Speaking of writing ...

Here's a link to a Tech Nation interview with Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid, an account of the neurological processes involved in writing and reading, and, more finely, the different systems involved in handling alphabetic versus pictographic scripts, like those used by Chinese, Japanese, and some other Asian languages.

Writing at the beginning

Given the time I've spent on the road the past several weeks, I didn't at the time find occasion to take note of it, but last month NewScientist ran an intriguing article about the work of Genevieve von Petzinger. While working on her masters degree at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, she set about to collect in a database all the glyphic signs found in the caves which served early humans as habitations and sanctuaries. She found that while the spectacular paintings in the caves had received considerable attention, of course, these early signs, perhaps the initial instance of writing as such, had not.

When faced with such spectacular beauty [as the paintings], who could blame the visiting anthropologists for largely ignoring the modest semicircles, lines and zigzags also marked on the walls? Yet dismissing them has proved to be something of a mistake. The latest research has shown that, far from being doodles, the marks are in fact highly symbolic, forming a written "code" that was familiar to all of the prehistoric tribes around France and possibly beyond. Indeed, these unprepossessing shapes may be just as remarkable as the paintings of trotting horses and tussling rhinos, providing a snapshot into humankind's first steps towards symbolism and writing.

For anyone involved with the complex process of writing - and to some degree, in this literate age, we all are - it's an important recognition. Give the article a look.

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Photo: Dozier Marc/Photolibrary, via the NewScientist. The article also includes some images of the signs themselves, and on one of them they're mapped to the countries (or continents, in some cases) where they were used; those locations include North America.

Ecopsychology takes hold

Today's NY Times reminds me why, in pre-digital days now long past, I'd often settled in with the Sunday print edition and a pot of coffee and read all day. And there's one article today that really caught my eye: Daniel B. Smith's "Is There An Ecological Unconscious", which delves into the work of several psychologists who are exploring, and treating pathologies in, the connection between mind and the world we know as Nature.

Smith, as any serious student of the link must, takes his review of ecopsychology all the way back to the work of Gregory Bateson, whose fundamental insights helped open the connection to study. Bateson held that, as Smith puts it, "Humankind suffered from an 'epistemological fallacy': we believed, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other. In fact, nature was a recursive, mindlike system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us."

“When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘what interests me is me or my organization or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure,” Bateson wrote. “You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” Our inability to see this truth, Bateson maintained, was becoming monstrously apparent. Human consciousness evolved to privilege “purposiveness” — to get us what we want, whether what we want is a steak dinner or sex. Expand that tendency on a mass scale, and it is inevitable that you’re going to see some disturbing effects: red tides, vanishing forests, smog, global warming. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Bateson wrote, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”

As someone who lived, when I first read him, at the northern end of Lake Erie, where the annual fish catch had dropped in a few decades from thousands of tons to a few hundred pounds, and those too poisoned to eat; where summer algal blooms engulfed the lakefront and whole islands; in a city where rivers flowing into Lake Erie would actually catch fire ... well, as you might imagine, I found that Bateson's words had real resonance.

"Critics would likely point out," Smith notes, "that ecopsychologists smuggle a worldview into what should be the value-neutral realm of therapy. Supporters would likely reply that, like Bateson, ecopsychologists are not sneaking in values but correcting a fundamental error in how we conceive of the mind: to understand what it is to be whole, we must first explain what is broken."

Go get a cup of coffee, dear reader, a cup of tea, or whatever you might prefer to drink on such an occasion, and settle in for a good read.

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When you've finished Smith's article, here's a link to two chapters of Bateson's Mind and Nature, so pour yourself another cup.

Neanderthals, too, had a certain style

Another pair of sites in Spain confirms that our Neanderthal cousins were capable of symbolic thought:

Professor João Zilhão and colleagues examined pigment-stained and perforated marine shells, most certainly used as neck pendants, from two Neanderthal-associated sites in the Murcia province of south-east Spain (Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Antón). The analysis of lumps of red and yellow pigments found alongside suggest they were used in cosmetics. The practice of body ornamentation is widely accepted by archaeologists as conclusive evidence for modern behaviour and symbolic thinking among early modern humans but has not been recognised in Neanderthals – until now.

Previous evidence of Neanderthal practice in the decorative arts had been dismissed as the result of "stratigraphic mixing (which can lead to confusion about the dating of particular artefacts), Neanderthal scavenging of abandoned modern human sites, or Neanderthal imitation without understanding of behaviours observed among contemporary modern human groups." Professor Zilhão believes that the current finds are clear evidence of advanced cognitive abilities among late members of the Neanderthal line.

(Thanks to Archeoblog for the find)

Rocking in the Stone Age

Archeologist Patrick McGovern has become a specialist in a particular form of prehistoric food use: turning it into alcohol. And he keeps finding earlier and earlier examples of humans partying down.

A secure supply of alcohol appears to have been part of the human community's basic requirements much earlier than was long believed. As early as around 9,000 years ago, long before the invention of the wheel, inhabitants of the Neolithic village Jiahu in China were brewing a type of mead with an alcohol content of 10 percent, McGovern discovered recently.

McGovern has come to believe that the desire for inebriation was one of the moving forces in the development of agriculture, and makes a good case. It's worth reading the whole article.

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Photo: Beer and wine cooling in a late holocene culture. Thanks.

Thought for the day ...

Just a little mid-holiday cheer from the bizarre right, or yet another reason I don't read PajamasMedia. Mary Grabar, presented as "an English Ph.D" claims:

Marijuana . . .has always been counter-cultural in the West. Every toke symbolizes a thumb in the eye of Western values. So it follows that in order to maintain our culture, we need to criminalize this drug.

So there. But, er, isn't it still criminalized in most of the West? Sort of, at least? Whatever.

And the insidious effects of marijuana? Just as you feared:

Alcohol may fuel fights, but marijuana, as its advocates like to point out, makes the user mellow. The toker wants to make love, not war.

Funny, that's what Dr. Leary used to say. Almost makes me think some clever stoner has managed to spoof the wingnut worldview into fifteen minutes of fame. Well done, dude or dudette.

Via Mona, with thanks to Kevin

At last, something to do for Halloween!

So many options for Halloween here in the Paris of the South -- dinners, parties, dances -- I'm in a quandary. It used to be so simple: there was the Freakers Ball, a Halloween party we counter-culture types threw for ourselves at various spots around the city, after it became too large to fit in anyone's home. Costumes, rock 'n' roll, lots of dancing ... that kind of party.

But that was then. By the late 80s, there were so many of us, and we were so various, and in various conditions of life (e.g. kids! wow!), that no one event could accommodate us all. And it's been that way since. Could there ever be something that would bring us all together again?

I think I've found it! Let's party with these folks:

Pastor Marc Grizzard claims the King James version of the Bible is the only true word of God, and that all other versions are "satanic" and "perversions" of God's word.

On Halloween night, Grizzard and the 14 members of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church will set fire to other versions of the scripture, as well as music and books by Christian authors.

“We are burning books that we believe to be Satanic,” Pastor Grizzard said.

“I believe the King James version is God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people."

All other religious or Christian texts are sacreligious, the pastor insists. The list of books being burned will include works written by "a lot of different authors who we consider heretics, such as Billy Graham, Rick Warren… the list goes on and on,” Pastor Grizzard said.

Also on the pastor's list of heretical authors — Mother Teresa, according to a full list that was previously available at the Amazing Grace Baptist Church's Web site. The Church's Web site — which is no longer available — calls the event 'Burning Perversions of God's Word,' and urges parishioners to "come celebrate Halloween by burning Satan's bibles."

Yeah, that sounds like great fun! And it's just up the road in Canton!

Gary Farber over at Amygdala has all the details, and managed to capture some of the now-missing website, so do check his post out.

See you there! And, er, you might not want to wear that cool Devil costume. Really.

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( A tip o' the hat to Political Animal Steve Benen)

Further Studies ...

Sorry, Bill*: more evidence has surfaced that music was part of the modern human cultural world from early on. Last week Nature published an online article about the discovery of "the oldest instrument in the world," a flute made from griffon vulture bone. It dates to 35,000 years before the present. Other flutes made from mammoth ivory were retrieved from the same site, Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, in southwestern Germany.

The AFP article also mentions the possibility that our cousins the Neanderthals made music as well, though it doesn't specifically mention the Divje Babe flute, which is ~10000 years older than the newly discovered instruments, but is often dismissed by paleontologists who hold that its finger holes were created by "a carnivore's bite."
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Sometimes astrology can be perilous. (via Kos)

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Update: The New York Times has an article by John Noble Wilford about the new finds , and John Hawks now has a post up on the flutes from Hohle Fels Cave as well. Hawks provides these details from the original Nature publication about the making of the ivory flutes:

The technology for making an ivory flute is much more complicated than that for making a flute from a bird bone. It requires forming the rough shape along the long axis of a naturally curved piece of mammoth ivory, splitting it open at the interface of the cementum and dentine or along one of the other bedding plains in the ivory, carefully hollowing out the halves, carving the holes and then rejoining the halves of the flute with air-tight seals along the seams that connected the halves of the flute.

Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and his colleagues, who made the finds, believe that these flutes establish that this early European culture had already developed an actual musical tradition. Similar flutes have been discovered at nearby caves also occupied by early modern humans.

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August 1, 2009: Updated again to replace the link to the AP article the post originally cited, no longer online, with a link to an Agence France-Presse article, which is.

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* A little dig at Bill Knott, who doesn't much care for music. More here.

Update: Note that Bill has now moved his blog (it's now here), and deleted all the content at his previous site; the links to that content in the posts I've linked to here are thus quite dead. One of these days maybe I'll go through the new blog to see if he's re-posted any of his old material. In the meantime, I'll leave that task, Dear Reader, to you.

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Photo: "Professor Nicholas Conard of the University in Tuebingen shows a flute during a press conference in Tuebingen, southern Germany, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009." AP Photo.

Political Animals

Way back in January 2008, in the midst of the presidential campaign, I put a link away in a draft post thinking I'd get to it in a few days ... And now that political season is long past, we're through the dismal Bush years (even if Dick "Darth" Cheney is still on the airwaves defending torture at every opportunity, working on that long-range plan to save himself and his buddies from the extended jail time they deserve), and the hook of the story is way out of date. It's a good story, though, by NY Times science writer Natalie Angier, a reminder that politics - the disposition to make fundamental decisions in groups - is, after all, something we share with lots of other members of the animal, er, kingdom. So check it out. We're always, after all, in a political season.

Another Scorpio becomes an astrologer...

Jessica Smith, since the beginning of her Saturn return, has become more than a little interested in astrology. She's got a nice post up on the secrets of the Scorpio heart over at looktouch.

Hawks writes on recent human evolution, and comes up with a metaphor

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks reviews research into recent evolution , via an evaluation of a profile of geneticist David Goldstein, and questions the assumptions Goldstein makes regarding the evolution of intelligence. His conclusion:

The assumption here that I find the most troubling is that intelligence is somehow the purpose of recent human evolution -- so much so that populations could not be anything but identical. But nothing could refute that assumption more eloquently than the scans for recent selection. Yes, the brain is represented on those lists, but so are the testes. And the blood. And the gut. We know from functional genomics and gene expression that brain, gut, bone, and blood are often influenced by the same genes. Recent human evolution is not progress toward a pinnacle. The human population is a snowdrift where ten thousand trade-offs have blown together, mostly by the luck of mutations. [his emphasis]

"... a snowdrift where ten thousand trade-offs have blown together." I think he shows promise.

Hawks is almost always worth reading, so go give him an eye or two.

Good news for the Ainu

On June 6th, the Japanese Diet passed a resolution officially recognizing the Ainu, the native people of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, as an indigenous people.

The act has stirred some debate in Japan, which has long seen itself as a nation of just one ethnicity.

Sadly, it comes at a time when the Ainu have largely been assimilated into the larger Japanese culture; there are few surviving speakers of the Ainu language.

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Late 19th century photo of Ainu from the collection of Flickr user Okinawa Soba (used under Creative Commons License).

Understanding the Antikythera Mechanis ... er, Computer

Work has continued on the Antikythera Mechanism, discovered off the coast of Antikythera at the beginning of the last century; an earlier post is here. It's been termed, as Wikipedia notes, the world's "first known mechanical computer."

From Science Daily:

The calculator was able to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the Zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon. The team believe it may also have predicted the positions of the planets.

The findings suggest that Greek technology was far more advanced than previously thought. No other civilisation is known to have created anything as complicated for another thousand years.

Professor [Mike] Edmunds [of the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University] said: "This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop."

The Wikipedia article on the device has been updated as of yesterday, and is remarkably thorough in its account of its internal systems. Speculation about the uses of the device so far focuses on its astrological and astronomical capabilities:

• Astrology was commonly practiced in the ancient world. In order to create an astrological chart, the configuration of the heavens at a particular point of time is needed. It can be very difficult and time-consuming to work this out by hand, and a mechanism such as this would have made an astrologer's work much easier.
• Setting the dates of religious festivals connected with astronomical events.
• Adjusting calendars, which were based on lunar cycles as well as the solar year.

The NY Times also covered the recent work deciphering the device, here.

So much we don't know about the ancient world.

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Photo via the Times from the Antikythera Research Project.

A good sounding room ....

National Geographic had an article a couple weeks ago on the acoustic properties of the cave sanctuaries so richly decorated by early modern ancestors of the peoples we think of as Europeans:

"In the cave of Niaux in Ariège, most of the remarkable paintings are situated in the resonant Salon Noir, which sounds like a Romanesque chapel," said Iegor Reznikoff, an acoustics expert at the University of Paris who conducted the research.

The sites would therefore have served as places of natural power, supporting the theory that decorated caves were backdrops for religious and magical rituals.

...

[Paul] Pettitt, [a] University of Sheffield archaeologist [who was not involved in the study], said Reznikoff's research is consistent with other work that suggests music and dance played an integral role in the lives of ancient people.

Instruments such as bone flutes and "roarers"—bone and ivory instruments that whir rhythmically when spun—have been found in decorated caves.

In rare instances, cave images include highly stylized females who appear to be dancing or enigmatic, part-animal "sorcerer" figures engaging in what seem to be transformational dances.

"This is therefore an artistic connection between dance and art. Perhaps in this case the art is recording specific ritual events," Pettitt said. "It is inconceivable that such rituals would have taken place in silence."

MSNBC also had a version of the story that has a little more from Reznikoff.

No flutes at Shanidar

...but the cave there did provide the first evidence that Neanderthals conducted funeral rites; the large concentration of pollens from medicinal plants in one of the burial sites in the cave led paleontologists to conclude that the body had been buried with flowers.

James Gordon, who's apparently working as a photographer with the Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, where Shanidar is located, has this nice shot of the cave up on his Flikr stream (via John Hawks). Gordon notes that:

Neanderthal habitation going back 60,000-80,000 years have been unearthed is this very large cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. ...
Of all the skeletons found at the cave, it is Shanidar IV which provides the best evidence for Neanderthal burial ritual. The skeleton of an adult male aged between 30-45 years was discovered in 1960 by Ralph Solecki and was positioned so that he was lying on his left side in a partial fetal position. Routine soil samples which were gathered for pollen analysis in an attempt to reconstruct the palaeoclimate and vegetational history of the site from around the body were analysed eight years after its discovery. In two of the soil samples in particular, whole clumps of pollen were discovered in addition to the usual pollen found throughout the site and suggested that entire flowering plants (or at least heads of plants) had entered the grave deposit. Furthermore, a study of the particular flower types suggested that the flowers may have been chosen for their specific medicinal properties. Yarrow, Cornflower, Bachelor’s Button, St. Barnaby’s Thistle, Ragwort or Groundsel, Grape Hyacinth, Joint Pine or Woody Horsetail and Hollyhock were represented in the pollen samples, all of which have long-known curative powers as diuretics, stimulants, astringents as well as anti-inflammatory properties. This led to the idea that the man could possibly have had shamanic powers, perhaps acting as medicine man to the Shanidar Neandertals. However, recent work into the flower burial has suggested that perhaps the pollen was introduced to the burial by animal action as several burrows of a gerbil-like rodent known as a Persian jird were found nearby. The jird is known to store large numbers of seeds and flowers at certain points in their burrows and this argument was used in conjunction with the lack of ritual treatment of the rest of the skeletons in the cave to suggest that the Shanidar IV burial had natural, not cultural origins.
Then again, a region like the Zagros foothills would have several thousand flowering plant species, of which only about 5 or 10% would be medicinal. It is unlikely that Neanderthals collected medicinal plants. But it is even less likely that jirds do.

Indeedy.

He has some more shots up, so go take a look.

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Much of Gordon's note is actually taken verbatim from the Wikipedia article on Shanidar, which gives a provides a good account of the site and discusses its significance.

Moses high on Mt. Sinai ...

... perhaps very high. Via Lisa Jarnot's ever entertaining lisablog, a story from the UK Guardian in which a researcher claims that Moses might just have been, shall we say, under the influence of something besides the Holy Spirit:

We all know that Moses was high on Mount Sinai when God spoke to him, but were the Ten Commandments a result of divine inspiration alone?

An Israeli researcher is claiming in a study published this week the prophet may have been stoned when he set the Ten Commandments in stone.

According to Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, psychedelic drugs formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times.

Writing in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy, he says concoctions based on the bark of the acacia tree, frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, contain the same molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca [my link - Jeff] is prepared.

"The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness," writes Shanon. "In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings."

References in the Bible where people "see" sounds, is another "classic phenomenon", he said, citing the example of religious ceremonies in the Amazon in which drugs are used that induce people to "see" music.

Speaking about his article on Israeli public radio, he added: "As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either. Or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics."

Moses was probably also on mind-altering drugs when he saw the "burning bush", suggested Shanon, who admitted to dabbling with such substances.

Speaking of his own experience of ayahuasca during a religious ceremony in Brazil's Amazon forest in 1991, he said: "I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations."

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday March 05 2008, and last updated at 15:59 GMT on that date.

There's a good article by the same researcher, Benny Shanon, here (it's a .pdf); it's a consideration of Psychoactive Sacramentals, an anthology of articles on the role of entheogens in religions, including Judaism and Christianity.

Gordon Wasson, Carl A. P. Ruck and their co-authors have previously explored some of the same terrain in their Persephone's Quest and the classic Road to Eleusis (see here for a .pdf that includes much of the book). Fascinating, if you're at all curious about how we came to be the strange creatures we are.

(The Road to Eleusis, including the great Homeric Hymn to Demeter, helped me delve into the Eleusinian materials that I approached/appropriated/attempted to locate myself within in some of the poems in NatureS.)

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Rembrandt's Moses from Olga's Gallery.

Wordplay: Mercury retrograde

Today's show with Lori Horvitz was really fun, had a great spontaneous flow, and Lori read some material from her memoir-in-progress that included really well-observed scenes and stories of some wonderful encounters - I especially enjoyed those that included her father. Unfortunately, if you didn't hear it live, you never will. Once again the WPVM archiving system failed to record the show, and neither Sebastian nor I, sadly, had brought a blank CD to use in the low-tech, but mostly reliable, back-up system. So it's gone, sound waves dissipated into the atmosphere.

My apologies to Lori; we'll have her back on the show and do it all again just as soon as her schedule and the show's permit.

After the show I poked around and found another issue: the automated FTP upload for last week's show had also gone awry, and the show never uploaded to the site from which it podcasts and streams. In fact, it's impossible to tell now when the last show uploaded. So we'll be talking again to WPVM's beleaguered manager about how we can fix the latest round of glitches, and make as certain as possible that they won't occur in the future.

At least until Mercury once again goes retrograde.

Music and Mirror Neurons

As I mentioned below, some of my favorite blogs are actually science blogs - or, more specifically, anthropology blogs, like Archaeoblog; John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, which focuses on paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution; Dienekes Anthropology Blog (featuring at the moment a post on "Mating patterns amongst Siberian reindeer hunters" ; you know that's got to be good); and PZ Meyers' Pharyngula.

One of the places their links have often taken me is the online science mag, Seed, which a couple of months ago ran a fascinating interview between David Byrne, the lead singer and songwriter, as Seed says, "of the seminal late 70s band Talking Heads", and Daniel Levitin, "who worked as a session musician, sound and recording engineer, and record producer", but "is now the James McGill professor of behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill University, and the author of The New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music".

The interview explores different approaches to articulating the role music plays in consciousness, and its complex relationship to emotion (from, for once, the performer's standpoint):

DB: In a musical performance, whether it's recorded or live, people feel the emotion is coming from the performer, and that's what makes it authentic and true and therefore more upstanding and good. Whereas I would say, yeah, okay, a little bit. But music has attributes that you can objectify. This kind of sound, this kind of rhythm, will generate this kind of emotion even if it's done in a half-ass manner.

Anyone who's ever played air guitar should be interested in their exchange about that bit of human play:

One of the great mysteries in human behavior was that a newborn child can look up at its parent, and the parent smiles, and the newborn will smile. Well, how does it know how to do that? How does it know by looking at an upturned mouth what muscles it needs to move to make its own mouth turn up? How does it know that it's going to produce the same effect? There's a whole complicated chain of neuroscientific puzzles attached to this question.

DB: So when you watch a performance, sports for example, you're not only watching somebody else do it. In a neurological kind of way, you're experiencing it.

DL:Yeah, exactly. And when you see a musician, especially if you're a musician yourself--

DB: —air guitar.

DL: Air guitar, right! And you can't turn it off—it's without your conscious awareness. So mirror neurons seem to have played a very important role in the evolution of the species because we can learn by watching, rather than having to actually figure it out step-by-step.

DB: Yeah, and not only that. You also empathize, you feel what they're feeling.

That, of course, is what drives Bill Knott up the wall about music, its power to inspire empathy:

(that's why they invented music in the first place: to accompany murder)

(that's the purpose of music: to facilitate killing) . . .

(Can you tell from those notes that Bill doesn't particularly like music?)

I may have more about all this later, but just go read it; it's a conversation well worth dropping in on.

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Later 8/7/07: Update: To be fair, do read Bill's comment here, too.

Thanks to Strangepaths.com for the neuron image, and a hat-tip to John Hawks Anthropology Weblog for the link.

Hard-wired for the Alphabet?

Probably a third of the sites I visit on a given days are science-related, and one of those I return to most regularly is Dienekes Anthropology Blog. Dienekes will occasionally explore cultural issues and other aspects of anthropology, but his primary focus is on genomic analysis, and you're much more likely to find there a post on the DNA haplogroups of the eastern Mediterranean than one on, say, Paleolithic tool assemblages excavated in eastern Siberia.

Yesterday he reported on a paper by Peter Frost about a gene variant that seems to have been linked with the spread of alphabetical writing. The variations occurs in the ASPM gene, which otherwise seems to be linked to the regulation of brain growth. The mutation apparently occurred somewhere in the middle east about 6000 years ago. It's now found in 38-50% of people in Europe, 37-52% of folks in the Middle East, but only 0-25% of people from East Asia (where writing, of course, has been non-alphabetic).

Whatever the current fate of scribes (and poets), it seems that the variation was initially of some value:

This task [of alphabetic writing] was largely delegated to scribes of various sorts who enjoyed privileged status and probably superior reproductive success. Such individuals may have served as vectors for spreading the new ASPM variant.

Nature and culture at play with one another, once more.

Mercury once again ...

is retrograde, moving "backwards" in relation to Earth's orbit. It's not necessarily a good time for Mercurial pursuits, like travel, writing (that probably includes blogging, too) ... It's retrograde this time in the sign Cancer, so the transit should have greatest impact on folks with Sun or Mercury in Cancer, Capricorn, Libra, or Aries. Just saying. It goes direct again on July 10th. Till then, think twice.

(For an account of previous encounters I've had with Lord Mercury, and a look at astrology in general, see this earlier post.)

(Image of Mercury from the Jet Propulsion Lab site, where it has this caption: "This photomosaic of the planet Mercury was assembled from individual high-resolution images taken by Mariner 10 shortly before closest approach in 1974. The sun is shining from the right, and the terminator is at about 100 degrees west longitude. Crater Kuiper, named after astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper, can be seen just below the center of the planet's illuminated side. The landscape is dominated by large craters and basins with extensive plains between craters.")