You would think that science and monsters are strange bedfellows. And yet, there are plenty of science geeks, myself included, who get a good giggle out of pondering the science behind mythical beings and worlds. Clearly, somebody at the Royal Society of Chemistry has a similar sense of humour, for they have just published Vampirology. Here, chemist and science communicator Kathryn Harkup trains a scientific lens on the fanged fiend—not so much to ask whether vampires do or do not exist, but whether they could exist given our scientific understanding today.
Vampirology: The Science of Horror’s Most Famous Fiend, written by Kathryn Harkup, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in June 2021 (paperback, 262 pages)
In ten chapters, Harkup investigates a diverse range of vampiric traits or facts associated with vampire lore. For some, she does not necessarily provide a scientific blueprint for how vampires would achieve what are obviously supernatural feats but looks at how other animals achieve something comparable. Could you actually live on a diet of blood? Vampire bats can, but they have had to make all sorts of compromises to manage it. If vampire metabolism is anything like a human’s this presents problems: blood is not very energy-rich, it is poor in the needed minerals and vitamins, and it is far too salty and iron-rich. Or what of Dracula’s ability to transform himself into other animals? Given the relationship between mass and energy, Dracula would not be able to rapidly transform into a much smaller bat, which “would release the sort of energy seen in atomic explosions [which] would result in the total destruction of [London]” (p. 130). But some animals are capable of extreme feats of camouflage or mimicry of objects. Octopuses can squeeze themselves through very small openings, as long as their hard beak can fit, so that is the kind of flexibility Dracula would need to squeeze himself through small cracks. And the question of how Dracula might crawl up and down vertical walls naturally leads to a piece on the way geckos adhere to surfaces.
Equally often Harkup will use vampires as a springboard to marvel at the natural world inside and outside of us. There is, for example, an extended section on how blood works and the hit-and-miss character of early blood transfusions when blood compatibility was not yet understood. And the question of whether vampires might exist alongside us as another species of Homo leads into a discussion on human evolution and the revelations of ancient DNA, how large a viable population would need to be, and what genetic changes would have to evolve to, for instance, ensure extreme longevity.
“Our limited understanding at the time of how the human body decomposes led people to take anything out of the ordinary as evidence of a vampire [alllowing] Harkup to discuss all sorts of delectable details of decay”
Another approach Harkup employs is to try and find rational explanations for historical reports on vampirism. Several researchers have suggested that the symptoms of diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera fed into vampire lore, while the Spanish neurologist Juan Gómez-Alonso theorised the same for rabies. As Harkup discusses here, not all of these claims can stand the light of day. Other powers, especially psychic ones, are harder to explain. Dracula’s mastery of the weather? This is something we are not capable of even today. The psychic connection that Dracula formed with Mina? Equally unlikely, though it could well reflect the Victorian craze for mesmerism and spiritualism at the time that Bram Stoker wrote his famous book.
The state of human knowledge, or lack thereof, is particularly useful when it comes to explaining the eyewitness testimony of people exhuming the corpses of suspected vampires. Our limited understanding at the time of how the human body decomposes led people to take anything out of the ordinary as evidence of a vampire. This allows Harkup to discuss all sorts of delectable details of decay, such as the suspiciously ruddy complexion of some corpses (due to blood vessel and tissue breakdown), the blood-stained lips (so-called purge fluid being forced out of the mouth), and their occasional well-preserved appearance (due to the formation of grave wax or adipocere on the skin when fatty tissues are broken down). There is a range of environmental factors that influence how decomposition proceeds and death can be a restless respite: corpses move.
“One particular challenge in writing a book like this is that our conception of what a vampire is has changed through time: from sinister fiend to seductive villain”
From the above, it is clear that Harkup takes stabs at her topic from many angles. One particular challenge in writing a book like this is that our conception of what a vampire is has changed through time: from sinister fiend to seductive villain. As the introduction explains, they have a surprisingly long lineage in history and folklore. Our picture today, however, is still strongly influenced by Stoker’s Dracula, with subsequent theatre plays and the 1931 movie starring Bela Lugosi adding certain tropes such as the opera cape. Even Nick Groom, who charted the history of the vampire before Dracula in his well-received book The Vampire, could not get away from him, writing that: “all the paths of the (un)dead lead to Dracula, just as they all lead away from it” (p. xv). Stoker, for example, introduced the association with bats. An interesting tidbit Harkup reveals here is that the sensitivity to sunlight was, however, an invention of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 movie Nosferatu—Dracula walked the streets of London in broad daylight. That knowledge makes attempts at explaining this particular vampiric trait by retrofitting medical conditions look a bit silly. This has been attempted for pellagra and porphyria where patients are very sensitive to sunlight.
Although I do not have it at hand, a quick comparison with Ramsland’s book The Science of Vampires suggests that, despite some inevitable overlap, the two authors have different takes on the subject. Ramsland comes at it as a forensic psychologist. Vampirology is entirely in keeping with Harkup’s previous macabre trio of books with Bloomsbury on the science of Frankenstein and how Shakespeare and Agatha Christie shoved their characters off this mortal coil. I expect that any negative reviews will probably come from the small contingent of people who take vampires and vampirism extremely seriously. For the vast majority of us mere mortals there is less at stake here. Vampirology is a fine piece of popular science that has its tongue firmly planted in its ruddy cheek and comes recommended if you enjoyed e.g. Kaplan’s book The Science of Monsters.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
]]>Neanderthals have enjoyed quite the renaissance in the last decade or so, with research attributing skills and capacities to them once considered uniquely human. One of the most contested claims in this arena is language. Since (spoken) language does not fossilise, nor leave material traces in the archaeological record, the case for Neanderthal language relies on indirect evidence. In this book, linguist Rudolf Botha takes a hard-nosed look at why this matter is so controversial and offers a framework to properly tackle it.
Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of our Extinct Cousins, written by Rudolf Botha, published by Cambridge University Press in May 2020 (hardback, 209 pages)
The introduction to Neanderthal Language might intimidate as it immediately introduces Botha’s conceptual framework and attendant terminology. The book is as much a review of the many claims put forth as it is about the nature of evidence and how to evaluate claims. This is where it all gets a bit meta, so bear with me.
In his previous book, Language Evolution, Botha introduced what he calls the Windows Approach. Basically, since there is no direct evidence available to study the evolution of language, you have to rely on other phenomena for which you do have direct evidence, and then convincingly argue that these offer a window on language evolution. For your inferences and conclusions to be sound, three conditions need to be met. One, your conclusions need to be pertinent: whatever you are describing (here, language) should be properly identified. Two, your inferences should be grounded: grounded, that is, in accurate data that is informative of the phenomenon you are trying to study. And three, your inferences should be warranted: you should be able to justify why you can draw on this indirect evidence to say something about language evolution, i.e. you require a so-called bridge theory. Are you still with me? The first two chapters will require you to wrap your head around this framework, but stick with it, it is quite intuitive.
Botha evaluates two groups of claims that archaeologists and anthropologists use to argue for Neanderthal language: behaviours that are symbolic (personal ornamentation, cave art, body decoration, and burials) and non-symbolic (making stone tools, teaching it, and hunting big game). The last chapter shortly touches on biological attributes such as genetics (e.g. the gene FOXP2) and brain regions, but that is not the focus of this book*.
“[Claims for language rely on] complex inferences: you do not just jump from finding objects at a dig site to the conclusion of language.”
All of these claims rely on what Botha calls complex inferences: you do not just jump from finding objects at a dig site to the conclusion of language. So, for the personal ornamentation argument, the chain of inference runs something like this: we find objects associated with Neanderthal skeletons, we conclude these were worn as ornaments, from which we conclude in turn that they were treated as symbols, from which we conclude in turn that Neanderthals had language. The problem is that upon close inspection most claims already fall at the first hurdle, writes Botha.
The examples of cave art attributed to Neanderthals might have been made by other hominids; we just cannot date them accurately enough. Plus, their meaning remains a mystery—maybe they were symbols, maybe something else. The blocks of manganese dioxide yielding black pigment might have had other explanations than Neanderthal make-up, fire-starters being one likely candidate. And those burials were probably intentional, but the lack of clear grave goods undermines their symbolic status as funerary practices. Out of this lot, only personal ornamentation fares reasonably well. This is the largest chapter as there is much empirical work to make a pretty convincing case that objects found associated with Neanderthal skeletons were, indeed, used as jewellery.
Where all these claims fail is the inference that they are examples of symbolic behaviour. Botha asks probing questions, such as “what are the distinctive properties of symbols according to [these authors]?“, and “To what theory of symbolism do they subscribe?” (p. 54). Many authors are either not explicit about this, do not specify what would count as evidence for or against, define symbolism but present data that has no bearing on it, or, in the case of ornamentation, simply state that ornaments are symbolic by definition, excluding them from empirical verification.
“[…] there is much empirical work to make a pretty convincing case that objects found associated with Neanderthal skeletons were, indeed, used as jewellery.”
Even if, writes Botha, we assume for argument’s sake that these behaviours were symbolic: how do you go from there to language? The often unspoken assumption is “because language is also symbolic”. This lands you into a hornet’s nest of linguistics. I quote Botha: “By what bridge theory is [the inference] underpinned—a theory specifying the ways in which semantically non-combinable cultural symbols and semantically combinable linguistic signs are interlinked?” (p. 105). Without this, it is merely “an arbitrary inferential leap” to go from symbolic behaviour to language. Further problems are the vague and frequently different definitions of what exactly would characterise Neanderthal language, and the failure to distinguish between Neanderthal groups. “The Neanderthal” does not exist: they were not a monolithic entity, but a hominid species that were around for roughly 400,000 years, distributed over a large area. So who, exactly, are we talking about?
It is much the same for the non-symbolic behaviours, according to Botha. The stone-tool claims start with empirical data obtained on modern human volunteers. In the former, there is the assumption that tool behaviour and speech are similar enough that, because we knap stone tools using a series of actions involving hierarchies and recursions, so did Neanderthals, and from there that this also applies to their language. The latter argues that, since teaching stone-tool making by modern humans benefits from verbal instructions, it is likely that Neanderthals used language too. The only claim that Botha deems likely is that of big-game hunting. We have unequivocal evidence of cooperative ambush hunting of large prey, which would have required cooperation, which would have required communication, which would have required language. Even here, though, by mentioning a grammatically simple language such as Riau Indonesian, he points out it need not have been a complex language.
“[Botha] is not unfriendly to the idea of Neanderthal language […] but he calls for better science and offers a framework to do so.”
I mentioned this book gets rather meta, talking of conceptual frameworks and bridge theories, the nature of evidence and the evaluation of claims, and a healthy dollop of linguistics. Fortunately, it is also clearly structured, both within and between chapters, making good use of lists, headers, and figures to make its points. Though aimed at professionals, this book is perfectly accessible to a more general audience.
Books such as The Smart Neanderthal and Kindred have popularised the idea that Neanderthals are not all that different from us, so you might think Botha a bit of a party pooper. Note, however, that he is not unfriendly to the idea of Neanderthal language and explicitly says his criticism does not disprove it, but he calls for better science and offers a framework to do so. As such, Neanderthal Language provides a healthy dose of caution and scepticism for readers of general works such as the above and should be a valuable guide for practising archaeologists and anthropologists.
* After this review was published, a user on Reddit by the name of Denisova commented that they found it “a bit awkward that genetic and anatomical arguments are left out in his assessments.” This is a good point of critique that, in hindsight, I did not raise sufficiently. Botha mentions in his introduction they will not be the focus of this book, but it would have made for a more complete treatment if he had, possibly seeking the help of a co-author better versed in those fields.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
]]>
Whatever mental image you have of our close evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, it is bound to be incomplete. Kindred is an ambitious book that takes in the full sweep of 150 years of scientific discovery and covers virtually every facet of their biology and culture. Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes has drawn on her extensive experience communicating science outside of the narrow confines of academia to write a book that is as accessible as it is informative, and that stands out for its nuance and progressive outlook. Is this a new popular science benchmark?
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, written by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, published by Bloomsbury Sigma in August 2020 (hardback, 408 pages)
Two things immediately struck me when I received this book. First, a personal favourite, illustrated end plates! Since Kindred discusses discoveries made at numerous dig sites, there is a map of Europe and part of Asia with their locations. At the back, there is a family tree showing the complex interrelatedness between early Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Second, at just shy of 400 pages with the bibliography online (more on that later) and having a larger trim size than usual for a Bloomsbury Sigma title, this is a chunky book
The reason soon becomes apparent: Sykes covers a lot of ground in this book. The deeper evolutionary history of our family tree, the history of Neanderthal discovery, their skeletal morphology, the traces and injuries that reveal their hardships in life, the climatological fluctuations during the 350,000 years of their existence on this planet, the stone, wood, and bone tools they produced and left behind, their diet, the temporary nature of their home sites as deduced from traces of fireplaces, their migrations and mobility in the landscape, the material traces hinting at a sense of aesthetics, the educated guesses we can make about their social and emotional lives, their funerary practices, the ancient DNA revolution, and, finally, the various explanations given for their disappearance. The scope of Kindred is nothing short of breathtaking. Her acknowledgements mention that the eight years it took to write this book were as daunting and as difficult as she had feared they would be, and the enormity of the task is clear.
“[…] the tools now at the disposal of archaeologists border on science fiction. Most certainly quite beyond the imagination of the pioneers, but even a formidable task for current scientists to keep on top of.”
Part of the reason is that technological advances have led to a veritable explosion in new methods to apply and new kinds of questions to ask. I was familiar with some of these, such as ancient DNA and the microscopic patterns of wear and tear left on teeth, but many were entirely new to me. The use of computers to fit stone flakes and fragments back together to reconstruct how a piece of stone was chipped and shaped into a tool? The use of laser scanners to document dig sites in exquisite three-dimensional detail? The analysis of the microscopic stratigraphy in soot layers, known as fuliginochronology? The use of isotopes to study where individuals were born and then moved to during their lives? As Sykes remarks, the tools now at the disposal of archaeologists border on science fiction. Most certainly quite beyond the imagination of the pioneers, but even a formidable task for current scientists to keep on top of.
This avalanche of information and techno-wizardry could have resulted in an inaccessible monolith of a book. There were a (very) few places where I felt Sykes careened into a dense thicket of details, such as when discussing the different lithic techno-complexes (for us mortals, the different styles of stone tools). And she does not always explain technologies. I assume most people will not know what the deal is with ancient DNA or what mtDNA even stands for. By and large, however, this book stands out for being fascinating, accessible, and terribly exciting. This is a golden age for archaeology! Most chapters are just the right length to avoid information overload, while a handful of drawings illustrate tricky concepts.
The picture that emerges of Neanderthals is that of hominins who are increasingly indistinguishable from early Homo sapiens; inventive, smart, social creatures, likely capable of spoken language, that survived for a very long time while weathering ice ages and warm periods. This picture is delivered in vivid writing that sometimes borders on lyrical—there were passages where I felt Sykes channelled the voice of deep time:
“Amid ancient surfaces densely spangled with myriad artefacts, fireplaces are like archaeological wormholes, bridging the impossible chasms of time separating us from long-vanished dwellers.”
But there is much else in her writing to admire. There are fascinating histories: how some skeletons ended up scattered over different countries, surviving multiple wars before the different body parts were reunited decades later. She reveals how archaeologists used to work and think, and how that has changed. For example, early excavators could not tell the difference between naturally shattered versus intentionally knapped rocks, thus discarding vast bodies of evidence at dig sites without recording them. In some cases, these are now being re-excavated for renewed examination. She repeatedly warns of simplistic interpretations and sexed-up headlines that dominate the news, instead stressing the far more interesting nuances, such as the fantastically complex patterns of population dispersals, influxes, turnovers, and interbreeding revealed by ancient DNA.
One of Sykes’s side projects is co-curating the website TrowelBlazers which celebrates the achievements of women in archaeology, geology, and palaeontology. Thus, I expected a certain progressive outlook. Indeed, why should the evidence for interbreeding always be interpreted as rape? Why is “desire and even emotional attachment […] regarded as more of a fairy tale than other explanations”? But she goes well beyond that, positively surprising me. Such as when parsing the complex and incomplete evidence for cannibalism in Neanderthals. She challenges the reader to consider different ways of interpreting this behaviour. Or by highlighting how Indigenous knowledge from hunter-gatherer communities can offer completely fresh perspectives on the archaeological record. This can illuminate blind spots of Western scientists, whether practical (the identification of tracks in the physical record) or more fundamental (challenging our ingrained tendency to see everything through a lens of dominance, exploitation, and conflict).
“[…] this book stands out for being fascinating, accessible, and terribly exciting. This is a golden age for archaeology!”
Finally, one decision that might divide opinions. Sykes opens the book explaining why, after careful thought, she did not include citations for claims and statements, focusing instead on the narrative. She has provided a 122-page bibliography online, but unfortunately, there is no link between references and what part of the text they are relevant to. Although I understand her reasoning, I have always found the use of superscripted numbers leading to individual notes and references to be a minimally intrusive middle road.
Though Kindred is not the first book to point towards a certain Neanderthal renaissance, its scope and authoritativeness eclipse what has come before. Whether you wonder what book to start with when new to the topic, or which book to pick if you only have time for one, Kindred is without a doubt the go-to book for a nuanced and current picture of Neanderthals.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
]]>
“Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet“, written by Will Hunt, published in Europe by Simon & Schuster in January 2019 (hardback, 277 pages)
It starts off innocently enough, with Hunt discovering an abandoned train tunnel running beneath his home in Providence, Rhode Island. This left in an indelible impression that would be reawakened when he moved to New York City and became part of the city’s urban explorer crowd. From here, Underground follows Hunt on trips around the world, exploring the Parisian catacombs, a sacred Aboriginal ochre mine in outback Australia, the underground cities of Turkey, and the Mexican tunnel systems that became such an intimate part of late Mayan culture.
Hunt weaves history throughout his tales. From the prevalence of the underworld in the gods and places of Greek mythology to the Magdalenian culture, “the Rennaissance Florentines of the Paleolithic Age”, who littered European caves with carved statues and wall paintings between 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. He introduces an extraordinary cast of historical characters, from the 19th-century Parisian cataphile Nadar, who was a very early tinkerer in subterranean photography, to the first attempts at underground mapping by Edouard-Alfred Martel, whose cartographic conventions we still use.
“The modern West may be a secular society now, but go underground, Hunt observes, and “we perform an unwitting shadow-performance of the old rituals […]””
Another very prominent aspect of Hunt’s story is the religious and spiritual pull these places have always had (see also Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on the Ritual Use of Caves). Examples he gives include the worshipping of the underground deity El Tío by Bolivian miners, the ritualized Aboriginal pilgrimages to dig up ochre, or the many shamans and philosophers who retreated underground for vision quests and extended retreats. The modern West may be a secular society now, but go underground, Hunt observes, and “we perform an unwitting shadow-performance of the old rituals, sometimes following the ancient choreography down to the last gesture” as we have to twist and contort our bodies in the same way to descend into these spaces.
As Hunt points out, subterranean creation myths are prevalent in cultures around the world. One could even argue that scientists have their own version of this. He joins a team of microbiologists working for the NASA Astrobiologist Institute Life Underground who hunt for so-called “intraterrestrials”, the microbes living deep underground, possibly even throughout Earth’s crust in microscopic passageways (see Deep Life: The Hunt for the Hidden Biology of Earth, Mars, and Beyond for much more on this). And he shortly considers the deep evolutionary history of burrowing animals, writing of ants in particular (see my review of The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath Our Feet for more on that). Hunt also considers the neurobiological basis to the powerful experience of being underground, illustrating it with his own tales of the disorientation when getting lost in catacombs, or the hallucinations that accompany the sensory deprivation when he camps underground in the dark for twenty-four hours.
“Hunt joins microbiologists […] who hunt for so-called “intraterrestrials”, the microbes living […] throughout Earth’s crust”
Part of what makes Underground such a fascinating book to read is the exclusive access it gives the reader. Over the years, Hunt has become increasingly well-connected in the world of urban explorers, anthropologists, and archaeologists. He meets one of New York’s most elusive and secretive graffiti artists, considered a phantom by the photographer who followed his work for over two decades but never met him. And he gets up close to an exceptional palaeolithic sculpture in the privately owned and zealously guarded Le Tuc cave in the Pyrenees, which archaeologists consider the most inaccessible major decorated cave in Europe.
Hunt has placed his narrative front and centre in this book, forgoing footnotes or an index (though major works are referenced in the text), but adding many fascinating though uncaptioned archival photos throughout. I became so engrossed in the book that I managed to blitz through its 260 pages in between the gaps of a single working day. This is an absolutely mesmerizing book.
So, how does Hunt’s Underground compare to Macfarlane’s Underland? It feels Macfarlane casts his mind outwards more, pondering deep time and the Anthropocene, while Hunt turns his gaze inwards, probing the more human side: religion, spirituality, and neurobiology. Macfarlane, as a nature writer, is more poetic in his writing, though Hunt, using a different tone, is an equally masterful storyteller. Underland is carefully annotated and referenced, but barely illustrated – Underground is the reverse. And even though both writers end up exploring under Paris and both touch on topics of biology and archaeology, it is striking how little they overlap. Clearly, the world under our feet is so vast there is space for more than one book. So why pick one? I heartily recommend them both!
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
, 
, __________________________________________________________________
]]>
, These three tasks, so says nature writer Robert Macfarlane, signify our relationship with the world beneath our feet, both across time and across cultures. Underland is his lyrical exploration of underground spaces where people have sought shelter from warfare or hidden valuable treasures, are extracting minerals in mines or knowledge in research facilities, or are looking to dispose of waste. It is one of two big books published only five months apart on the subterranean realm, the other being Will Hunt’s Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet which I will be reviewing next. But first, Underland.
“Underland: A Deep Time Journey“, written by Robert Macfarlane, published in Europe by Hamish Hamilton in May 2019 (hardback, 496 pages)
For those who don’t know him, Macfarlane has been writing about “the relationship between landscape and the human heart”, bagging several literary prizes along the way. For him, Underland is a conclusion to a personal story-arc of exploration that started up high with his fascination with mountains (see Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination) and descended from there (see his books The Wild Places, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and Holloway). The book is based on more than a decade of exploration, usually in the company of experienced locals.
Think underground, and you will likely think caves, and there is plenty of caving here. Macfarlane takes the reader into the underground river Timavo in Italy, a starless river that speleologists have been exploring and mapping for decades. He is guided into the karst landscapes of the Slovenian highlands that hide a chilling legacy of ethnic cleansing dating to the second World War, when corpses were dumped down sinkholes by the thousands. He explores cave chambers in Norway’s Lofoten archipelago, whose cave paintings make it the Lascaux of the high North. And he traverses, and descends into, glaciers in Greenland. But he also ponders realms not accessible to us, such as the “wood wide web”, the symbiosis between tree roots and soil fungi. This might allow trees to exchange information with each other, even crossing species boundaries. The idea of this “underground social network” has been popularised by Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World.
“He joins urban explorers […] in Paris and London who roam […] under these cities, “shadow twins to the upper world””
But equally fascinating are the human subterranean landscapes he enters: prehistoric barrows (cemeteries) in Somerset, and a modern rock-salt mine in Yorkshire where excavated chambers double up as laboratories for physicists probing the universe for dark matter. He joins urban explorers, so-called cataphiles, in Paris and London who roam the crypts, catacombs, wells, bunkers, tunnels, and drains under these cities, “shadow twins to the upper world” (see e.g. Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within or Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital). And he gets a tour around the subterranean waste facility in Olkiluoto in south-west Finland, currently under construction, which will store highly radioactive spent uranium fuel rods for 100,000 years. A feat which brings with it a whole new suite of considerations – how do you warn the species of the future to stay away?
What make these 400+ pages of caving, crawling, and occasional claustrophobia such a joy to read are Macfarlane’s evocative descriptions. Here is a word-smith at work, who can go from profound (“To these subatomic particles, we are the ghosts and ours the shadow-world, made at most of a diaphanous webwork”) to funny (“If you wish to listen for sounds so faint they may not exist at all, you can’t have someone playing the drums in your ear”) with but a flourish of his pen. The things he has seen have etched themselves into his memory, and he is intent on burning them into the memory of his readers in turn. From the majestic and rarely witnessed calving of a Greenland glacier (“a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses, all of them joined together into a single unnatural side-ways collapsing edifice”), to the surreal dumping ground in mid-Wales where locals have been pushing car wrecks down an abandoned mine shaft (“The result was an avalanche of vehicles […] a slewing slope of wrecks”). There are some truly memorable passages in this book.
Two themes run through this book, one already hinted at in the book’s subtitle. The first is that of Deep Time; the vast stretches of time in which geologists think when describing the evolution of our planet (see e.g. The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History). “Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth”, writes Macfarlane. Whether it is caves that have been hollowed out by the lapping of the sea over milennia, or the palaeoclimatological archive that we are retrieving from glacial ice cores (see The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future), going underground brings into focus the steady grind of our planet. Although a human lifespan pales into insignificance, Macfarlane resists apathy. Much like Bjornerud (see my review of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World), Macfarlane hopes that “deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as a part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years”.
“[…] going underground brings into focus the steady grind of our planet.”
Tying in with this is the theme of the Anthropocene, the newly proposed geological epoch based on the detritus that humanity is leaving in the rock record (see my review of The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit). Like others before him, such as Alan Weisman in The World Without Us or Jan Zalasiewicz in The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, Macfarlane asks what legacy we are leaving behind. Nuclear waste is obviously one of the longest-lasting, but there are other revelations in this book. I was, perhaps naively, shocked to read of the mining company that simply abandons worn-out excavators, which cost £3.2 million, underground.
Each chapter opens with a black-and-white photo or illustration. I woul have loved to see more images, perhaps a colour plate section, as there are some striking photos included in this BBC interview. A book of this calibre leans on poetic language to a certain degree, but nowhere did I find Macfarlane self-indulgent or flowery. On the contrary, the book provides its own beautiful raison d’être during an interview with plant scientist Merlin Sheldrake. Macfarlane ponders how to make sense of the implications of the symbiotic interaction between fungi and trees: “Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi… We need to speak in spores.” To which Sheldrake enthusiastically replies: “That’s exactly what we need to be doing – and that’s your job […] the job of writers and artists and poets and all the rest of you”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
So, how does Macfarlane’s Underland compare to Hunt’s Underground? It feels Macfarlane casts his mind outwards more, pondering deep time and the Anthropocene, while Hunt turns his gaze inwards, probing the more human side: religion, spirituality, and neurobiology. Macfarlane, as a nature writer, is more poetic in his writing, though Hunt, using a different tone, is an equally masterful storyteller. Underland is carefully annotated and referenced, but barely illustrated – Underground is the reverse. And even though both writers end up exploring under Paris and both touch on topics of biology and archaeology, it is striking how little they overlap. Clearly, the world under our feet is so vast there is space for more than one book. Why pick one? I heartily recommend them both!
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
, 
, __________________________________________________________________
, 
or 
, __________________________________________________________________
or 
or 
, __________________________________________________________________
or 
, 
or __________________________________________________________________
]]>
, 
, 
“Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone“, written by Brian Switek, published in the US by Riverhead Books in March 2019 (hardback, 276 pages), and in the UK by Duckworth in August 2019 with the title “The Secret Life of Bones: Their Origins, Evolution and Fate” (paperback, 288 pages)
Switek starts off with a potted evolutionary history of the skeleton, taking the reader all the way back to the Cambrian, some 455 million years ago. The small fossils of Pikaia gracilens are some of the earliest evidence we have of the starting point of skeletal evolution. Looking for all the world like a small worm, it was one of the first creatures to possess a notochord, a cartilage-like structure that is the precursor of the backbone. (For a more technical exposé of that borderline between vertebrates and invertebrates, see my review of Across the Bridge: Understanding the Origin of the Vertebrates.)
He then hops, skips, and jumps to other significant milestones; fossils of the fish Entelognathus primordialis show the transition to jawed fish, while Tiktaalik roseae (see Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor) shows the transition of vertebrates moving onto land. He considers protomammals, the cynodonts, whose offspring lived through the age of the dinosaurs, and the primordial primates, noting how the changing skeleton acquired more and more traits we now think of as human.
This part is far from a complete overview of the evolution of skeletons (for that, see e.g. Skeletons: The Frame of Life), but that was never the intention. It does allow Switek to exercise his funny bone, wondering whether without the evolution of jaws the book and movie would instead be known as Pharyngeal Slit, or comparing the earliest invasion of land by plants to a prehistoric salad bar. At the same time, he is keen to correct misunderstandings about evolution: “It is easy to make categorical divisions between humans and apes when extinction has removed your ancestors”. Similarly, as Tiktaalik shows, any true invasion of land did not coincide with the origin of fingers and feet, with fish evolving into amphibians only millions of years later. This should do away with the misconception of evolution being goal-oriented (beyond, you know, making it to the next generation).
“Without the evolution of jaws, would the book and movie instead be known as Pharyngeal Slit?“
But we cannot dwell here any longer. Bone as living tissue is fascinating, and Switek introduces the physiology, with osteoblast cells continuously forming new bone while osteoclasts break it down again. Something that goes off kilter when astronauts spend months in space and lose bone mass. That makes hibernating bears all the more of a miracle, how do they not lose bone mass? Switek has the answer. Bone can be moulded in life, as seen by cultures around the world that change the shape of infants’ skulls, while in death it retains a personal history of disease and injury. Archaeologists are becoming increasingly skilful at elucidating these stories (see for example Injury and Trauma in Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Violence in Past Lives and Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology).
At this point Switek transitions seamlessly into the cultural significance of bone, and how especially skulls have become emblems of death. Neanderthals appear to have been much more sophisticated than we have long given them credit for, as evidenced by burials (see my review of The Smart Neanderthal: Cave Art, Bird Catching, and the Cognitive Revolution), while his recounting of the exhumation of Richard III’s skeleton in a Leicester car park in 2012 is a fascinating archaeological detective story.
A far darker chapter that Switek tackles with panache is the heritage of anthropology. The pseudoscience of phrenology (where measurements of the bumps on a skull supposedly predicted someone’s mental capacities and traits) was long used to justify white man’s superiority. As he mentions, anthropology may not have invented racism, but it certainly fueled it through the 19th and 20th century. Switek is deeply troubled by the resurgence of the idea that race is biologically meaningful. As has been documented at length, there is more variation within populations than between populations, and the overlap between what we thought of as races is enormous (see strident takedowns in The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea and Superior: The Return of Race Science).
“[…] anthropology may not have invented racism, but it certainly fueled it through the 19th and 20th century.”
This naturally leads on to the literal skeletons in the closets of many research collections. Lance Grande, a curator at Chicago’s Field Museum, dedicated a chapter to this in his book Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums. The repatriation of old skeletons to for example Native American tribes, for whom the bones of the deceased hold particular spiritual significance, is becoming more commonplace. But not all museums are going along with it, as evidenced by Switek’s story of the skeleton of the Irish Giant Charles Byrne, who is still on display. Another one of those eye-opening tidbits in the book is his peek at the online trade in human bones on platforms such as eBay and Etsy (who have since cracked down on it), and now Instagram. You are far better off building your own.
Each chapter opens with a drawing from the 1733 book Osteographia or the Anatomy of Bones. These are lovely, and my only bone of contention (sorry) is that there aren’t more illustrations in the book. I would have loved to see some photos included, as Switek describes many wonderful things. For that, readers will have to turn to, for example, the work of palaeoartist John Gurche (see my review of Lost Anatomies: The Evolution of the Human Form) or, two of my personal favourites, Evolution in Action: Natural History Through Spectacular Skeletons and Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley’s Curious Collection. Other slightly less spectacular but still noteworthy books are The Skeleton Revealed: An Illustrated Tour of the Vertebrates and Skeletons: The Extraordinary Form & Function of Bones.
Skeleton Keys is a multifaceted exploration of bones and their biological and cultural importance that is very absorbing. Far from a macabre gawk-fest (Skeletons! Eek!), Switek capably handles a range of serious topics, smoothly transitioning between them. The narrative sizzles, whether it is with witty jokes or genuine ire at the disrespect to bones and the questionable ideas they are used to prop up. An incredibly enjoyable book that comes highly recommended.
*Note that the book is published in Europe by Duckworth in paperback with a completely different title: The Secret Life of Bones: Their Origins, Evolution and Fate.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
Other recommended books mentioned in this review:
, 
, 
or __________________________________________________________________
or 
or 
, __________________________________________________________________
, 
, 
or __________________________________________________________________
or 
__________________________________________________________________
]]>
