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Bioarcheology, Paleodemography and Halloween |
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Bioarcheology, Paleodemography and Halloween |
“Thoughts beyond the Pleistocene, this Halloween.”
It's unbelievable -- October 31, and I'm just now writing October's curator's note. What happened to this month? Perhaps the reality of today explains the curatorial inertia: A) I'm supposed to get lab tests, but B) I don't have any gas in my car to go to the clinic to get the blood draw, because I haven't gotten paid yet from the “little” job-from-a-friend that I'm doing, that puts in gas in my car, etc., until I get my first “real” paycheck from my other job...at the end of the November.
Trick or treat? Trick!
This month, It felt like a great unburdening to finish the physics envy section of the menstrual suppression MOLTXIBIT, and so interesting to find out about such approaches to prehistory as paleodemography and bioarcheology - that other methodologies exist, besides direct observation of contemporary forager/hunter-gatherer/sedentary agriculturalist populations - which too easily gets interpreted as direct observation of prehistoric populations.
It was also interesting, over the past month, to explore contemporary poetry about prehistory. Mary Molinary, in her poem “Eve's Epistle to Lilith,” quotes Mary Leakey as follows:
“At one point...the traveler stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time. Three million seven hundred thousand years ago, a remote ancestor--just as you or I--experienced a moment of doubt.”
Molinary then continues:
Headstrong and striding as only upright bipedal creatures can
I stop pause and stand on the edge of the gorge in the darkened
part of night as though perched upon a single strand
of DNA searching for a sound that I can track as easily as a strange
footprint in these sedimentary layers---one that (like me) mourns
Binomial Nomenclature echoes back names for a near perfect
leg bone fragments of skull---precise but once removed: how
our husband-my-father reads history with fingernails of perfectibility
flips page after page asks the same question of the same residual
night.
Jerry Jenkins, in his poem “Lucy,” writes:
Now we will chivy nature from her cells,
unravel frog and fruit-fly chromosome
and you, the fruit of patience and of dust --
we'll recreate you, strand by patient strand.
Lucy, I fear us. Let me hold your hand,
and Mother of all, Grandmother:
Lead me home.
Although the above are excerpts from “just” poems, they do raise the intriguing question: What does the observed reproductive pattern of Dogon women in the 1980s, tell us about the reproductive pattern of “Lucy,” and other Australopithecus afarensis females? And: If we trace tool-making back 2.5 million years ago, then why not trace the human reproductive pattern back 2.5 million years as well?
“Thoughts beyond the Pleistocene, this Halloween.”
