The most precious jewelry in the world

It’s not the Koh-I-Noor or the Empress Eugenie Brooch or whatever my wife is wearing right now, it’s this:

neandertal_shell

It’s a small, broken fossil shell, collected from a fossil outcrop and transported 110 kilometers to a hole in the ground in Italy. Close inspection reveals that before it was broken, there was a pattern of abrasion in one spot that suggests a hole had been drilled in it and a loop of sinew threaded through it. Although most of it has been worn away by time, bits of material in microscopic pits on its surface reveal that once, this shell had been painted with red ochre.

It doesn’t sound like much. But then, what makes it precious is the burden of antiquity it carries: it’s about 47,000 years old, and it was made by Neandertals.

A few Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites preserve exotic objects with no obvious functional role and striking visual appearance such as quartz crystals, fossils, shells, and natural objects mimicking human or animal shapes. These are interpreted as the first evidence for the ability to distinguish ordinary from exotic items, to create conscious cultural taxonomies, and/or to detect iconicity in the natural world. Some argue these sporadic finds would have prompted the mental bridge between referent and referrer thus igniting the creation of symbolic material cultures. Although this possibility cannot be discarded, three reasons may favor the interpretation of the Aspa marginata from Fumane as a pendant, i.e. an object conceived to be suspended for visual display body through threading or stringing. The attention put to uniformly cover the outer shell surface with good quality red pigment suggests that this action may have been performed to make the object suitable for visual display. The wear detected on the inner lip, made of overlapping groups of striations oriented perpendicular to the shell main axis, is consistent with a sustained friction produced by a cord rich in abrasive particles, such as sinew. The absence of pigment on the shell fracture is most consistent with this item being used as a pendant.

It’s art. Very, very old art, made by a people who are completely extinct today, from a culture of which we have almost no knowledge, just these lost scraps with all context lost. That also adds great value to the object, that it is such a tiny fragment of knowledge, that it reminds us of how little we actually know about these long-gone people. Tens of thousands of years from now, if anyone is going through our decayed rubbish heaps, they aren’t going to find the Mona Lisa, a well-preserved space shuttle, or sheet music from a Beethoven symphony — they’re going to find a broken plastic toy from a McDonald’s Happy Meal, or a nicely symmetrical fragment of a concrete traffic bollard, and I suspect it will be regarded as a great and rare treasure then, too.

I also just find it wonderful to contemplate — that over 40,000 years ago, our relatives found enough stability and security in their communities that they had time to express themselves, and that they naturally exercised their minds and hands to create art, and that they worked to adorn themselves.

Peresani M, Vanhaeren M, Quaggiotto E, Queffelec A, d’Errico F (2013) An Ochered Fossil Marine Shell From the Mousterian of Fumane Cave, Italy. PLoS ONE 8(7): e68572. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0068572

A poll for the Irish gay folk

The Irish Constitutional Convention has decided in favor of gay marriage, but it is likely to be opened up to a referendum of the people next year. So we get a little poll, testing the waters.

How will you vote on gay marriage?

Against 48%
In favour 44%
Undecided 7%

I see the problem! They misspelled “favor”, so everyone is confused. I’ll help: in Ireland, voting “in favour” means you approve of gay marriage.

There. That should swing the voting around just right.

Department of Completely Unqualified Politicians Given Responsibilities for Which They Are Ill-Equipped

The UK Health Secretary, the man in charge of the National Health Service, is a fellow named Jeremy Hunt. He believes in homeopathy. Here is an excerpt from a letter he wrote to a constituent, defending homeopathy.

I understand that it is your view that homeopathy is not effective, and therefore that people should not be encouraged to use it as a treatment. However I am afraid that I have to disagree with you on this issue. Homeopathic care is enormously valued by thousands of people and in an NHS that the Government repeatedly tells us is "patient-led" it ought to be available where a doctor and patient believe that a homeopathic treatment may be of benefit to the patient.

Santa Claus is enormously valued by millions of young people, so I guess we ought to start subsidizing him. I believe that a vacation in the Bahamas would be of benefit to my heart condition, therefore my insurance ought to pay for it.

Notice that his response to an argument that the evidence shows that homeopathy doesn’t work is to rely on the subjective claim that people “value” or “believe” in this quackery. Belief should not be enough — it should not be prioritized over empirical evidence.

Oh, well, schadenfreude to the rescue. Ha ha you Brits, maybe your health care will be as sucky as ours soon enough.

AAAAAAIIEE! Philistines!

A number of valuable paintings were stolen from a Rotterdam museum by a ring of Romanian criminals.

The stolen works have an estimated value of tens of millions of dollars if they were sold at auction. Thieves took Pablo Picasso’s 1971 "Harlequin Head"; Claude Monet’s 1901 "Waterloo Bridge, London" and "Charing Cross Bridge, London"; Henri Matisse’s 1919 "Reading Girl in White and Yellow"; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 "Girl in Front of Open Window"; Meyer de Haan’s "Self-Portrait" of around 1890; and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work "Woman with Eyes Closed."

They’ve been found.

A Romanian museum official said Wednesday that ash from the oven of a woman whose son is charged with stealing seven multimillion-dollar paintings — including a Matisse, a Picasso and a Monet — contains paint, canvas and nails.

…

Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of Romania’s National History Museum, told the Associated Press that museum forensic specialists had found “small fragments of painting primer, the remains of canvas, the remains of paint” and copper and steel nails, some of which pre-dated the 20th century.

“We discovered a series of substances which are specific to paintings and pictures,” he said, including lead, zinc and azurite.

You are permitted to cry a little bit.

Differential Interference Contrast Microscopy, or the question I’m never asked

Thirty, almost forty, years ago when zebrafish were an up and coming model system and very few labs were working on them, we were used to going to conferences and reciting the zebrafish litany, a list of attributes that justified us working on such an oddball animal: we’d explain, for instance, that it was prolific, fast developing, and optically transparent, so we could see right into the nervous system in the living embryo. And you know, not once have I ever been asked the really simple and obvious question: if it’s transparent, then how do we see anything inside it?

I know. It takes a moment to step outside the assumptions (we say we see stuff, after all) and think about what transparency actually means. Of course, I always have an answer prepared: “With differential interference contrast microscopy, Nomarski optics specifically.” A polysyllabic phrase is always an effective way to shut down the rubes, isn’t it?

But I can also explain it in simple English, especially if I can flail about on a chalkboard at the same time. So let’s try.

[Read more…]

FtBConscience looms ahead

It starts Friday evening, Central time. You can view the full FtBConscience schedule online right now — please note that all times listed are on US Central Time. This is a purely historical artifact, because I put the first draft of the schedule together, and I included a big messy table of time zones that gave the hours of events in Perth and Moscow and points in between, and everyone puked over the complexity. I think they all just said “screw it, we’ll use Myers’ time zone”.

All the sessions are organized in one hour blocks of time; most are a single hour, a few are two hour discussions. The way this is going to work is that speakers should only assume they have 45 minutes to talk, and leave 15 minutes of slack for questions.

We’re going to be strict about the times, I hope. I’m moderating lots of sessions, set up in alternating hours, so if I don’t crack the whip and close out discussions promptly on the mark, I’ll get lost and confused. The FtB facilitators who are moderating the sessions will be under orders to be disciplinarians.

We also have a chat room set up for random conversations. We moderators will be watching that, but if it gets hectic questions might fly by. I’ll be watching the youtube channel for my sessions, so that’s another place you can leave questions/comments.

As always, go to FtBCon.org for the latest information. Miri is in charge of that, I think she might have a stroke when it comes time to deal with the flood of updates that will be necessary as the con is in progress. Be patient, this is our first time.

What? Indulgences are still a thing?

Everytime I get a peek into the weird world of Catholicism, it gets stranger and stranger. I had heard before that the Vatican was still offering “indulgences”, token recognition of piety that give you time off in purgatory, but I had no idea that they were going to make it technology driven — a medieval idea given a 21st century facade. But here they go, the Vatican has a new way to get time off in purgatory: follow the Pope on twitter!

All you have to do is follow the Pope’s 140 character tweets as he presides over Catholic World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, and presto, indulgences! No word on the exchange rate — is it like one tweet is worth one day off, or 140 seconds, or something? Does retweeting give you a special bonus?

If you thought Catholicism couldn’t possibly get more trivial or silly, I think they’ve just about hit rock bottom.

Oh, wait…

"What really counts is that the tweets the Pope sends from Brazil or the photos of the Catholic World Youth Day that go up on Pinterest produce authentic spiritual fruit in the hearts of everyone," said Celli.

Pinterest, too?

Could we also get spiritual credit if we set up a Pope porn tumblr?