jamieproctor.ca

“But what’s left to say?” you might not ask, so I will ask myself for you. “We’ve already covered shark attacks, dangerous sharks, and several hideous photoshop’d lolsharks!” “Why, but the shark’s senses, Jamie,” I tell myself in the condescending voice I use for friends and relatives. “You should know about this already, you shallow and insufferable twit.” I laid myself out after this with an enthustiastic yet inept punch to my frail, porcelain-like jawbone, so I can’t recall the rest of that conversation and the following article may become incomprehensible in places where my brain damage in leakeds.

Electroreception

This chart, sadly, contains no pie. Imagine one for yourselves.

Since we’re going alphabetically, first up on the list of shark senses is one that we don’t have any equivilant for, because we suck. Jelly-filled tubes in a shark’s face (the Ampullae of Lorenzini, named after the guy who first really took a look at them in the 1700s) detect electrical fields in the water. How sensitive are they? They can detect muscle contractions. Go from this to the fact that the heart is a muscle, and if you’re close enough a shark will notice you based solely on your heartbeat. That’s pretty impressive, and in fact sharks may be the most electrically sensitive animals on the planet. It’s extremely possible that they also use the Ampullae to find their way around the world, sensing the planet’s magnetic field and electrical currents within the oceans – a useful trick for any species that wander around a lot.

Hearing

It'll hear you coming. But it only loves you for your spearfishing.

Shark hearing tends towards good. Higher-pitched noises give them difficulty, however – the upper registers of our hearing are completely soundless to them. Screw that crap. This is the ocean, not some namby-pamby surface world. We use LOW-PITCHED sounds here, and we like it, and sharks hear those like a cat hears a can opener. They can hear very low noises with incredible accuracy for several miles…. such as those emitted by something splashing into the water, or a fish struggling in distress. No, I’m not deliberately trying to add a sinister bent to each and every capability, why do you ask?

Sight

Jeepers creepers, where'd you get those peepers.

Being underwater all the time makes sight slightly less useful than it is in the crisp, clean (well, nowadays smoggy and filthy) air of landbound critters. Still, shark eyes are good, and (naturally) can see better underwater than a human’s. They can see you before you even know they’re there okay I’ll stop now. Anyways, shark eyes. The more durinal the shark is, the better its eyesight, the more nocturnal, the worse (harder to see at night and all that). Daytime active hunters tend towards the best eyesight. All sharks possess the tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer of tissue behind the eye that bounces light entering it back outwards, allowing improved night vision. Cats and dogs possess it as well – visible in cameras and at night as “eyeshine.” That’s right, shark eyes glow in the dark sorry I said I’d stop that. Many sharks possess a sort of eye-covering lid called the nictating membrane, which flips over their eye when they’re doing something that might hurt it, like mangling flailing prey. However, some, like the great white, don’t have this. Instead, to protect their vulnerable eyes when biting, they roll them back in their sockets, turning them from all-black to all-white (permission to shiver slightly granted) and relying on their other senses to land the kill.

Smell

Don't laugh; it works.

Ah, smell. The most famous shark ability, the ol’ “able to find a single drop of blood in an olympic swimming pool.” Truth be told, fish guts have always excited sharks more than blood under testing, but it’s still no exaggeration. Sharks have phenomenally keen noses, and that above swimming pool line is a fancy way of saying “one part blood per million seawater.” This nose leads them to prey over very large distances, as well as sewege outlets. Now you have one more reason not to swim near them – no need to thank me. By the way, the odd head shape of hammerheads, as seen above, is thought to provide a sort of extra platform for scent – making it very easy to determine smell direction by testing which nostril the scent is in, swinging the head back and forth as you swim. It’s also supposed to provide a broader platform for the Ampullae of Lorenzini, for much the same reasons – hammerheads are particularly adept at finding buried rays made completely invisible by hiding in the sand.

Lateral Line

Note how line-like it is.

Yet another sense our feeble bodies don’t possess, but this one is scarcely unique to sharks – fish in general have it, as well as a few other marine organisms. The lateral line’s function can best be summed up as “ranged touch.” Groups of hair cells surrounded by jelly form “neuromasts,” which sense vibrations and movement in the water around them, arranged in, well, a lateral line down each side of the shark. They have a much longer sensory reach than the shark’s electroreception, and their hair cells bear a curious resemblence to those in the inner ear, hinting at a common origin. It might also let sharks tell if big chunks of low pressure – like say, a hurricane – is coming towards them.

I could mention taste and touch, so I will. The shark’s mouth tastes stuff, and also touches stuff, because the rest of the shark is covered in thorny dermal denticles (skin-teeth, or tiny little spiky bits that make a shark’s skin aquadynamic sandpaper). So if a great white grabs you in its mouth, it might just be seeing what the hell you are. You can’t fault curiosity.

• Credits:
• Drawing of electroreceptors in shark head: Public domain image from Wikipedia by Chris_huh.
• Whitetip reef shark: Public domain image from Wikipedia, from NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
• Bigeye threasher: Public domain image from Wikipedia, from PIRO-NOAA Observer Program.
• Scalloped Hammerhead: Public domain image from Wikipedia by Littlegreenman.
• Diagram of shark’s lateral line: Public domain image from Wikipedia by Chris_huh.

Once again, it’s time to talk about people. This time, however, we’re going to do so under the aegis (delicious greek word) of physical/biological anthropology. We’re going to go check out the hominids in general. As per usual, I warn you that I’m not an expert and not only could you not take this information to the bank but you probably shouldn’t put it in your piggy bank either. Even inside a sock hidden under your mattress is a bit suspect. That said, here we goooo….

Mom, where do humans come from?

Why from the depths of time, Jimmy. Hah, just kidding. Humanity’s origins are barely from the very tip of the peak of the crest of the gently moving wave of the surface of the kiddy pool of time. We are latecomers and we are by here by chance, same as anyone else. Presumably, like almost every species ever, we’ll also soon be extinct. Them’s the breaks.

Annnnyways, our first appearances as a group (hominids) distinct from the rest of the primates show up around 6-7 million years ago, when our ancestors and chimpanzee ancestors split off from one another. Maybe someone said something they shouldn’t have in the heat of the moment, and if it weren’t for one mouthy simian, evolution’s course would’ve altered. Whatever. Anyways, after this follows a neat and linear progression of steady improvement from primitive ancestors to modern-day oh who am I kidding. Human evolution is a MESS, and our evolutionary tree looks more like a briar patch. Entire clans of anthropologists have vanished into it and never returned, and sometimes others come back changed and haunted by memories of seeing their colleagues torn limb from limb by rampant taxonomy.

The oldest thing we have that’s possibly a hominid (some people are arguing it’s too ape-ish) is Sahelanthropus tchadensis from Chad, dating back to the 6-7 mya (million years ago) limit or around then. We’ve got his noggin, some teeth, and five chunks of jaw. Maybe he was in a barfight. From then on we move into a gradually more and more tangled mess. We’ve got Ardipithecus ramidus from around 4.5 mya in Ethiopia, Australopithecus anamensis from roughly 4.1 mya near Lake Turkana in Kenya, and Australopithecus afarensis from 3 mya in Ethiopia and Tanzania (the species to which the famous fossil dubbed “Lucy” after the Beatles song belongs to). This last one comes with a twofer of confusion, where some of them are around five foot and 150 pounds and others are 3.5-4 foot tall, most likely from sexual dimorphism (the differing of shape between sexes in a species, most often in terms of size). This can only add to the trouble of identifying what the hell species some random jaw fragment you found belongs to.

Past about 3 mya afarensis‘s descendants started to split up further, making things even more annoying. You got the Australopithecus africanus of south Africa and 3 mya, the A. garhi from around 2.5 mya, and the more robust bunch of A. aethiopicus, boisei, and robustus from 3-1 mya around east and south Africa. Somewhere in this thicket is our ancestor. Or maybe we haven’t found him yet. Whichever.

Humanity Rhymes With Mundanity

Around 2-1.8 mya the genus Homo appears in its early forms. Bigger brains, smaller jaws and teeth, more dexterous hands, and diminished sexual dimorphism are its trademarks, along with the first stone tools (mastering the innovative and appealing idea of “smack chips off a rock, then take the chips and cut shit up,” leading into the Oldowan, the oldest form of stone tool industry).

Say hi to grandpa, kiddies. Hiiiii grandpa!

First up to the plate is Homo habilis, or “handy man.” Haven’t you ever noticed your plumber’s sloping cranium and pronounced brow ridge? If you have, you should probably phone an archaeologist somewhere. Dating back around 2 mya, this fella looked fairly similar to the good ol’ Australopithecines of ye olden dayes, but with a slightly less apelike skull. Apparently he still ate lots of fruit, but was more than willing to scavenge meat (whether or not they actually hunted is up in the air verging on not likely). He was walking upright and had a very strong hand – good for grasping and climbing, not quite so hot at fine manipulation, but still very precise and useful in toolmaking. Females were still probably shrimps compared to the big boys, and his larynx hadn’t descended yet – a process that begins around 1.5 mya with H. erectus and finished around 300,000 years ago, allowing complex speech and the uniquely human ability to choke on your own food. Thanks to the mess of our history, by the by, H. habilis may contain two or more early Homo species. Just in case you thought this was starting to become sensible.

Java man: unrelated to coffee or scripting.

After H. habilis came Homo erectus (“upright man”), whose name makes my filthy-minded sister snigger constantly. Pervert. Anyways, he showed up around 1.9 mya and celebrated the occasion by spreading around like crazy, starting out in eastern Africa and ending up in southeast Asia by 1.8 mya, probably motivated by the Sahara getting dry as a bone, forcing them northwards and outwards across the planet. Like habilis, erectus may or may not include a few species lumped together, such as H. ergaster, which it may in fact be a subspecies of. Or H. ergaster may be a subspecies of erectus. Or not. Look, it’s complicated, all right? Whatever their relationship, by a million years ago they were pretty much the last hominids standing, from a 1.6 mya pre-Ice Age population of five or sixish species. Being bigger may have helped.

Erectus and co were larger, less prone to sexual dimorphism, and in general much more similar to modern humans in overall proportions (probably less hairy than their predecessors, too). They had pretty fancy brow ridges still, but they had a cool 750 cubic centimetre brain size – an improvement over the 600-700 cc size of habilis, and one that shaped their skulls quite differently. They used it, too – fire shows up in east Africa nearly two million years ago, tamed fire in south Africa and the Kenya Rift Valley around 1.6 mya, opening up many diferent food sources, protection, and hunting. Stone tools were getting more and more complicated, even in Asia, where stone tools are slightly rarer because the locals sensibly used bamboo for many things (lightweight, strong, sharpenable…what more do you want?). Flaked hand axes, wooden spears, and scrapers for wood and skinning all show up, and a specific form of hand axe technology covering Africa, Europe, and parts of Asia is termed Acheulian. It was the greatest thing since chipped rocks, and more specifically, the Oldowan. Big-game hunting was helped along by both the bigger bodies and the nasty new toys, and horses, rhinoceros, bison, deer, and bears were all brought down in various locations.

Enter the Most Ironic Scientific Name Ever Conceived, Plus, Uncle Ned

Anyways, around 250,000 years ago (woah, what happened to millions?), archaic versions of Homo sapiens (“wise man”….ostensibly) show up. But we don’t have the scenery to ourselves for long. Another Homo offshoot sprouts up, the eminently cold-adapted and robust Homo neanderthalensis (or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, depending on whether or not you think they’re a subspecies of us or just very close relatives), or the Neanderthal (if you want to be very German, as you would due to his bones being found in the Neander Valley, pronounce it “Neandertal”).

Your cousin Julie, twenty thousand times removed on your mom's side.

Neanderthals were by far the most similar to us of all our relatives, which made their differences all the more notable. They stood about five foot on average, were built robust (think dwarves – hugely strong bones with massive muscle attachments), had almost no chins, brow ridges, receding foreheads, projected faces, and brains that seem to be slightly larger than our own. Needless to say, explaining why we’re still around and they aren’t has always been an interesting affair. They were built for the cold, and did pretty well in Ice Age Europe. The stone tool industry termed Mousterian is heavily associated with them, and was quite an improvement over the old Acheulian hand axes – the same pound of flint that could make two nice hand axes could be turned into more than 30 inches’ worth of Mousterian cutting-flakes, using “prepared cores” of flint to create perfect surfaces to strike sharpened flakes from. It was also hard as hell; there are probably about twenty modern flint knappers that can approximate some of its tricks (“Levallois technique,” anyone?) as well as its creators did. Stone tools ain’t no game for kids.

Neanderthals buried their dead at least occasionally, ate one another now and then (reasons unknown), and seem to have occasionally left items in burials like red ocher powder and goat horns, pointing at some sort of symbolism. Who hasn’t done all of those things at least once, I say. Anyways, they were all gone by about 22,000 BC. Whether we outcompeted them, killed ’em off, or absorbed them is up in the air, although genetics testing says the last option’s probably not very likely beyond limited hanky-panky. Also, given our historic attitude towards things even marginally different from us (“Your skin is weird! WAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!“), I think I know where I place my money.

Yes, we sent porn into space. Just in case.

Well, what else is there to say? Homo sapiens either showed up in Africa and spread out like crazy (the “out of Africa” theory, a la erectus) or H. erectus populations worldwide gradually evolved into first archaic H. sapiens, then modern humans (the “multiregional model”). The latter option feels uncomfortably racist (“This uncivilized lot probably only became modern in the past millennium!“) and also has to deal with the issue that African populations have the most diverse types of mitochondrial DNA of anywhere on the planet, which fits nicely into the idea that we’ve been living there longer than anywhere else – which is confirmed by African finds showing modern features earlier than anywhere else on Earth. Don’t think we’ve gotten out of the confusion yet, though – human distribution patterns worldwide make no sense more often than not (“How did we manage to colonize Australia 45,000 years ago again, thousands of years before good boats?“) and there’s more than plenty to argue about.

The rest of history after this is a long and cloudy series of people stabbing each other repeatedly and building statues.

Original material copyright 2009, Jamie Proctor.

• Picture Credits:
• Australopithecus africanus sculpture: crafted by Toni Wirts, public domain picture from Wikipedia. Cruellly vandalized in Paint by yours truly.
• Skull KNM ER 1813: picture taken by José-Manuel Benito Álvarez, 2007, public domain image from Wikipedia.
• Illustration of Java Man’s skull: drawn by J. H. McGregor in 1923, public domain image from wikipedia.
• Reconstruction of Neanderthal child: “Some people claim that this image is “incredibly human.” However, according to Christoph P.E. Zollikofer, it was made using modern techniques of computer-assisted paleoanthropology from the Gibraltar 2 Neanderthal specimen discovered by en:Dorothy Garrod at Devil’s Tower, en:Gibraltar in 1926. Tomographic scanning was used to convert the remains into a computer model, from which a physical model was constructed using a stereolithography apparatus. Soft tissue was then extrapolated using a thin plate splining technique originated in 1991.When distributing this image, provide a link to Anthropological Institute, University of Zürich as a courtesy to them.” Public domain image from Wikipedia.
• Depiction of man and woman from the Pioneer’s plaque: Public domain image from Wikipedia.

Good midday. I’m Joey Fishlips and you’re watching OMG’s Not Really News: All the news that’s fuelled by booze. And drugs. Can’t forget the drugs. Weekends just before the peahen screams thrice at the sun after dark, weekdays at ninety-five o’clock.

Our headliner for the night is a big one: a giant porcelain skull modelled to resemble the cranium of Shaquille O’Neal shut its eyes earlier today when the artist was attempting to paint its nostril hairs. The artist, Pensy Flipfloor, also claimed that it asked her to “go lower and use a scratchier brush,” but sceptics have noted that she is not entirely reliable given her prior claims that her mother was a wallaby. The elder Mrs. Flipfloor (nee Persnickushions) was unavailable for comment, as she was busy licking a pathway for her freshly-born son to travel along her belly so that he might reach her marsupial pouch and secure milk to allow his continued growth. If she or her family existed, she might have been persecuted for unsafe parenting.

Less gossip, more international politics to follow! It does not seem that three hours ago, a Jamaican Great Hammerhead shark illegally crossed national boundaries by swimming into Florida’s waters. A lack of commands sent via radio from the US Coast Guard were not met with defiant silence, and a warning shot across the shark’s bows did little to dissuade her because it was never fired. As the Jamaican citizen swam directly towards the 90-foot cutter, still ignoring warnings to place her hands on her head and cease movement, the Coast Guard was forced to assume she was armed and dangerous and opened fire in self-defence, promptly killing her. The shark, age 14, will not be buried Monday in the soil of Jamaica, where she didn’t spent so much of her tragically short life, dying at least six years before the estimated lower end of the average age of her species.

A domestic update: efforts to struggle against a controversial new tax law are not still being rallied, and are not now spearheaded by non-existent homosexual senator Harold Adams. “This measure is unjust and will punish those with lower income moreso than the upper class,” claimed the public official, who is gay. When he wasn’t pressed for further comment, the senator, repressing his sexual attraction towards men long enough to speak further, added that he would fight this law “all the way to the top,” much as in the common phrase “on top” relating to two people engaging in sexual activities, one on top and one on the bottom, in this case obviously referring to the handsome young men that the senator would very much enjoy having sex with. Following this brief added tidbit the senator turned on his heel and entered the courthouse, undoubtedly forcing him to recall the many times he had entered, or been entered by, other men. Because he is gay. A gay human male.

In technology tonight we’ll have an in-depth look at a recent event in which a San Francisco man’s wristwatch failed to gain sentience. Hubert Humphrey has never claimed that he was simply drinking a glass of orange juice when his relatively cheap digital watch blinked twice at him and began to scream at the top of its lungs, breaking into a hysterical lament at the incredible unlikelihood of its existence being undermined by the fact that its operational lifespan is measured inside of three years. Plans to transplant it into a Rolex aren’t well underway, although the watch remains nigh-inconsolable by means religious, philosophical, or scientific. It responded well to gummi bears, however, particularly the weird transparent ones that are probably meant to be pineapple or something.

A new age of exploration is at hand, echoing back to the days of Lewis and Clark, Pizarro and Cortez, Magellan and Cook, as the formerly lost and now found continent of Atlantis wasn’t recently located just off the coast of New Jersey, about half a kilometre offshore. Scientists haven’t hypothesized that no one was really paying enough attention to locate the fabled kingdom, which measures approximately more than a thousand miles across at its widest point. Precise measurements will be forthcoming as buckskin-bedecked explorers armed with grizzled beards and muskets have been dispatched into the wilderness of the new world with sundry supplies including 200 pounds of flour, a canoe apiece, trading beads, pemmican, spam, the clap, and smallpox. Historical precedent is being followed precisely to the letter, and experts are confident that we can expect a much more peaceful and gentle first contact with the unknown inhabitants of the land. Incidentally, rumours of gold have brought thousands of Americans and Canadians across the narrow strait and into the virgin wild, where they are building crude settlements and persecuting each other.

Continuing our story from last whenever, parts of northern France haven’t been discovered floating slightly past Neptune in the unimaginably infinite and utterly lifeless void of space – the first sighting of the landmass since it removed itself from the planet, turned into a giant robot, and hyperbolically announced its goal of destroying Pluto. A large chunk of the Eiffel Tower, which witnesses claim was reconfigured into the mighty sword of the behemoth, has been knocked free, apparently by violent force. Despite the original and official fictional intent of the being to defeat the rogue non-planet in the center of the galaxy, it seems that Pluto did wage dishonourable warfare upon it, striking it from hiding as a coward would, using Neptune’s bulk as an ambush point. The rest of France has broken its silence to state that if its god-brothersoul had perished from treachery, “The Milky Way Itself Shall Wind About And Tear At Our Foe, The Planet Who Is Not, And His Dying Song Will Rupture The Minds Of Entire Nebula.” At this point most of the assembled media backed slowly away from France, which had begun to leak sparks of concentrated energy from its eyelids. This afternoon, thousands of pieces of Brie all around the world shuddered with frightful violence, then exploded. This bodes ill.

A nonexistent caving trip in Kentucky led to the discovery of a several-hundred-year-old man named Bronson, who claims he was shoved in by his sister as a youthful prank at age six. Bronson claims to owe his long life to a sulphurous, stench-ridden underground pool that constantly rejuvenated his body and quenched his thirst while he hunted earthworms for food. Tragically, the pool was destroyed when the excavators brought in heavy equipment to penetrate the walls of his prison, but Bronson remains mellow, stating through his halitosis-laden, rotted-toothed, drooling maw that he was sick and tired of drinking it anyways and it was high time he got a date. Then he blinked twice and bit our cameraman, apparently because he was hungry and craved the taste of warm, succulent human flesh. This would explain the eighteen skeletons clad in spelunking gear found lying about his filthy nest, which he claimed he had whittled out of chalk using only his elbows.

An infinite amount of monkeys have staged a press conference in New York, announcing that they have written the complete works of Shakespeare given an infinite amount of time and a single typewriter apiece. The leader, one named SubatomicParticlesAreNotAChildrensPlaything, says that all it took was for them to evolve sufficiently to comprehend quantum mechanics, dismantle their typewriters to create cold fusion, use the power source to transcend space/time, then spy on Shakespeare as he wrote each play over the course of his life, transcribing it as they went. They plan to publish the results in separate volumes including all lost plays at the rate of once a month. This one’s almost strange enough to be true.

And that’s OMG’s Not Really News. I warn you to attempt whatever you just heard about at home, in the faint hope that your death brings a moment of actual entertainment and hilarity to our dying, burdensome, pathetically grounded planet. I’m Joey Fishlips, and I hope your children marry carp with herpes.

Copyright 2009, Jamie Proctor.

Well, on Saturday morning I leave for the frigid wyldernesse ofe Northeron Ontarioe for two weeks. Seeing as there’s no internet there, there shall also be no updates for all two of you reading this (I count myself and my mother). On the other hand, I’m going to throw two bonus updates at you tomorrow to tide you over. Don’t gobble them both in the same day or you’ll go hungry for the rest of my absence. Instead, to attain maximum authenticy, read one apiece on Wednesday, preferably absurdly late in the day when any sane person would’ve posted something at ten o’clock if not earlier.

An Update: Okay, we’re leaving at 7:30. My average time of wakeup is nine, my average time of coherency is eleven. Therefore, your updates arrive early.

I confess, I had nothing for this week. I’d flooded you with enough dull definitions and poorly-worded mediations on why people act like they do (dips, mostly) that my essaying juices had run dry, and although I’ve finally managed to start up writing again, the resulting short story is (A) unfinished and (B) twenty pages long as of last count. Ah well, maybe you can take a gander by next week as some sort of two-parter. To fill time, here is a list of animals that will kill you horribly.

The Varied and the Venomous

The following creatures are venomous. Not, it must be noted, poisonous. If you’re poisonous, picking you up or eating you is dangerous. If you’re venomous, you’re shoving your venom into something of your own un-molested will, be it through sting, stab, or bite.

The Box Jellyfish, AKA the “Sea Wasp.”

Not actually a box shape, or a wasp.

What is it? A jellyfish. Contrary to its nicknaming, it hurts a lot more than a wasp. Its wispy little tendrils contain the most potent venom of any known animal, and if you casually swim into it facefirst you’ll probably experience more pain than your body’s nerves can possibly comprehend, followed shortly thereafter with death, which would come as a relief if your brain was capable of thinking about anything other than the terrible, terrible pain.

Why has it just killed me horribly? It’s a jellyfish. Technically, it does not even have a brain or central nervous system. Most likely you failed to notice the almost completely transparent little bag of death hovering quietly in the water until you swam into it.

The Brazilian Wandering Spider, AKA “The Banana Spider.”

Yes, this picture is horrifying. I apologize.

What is it? The name sort of gives it away, doesn’t it? It’s a highly grouchy and aggressive spider with a leg span that can get up to five inches across that wanders around looking for things to bite with its horrible, horrible jaws and pump full of what may very well be the most toxic spider venom known (honorable mention to the Australian Funnelweb spider and the Sydney Funnelweb in particular, which casually lives within an 100-kilometre bubble that includes Australia’s largest city, for sheer perfection of bad location). Sometimes it sits in bananas. Sometimes those bananas end up in supermarkets. Yes, most of those incidents are quite likely to be urban legends, but it’s worth passing on these stories so you can tell them to your small, gullible children. That’s why you had them, right?

Why has it just killed me horribly? The Brazilian Wandering Spider is a firm proponent of first-strike principles, attacking those rogue humans that may be plotting to unleash Weapons of Mass Despideration upon it and the Brazilian Way. Or if they’re just too close for comfort. You know that one guy, the one who freaks out if anyone stands closer to him than five feet? It’s like him, except instead of talking rudely it bites you and pumps you full of nuerotoxins that prevent you from breathing and make your muscle system go on a conga without permission.

The King Cobra.

Substantially cuter than the last few, isn't it?

What is it? The largest venomous snake on the planet, that’s all. This hefty little charmer averages around twelve feet long and can reach up to eighteen, and can shove a more-than-way-too-much dose of seven mililitres of neurotoxin into your hide before you can say “oh shit.” Its venom is outclassed by its Black Mamba and Taipan cousin-in-laws, among others, but it puts so much of it into whatever it’s bitten that it scarcely matters – one good bite on the trunk can take out an elephant. Interestingly enough, its main food source is other snakes (well, it’ll go for its own kind if they’re smaller and it’s getting pretty peckish), and its genus name – Opiophagus – translates from the Greek as “Snake Eater.”

Why has it just killed me horribly? Given that king cobras are both fairly shy around humans and give ample warning of when they’re feeling pressed with growling hisses and the whole “raise up one-third of massive body to stare at you with enormous hood fully spread” thing, odds are you were an utter moron/very unlucky and cornered it, or you were completely devoid of intelligence and tried to poke it with something. Either way, tough luck.

*SPECIAL GUEST STAR!*

The Komodo Dragon, AKA “The Ora.”

It's just a big, flesh-shredding, venomous, multi-hundred-pound softy.

What is it? Why, it’s the world’s largest lizard! Averages about 10 feet and 150ish pounds, can outrun an average human for short bursts, and is capable of killing and devouring water buffalo! And, as of 2009, it’s been verified as venomous, rather than (as previously thought) merely containing a mouthful of viciously fermenting bacteria. The venom leaks out of ducts pocked in between the dragon’s teeth and sinks into the bite victim as it tears at it, ensuring that if it gets away it does so with an onset of horrible, horrible pain, lack of clotting, and muscle paralysis just around the corner. Which seems somewhat like overkill considering the equipment it already has going for it.

Why has it just killed me horribly? Komodo dragons eat anything from birds to entire horses. Humans fall comfortably within that range, although there have only been five fatalities past 1974. Still, this is probably because most people know better than to carelessly tool around near gigantic, flesheating, venomous lizards. Finally, an animal on this list that will genuinely regard you as possible food rather than just a big prick infringing on its personal space.

Hack and Slash

The following animals will bite, claw, or otherwise shred you into a gooey and unrecognizable mess. Likelihood of said mess being eaten varies on a case-to-case basis.

The Great White Shark, AKA various themes on “white” that you can go back and read in the first shark article.

Fact: sharks always know where you live. Fact 2: thankfully, they can't walk.

What is it? It’s big (the biggest carnivorous fish on earth at 20 feet or so maximum length), it’s got a whitish underbelly, it’s been demonized to hell and back and made famous worldwide. Ladies and gentlemen, Carcharodon carcharias. Even laser beams mounted on its skull would be hard-pressed to increase the inherent cool factor of this animal. It takes its prey without warning from below, barreling upwards to smash into them like a freight train with teeth.

Why has it just killed me horribly? As has been said previously on this site, ol’ whitey eats marine mammals like seals, sea lions, and dolphins. When you’re carelessly flapping around on the surface in your silly mammalian way, you confuse the crap out of him – what are you supposed to be, some sort of mentally-defective fur seal? So he’ll check you out. Unfortunately, the only way he can do this is to stick you in his mouth, at which point he’ll realise that you’re mostly bone and skin with no yummy nutritious blubber, and probably not worth the space in his gut. So he swims off dejectedly, leaving you with a big set of dejected toothmarks embedded in your stomach. Alternatively, he may decide “the hell with it” and just eat you. This happens more often in Australia, apparently, possibly just because they’re like that. A good way to tell whether a great white shark was actually trying to hunt and kill you or not after an attack is to check your pulse. If you have one, it probably wasn’t really trying.

The Saltwater Crocodile, AKA “Estuarine Crocodile,” “Salties.”

HAI THAR GUISE!

What is it? The largest reptile currently living, pulling it in at an average length of 15 or so feet (for males; females tend to 7-11 feet) and capable of growing somewhere over twenty. It’s built pretty thickly for a crocodile and has occasionally been misnomered as some kind of alligator. Its name reflects its fairly unique tendency to venture casually out into the ocean, and salties used to be fairly common scattered across Southeast Asia and Australia. Hunting’s brought their numbers dangerously low (my goodness, a large predator being overhunted? Colour me shocked and mark this one with the “UNIQUE CASE!!!” sticker), but wherever they’re still common they make entire bodies of water off-limits deadly. Salties attack from the water, lunging out lightning fast and dragging in prey before it has time to blink, let alone struggle. Beyond their terrifyingly powerful bite strength (one of the strongest of any animal), they drag the prey into a series of underwater spins aptly termed “death rolls,” ensuring drowning kills the disoriented victim quickly even if the bite doesn’t. If whatever they’ve just bagged is large they’ll sometimes use continued death rolls to rip swallowable chunks off it, seeing as crocodiles (being lacking in the molar department) can’t chew.

Why has it just killed me horribly? Here it is, simply put: the saltwater crocodile eats almost anything. If it looks like an animal, and looks like it can catch it, it’s food. This includes sharks, smaller crocodiles, kangaroos, humans, monkeys, water buffalo, and just about anything else. And if they attack a dull-sensed, slow, weak, incompetent average human, that’s pretty much it – almost all attacks by adults on humans are fatal.

The Lion, AKA “King of the Beasts.”

Less well known than the lion's mane is the more embarassing "lion's porn 'stache" commonly grown by subadult males.

What is it? You keep asking that question. It doesn’t get any smarter. Anyways, lions. They have killed people, usually as food, and in some of the more famous cases (the Tasvo maneaters especially) the same lion(s) has killed several hundred or even (reputably) thousand humans. This sort of serial massacre has turned up more than a few times among big cats in general, particularly tigers, which are not getting an entry here because they are too good for the likes of you. Lions, on the other paw, are jerks.

Why has it just killed me horribly? There are a few factors that can make lions that much more likely to sample your scrawny behind. First, you could have stupidly run all their prey out of an area, and they’re hungry. Second, there could be enough humans and domestic herd animals around that you’re suddenly the predominant prey species in the area. Third, the lion could be old, sick, or otherwise too infirm to take down anything quicker and stronger than a slow, weak human. In any of these cases it’s fairly easy for the lion(s) to become reliant on eating humans – not least because it’s so damned easy. Which is harder, a painstaking stalking and ambush of a large, angry buffalo, or barging into a village in the middle of the night and dragging out some poor bastard by his neck? Granted there’s more meat on the buffalo, but there’s thousands and thousands of people clumped up in big groups, no end of targets.

Say Hello to My Big Foot

The following animals will never kill you for food. They may, however, simply run over, roll over, or trample you.

The Elephant.

Elephants never forget. And they never forgive.

What is it? For the love of potato chips please tell me that you’re not high. This is the world’s largest land animal, the African Elephant, the genus Loxodonta (we won’t get into the Indian Elephant, Elephas, because it is smaller and less photogenic). Beloved of children, the elephant’s massively muscular trunk can perform actions as gentle as plucking a leaf, or as powerful as knocking down a tree or crushing a human ribcage into little tiny bits. Although given that it weighs five or six tons, this sort of thing is getting unnecessarily fancy when it can simply step on you or smack you with its skull, let alone the gigantic chunks of pretty ivory spears sticking out of its jawline.

Why has it just killed me horribly? Bull elephants are, to put it bluntly, tetchy. And if the elephant is feeling pressured or harassed, or just needs to show you who’s boss, it can get quite a bit more than tetchy. As a bonus, adult male elephants enter a periodic condition known as “musth” (or “must”) during which their testosterone levels are jacked upwards about 60 times higher than normal. That is a seriously roided out elephant. And there’s another fun side effect: glands on an elephant’s head can secrete a substance named temporin during this time, pressing painfully on his eyes, which can’t help his mood. And as a final jolly detail, the temporin, which apparently tastes terrible (want to know how they checked that? Me too), naturally runs down and right into the elephant’s mouth. Yeah, I don’t think we need to ask why they’re dangerous around this time, do we.

The Bison, AKA “Buffalo” if You are a Doofus.

This is NOT a buffalo DAMNIT!

What is it? It is most certainly NOT A BUFFALO. It is a bison, an american bison, and you will CALL IT THAT! It’s also the largest terrestrial animal in North America. So there.

Why has it just killed me horribly? Bison are probably the most inoffensive thing on this list, placed here mainly because we can’t have all entries in this section be African. You’re less likely to be killed by a bison than rammed into – cracked ribs, not crushed skulls, if you get my meaning. Still, Yellowstone has had two bison-related deaths since its founding in 1872, which means that they are as fully qualified for this list as the lions that ate several thousand people. Now stop looking at me like that. Bison seem to take offense easily, sometimes with advance warning, sometimes out of the blue. Usually they’ll ram something and then walk off, but a single headbutt from an animal weighing roughly a ton and six foot five at the shoulder is nothing to sneeze at. This sort of attitude is what you’d expect from animals that evolved expecting to be constantly stalked by wolves. You need to show them predators just outside your field of vision who’s in charge here, stop them from waiting around for signs of weakness.

African Buffalo, AKA “Cape Buffalo,” “Affalo,” “Actually a Goddamned Buffalo.”

If you can see this, you are already too close.

What is it? The african buffalo is a freakin’ buffalo. It is not a bison, which are NOT buffalo. Get that straight right now. It’s also one of the most dangerous animals on the continent: surly, aggressive, grumpy, tetchy, belligerant, and all-around crotchety. Of the “big five” big game hunting animals of the Africa of yore, back in the days when wealthy white men would shoot things for the joy of it (lions, leopards, african elephants, buffalo, and either species of rhinoceros), the cape buffalo was considered the most likely to kill you.

Why has it just killed me horribly? Reread the list of adjectives in the fourth sentence of that paragraph above us again.

The Hippopotamus, AKA “Hippo.”

This is the same thing you think looks cute and silly. Try that now.

What is it? We’re practically working our way through a children’s animal encyclopedia, I’m giving up on you. Hippos are quite possibly the most human-hazardous animal in Africa, tangled up with the cape buffalo and Nile crocodile (which they hate, probably because they eat hippo calves).

What has it just killed me horribly? Hippos may look twice as goofy as either of their competitors, but are incredibly ill-tempered and are more than willing to kill humans and smash boats simply for getting in their space. They might not be territorial out of water, but stretches of rivers that they claim are Theirs with a capital T and you’d better stay the hell out of there if you know what’s good for you. Even out of water, they’re just too damned tetchy to be safe.

The Maniacal and the Murderous

The following animals will kill you just for the hell of it, often in extremely cruel ways for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Their behaviour is unpredictable and they must be treated with extreme caution.

Humans, AKA “Man,” “Homo sapiens.”

What is it? The most dangerous animal on the planet. Weak and slow on their own, they use group tactics and artificial tools created from their environments to kill almost everything. They have no apparent natural enemies, although some apex predators will perform opportunistic predation upon them. They do so, however, at great personal risk, for retribution is invariably sought. Voraciously territorial, they will claim entire continents with a speed and zeal that army ants would envy, purging and ransacking its ecology for their own benefits.

Why has it just killed me horribly? Who can say? The most terrifying thing about these creatures is their bizarre unpredictability. Some individuals will carelessly kill each other and anything else over almost nothing, while others live to old age without harming anything bigger than an insect. You never know precisely what a human will do, or what will bring it to violence. And the means they use to end their victims can be slow and cruel or mercifully quick. Poisons and projectiles, heavy implements and machinery, there is no apparent end to the creativity of H. sapiens when it comes to lethal violence, especially against its own kind.

So, hope you’ve enjoyed our little slideshow. See you next week.

All original material copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.

Picture Credits:

• Box Jellyfish: From Great Barrier Reef, at http://www.barrierreefaustralia.com/the-great-barrier-reef/jellyfish.htm.
• Brazillian Wandering Spider: From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wandering_spider.jpg, taken by “Techauser” in 2007.
• King Cobra: From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ophiophagus_hannah_(2).jpg, contributed by Dawson.
• Komodo Dragon: Public domain image from wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Komododragon2.jpg contributed by GambitMG.
• Great White Shark: From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shark_and_boat.jpg, taken by Mila Zinkova at Isla Guadalupe, Mexico.
• Saltwater Crocodile: Public domain image from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leistenkrokodil.jpg, taken by J. Patrick Fischer in June 2002 in the Adelaide River, Northern Territory, Australia.
• Lion: From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P_l_Bleyenberghi.jpg, taken by Apaloosa.
• Elephant: Public domain image from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:African_Bush_Elephant_Mikumi.jpg, taken by Oliver Wright in 1992 in Mikumi Nation Park, Tanzania.
• American Bison: Public domain image from Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Americanbison.jpg, taken by J. Schmidt, 1977.
• African Buffalo: From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:African_Buffalo.jpg, taken by Stefan Ehrbar in April 2002.
• Hippopotamus: From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HippoJaw.jpg, taken by Aqwis, July 5th 2008.
• Happy Pensioneer: From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HappyPensioneer.jpg, uploaded 12 April 2005 on en wikipedia by Nickfraser, copyright holder, with GFDL licence

This will hopefully be the final piece of cultural anthropology that I plop out onto this site, if only because I am frightened that my tutor will read it, pass out in horror, and then find and shoot me for my own good. As per always, plausible deniability, I was very young and stupid, it’s all a blur officer I honestly can’t say jesus christ I didn’t mean to hurt her yadda yadda yadda YADDA. And now we press on. Today we’ll cover various random things. You may now clasp your hands to either side of your face, bug your eyes out, and say “I had NO idea!” in an irrepressibly annoying voice. Go on. Tell them I said it was okay.

Politics: My Dong is Bigger Than Your Despot.

During the taking of this picture, Roosevelt expressed his desire for Stalin's hat.

Ah, politics. There are so many wonderful systems that humans have made whose primary tasks are convincing everybody that they are totally essential, but politics has to take the delicious, homemade strawberry angel cake with raspberries on top. Political anthropology is devoted to studying it; more precisely, things related to power. Who has power, who wants power, degrees of power, bases of power, abuses of power, excetera, etc, ec, e. Don’t confuse political anthropology with political science, however – political science is narrower in scope, dealing more with formal party politics, voting, and so on. Political anthropology includes that, a headman kicking someone out of the tribe for sleeping with his wife, and almost every leadership system outside of your family members telling you what to do. Now let’s get some of these here politimackul definitions. Because lord knows we didn’t cram enough into the last update.

• Power: The ability to produce desired results by possession or use of force.
• Politics: The use of organized public power.
• Authority: The right for someone to take certain forms of action based on status or moral authority. Unlike power, you don’t need force to back it up. Notably, power doesn’t need this.
• Influence: The ability to achieve an end through exertion of social or moral pressure on someone/some group, like your granny making you donate to charity or she’ll tell your mother about the enormous stack of porn she found in your closet. Unlike authority, you don’t need to be in charge or in center stage to exert this.

There we go, that wasn’t so bad. Now you’ve got a fascinatingly deep knowledge of politics rivalling that of the president of your nation’s nearest stamp collector’s club, and we’re ready to talk political organizations. We’ll be going roughly in order of appearance in human history, from earliest to latest.

Bands

Relatively eglatarian, sometimes nigh politics-free, and usually completely screwed.

The oldest human society of all, and one that some anthropologists have argued is politics-free in a pure state. Everybody’s pretty equal, leadership’s pretty informal, groups tend not to fight too much because they both don’t use up a whole lot, wander around a big area, and there aren’t many of them, and the closest you can get to politics is group decision-making. Usually you don’t have a big population growth rate because you get all your food via foraging and don’t build up big surpluses for population booms or specialists who don’t know how to feed themselves. Also, flowers and key lime pies rain from the skies on Tuesdays at six forty-five PM, so that you are well prepared for the 7 o’clock forced colonization and massacre at the hands of more complex societies (note that you cannot rearrange the letters in “complex” to equal “superior” or “better.” This means something).

Tribes

Once you’ve stopped foraging and started up planting and weeding (or herding and milking), you’re probably going to be in a tribal society. You’re a bunch of related bands held together in a territory by distinct language and lineage (and a dash of alliteration). A tribal headman is more certifiably “the boss” than a band leader, and he has more power, but he’s still part-time, and in charge because he’s respected – being generous earns a lot of respect. Since you’re starting to get a bit of food surplus, you can support the odd guy who can’t get his own food but is really good at making those specially carved statue-things you like so much, and maybe you’ll also be able to have more kids. Which is good, because the work you’re putting into growing/raising your meals is back-breaking, and you need all the extra hands you can get for weeding and tilling. Foraging was a free meal ticket compared to this.

Chiefdoms

A complex society can lead to all manner of hijinx, such as totem poles and lawn tennis.

Now we’re getting complicated. Chiefdoms are conglomerates of tribes and bands, all clumped together forever and ever under the chief. Society acquires more ranks and stratifications, and the chief may still acquire reputation through generosity but you better believe he’s going to be living a good bit better than the majority of his subjects. And make no mistake, they are his subjects now. This is no part-time leader, the chief has to take charge in major decisions and simply running the chiefdom. You can take this to the next level and have a whackuv chiefdoms linked together either under a sort of uber-chief, what you can call a confederacy.

States

Statehood is serious business.

Onward and upward into spiralling complexity. States arise as centralized political units, borne aloft on the flowery winds of intensive agriculture and storage techniques. Combining these technologies gives food surpluses out the sociological wazoo, and suddenly you have thousands of people free to take time off from feeding themselves to dedicate their lives to carving very large stone blocks, or charting the movements of the skies, or telling you that you need to kill those guys over the next hill or else your god(s) will be totally pissed off at you. It’s now relatively easy to get big cities rolling, or create a rigidly-organized religion, kick-start a technology, or launch a war. On the other hand you gobble resources like an emaciated hippopotamus, and you’re going to have to make sure that those other jerks in their state over the next hill don’t come over and take all your stuff, ideally by conquering them. Unless that would endanger your trade with them for those really shiny rocks your stoneworkers like so much. This is all a good example of exactly what states exemplify: complexity. They have eighty billion different benefits, issues, problems, and solutions, and often they all amount to exactly how well-coordinated the thing is.

Development Anthropology: Studying How People Will Screw Themselves This Time.

Development in action. Specifically, lung tumors.

Or, more specifically, studying how development changes cultures. Or how change develops them. Or whatever. Whether internal (finding a massive nickel mine ten miles from the capital, some random schmoe inventing the aromatherapeutic lightbulb) or external (a shipload full of conquistadors on your front porch, trading for a barrel of gunpowder and deciding to take a crack at deciphering it), change is inevitable. Thanks to globalization nowadays everybody’s in everyone’s backyard, and external influence is a given. How will nations develop? Modernize yourself with all the latest gadgets so you can play with the big boys? Fantically attempt to get your economy kickstarted enough that you can afford to feed more than 5% of your population? Try and reorganize things so that you don’t have that same 5% of your population eating 78% of all the resources? See if you can fix it so that everyone’s lives don’t really, really suck and are longer than that of the average fruit fly? Make sure that you aren’t eating up your next thousand years of resources over the next two decades? Everybody has a different goal, a different solution. Or the same goal with different solutions, or different goals using the same solutions. Whatever.

In the midst of all this, you’ve got institutions striving to help with development, or at least influence it. Two rough kinds: multilaterals (lots of nations as donors, such as the UN) or bilaterals (two countries, one giving, the other recieving). Naturally, the aid provided is going to vary depending on all manner of political bullhickory, and factors such as whether or not it’s meant to be spent on specific projects endorsed by the donors or untied to any specific goal, and whether it’s a grant or a loan. Anthropology comes into all this when an anthropologist is asked to advise on exactly what planting the Ultimate Power Dam Of Justice directly on top of a local village while ploughing over their burial grounds for a gas station might do to the area’s people. Originally this worked poorly, as the way projects were run basically went (1) create and design project with no input a thousand miles away, (2) ask anthropologist, (3) get pissed off when they tell you you’re a clueless berk. Nobody likes being called a clueless berk, and so anthropologists were disliked. Nowadays anthropologists tend to get more input into the situation, and have moved on a bit themselves from being consultants to actively monitoring their projects to make sure that nobody acts like a gigantic dick.

All of the above, interestingly, falls under applied anthropology, which is exactly what it sounds like: the application of anthropological knowledge to something, hopefully to better it. We’re seeing more and more of that nowadays, and some of it even works.

All original material copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.

Picture Credits:

• Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at the Teheran conference: Public domain image from Wikipedia.
• Shoshone around 1890ish: Public domain image from Wikipedia.
• Mayan pyramid at Coba: Public domain image from Wikipedia.
• Haida Houses around 1901: Public domain image from Wikipedia.
• World War II factory: Public domain image from oh for Christ’s sake just look up.

Naturally, the vast majority of my 52 pages of notes proved useless, leading to me cursing once again at having been fooled into learning stuff without purpose. Now it’s demi-memorized and as such shall take an extra three months to leak out of my skull. The best use I think I can get out of this is to cram as much half-remembered misinterpretations of what I mindlessly stared at for two weeks into your heads as quickly as possible. Seatbelts on? Engine turned off and windows rolled up? Let’s get going.

The History of Cultural Anthropology (the truncated and demi-accurate collector’s gold limited premium special re-release edition with bonus discs and behind-the-scenes documentary)

Originally, of course, cultural anthropology didn’t exist. Why would you want to truly understand those other schmucks when that takes up valuable time you can use to kill them and take their stuff? Besides, they were obviously inferior, and therefore anything they could tell you would be worthless. They also didn’t believe in the right things, and should be properly brainwashed educated as to who was the biggest deity on the block.

Eventually the bad old days fell away and modern (well, early-to-mid-nineteenth-century) scholars began to conduct what is known as “armchair anthropology,” which basically followed a winning formula that I shall now bestow upon you:

1. Send jackhole #092 into the wildes to communicate with the savages.
2. Read ye olde reporte sent back by thine jackhole #092 (Day 1: met guye, Day 2: was fed by guye, Day 3: raped his wife, he got tetchy, shote him).
3. Posit wanton and shamelessly second-hande speculations upon the nature of the savages described withine ye olde reporte.
4. ????
5. Profite.

Well, maybe not so winning as all that. Anyways, sooner or later someone realized they weren’t so much recording scientific information about other peoples so much as they were making shit up on the basis of a handful of scribbled notes, and this wasn’t really meeting the best standards of journalism, or even National Enquirer standards. So they hitched rides out into the world, arrived in the colonies, got to within a few miles of the nearest primitive tribes that just needed some white people’s direction, poor things, rolled up their sleeves, hitched up their suspenders, and lived in nice big houses. Once in a while they’d send word over to the chappies in the village that they’d rather like a native informant to come over to the place and have a nice chat on how him and his blokes did their thing, donchaknow. This was termed “verandah anthropology,” and it was an improvement in roughly the same manner as having cancer in remission is an improvement over cancer. Very much an improvement, but considering where you started, not saying much.

Well, around came World War I, or The Great War, or The War to End All Wars, three names for the same thing of which two are blatant lies – it certainly didn’t end wars, and it fails in both senses of “great” as not only was it pretty dismal but there was a bigger one right after it. During this period, a 30-year-old Polish man named Bronislaw Malinowski (a strongly excellent name, typed or said aloud) was waltzing about near New Guinea, a British-held domain. Australian authorities politely told him that as a Polish man from Austria-Hungary he was somewhat less than welcome to be at his leisure, and told him he could either get locked up or sit in the Trobriand Islands (what modern parents term a “time-out”). Bronislaw opted for the latter and conducted some of his most famous research, making advances in a new method of studying peoples: participant observation, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The anthropologist gets up close and personal with his subjects, finding out how they live by attempting to do it him(her)self. On the one hand you lose the verandah and become culturally incompetent to the point of children laughing at you, on the other hand you can actually connect to the people you’re studying as slightly more than “hey you, go get me a towel, some hot water, and a razor – chop chop!” and you get to actually learn something for once, since the more relatively normal you act the more relatively normal your study subjects will, too. Trading off pride and pomposity for contact and enlightenment started to appeal to more and more anthropologists, mostly because you came off as less of a twit and more of a scientist.

Speaking of scientists, Franz Boas may have done some stuff when we weren’t looking over the past few paragraphs. The “father” of American anthropology, Boas was German. Boas started with a doctorate in physics, moved on to geography, and spent 1883 with the Baffin Island Inuit examining how the local (and downright evil) geography affected their movements. He came out of it with a good deal of respect for the people and their culture, and an experience-backed attitude that anyone who presumed evolutionary superiority over other humans or their cultures was an ignorant tool. Over his life he played big daddy to anthropology in America, originated and encouraged the “four fields” method of divvying up anthropology that we went over last time, did stuff in all four, proved that anyone who argued for human intelligence based on cranial size was a moron, studied Native American languages like a man possessed, and promoted cultural relativism.

This man's moustache alone is smarter than either of us.

Okay, that was rather impressive. Well, actually a whole lot more than rather. Now that we’re done remembering how much more energetic everyone seemed to be about a hundred years ago, let’s stop reviewing the past and look at the present.

What the Hell are You Doing?

Now, there are quite a few ways of getting your info on whoever you’re staring slightly too closely at this week on-site. Because we are full of SCIENCE we shall have a special term for each of them, which I shall convey to you through the magic of crude description.

• Etic research refers to the gathering of data and juicy gossip by outsiders looking in on a culture and checking in on specific questions.
• Emic research refers to descriptive reports of what it’s like living in Insert Subject’s Hometown Here conveyed by insiders about their culture.
• Deductive research involves asking a question or posing a hypothesis and then gathering a bunch of info, then figuring out whether or not you’ve proved, disproved, or haven’t the foggiest about your original idea.
• Inductive research involves gathering a bunch of info and then seeing what it tells you. “Screw the hypothesis, I have data” basically.

There, who says definitions aren’t fun? Look at how much fun we just had! By the way, the data constantly harped upon above can come in two broad flavours

• Quantative information come in the form of charts, graphs, tables, and numbers. Lots of numbers. No, more than that. You will count those numbers up and you shall like it.
• Qualitative methods rely on written descriptions, reports, and so on. No (well, not as much) counting, but lots of talking. And scribbling.

Both require participant observation to pull off, observation skills technically described as “out the wazoo,” and reliable methods of recording said wazoo-related eruptions of data, all with sides of both up and down. Written notes can be really comprehensive and jotted down right as the event happens, or they can be limited by writing speed or taken later when the memories have had time not only to degrade but to actually drop out of school and get really high, in something like that order. Tape recordings can grab all the sound in an area, being at once incredibly informative and incredibly irritating at a single stroke (boy, bet you wish you hadn’t sat next to the instruments when that guy was making the big, important, once-a-year speech, eh?). Video cameras, well, we need not chat about how much they can snag, but they only really get what you point them at. Tons of little details that you might catch on and note yourself can get gleaned over in a video, particularly if its quality is what the polite people call “crap.”

Oh, and while we’re at it, there’s a few distinct ways to have at your research. Because lord knows we can’t have enough definitions.

• Ethnography. Exactly what it says, “culture writing.” You write about a culture. Specifically, you write up all your info into a honkin’ big pile of words on the culture. It’s descriptive, detailed, and first-hand. You can write it in a traditionally detached third-person manner (realist ethnography, the traditional method), or you can get really fancy and use a more recent approach known as “realist ethnography,” where it’s first-person, poetical insight may be used, and you aren’t afraid to liberally sprinkle “I” through your writing. I think that sounds more like writing a book than a research document, but bear in mind that I’m a flamin’ idiot.
• Ethnology. Cross-cultural analysis, which, again, is basically what it’s called – you take a topic, say, the particular noises that people consider polite to make when eating something at lunch in public, and then you compare how different cultures do it using ethnographic materials. You check out what’s similar, what’s different, and why they might be alike/not alike.

Final thing for today – recall our little lesson on ethnocentrism yesterdayweek? Remember how I mentioned that it was dumb, and stupid, and smelly, and only a total jerk would use it, and I was all like “hey, you shouldn’t judge other people’s arbitrary crap by the standards of your arbitrary crap”? Scroll upwards to check out the lattermost of the eminent Franz Boas’s achievements: promoting cultural relativism. That’s it. Cultural relativism: the denial of judging other cultures by your standards, and the opposite of ethnocentrism. And then I was “but that doesn’t mean you can claim genocide as a cultural tradition and say that makes it okay”? That’s one of two really vague “flavours” (I use that term too much. Let’s try “sounds” next time) of cultural relativism: absolute cultural relativism (the aforementioned “I cannot judge your decision to eat your baby because it vexes you/preach that the heathens must be shot until they worship the right imaginary friend”), and critical cultural relativism (“Both of those sound like bad things for everyone”). The prior is widely regarded as being quite dense by absolutely everyone, the second as being preferable to either ethnocentrism or its own moronic sibling yet philisophically difficult to justify. Then again, philosophy makes many things difficult to justify, so let’s do what almost all people do when confronted with philosophy: ignore it because it makes your head hurt.

I promise that next time I shall chose a topic that lends itself more favourably towards purty pictures.

All original material copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.

Picture Credits:

Tupac Amaru being shown who’s boss by Spaniards in 1572: Public domain image from Wikipedia.

“The Rhodes Colossus” from Punch in 1892: Public domain image from Wikipedia.

Franz Boas being awesome in 1915: Public domain image from Wikipedia.

As of 8:20ish PM today I will be considered one year older and still fairly useless. To commemorate this occasion, I have prepared a list of things that I think are probably awesome. I can’t be sure, but you may find some of these awesome as well.

-Surfing using a fin whale as a board. Alternatively, a fin whale surfing using you as a board.

-A spork that can cut a grown man clean in two with a single blow.

-Volcanoes full of lilies that erupt in showers of flower petals rather than ash. Tragically, the flower petals remain superheated.

-Boats that are made of an alloy of light and sound and painted gravity-coloured.

-Gigantic people that appear harmlessly misunderstood but are secretly plotting to become business executives.

-Mr. Potatoheads that come with potato bugs.

-Sumo matches held inside deep fryers the size of the Skydome.

-A sports stadium that was designed by a man who thought he was drawing up blueprints for a toaster oven.

-A seventy-nine-and-two-eighths-year-old human skeleton that enjoys combining long walks on the beach, vodka, and gunplay.

-A rhinoceros that’s mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

-A patch of chrysanthemums that bud into a diorama of Hitler being kicked in the forebrain.

-Cloning dinosaurs willy-nilly.

-A gold made of solid statue.

-An Olympic sprinter and marathoner brother and sister team that accidentally swap events.

-Using a single stick of gum to blow a bubble bigger than your head while thinking about sex.

-Building a supercomputer from used honeycombs and superconducting material.

-Really big animals that just don’t give a hoot about you except as a snack or back scratching device.

-A dragon that forces villagers to bring it a virgin sacrifice once a month that gets nothing but overweight men in their forties who spend their time trolling webcomic discussion forums.

-Owls that fight crime, or better yet, owls that commit crimes and are then caught and tried by a jury of their peers.

-Court officials who must make it a temporary part of their jobs to track down an expert in bird-based communication.

-People that aren’t afraid to marinade things at random.

-Puppies that grow up to be cyborgs.

-Somersaulting over national landmarks.

-Frisking law enforcement agents for drugs while giving them a stern talking-to.

-Circus cortortionists that train their children from birth to be international assassins.

-Enraged middle-aged tradesmen snapping under the strain and eating entire tractor-trailers in a single chomp.

-A man who’s flipped off every single person he’s ever seen. With both hands.

-Quintuple amputees who live normal, fulfilling lives.

-Angry young cows that terrorize sleepy dairy farming towns in the Midwest.

-Babies that fire dynamite from their mouths when you burp them.

-A hundred-and-fourteen-year-old man that can still perfectly pronounce the name of every dinosaur he memorized when he was six.

-Gigantic doom temples dedicated to peace and true love.

-Deities of Frisbee and lawn darts. One, the other, or both.

-An atrocious amount of casualties and horrifying death inflicted by the power of friendship.

-When someone uses a multi-billion-dollar supercomputer to run a spellcheck on the word “parsnip.” Especially if they’ve spelt it correctly.

-The universe performing a multi-billion year game of charades using trillions of galaxies in order to physically spell out to humanity and every other species of intelligent life that exists that they’re not worth its time.

-Rappelling down the surface of the sun while wearing nothing but a healthy glow of skin cancer.

-Sharks that grow old to a peaceful retirement where they can fondly look back on all the times they appeared on the Discovery Channel.

-Extremely resentful and bitter plates of fish and chips that blame you for all the world’s ills.

-A homeless man that becomes CEO of a multinational corporation by killing each and every one of its managerial staff in unarmed combat.

-Foodstuffs being used as transcontinental weaponry.

-Books written entirely in the genetic information of palm trees.

-Global superpowers that admit that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing, and never have.

-Judges with pronouncedly obvious body language that base their verdicts on rock-paper-scissors against the defendant.

-A closet that eats people based on fashion sense.

-Performing the full stage version of West Side Story on the plume of a geyser.

-Sassy, independent subatomic particles that aren’t afraid to say what’s on their minds being rudely shoved into the Large Hadron Collider and unceremoniously accelerated.

-Giant, heavily-armed, human-piloted robots that spend their time tidying up major cities and filtering the exhaust out of the air.

-Cloning dinosaurs helter-skelter.

-A man with astonishing superpowers who spends most of his time playing mid-1980s video games.

-A dream of a penis being interpreted by a professional as a metaphor for a penis.

-Any tree that deliberately and fatally falls on someone with premeditation.

-The graveyard-pit formed from the rubble of a series of tubes located at the center of the internet, where old memes go to die.

-A man who can snort objects the size of his hand into his nostril that has never contemplated doing drugs.

-Defeating an enraged saltwater crocodile with nothing but dental floss, 2 fluid oz. of urine, and a heart-to-heart, life-changing, one-in-a-million relationship counselling session.

-Cacti that only stand still when somebody’s looking.

-Cats that will walk over to the dying bodies of their owners to meow crankily at them for not having dinner ready.

-A gangsta with an upper-class British accent and camp gay mannerisms.

-A hidden doom fortress located inside a volcano on top of a mountain that is underwater. On the moon.

-Things that don’t make any sense to humans and never will.

-The superpowered result of a forbidden love affair between a sweet potato and an Idaho Russet.

-Something larger than your head that you can, and are actively encouraged to, eat.

-Lethal edged weapons crafted wholly from gelatine. Or gelatine composed entirely of lethal edged weapons.

-Globally-ranged ballistic missiles designed to hug you at over mach 14 before you even know they’re coming.

-A glacier boasting a keen sense of joie de vivre.

Happy birthday to you all.

Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009

Anthropology can be sort-of defined as the study of humans. The study of other species can get lumped under entire categories (zoology, herpetology, icthyology), but no, we have to hog an entire field of study to ourselves, because we’re that special. Though exactly what type of “special” is sometimes not obvious. Anthropology itself can be hacked into four big chunks:

Archaeology:

The typical archaeologist at work

The study of past cultures through examination of their material remains. Tragically, these remains usually lean more towards broken chunks of dinnerware and less towards platinum-engraved golden vases with symbols depicting enormous ancient evils. Still, despite the waning interest many feel towards archaeology when they realize its practitioners are not bull-whipping adventurers, it plays a vital role in understanding exactly how those interesting folks white people genocided used to live before we killed them and smashed up their stuff and then looted and raped whatever was left over.

Biological/Physical Anthropology:

The magic of biology lies within.

Loads and loads of stuff. From genetics to forsenics to examining apes uncomfortably closely, biological (or physical) anthropology states that examining “the human condition” is for sissies and gets down to examining the bolts, nuts, and other assorted equipment that allow us to fill our busy time watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and masturbating, although hopefully not both at once. A subfield within physical (or biological) anthropology is primatology, because chimpanzees and company are just close enough to human that we feel compelled to make endless documentaries about them while killing them for bushmeat. Let no one say that humans do not do unto others as they would do unto themselves.

Linguistic Anthropology:

An intriguing and deep example of languages and cultures colliding.

The study of how hue-mens lurn 2 spek gud. Language and culture can interact in all sorts of interesting ways, such as Inuktitut having lots of words for snow or present-day English having lots of words for calling someone homosexual in increasingly less-than-complimentary methods. Tracing these interactions is the job of linguistic anthropologists, as is the task of discovering the roots and sources of modern languages, and the preservation of failing or extinct ones. Here’s a do-it-yourself activity: show a linguistic anthropologist a sample of leetspeak just to see what happens, and try to get the whole thing on tape.

Cultural Anthropology:

The frescoed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Petroglyphs from Gobustan.

The lolcat, from photoshop and brain damage.

The study of culture, that ill-defined mass of beliefs, prejudices, accepted common knowledge, values, attitudes, and symbols universal to humans the world over. It’s adaptive, society-defining, personality-shaping, and sometimes so mind-bogglingly complex that you wonder how in heaven’s name the collection of bipedal fruitcakes you know could manage to remember half of it, let alone create it. It’s as expansive and varied as the imagination of a toddler on 100 cc of sugar injected straight into the jugular, and sometimes its products seem even less realistic than that metaphor. And without it we’re not all that much. It influences or controls when, how, and what we eat, sleep, and drink, what we find attractive, hot, disgusting, and boring, our gender, the roles of our gender, our religious beliefs, our outlook on life, the universe, and everything, and whether or not we’ve heard of Douglas Adams.

The issue with culture is that a lot of it is based on symbols, and one of the qualifiers for symbols is that they are basically stuff that gets arbitrarily assigned value – they symbolize something entirely different from their actual properties (like a lion or eagle symbolizing nobleness/freedom/who gives a toss). This means that most of anyone’s culture makes no sense, which presents an excellent explanation for why ethnocentrism (the judging of another culture by your own culture’s standards, underlined with the smug, wine-scented trace of self-assured superiority) is bull: you’re judging another person’s arbitrary crap by the quality of your own arbitrary crap. This doesn’t mean that you have to tolerate anything and everything without exception (such as, for example, burning witches, or invading continents and wiping out most of the indigenous population through disease and warfare while not really acknowledging them as “real people”). It just means you shouldn’t automatically presume that you’re right because your society is right because you were born into it which means you’re right repeated ad nauseum.

When it comes down to it, cultural anthropology tries to take you by the forehead and jam that ignorant, insular dome of yours into the billion different varieties of human life on the planet, and if you come out of it dizzy and going “woah, I think I see the innate absurdity and familiarity of all cultures, including my own!” then it’s probably succeeded in its goal: removing your head from your backside. Then, if you’re like me, you eat some salty deep fried foods and forget all about it. Cultural anthropology can be frustrating like that.

All original material copyright Jamie Proctor, 2009.

• Picture Credits:
• Indy grabbing the idol: Screenshot from Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981.
• Outhouse: Public domain image from Wikipedia by user Oven Fresh
• Terrible subtitling on Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith: Someone who did not conduct his linguistic anthropology properly.
• The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo.
• Gobustan Pictoglyphs: Public domain image from Wikipedia by user Baku87.
• Yet another lolcat: The internet. Somewhere.

I’d like to note that I’ve passed a personal goal of mine, outlined under post number one – that of making more than ten posts before breaking down into a useless heap of apathy and cardboard. Technically, I equalled ten two weeks ago and passed it last week – but hey, close enough. It’s not necessarily better late than never, and the early bird eats worms. It takes fewer brain cells to smile than to frown. While I’m debunking random things, do is not a deer, a female deer, it is a notey musicish thingy, saving for a rainy day is stupid when you could save for a house somewhere eternally sunny, and laughter is only medicine insofar as it makes you feel better, possibly lowering your blood pressure. You still shouldn’t cry over spilt milk, though. I mean really, if you’re that attached to your beverages I’d seek help. Spilt ice cream, however, is worth weeping for.

To commemorate this occasion, here, in hopes of redeeming the past few pictures of selachians that have appeared on this webby thingy, is a picture of a shark that knows no lulz.

Most certainly not a lolshark.

Ain’t he cute? Now, because moderation in all things is an admirable goal, here’s a contrast:

Show this to those that claim that dolphins are cute. SHOW THEM.

And finally, because moderation in all things also applies to moderation, enjoy a soulless monstrosity.

There is no God. There is only the lolshark.

Picture Credits

• Shortfin Mako: Public domain image from Wikipedia.
• Baby Bamboo Shark: Picture found at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1027637/The-tame-baby-sharks-DONT-bite-hand-feeds-them.html
• Lolshark: Adapted with Microsoft Paint from photo of whale shark feeding by Werner Mischler, found at http://www.aboututila.com/ScubaInfo/Whale-Sharks/Whale-Shark-Facts.htm