

    Film lots of sweeping landscape shots in HD. If you film too many, don't worry, just stick them in the next documentary you make - no one will notice.

    Overlay the whole thing with audio from the latest Moby Sigur Rós album.

    In other words, siphon the genius out of the tank of British Top Gear, resulting in something like the lifeless corpse of American Top Gear.

    Well, I give the BBC Horizon and other science programs a lot of credit, since here in the States the number 2 science program on television is ...

    Ancient Aliens.

    OK, yes, it's highly misleading to call that a science program, since it denies science in every episode. It's a pseudoscience program. Likewise for Ghost Hunters and MonsterQuest. But these shows have been averaging well over a million viewers per episode. Since the new season started, Ancient Aliens has had more than 2 million viewers every week. Those are big numbers for cable, which means the History Channel will probably bring us Ancient Aliens for longer than they gave us Hitler's secrets.

    Pseudoscience drafts off science's fumes. It doesn't work if it isn't trying to look like science, so it follows the forms. Ancient Aliens has a disembodied narrator, parade of experts, HD landscape shots of the Nasca lines, pyramids, and whatnot. The "experts" are retreads like Erich von Däniken, Michael Cremo and Graham Hancock -- the show presents them "asking the tough questions", implying that real archaeologists don't have the answers.

    It's a joke. Put one real scientist on the show and it'd fall apart like a house of cards. The entire premise is that ancient people were too stupid to invent stuff.

    You know what I'd really love to see? I'd like to see somebody give Ghost Hunters the VH-1 treatment -- you know, coming up with totally comical riffs on the "EVP" recordings that supposedly have ghost voices on them. Oooh-oooh! A spectral voice said "Bring me the head of Mo Rocca."

    Mythbusters is the only science show right now that smokes these pseudoscience programs. What makes it work? Well, it doesn't take itself too seriously, it shows experiments with a real chance of failure, it calls on many different specialties and relates to ordinary experience. It definitely isn't "gutless" -- although it does have its conventions, including the frequent explosive endings.

    Anyway, I think Robbins is onto something. During the past few years there have been some excellent programs featuring archaeology on American TV. Some of them followed the high-Q presenter formula, others the disembodied narrator approach. Some of them I've really enjoyed. But I'm afraid people are lulled into complacency by the format. Viewers who are already knowledgeable about science can follow them and get a lot out of them, taking on faith that the people doing the science know what they are doing. What's the difference between that presentation and the pseudoscience shows, though?

    Robbins writes that the solutions to these problems are most likely to come from the innovative approaches found in new and alternative media:

    [A]mateur science communicators are beginning to reach audiences that rival science magazines and the backwaters of digital TV. Some of the most creative new work is springing up at blogs, Youtube, local theatres, and even pubs. It's messy, but it's quietly brilliant, and reaching a bigger and bigger audience, and no doubt if TV had come along and picked it all up I'd just be sitting here ranting about how they ruined it all with their bloody rules.

    These laboratories are great for developing new concepts, but they're a niche. Science should have a better presence on TV.

    Tags: 
    science communication
    media
    metascience
    tv
    Synopsis: 
    The second highest-rated science show on U.S. television is Ancient Aliens. How can this be?

  • Dinosaur Wars

    Sat, 2011-01-22 10:49 -- John Hawks

    Brian Switek reviews the American Experience program, Dinosaur Wars, which covered the scientific rivalry between paleontologists Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. We watched it this week, I love it when AE takes a science-related subject. It does this way too rarely considering the importance of science and technology to American history.

    Without doing a full review, it was a good show. I liked it when Thomas Henry Huxley showed up to visit.

    I just wish I knew someone with the middle name of "Drinker."

    Tags: 
    history of paleontology
    tv
    history

  • Tomb raiders

    Fri, 2011-01-21 22:14 -- John Hawks

    Cracked.com features "8 Famous Fictional Archaeologists Who Suck At Their Job".

    OK, yes, this is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, what with Lara Croft, Brendan Fraser and the like. The list is so packed that they don't even find space for Allan Quatermain. Or maybe Alan Moore has successfully rehabilitated Quatermain's geek cred.

    Anyway, the whole list is a hoot. Here's a snippet from the inevitable Indiana Jones entry:

    We have lots of gold, Indy! We have people and machines whose entire job is to make holes in mountains until gold comes out, and you're collapsing a priceless trove of ancient machinery to recover something we could dig up in 10 minutes. Most archaeologists consider themselves lucky to find all the shards of the same destroyed vase, because they'll be able to put it back together in only a few months. That pressure-plate-triggered arrow-launcher? That was worth more than the gold. That shouldn't be that difficult for Indy, an archeologist, to comprehend. Yet he destroys ruins so intact they're actively trying to protect themselves from him. In other words, they weren't ruins until he arrived.

    I think that real archaeology has a shortage of suitable MacGuffins. Of course, those silly "power stones" in Temple of Doom set the bar pretty low...

    Tags: 
    humor
    tv
    movies

  • Botany of boredom

    Wed, 2011-01-05 21:24 -- John Hawks

    We flipped the channel to "The Botany of Desire" on PBS. The show is a documentary based on the book of the same name by Michael Pollan.

    After watching the show for four minutes, I decided it had been made by people who had gone to the Ken Burns School of Painfully Slow Storytelling. Literally, no new information in four minutes of program. Gretchen thinks the show is dumbed down way too much. I have to agree. Why do I want to watch some kind of Disney cartoon about Johnny Appleseed? And now I'm typing this, and 10 minutes later, they're still talking about Johnny Appleseed. OK, Pollan is telling us that there's a point here about genetic diversity coming from seed instead of grafting clones. Wow, what a long time it took to make that point!

    However, I will say that the art credits of the show are incredible. I really liked one of the 19th-century paintings on the screen and Gretchen was able to source it in just a few moments by using the online credits for the program.

    UPDATE (2011-01-05): OK, we watched the whole show. It wasn't bad, the tulip and cannabis sections were the most interesting. I think the ending, which covered potatoes, was very heavy-handed in its treatment of genetically modified potatoes. Here at the Hawks house, we're highly into local sourcing and diversity of heirloom varieties. But genetic technology can play an important part increasing productivity and reducing the human footprint. Pollan himself comes off in the program as an alarmist. The last ten minutes of the documentary could have used more balance.

    Tags: 
    tv

  • Battlestar mitochondria

    Sun, 2010-10-31 00:39 -- John Hawks

    Wired has an interview with the authors of a book titled, The Science of Battlestar Galactica. I wasn't a viewer of the show, so I wasn't aware that the mitochondrial Eve scenario turned out to be a major plot point in the series' finale. Wired chose to excerpt that part of the book.

    The excerpt does a good job differentiating the most recent ancestor of humans from the most recent ancestor in the exclusively maternal line -- the mitochondrial Eve:

    It’s important to emphasize that Mitochondrial Eve and her contemporaries had offspring, and those offspring had other offspring. But throughout the subsequent generations, for one reason or another, the lineages of Eve’s contemporaries all died out. Of all the women alive then (and in our case, that means the entire female population of Galactica and the fleet), only one has offspring alive today. We know her as Hera Agathonv.

    This does not necessarily mean that Hera is our Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA). Hera populated today’s Earth solely through her daughters and daughters’ daughters. The MRCA is the person who, while no doubt descended from Hera, populated today’s Earth via their daughters and/or sons. By adding males to the mix, the MRCA almost certainly cannot be the same as Mitochondrial Eve. In fact, most researchers today feel that the MRCA lived only about five thousand years ago, 145,000 years after Hera.

    That's a good two-paragraph summary of the issue, though it could use more fleshing out. Unfortunately, the book excerpt goes off on a Toba tangent, discussing the near-extinction of our species as a "real population bottleneck."

    This is a hard part of population genetics to get right, the distinction between effective and census population size, and the relationship between demographic events (like bottlenecks) and heterozygosity. A good description of the science should be appropriately skeptical -- I would expect no less for various "faster than light" drive technologies, which surely are harder to explain than population models. In this case, the reconstruction of population bottlenecks is highly speculative, and there is positive evidence against the Toba scenario having been a catastrophic event on the scale described here.

    Still, I don't have any problem with a science fiction series making use of such a scenario as a plot element. It's the perfect kind of thing for fiction. Beats the heck out of "midichlorians"!

    Tags: 
    science communication
    tv
    bottlenecks
    mtDNA

  • "You could blue screen Ardi"

    Thu, 2010-10-21 12:30 -- John Hawks

    The Guardian is running an interview with Pauline Fowler, whose company Animated Extras has been involved in many film and television projects where apes and hominins are part of the cast. It's an interesting interview, and I like to get this behind the scenes look at the artistic and technical process. As many may know, I'm one of the most irascible critics of the results, but I very much appreciate the challenges of realism in portraying ancient hominins.

    I asked Fowler how she would go about animating an Ardipithecus ramidus, who lived 4.4m years ago. The 45% complete fossil, known as "Ardi" was discovered in Ethiopia by Tim White's team in 1992 just 75km from the location of the famous "Lucy" fossil. "Well Ardi was short, stood about three and half to four feet tall. She had long arms. If you are going to make suits you need small people and arm extensions. Children are hard to work with so you need adult midgets, not dwarfs, you need average human proportions, but smaller. But finding enough midgets who can act is tough. You could blue screen Ardi and put in the environment later or have it as a CGI construct. There's several ways you could animate Ardi. But the colour of Ardi, her hair and size and shape of the soft tissue is informed guesswork, soft tissue doesn't usually fossilise. I always liaise with an expert and we find a realistic compromise."

    Not so different from R2D2, really.

    Tags: 
    art in science
    tv
    art
    movies
    Ardipithecus

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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.