Laputan Logic

Archive for March 2005

The Brain of Ebu Gogo

This is a place holder because I simply have no time to write anything about this.

But then again why would you want my take on it? Go thither.

UPDATE: All Ebu Gogo. All the time.

Basically, the brain scan that was carried out on the Homo Floresiensis skull before being taken by Prof Jacob (but only published now) appears to have disproved the charge of microcephaly. This hasn't silenced the skeptics, however. Doctor Alan Thorne won't be happy until he has seen a "couple of dozen" samples of this species, so the debate sure doesn't seem likely to die down any time soon. He is arguing that the skull shares racial characteristics with local Melanesians and this makes the separate species argument seem highly improbable. A key point is that he is talking about a condition known as secondary microcephaly which is not a genetic condition but rather one that is caused by an infection during pregnancy.

Nevertheless, this is all starting to sound like a bit of a stretch. The view of the majority of scientists is that Ebu Gogo is a new species. Furthermore, as Carl Zimmer's article (linked above) has it, it may even be a different species to Homo Erectus which is a species that is known to have lived in Indonesia for at least 800,000 years. This new species may have more affinities with another and even more archaic ape-like species, raising the possibility that there may have been more than one species of archaic human wandering about in Asia at the time.

Also of interest, scientists have suspected for a while that archaic humans were living in Java as recently as 27,000 years ago.

In other news, it appears that some of the bones of Homo Floresiensis have been badly damaged while in the care of Prof Teuku Jacob. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Mike Morwood, leader of the Australian and Indonesian team that discovered Homo floresiensis on the island of Flores, yesterday said a pelvis had been severely damaged while being transported to and from the laboratory of the Indonesian palaeoanthropologist Teuku Jacob, of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. A jawbone that is crucial to the discovery team's claim that more than one hobbit lived in the Flores cave had also been cracked and badly repaired while in the care of Professor Jacob, who returned most of the remains of the seven hobbits a week ago.

"It's sickening," Professor Morwood said. "Jacob was greedy and acted totally irresponsibly"

...

The discovery team was able to get a CT scan of the hobbit skull at a Jakarta hospital before it was taken, but it did not have time to strengthen the second lower jawbone, also found last year. Professor Morwood said it appeared to have been broken when a mould was made in the Yogyakarta laboratory. Someone had then "rammed the two halves together at the wrong angle, stuck bone fragments in the cracks, and hidden the mess with a thick coating of glue".

The damaged pelvis would have provided crucial evidence, "now lost", for the shape and size of the hobbits and how they walked.

FURTHER UPDATE: John Hawks thinks that the microcephaly question remains far from settled and he also questions the parts of the recent study which makes certain claims about Ebu Gogo's cognitive abilities. If this really is a different species of human then one should be very careful about inferring brain functions by comparing brain-case depressions with those in modern humans. He does, however, support the idea that Ebu Gogo might be a different species from either Homo Erectus or Homo Sapiens. He has previously floated the possibility that they are a branch descended from australopithecines.

Suppressed Roman Tech

Some stories are just too damned cute to resist. Take this story reported by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History:

One day a goldsmith in Rome was allowed to show the Emperor Tiberius a dinner plate of a new metal. The plate was very light, and almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith told the Emperor that he had made the metal from plain clay. He also assured the Emperor that only he, himself, and the Gods knew how to produce this metal from clay. The Emperor became very interested, and as a financial expert he was also a little concerned. The Emperor felt immediately, however, that all his treasures of gold and silver would fall in value if people started to produce this bright metal of clay. Therefore, instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.

There you have it. The Romans discovered aluminium two thousand years ago, a substance which is extracted "from clay" (i.e. bauxite) and which has only been produced in commercial quantities in the past hundred or so years.

For most of the 19th century it was considered a precious metal so much more valuable than gold that Emperor Napoleon III (nephew of more famous and greater, Napoleon I) commissioned several important works for his recently restored imperial dynasty out of the stuff. He proudly wore a helmet made of aluminium and in 1856 when his son, the crown prince Eugene Louis Jean Joseph was born, he commissioned a baby rattle made out of aluminium (and combined with gold, diamonds, emeralds and coral). In 1860 he ordered that his battle standards, eagles atop of flagpoles, which had formerly been made of bronze, be replaced with aluminium gilded with gold (which had the added advantage of making them three time lighter) and in 1861 he had the state dinner held in honour of the visiting Siamese delegation to be served on aluminium plates while ordinary dignitaries had to be content to eat off gold. Basically, the Emperor was really very positive about aluminium.

So contrast the vision of this enlightened emperor with the stodginess and paranoia of old Tiberius. Imagine how the history of carbonated soft drinks could be been so very very different if the Romans imperator hadn't sought to suppress this wondrous stuff. A cursory glance at Google will tell you that these two stories go hand in hand and are repeated verbatim on virtually every website that has an interest in aluminium.

So I was quite interested to learn while searching for an original source of Pliny's quote, that this was actually just a myth and that Pliny had said no such thing*. Not only that, it was a carefully constructed myth that was promulgated by Napoleon's very own aluminium guy, Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville, the man founded the world's first commercial aluminium process with the genreous support of the Emperor. The purpose of this tale was to explicitly contrast the virtues the two emperors. Tiberius has never been regarded highly by posterity and he really was crotchety and paranoid. Napoleon III, on the other hand, was to be seen as a modern and enlightened monarch, one especially suited to lead France into a glorious future age**. Deville's initial marketing of aluminium was as "silver from clay".

However, what Pliny was actually talking about was a completely different wonder material: flexible glass.

The tale is told that, during the reign of Tiberius, a glass was devised, so compounded as to be flexible, and that the workshop of the inventor was utterly destroyed, lest there should be a decline in the value of copper, silver, and gold.

--- Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 36, para. 195

No mention of a goldsmith, no mention of a metal "almost as bright as silver", this was all Deville's work. The material Pliny discussed was wondrous in itself but it certainly wasn't aluminium. The story is laid out more explicitly by Petronius in The Satyricon:

"But there was an artisan, once upon a time, who made a glass vial that couldn't be broken. On that account he was admitted to Caesar with his gift; then he dashed it upon the floor, when Caesar handed it back to him. The Emperor was greatly startled, but the artisan picked the vial up off the pavement, and it was dented, just like a brass bowl would have been! He took a little hammer out of his tunic and beat out the dent without any trouble. When he had done that, he thought he would soon be in Jupiter's heaven, and more especially when Caesar said to him, 'Is there anyone else who knows how to make this malleable glass? Think now!' And when he denied that anyone else knew the secret, Caesar ordered his head chopped off, because if this should get out, we would think no more of gold than we would of dirt."

---The Satyricon, by Petronius, Volume 2 Chapter 51

So what was this remarkable material? Why was it really suppressed? Was it alien technology?

* This little exercise was for me interesting illustration of the relative strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia which, being the closest thing the web has to an authoritative voice, probably has done the most to spread this myth (mainly through those Wikipedia rip-off sites -- are those things really legal?). But at the same time, it was also the source of the link to the article that debunked it.

** Karl Marx, incidentally, wrote of the two Napoleons: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." --- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

Oh, how true.

UPDATE: Language Hat provides a little further on that famous Marx quote:

Regarding the Marx line, Alexander Cockburn has this to say: "In his 1973 NLR/Penguin edition, David Fernbach claimed that it is doubtful whether Hegel ever said any such thing. On the other hand, Engels had recently written Marx a letter in which he observed, 'It really seems as if old Hegel in his grave were acting as World Spirit and directing history, ordaining most conscientiously that it should all be unrolled twice over, once as a great tragedy and once as a wretched farce.' Marx obviously thought it was a bit more dignified to cite Hegel than to say 'Fred Engels was saying to me only the other day..."

The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

He was known as "Mad Carew" by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel's daughter smiled on him as well.

He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,
The fact that she loved him was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.

He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad;
And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do
But the green eye of the little Yellow God.

On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars:
But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night beneath the stars.

He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temple dripping red;
He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,
And the Colonel's daughter watched beside his bed.

He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;
She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;
He bade her search the pocket saying "That's from Mad Carew,"
And she found the little green eye of the god.

She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;
But she wouldn't take the stone and Mad Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he'd chanced his life to get.

When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,
She thought of him and hurried to his room;
As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro' the gloom.

His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slipp'ry where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
'Twas the "Vengeance of the Little Yellow God."

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

--- J. Milton Hayes (1911)

Emnity

So what is the source of this great acrimony that seems to exist between the two sides in this debate over the species-hood of Ebu Gogo? At one level it is theoretical dispute: Alan Thorne and Maciej Henneberg are proponents of the "Multi-regional" hypothesis of human evolution while Peter Brown and Mike Morwood, like the majority of scientists, accept the "Out of Africa" hypothesis. But scientific differences only go so far to explaining the apparent enmity involved.

Paleoanthropology is a small field and Australian paleoanthropology is even smaller. A quick Google search will tell you that, Thorne and Brown have been sparring for years, in fact ever since Brown, a former PhD student of Thorne's, started publicly disputing his findings. Thorne had argued that Australia may have been settled by two strains of human represented by different skeleton types: one gracile and modern looking found at Lake Mungo, the other robust with primitive, almost Homo Erectus-like, features from Kow Swamp. Thorne's view is that modern Aborigines are descended from both of these groups, a unique amalgam of modern human that can only said to have originated from Australia - not Africa.

Brown disagreed, arguing that there is no evidence to suggest that there really were two groups. What was "gracile" about the Mungo "man" was due to it being female not male and what was primitive about Kow Swamp skeletons was due to a head-deforming practice which had been applied to the individuals while they were still infants (a cultural practice still observed in some parts of Australia as late as the 19th century). Skeletons found in both groups were of human beings who were modern in every respect, as modern, apparently, as the day their ancestors set foot outside of Africa.

Years later, Peter Brown analyses a new skeleton found on an Indonesia island and declares it to be from a hitherto unknown hominid species. Alan Thorne, now retired from the ANU, takes the extraordinary step of flying to Jogjakarta to visit Teuku Jacob's lab - in the knowledge that the bones were under dispute and had been made inaccessible to the researchers who found them - to confirm his already announced position, that they were those of a human being, modern in every respect except for a certain deformity. Hmmm.

Fortunately for the rest of us, the Internet has made us all instant experts on everything. So I guess it's up to us to decide who's right and who's wrong. See for yourself: the above illustration comes from supplementary material supplied for Dean Falk's paper in Science where she made virtual endocasts of the brain-cases of various skulls and compared them against Homo Floresiensis.

Ebo Gogo's brain-case is in the middle, while a modern human one is above it and a chimpanzee's is below it. To the left is the brain-case of an individual suffering microcephaly (not the variety mentioned by Alan Thorne, by the way) and to the right is one from a Homo Erectus skull.

UPDATE: a good piece on Prof Teuku Jacob and Alan Thorne's reprehensible behaviour.

A Deplorable Proposition

The General

In 1798, General Napoleon addressed his troops who were preparing to do battle with Marmluks, a slave-warrior caste which had directly and indirectly ruled Egypt for over five hundred years. His goal was to wrest Egypt from the Ottoman Empire and obstruct Britain's access to India.

Pointing at the Great Pyramids of Giza that stood before them, he cried out: "Soldats! Du haut de ces Pyramides, 40 siècles nous contemplent".

(Soldiers! From the top of these Pyramids, 40 centuries look down upon us.)

This estimate of Napoleon's of the antiquity of the pyramids was all guesswork on his part as no one at that time really knew the age of the pyramids. As it turns out, even this seemingly generous figure underestimated their true age by half a millennia (not a bad guess but).

The Pasha

After defeating the Marmluks in Lower Egypt, Napoleon failed to consolidate his control over the entire country. Nelson managed to destry his fleet and in 1799, Napoleon left Egypt on a more pressing matter: to assume mastery of France. Two years later the French quit Egypt entirely.

This left a power vacuum which lead to a civil war and in 1805 control of the country fell to Muhammad Ali, an Albanian commander, who claimed to be reasserting the suzerainty of the Ottomans over Egypt but in practice began to rule the country as an independent nation.

Muhammad Ali liquidated the Marmluks, first by assassinating their leadership (the old feast and daggers trick) and then through outright massacre of the troops, destroying their power forever. His then went on to create a modern professional army which was based on peasant conscription, education institutions and a series of massive infrastructure projects designed to boost Egypt's economy and develop it into a formidable industrial and military power.

He built roads, canals, dams along the Nile and established Egypt as the world's largest cotton producer. Through these tireless efforts at modernisation and his ruthless exploitation of the peasantry, Muhammad Ali sought continually to strengthen his autocratic grip on the country and his de facto independence from Istanbul.

The Engineer

Muhammad Ali's ambitious projects required talented and energetic individuals to carry them out. He often relied upon the advice and expertise of foreigners and one of the most important amongst these, both in terms of his proven worth to the Pasha and the legacy he left to future generations, was a Frenchman by the name Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds.

Linant was engineer who had risen to prominence within the Pasha's service because of his efficient and meticulous execution of the Pasha wishes. Though little known today for his role in the initiating and constructing the Suez Canal (he also surveyed and plotted its course as well as serving as its chief engineer), perhaps Linant's greatest achievement was a work that he didn't do, the demolition of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Whispering Imps

So what is it with the whispering imps?

The Grandmother who eats everything

Ebu Gogo really living up to her name.

John Gurche's remarkably life-like facial and body reconstruction of Homo floresiensis over at National Geographic and John Hawks' take on them.

I was struck by the impression that it looked Indonesian. That is to say, something about the face structure, especially through the nose and eyes, spoke to me of populations in the region today. This impression was enhanced a bit by the coloration, and I can't say how much of it was created by deliberate choices made during the reconstruction process. Some certainly was -- for example, if Gurche had put fur and a chimp nose on like his AL 444-2 reconstruction, it would necessarily have looked more australopithecine-like. But I didn't get the impression that he used anything like Javan tissue depth standards, so I assume that much of my reaction comes from the bone structure itself. In any event, it's far from conclusive, but it did lend credibility in my mind to what Teuku Jacob has been saying about its features.

Personally, I don't think the face looks specifically Indonesian at all. There appear to be some superficial similarities with Melanesians and Australian aborigines, things like the accentuated brow-ridge and the skin colour (if the creature really was hairless, it would have almost certainly had dark skin to survive that close to the equator). One thing is certain though, she looks very human even while we remind ourselves that she was only a metre tall and had a brain the size of a grapefruit.

More facial reconstructions here, this time of Georgian skulls found at Dmanisi as well as an interactive map of the most significant hominin finds to date.

Life cycle

From the guy who brought you the Nemesis theory, we now have something new to worry about. In a study of underwater fossil records conducted by Richard A Muller and Robert Rohde of Berkeley, there appears to be strong evidence that the planet's bio-diversity fluctuates on an 62 million cycle. This cycle overlays all the major mass extinction events in the past 500 million years, including the Permian-Triassic extinction event which wiped out about 95% of all marine species and the more famous Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.

While the cycle appears to be quite clear in the data, the causes of it are not. Muller has long favoured an astronomical explanations for species die off but his co-researcher, Rohde, prefers the idea of massive periodic bouts volcanism.

Whichever is the case, I'd just like to point out that the last low point in this cycle happened just over 62 million years ago and that right now the planet's bio-diversity is plummeting at an alarming rate. Perhaps, they're right when they argue that Doomsday really is nigh.

Also of note: the dinosaurs died of athletes foot.

"Irreparable" Damage to Ebu Gogo

Thomas Sutikna of Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta briefly admires his discovery before it is stolen...er, I mean... borrowed by Prof. Jacob.

As Professor Macief Henneberg says in this heated debate with Professor Richard Roberts on the ABC earlier this month:

Let me finally straight out say that we are not discussing fossils at all. Neither the skeleton LB1 or any comparing remaining bones, but we didn't really study them, neither of those are fossilised. They're as fresh bones as those that are excavated - I have excavated several thousands of them - from cemeteries and burial grounds that are a few thousand to several hundred years old. This is not a fossil.

Indeed, these bones are not fossils, that is they haven't become mineralised and turned to stone. Instead they were preserved by the damp oxygen-starved mud of the cave at Liang Bua. Bones in this state are extremely delicate and when they were found, were described as having the consistency of "mashed potatoes" or "mud" and when dried became extremely brittle.

So while Henneberg has elsewhere defended Professor Teuku Jacob professionalism and experience, why is it that that when he had the bones they were handled so poorly?

According to this article in USA Today, the bones have "suffered irreparable damage [...] so extensive that it will limit scholarly research" on the new species. Most of the damage was caused by the application of rubber moulds which made at Jacob's lab, a process which, according to Tim White of the University of California-Berkeley, should never have been attempted on bones of this type. When the discovery team still had the bones in their possession, they chose to make CT scans instead.

Here is an outline of the damage according to the article:

Much of the detail at the base of the skull was pulled off.
The left outer eye socket and two teeth were broken off and glued back. Bits of molded rubber still adhere to some sections.
Long, deep cuts mark the lower edge of the hobbit's jaw on both sides, left by a blade used to cut away molded rubber.
The chin of a second hobbit jaw was snapped off, losing bone. It was glued back together misaligned and at an incorrect angle.
The pelvis was smashed, perhaps in transit, destroying details that reveal body shape, gait and evolutionary history.

Tony Djubiantono, the Centre's director is still pretty cross, "We have a big dispute with Professor Jacob [...] We didn't give him permission to do any of these things."

Self Destruction

The city, which was not built in a manner suitable to the grandeur of the empire, and was liable to inundation of the Tiber, as well as to fires, was so much improved under his administration, that he boasted, not without reason, that he found it of brick, but left it of marble. He also rendered it secure for the time to come against such disasters, as far as could be effected by human foresight.

--- The Divine Augustus by Suetonius

Here is an aerial view of the ancient city of Rome is as it would have looked circa 320 AD during the reign of Emperor Constantine. Looking as we are from the South East, starting from the left, you can see a bend in the Tiber river and the boat-shaped island of Tiberini. The half circular building next to it is the Theatre of Marcellus and raised and slightly to the right of that is the Capitol with its Temple dedicated to Jupiter. In the foreground is the enormous Circus Maximus, a venue for racing chariots which had a seating capacity of a quarter of a million. To the right of this is the palace complex on Palatine Hill and feeding into this is an aqueduct which snakes itself past the square perimeter of the Temple of the Divine Claudius. Directly above this is the elliptical shape of the Amphitheatre Flavius (better known today as the Colosseum). To the right of this are the magnificent grounds of the Baths of Trajan. The expanse of densely packed buildings behind the Colosseum is the sprawling and (somewhat disreputable) commercial district known as Subura.

Dino Meat : Finger Lickin' Good

Demineralised fragments from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone contain fibrous areas yielding structures that appear to be cells of a type found in living bone.

No one would expect that after spending millions of years in the ground, that there would be anything much in the way of organic material left in fossilised dinosaur bones. Fossilisation is a process in which animal remains become mineralised and after the passage of aeons, all that should be left would be a stone replica of the original creature.

However, at least in the case of a fossilised leg bone of a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus rex, scientists have been able to extract a flexible organic material which contains structures that appear to be cells and blood vessels. This material was extracted from the bone by dissolving its minerals in a mildly alkaline solution. What was left was stretchy and organic and appeared to contain a network of hollow blood cells. The researchers were able to squeeze out of these vessels tiny red and brown spherical objects which may be blood cells. Also identified were structures that resembled bone-building cells known as osteocytes.

Branching vessels found in bone matrix of a Tyrannosaurus rex and a modern ostrich.

Although the exact composition of this material is not known, an experiment which involves using antibodies to recognise collagen tested positive and this is a strong indication that some at least of the original proteins do still exist.

These results have since been replicated using the bones of two other tyrannosaurs and one hadrosaur (65 and 80 million years old respectively). All yielded a flexible material which preserved recognisable organic features. This indicates that the current theory that organic material should not last much beyond 100,000 years is wrong and that structures like these may be preserved more often than is commonly believed.

Is there any Dino DNA to be extracted from these bones? Unfortunately this seems very unlikely because the DNA molecule decays extremely rapidly after death, however, on a more positive note, some kinds of protein are known to last considerably longer. Proteins consist of long chains of amino acids and proteins in all living creatures use the same vocabulary of 20 amino acids. Each of these amino acids in turn correspond to a sequence of nucleotides on the original strand of DNA. It is thus possible (in a limited way because this mapping is not without its ambiguities) to work backwards and use the sequence of amino acids to reconstruct the original code of the gene that produced it.

Gratuitous but fun

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

King John, Act iv, Sc 2
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Dali from the Back Painting Gala from the Back Eternalized by Six Virtual Corneas Provisionally Reflected in Six Real Mirrors...

in 3D!

(and here)

(and more on the technique used here)

To see this pair of images in stereo, you'll need to cross your eyes.
All the usual caveats apply -- if you break something in the process then you own both halves.