The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

12. EDGE PEOPLE

Rincewind's 'edge people' are a caricature of early hominids, and quite close to what anthropologists used to think Neanderthals were like. We now think that Neanderthals had a bit more going for them, quite apart from burying their dead. At least, it suits the mood of the times to desire to think that they did have something happening behind that big brow-ridge. A bone with holes in it, which some archaeologists believe to be a 43,000-year-old Neanderthal bone flute, has been found in Slovenia. But others dispute that it is a musical instrument. Francesco d'Errico and Philip Chase have studied the bone carefully, and they are certain that the holes were gnawed in it by animals, not bored by a musically minded Neanderthal. We do not know if it's been handed to a musician ...

Whatever the status of the flute, it is clear that Neanderthal culture didn't change significantly over long periods of time. The culture that led to us did. It changed dramatically, and so far it's never stopped. What made us so different from the Neanderthals?

According to the Out of Africa theory, our ancestors, and everybody else's, came from an original population that evolved in Africa. They migrated through the Middle East; the ones bound for Australia probably left from South Africa, but might have gone round through the Far East and Malaysia. If you've got boats, you can do either.

In principle the immune-gene story that we discussed in Chapter 10 could tell us more, but nobody's yet done the research: either the Australian 'aborigines' have the same gene spectrum as the rest of us post-bottleneck humans, or they have their own small and characteristic selection instead. Whichever is the case, it will tell us something interesting, but until someone gathers the genetic data, we have no idea which interesting thing it will tell us. A lot of science is like that, a win-win situation. But try explaining that to the bean-counters who control research funding.

When we speak of 'migrations' in this context, you shouldn't think of the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. It wasn't a case of one group of humans taking forty years or whatever and conquering other hominids along the way. It was more likely the successive formation of small settlements, slowly getting further and further away from the original homeland. The people themselves didn't even know that they were migrating. It was just 'Hey, Alan, why don't you and Marilyn settle down to hunter-gathering a couple of valleys over, by that nice Euphrates river?'

Then, after a hundred years, there would be a few settlements on the far side of the river, too.

This isn't pure speculation: archaeologists have found some of the settlements.

If humans formed new settlements a mile away every ten years, it would take only 50,000 years, a mere 1,000 grandfathers, for them to diffuse from Africa all the way to the frozen north. And they surely diffused faster than that. Hardly anybody actually went anywhere; it was just that the kids set up home a few hundred yards along the track, where there was a bit more room to bring up their kids.

As we diffused, we diversified. It is impressive how diverse we are, physically and culturally.

But perhaps, from the elvish viewpoint, we're all much the same, from Chinese to Inuit to Maya to Welshman. Our similarities are far greater than our differences[40]. We had diversified in Africa, too, from the tall willowy Masai and Zulus to the !Kung[41] 'pygmies' and the stout Yoruba. These peoples are really, anciently, different: they differ from us, and from each other, almost as much as wolves differ from jackals. The post-bottleneck humans differentiated quite recently, just as the breeds of dogs differentiated from one kind of wolf (or perhaps it was a jackal).

This kind of rapid differentiation is a standard evolutionary story, called 'adaptive radiation'.

'Radiation' means 'spread', and 'adaptive' means that the organisms change as they spread, adapting to new environments -and, especially, to the changes brought about by their own adaptive radiation. It happened to 'Darwin's finches', where one small group of finches of a single species arrived in the Galapagos islands, and within a few million years had radiated into

13 separate species, plus a 14th on the Cocos Islands. (We wonder what the legend of The Fourteenth Finch might be.) Another well-known example is the vast array of cichlid fish that diversified in Lake Victoria over the last half a million years or so. There they produced variants for the catfish niche, for the planktonic filter-feeder, for the general-detritus feeder; they evolved into species with big crushing teeth for eating mollusc-shells, species that specialised in scraping scales or fins off other fish, and species that specialised in eating the eyes of other fish. Yes, really: when fish from that species were caught, all they had in their stomachs was eyes[42]. These cichlids ranged in size from a couple of centimetres to half a metre. The original river-dwelling species Haplochromis burtoni, whose descendants they all are, grows to a length of 10-12 centimetres.

Curiously, the range of genetics of these fishes was quite small, considering their morphological and behavioural ranges: about the same as out-of-Africa humans, but not as wide as in-Africa humans. At least, that's the case according to some reasonable ways to estimate genetic diversity.

The second part of this story nearly always involves extinction: just occasionally, one of the newly differentiated species has evolved a new and successful trick, and survives while all the others perish.

But the usual demise of these specialised, adaptively radiated fish happens when a professional specialist -a catfish perhaps, whose ancestors have been feeding on detritus for 20 million years

-comes in and takes over from the amateur cichlid catfish. Unfortunately, in this case, it wasn't an inoffensive catfish, but the Nile perch, a specialised carnivore from an ancient stock. The Nile perch has now cleaned out nearly all of the Lake Victoria cichlid explosion, which is why we wrote the previous passage in the past tense[43]. The main remnants of that glorious radiation of the cichlids are now to be found in the homes of a few amateur hobbyists, who are keeping some of the odd cichlid species in aquaria, and the Geoffrye Museum in London, which by chance has one of the largest ranges of cichlids and is now sponsored by public bodies. We don't know yet if any of the cichlid variants in Lake Victoria has hit on a trick to survive even the Nile Perch.

It's difficult to know what Nile Perch is about to come in and prune Homo sapiens' current diversity. With luck, it will be our own propensity to miscegenation, aided and abetted by airlines, despite the contrary admonitions of our priests. Maybe we'll all be mixed up into one fairly diverse type. Or maybe it will be Independence Day aliens, out to conquer the galaxy. Or perhaps more competent ones, with elementary virus protection software.

Were we the Nile Perch for the Neanderthals? What was special about us that they couldn't compete with? In an editorial in Astounding Science Fact and Fiction, John Campbell Jr proposed that we have been selecting ourselves -in very elvish ways -from earliest times.

Campbell credited his idea to the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Morgan, but in truth Campbell contributed most of the story.

It runs: we select ourselves, through puberty rituals and other tribal rites. To some extent these interact with our religious stories, but as a socialising technique the puberty ritual may have preceded all but the most basic of animistic beliefs. It certainly sits at the base of our Make-aHomo- sapiens kit. But the Neanderthals may not have possessed such a cultural kit, at least not in the same effective form. If they didn't, they would probably have been much like Rincewind's edge people, indeed like all the other great apes: settled and (mostly) contented in their Garden of Eden, but not going anywhere.

What is so special about puberty rituals? What story makes them a necessary part of how we evolved ourselves into the storytelling animal? Just this, said Campbell: puberty rituals select the breeders. This is the standard mechanism of 'unnatural selection' used to breed new varieties of dahlias or dogs, only here it bred new varieties of humans or stabilised existing varieties. The wizards have always known about unnatural selection, and it is reified on Discworld as the God of Evolution in The Last Continent. Unnatural selection is not just a matter of genetics, either. If you don't get to breed, then you don't have the opportunity to pass on your cultural prejudices to your children. At best you can try to pass them on to other people's children.

Here's how it works. Over there, we see a group of half a dozen lads, perhaps aged 11 to 14. The older men have prepared an ordeal, and the kids must endure this to become accepted as full members of the tribe: that is, breeders. Perhaps they will be circumcised or otherwise wounded, and the wounds will be 'dressed' with painful herbs; perhaps they will be whipped with scorpions or biting insects; perhaps their faces will be seared with red-hot metal brands; perhaps (indeed, usually) the older men will violate them sexually. They will be starved, purged, beaten ... oh yes, we are a very inventive species in this regard.

Those who ran away were not accepted into the group[44], and so were not breeders. So, in particular, they were not our ancestors, because they weren't anyone's ancestors. In contrast, those who submitted to the humiliation were rewarded by acceptance into the tribe. Campbell's insight was that these puberty rituals selected against the immediate animal avoidance-of-pain response, and selected for both imagination and heroism: 'If I bear this pain now I will be rewarded by getting the privileges these old men get, and I can imagine that they went through exactly this, and survived.'

Later on it was the priests who administered the pain. That is how they became the priests, and how successive generations came to 'respect' them and their teachings. By then, humiliation had become its own reward, at both ends of the instrument of torture (see Small Gods), and humans had been selected for obedience to authority.

Indeed, Stanley Milgram's book Obedience to Authority shows just how obedient we are, by using the authority of a white laboratory coat to force people to torture other people, remotely.

The other people were actually actors, responding to 'mild', 'strong' and 'excruciating' pain - or so the experimental subject was led to believe -with the appropriate actions. Milgram's book shows how human beings invented authority and obedience, both very elvish sentiments. That ingredient in the story of our evolution explains Adolf Eichmann as well as Einstein: we won't go any deeper into that issue here, because we've already covered it in The Privileged Ape and Figments of Reality. A few people refused Milgram's instructions, though, and these mavericks have always been generated either by experience (some of the refusers had survived concentration camps, or had been otherwise tortured themselves) or by the Make-a-Human kit itself. Many of these kits generate a few mavericks, and we are optimistic about the Western one that uses Hollywood films to laud resistance to authority. But perhaps that comes only by working through the right genetics and the right home background.

Many of these ancient rituals have become empty now. Jews use circumcision to test the parents'

commitment, rather than that of the baby, who has no choice. Jack was the Boston foreskin collector in the early 1960s; it was a very good source of the living human skin samples that he needed for his research on pigment cells in the skin. He saw a lot of parents, many of whom went very pale and a few of whom fainted: more men did that than women. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah is very daunting to the child, in prospect, though, as with circumcision, nobody fails it -not any more. But people did fail in the past, with serious consequences. For example in the ghettos, where only a third of the population married, the mothers of the 'best' girls chose only the boys who performed their Bar Mitzvah best. This would account for the kind of verbal success that the Jewish faction of many Western populations has achieved. Another explanation, that Jews were permitted verbal abilities only because land-or property-owning was denied them, is a contextual constraint within which they had to live. Why they were good enough verbally to succeed despite that constraint is the interesting question, and Bar Mitzvah competition and selection of breeders is a persuasive answer.

Gypsy populations provide a possible counterexample, though, with very little testing of young men before marriage, which frequently takes place at ages that other cultures consider to be pre pubertal. The few gypsies who have been successful in Western cultures have not been primarily verbally successful. Music provides a good contrast, with gypsies excelling in dance while classical composers and instrumental soloists are often Jewish. Of course, gypsies also share our common selective ancestry, if we're right about puberty rites being ancestral and effectively universal.

The other great apes don't torture their children for ritual purposes, and the other hominids like Neanderthals probably didn't either. So they haven't produced a civilisation. Sorry, but that which does not kill us does appear to have made us strong.

There is another story that we now tell, about what happened to the young men around the time when people were inventing agriculture, which explains barbaric societies. Don't get us wrong here: we don't mean that torturing adolescents is barbaric. It's not, from the tribal point of view.

It is an entirely proper way to get them accepted into the tribe. 'We've done it ever since god-onhigh made the world, and to prove it, here's the holy circumcision-knife we've always used.' No, from the tribal point of view, the barbarians that we have in mind are awful; they don't have any rules or traditions ... Even the Manky tribe, over that way a couple of miles, is better than them; at least the Mankies have traditions, even if they are different from ours. And we've stolen some of their women, and they have the most amazing tricks ...

The problem is that lot up on the hillside, the young men who have been expelled from the tribe because they failed the rituals, or went of their own accord (and so failed the test anyway).

'Couple of my brothers up there with 'em, and Joel's boy, and of course the four kids that were left when Gertie died. Oh, they're all right on their own; it's when they're in that gang together, all doing their hair in that same funny way to be different, that you lock up the sheep and let the dogs loose. They've got these funny words like "honour" and "bravery" and "pillage" and "hero" and "our gang". When my brothers come down the valley to my farm -by themselves -I give

'em some food. But some gang of young men, I'm not saying it was that lot and I'm not saying it wasn't, set the Brown's farm alight, just for the hell of it ...'

In any cowboy film we find the message that barbarism is opposed to tribalism, that honour and tradition are not good bedfellows. And that, having selected himself or herself for imagination and the ability to endure pain for future pleasure, Homo sapiens is now prepared to die for his or her beliefs, for his or her gang, for honour, for hatred, or for love.

Civilisation, as we know it, seems to combine elements of both ways of human culture, tribal by tradition and barbaric for honour, for pride. Nations are internally tribal, but present a barbarian face to other nations. Our extelligence tells us stories, and we tell our children stories, and the stories guide us about what to be or do in what circumstances. Shakespeare is the ultimate civiliser, in this view. His plays were composed against the barbarian background, in a city where you could see heads on spikes and ritually dismembered bodies; all of them were set on the tribal, traditional base that is most of human life, most of the time. He tells us very persuasively that evil fails in the end, that love conquers, and that laughter -the greatest gift that barbarism brought to tribalism - is one of the sharpest weapons, because it civilises.

Cohens are the hereditary High Priest lineage of the Jews. Jack was once asked, in Jerusalem, whether he was not proud to be a Cohen, in view of the noble Jewish history that the High Priests had promoted. Jack sees this nobility as based in about six inches of blood in the streets, nearly all of it other people's, so he is not proud. Instead, to the extent that any of us is responsible for what their ancestors did, he is ashamed. He loves Small Gods, in much the way he enjoys the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur: it engenders a feeling of repentance, and he can always find plenty to repent. He is sure that this emotion -guilt -is a legacy of the Morgan/Campbell selection of his ancestors through tribal rituals.

Tribesmen aren't 'proud'; for them, everything that isn't mandatory is forbidden, so what is there to be proud about? You can praise your children for doing things right, or admonish or punish them for doing things wrong, but you can't take pride in what you -a fully fledged member of the tribe -do. That comes with the territory. However, you can be guilty about not having done the things that you should have done. Having said that, High Priests waging war on dissenters or neighbouring tribes, leading to atrocities like heads on spikes, is straight barbarism.

The distinction between tribalism and barbarism is illuminated by the story of Dinah in chapter

34 of Genesis. Dinah, an Israelite, was the daughter of Leah and Jacob, and 'when Schechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her'. Then Schechem fell in love with her, and wanted to make her his wife. But the sons of Jacob felt that maybe Schechem had gone about things in the wrong order: "... the men were grieved, and they were very wroth, because he had wrought folly in Israel in lying with Jacob's daughter, which thing ought not to be done'. So when Hamor, the father of Schechem, asked for approval of the marriage, and for an intermingling of his tribe with the Israelites, the sons of Jacob came up with a cunning plan.

They told the Hivites that they would agree to the proposal, but only after the Hivites had circumcised themselves, so that they were just like the Israelites. The Hivites were willing to go along with this, because they told themselves that 'These men are peaceable with us, therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade therein; for the land, behold, it is large enough for them; let us take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our daughters'. The decision was made, and 'every male was circumcised, all that went out of the gate of the city'. And they stood around in pain for a couple of days. At that point, Dinah's brothers Simeon and Levi hauled Dinah out of Schechem's house, put all the Hivite men to the sword, destroyed their city and took all their domestic animals, their wealth, their children and their wives. This story of deceit and betrayal has not been given much circulation in recent years; it doesn't appeal to people's sense of humour any more, as it once did.

At any rate, in that story, the Hivite response to Schechem's crime is tribal, but the Israelites behave like barbarians. The Hivites, after their initial mistake, want to make amends and coexist peacefully, and they're prepared to offer dowries and other concessions to try to make up for what Schechem did. But all that matters to the Israelites is a twisted kind of 'honour', in which cruelty, murder and theft are justified to protect Dinah's reputation. Or, more likely, their own sense of manhood.

A favourite Discworld character is Cohen the Barbarian, a satire on sword-and-sorcery heroes like Conan the Barbarian, all muscles and trolls' teeth necklaces and testosterone-propelled heroism. He first appears in the second Discworld novel The Light Fantastic:

'Hang on, hang on,' said Rincewind. 'Cohen's a great chap, neck like a bull, got chest muscles like a sack of footballs. I mean, he's the Disc's greatest warrior, a legend in his own lifetime. I remember my grandad telling me he saw him ... my grandad telling me he ... my grandad ...'

He faltered under the gimlet gaze.

'Oh,' he said. 'Oh. Of course. Sorry.'

'Yesh,' said Cohen, and sighed. 'Thatsh right, boy. I'm a lifetime in my own legend.'

Cohen, by then 87, is the sort of barbarian whose hordes ride into town, set the houses on fire and look wistfully at the women. But he's no softie: as he ages, he goes hard, like oak. In Interesting Times he explains to Rincewind why, in the area known as the Ramtops, there's no future in the Barbarian business any more:

'Fences and farms, fences and farms everywhere. You kill a dragon these days, people complain.

You know what? You know what happened?'

'No. What happened?'

'Man came up to me, said my teeth were offensive to trolls. What about that, eh?'

According to Jewish tradition, Cohens are the true Cohanim, the lineal descendants of Aaron.

Recent research into the genetics of Cohens has turned up some interesting findings about the very prideful (barbaric) issue of Cohen heredity. Professor Vivian Moses (yes, indeed ...) and a group of scientists in Israel decided to check whether the tradition has any factual basis. Just as the mitochondrial DNA sequence traces female heredity, so the Y-chromosome, possessed only by males, can be used to trace male heredity.

There has been an interesting division of the Jewish peoples, and that provides a scientific check on the story of the Cohanim. During the Diaspora, some Jews remained in North Africa, but one large population went into Spain. They are known as Sephardi, and the Rothschilds, Montefiores and other banking families are all Sephardic. Another, more diffuse population went into middle- Europe, especially Poland, and they are known as Ashkenazi. Moses and his colleagues looked at the Y-chromosomes of representative Sephardi and Ashkenazi Cohens and non-Cohens

('Israelites'). They found characteristic DNA sequences, specific to Cohanim, in about half of the Cohens that they tested, but with small and characteristic differences in the three groups. From these differences it is reasonable to suppose that Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews separated rather less than 2,000 years ago, and that all Cohens were a single group only 2,500 years ago.

This looks like a very nice story, with the DNA evidence supporting the expected history. But science is the best guard against believing things because you want to. There is a factor that Moses and his colleagues didn't explicitly consider, and it needs to be explained away, because it makes those figures much too good.

Most human groups pretend to practise monogamy, but like swans and gibbons and other creatures that we thought were faithful for life, there are plenty of adulterous relationships and children 'whose legal and biological parentage differ'. In English society, about one child in seven is in that position, and the proportion doesn't differ much between the slums of Liverpool and the stockbroker belt of Maidenhead[45].

The most restrained people that we know, in this regard, are the Amish of Eastern Pennsylvania and other parts of the United States, for whom the figure is a mere one in twenty. So, to err on the safe side, let's assume that all of the Mrs Cohens, from the present day back 100 generations to the sons of Aaron, were as well behaved as the Amish. Then the proportion of Cohen males with Aaron's Y-chromo-some should be 0.95100, which is considerably less than one in a hundred. So how can it be as high as one in two?

There is a possible explanation, consonant with what we know about human sexuality, or at least with what John Symons, an expert on human sexual practices, says in his books. According to many surveys of sexual behaviour, going right back to Alfred Kinsey around 1950, women practise adultery with men of both higher and lower status. The two situations frequently occur in different social contexts, with women 'doing favours for' higher status men (think Clinton), but going down-market for 'a bit of rough'. Overwhelmingly often, however, when a baby results the father is of higher status than the woman's husband or regular partner.

This implies that if Mrs Cohen, living in a ghetto or any other predominantly Jewish society, wants to go up-market, her only choices are other Cohens. So the maintenance of the Aaron Y- chromosome may have been assured by sexual snobbery rather than amazing fidelity, and that's a much more likely story.