Meanderings, 9 November 2024

Good morning, readers of Weekly Meanderings, where we gather links and stories from across the Internet. Most of these have been sent to me by Kris and from others.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Thank you Mike Bird:

In Science Advances there is an article on The child who lived: Down syndrome among Neanderthals? The abstract reads:

Caregiving for disabled individuals among Neanderthals has been known for a long time, and there is a debate about the implications of this behavior. Some authors believe that caregiving took place between individuals able to reciprocate the favor, while others argue that caregiving was produced by a feeling of compassion related to other highly adaptive prosocial behaviors. The study of children with severe pathologies is particularly interesting, as children have a very limited possibility to reciprocate the assistance. We present the case of a Neanderthal child who suffered from a congenital pathology of the inner ear, probably debilitating, and associated with Down syndrome. This child would have required care for at least 6 years, likely necessitating other group members to assist the mother in childcare.

What you have to remember is that before 1900, the average life expectancy for a child with Down syndrome was 7 years old. So the fact that Neanderthals were keeping Down syndrome children alive for so long is quite amazing.

Such a feature can be put in juxtaposition to contemporary attitudes towards Down Syndrome which include the option or even the imperative to destroy them in-utero, to engage in infanticide shortly after birth if their condition was not detected, or else to offer/compel them to be euthanized if their lives become difficult or burdensome.

More terrifying, are the views of Australian “ethicist,” Singer, who has previously argued, that parents should be able to euthanize infants with conditions like Down syndrome, spina bifida, hemophilia, and other disabilities that make “the child’s life prospects significantly less promising than those of a normal child.” He has claimed that it is perfectly permissible that the parents of children with these conditions should be allowed to end their child’s life rather than be forced to go through the burden and trauma of raising them into a life that offer little quality to them and their carers.

I’d like to tell Singer some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that many European intellectuals and political leaders would wholeheartedly support their views on terminating the lives of people with disabilities either in utero or shortly after birth.

The bad news is that most of them were executed shortly after the Nuremberg trials.

DNA can revise our knowledge of Pompeii:

Ancient DNA has revealed surprises about the identities of some people who perished in the ancient Roman town of Pompeii after a volcanic eruption, overturning misconceptions about their genetic relationships, ancestry and sex.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the volcano spewed hot, lethal gases and ash into the air, slowly killing most of the city’s population. Ash and volcanic rock called pumice then covered Pompeii and its residents, preserving scenes of the victims of the city’s destruction like an eerie time capsule.

Excavations first began to unearth the forgotten city in 1748, but it wasn’t until 1863 that archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a method to make plaster casts of some of the Pompeii victims. The soft tissue of the bodies encased in ash had decomposed over time, so Fiorelli poured liquid chalk into some of the outlines left behind by the bodies to preserve the shapes of 104 people.

Narratives formed based on the positioning of some of the remains, including those of an adult wearing a bracelet who was holding a child and thought to be the child’s mother. Similarly, a group of bodies found together were suspected of being sisters.

Now, during modern efforts to restore some of the casts, researchers retrieved bone fragments from within the plaster and sequenced DNA from them, discovering that none of those assumptions were true.

[e.g.] Traditionally, researchers assumed the bracelet-wearing person [at one site] to be the child’s mother. But the genetic analysis revealed the pair to be an unrelated adult male and child, Reich said. The adult male likely had black hair and dark skin.

The new study reveals a lot about our own cultural expectations, said Steven Tuck, professor of history and classics at Miami University in Ohio. Tuck was not involved in the new study.

“We expect a woman to be comforting and maternal, so much so that we assume a comforting figure is a woman and mother, which here is not the case,” Tuck said.

Learning more about the remains of people at Pompeii can help others appreciate those who lost their lives in the disaster, said Caitie Barrett, an associate professor in the department of classics at Cornell University. Barrett also was not involved in the new study.

“Whatever their relationship was, this is someone who died trying to protect the child, and who provided that child with their last moments of human comfort,” she said.

This is an exceptional book — Exiles from Eden:

Again, many of the important books in the early 1990s used a narrative of secularization to analyze with precision the way academic institutions wrestled with religion within a context of modernity. As these two illustrations suggest, however, Schwehn is up to something different. Schwehn understands the most important aspect of the academy’s wrestling with religion and modernity not to be secularization but professionalization.

Importantly, for Schwehn, this professionalization is at the heart of what ails universities because it separates research from teaching and teaching from the cultivation of virtue. For professors, these divisions prioritize research over teaching in forging vocational meaning. As these individuals embody this vocational priority, the institutions they inhabit focus on skill acquisition rather than educating the whole person. Schwehn suggests that the remedy for this state of affairs is to reimagine an academic vocation and institutional mission with teaching as its organizing principle. By understanding all of our work as pedagogical, our colleges and universities would be communities of spirited inquiry that develop certain communal virtues on which such pedagogical work depends.

To explain further how we got this vocational separation of teaching from “my own work,” Schwehn engages Max Weber’s indispensable 1917 lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” which offers a penetrating description of how the modern academy arrived at this professional ideal.² To understand the importance of Weber’s analysis of academic work, Schwehn must, however, explain the long historical relationship between Christianity and formation in higher learning. Higher education in Europe and the United States, in all its premodern forms, shared an intellectual and institutional connection to the church. Important aspects of this connection included (1) that learning was done in community, (2) that learning and knowing were understood to be quests for truth, described in religious terms like enlightenment and formation, and (3) that learning was tied to certain Christian virtues of intellect and character that included humility, charity, faith, and self-­sacrifice. In this model, academic work was communal in orientation and found meaning in connecting to transcendent truth through the formation of certain communitarian virtues. These habits of thought and practice shaped the meaning of academic work as well as the purpose of these institutions.

The Python huntress:

It is nearing midnight on an unpaved road bordering the Florida Everglades when Donna Kalil slams on the brakes. Light from her blue F-150 floods the scene along the road, where, within the grass, a sheen of iridescent skin glints, and the sinuous shape and inkblot pattern of a Burmese python leap into focus.

Kalil jumps from the truck, long braid swinging, and moves in on her quarry. At sixty-two years old, Kalil is a full-time, year-round professional python hunter, and the original python huntress: She is the first woman to hold this job, not that gender crosses anyone’s mind out here in the living, breathing wilderness of the Everglades. I am tagging along to witness her in action and to experience what it’s like to catch one of the most devastating invasive species in the world.

The night air, heavy with the promise of rain, reverberates with frog calls. Mindful of where her shadow falls, Kalil positions herself between the python and the endless black reach of swamp beyond it. Then she pounces, angling for a strong grip just behind the head. After a tussle, the Burmese python submits even as it wraps itself, cool and smooth to the touch, around her leg. This brief fight represents the 876th time Kalil has pitted herself against a Burmese python and won—the 876th time she will snap a photo of the snake, lower it into a cloth bag, and load it into her truck. And the 876th time that, later, in private, she will take its life.

Writing and Welding:

Although I have a good gig as a full professor at Iowa State University, I’ve daydreamed about learning a trade – something that required both my mind and my hands.

So in 2018, I started night courses in welding at Des Moines Area Community College. For three years, I studied different types of welding and during the day worked on a book about the communication between welding teachers and students. I wasn’t the only woman who became interested in trades work during this time. Recognizing the good pay and job security, U.S. women have moved in greater numbers into skilled trades such as welding and fabrication within the past 10 years.

From 2017 to 2022, the number of women in trades rose from about 241,000 to nearly 354,000. That’s an increase of about 47%. Even so, women still constitute just 5.3% of welders in the United States.

When I received my diploma in welding in May 2022, I’d already found the place I wanted to work: Howe’s Welding and Metal Fabrication. I’d met the owner, Jim Howe, when I visited his three-man shop in Ames, Iowa, in January 2022 for research on a second book about communication in skilled trades.

Crusty cake:

A “very rare” 77-year-old slice of the cake served at Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s wedding sold for £2,200 ($2,800) this week, according to auction house Reeman Dansie.

The cake, which no longer looks edible, survived for almost eight decades since the wedding day on November 20, 1947.

It is still neatly packaged in a small box with the silver insignia of a then-Princess Elizabeth stamped on it and an elaborate doily inside.

This box kept the cake safe as it was sent from Buckingham Palace to Marion Polson, the housekeeper at Holyrood House in Edinburgh, Scotland, as a gift from the royal couple.

Alongside the cake, Polson received a letter from Elizabeth thanking her for “such a delightful wedding present.”

“We are both enchanted with the dessert service; the different flowers and the beautiful colouring will, I know, be greatly admired by all who see it,” read the typewritten letter, which is signed by Elizabeth.

“This is a present which we shall use constantly, and whenever we shall think of the kindness and good wishes for our happiness which it represents.”

Behind cuneiform and proto-cuneiform? The “historical script.”

Researchers have uncovered links between the precursor to the world’s oldest writing system and the mysterious, intricate designs left behind by engraved cylindrical seals that were rolled across clay tablets about 6,000 years ago.

Scholars consider cuneiform the first writing system, and humans used its wedge-shaped characters to inscribe ancient languages such as Sumerian on clay tablets beginning around 3400 BC. The writing system is thought to have originated from Mesopotamia, the region where the world’s earliest known civilization developed that’s now modern-day Iraq.

Before cuneiform, however, there was an archaic script using abstract pictographic signs called proto-cuneiform. It first appeared around 3350 to 3000 BC in the city of Uruk, in modern southern Iraq.

But the origins of proto-cuneiform’s emergence have been murky, and many of its symbols remain undeciphered.

Researchers conducting a careful analysis of proto-cuneiform symbols were surprised to uncover similarities when they studied the engravings of cylinder seals invented in Uruk in 4400 BC and used to imprint motifs on soft clay. Not only do some of the symbols match exactly, but they also appear to convey the same meanings in relation to ancient transactions and trade.