LINKS - September 13th, 2023
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Archaeological Tropes That Perpetuate Colonialism
By Nicholas C. Laluk & Joseph Aguilar, Sapiens
“Starting in the 19th century, archaeologists helped create a recurrent theme, or trope, about social collapse and abandonment that was figurative and metaphorical, not literal or based in Indigenous truths. As Indigenous archaeologists ourselves from Tribal communities in the U.S. Southwest—Laluk is Ndee (White Mountain Apache), and Aguilar is San Ildefonso Pueblo (Tewa)—we’re all too familiar with how these tropes still carry weight. These narratives implicate archaeology in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from our lands, resources, cultural patrimony, and histories. Ultimately, some of the ideas that come from archaeology have been used to justify the basic practices of settler colonialism.”
Germany matches DNA from skulls stolen from African colony to living relatives
By Agence France-Presse in Berlin via The Guardian
“The skulls are part of a collection of about 7,700 that were acquired by the museum from Berlin’s Charité hospital in 2011, the museum authority said. Many of them were part of a collection assembled by the doctor and anthropologist Felix von Luschan during German colonial rule.”
Ancient-human fossils sent to space: scientists slam ‘publicity stunt’
By Ewen Callaway, Nature
“Everyone aboard VSS Unity — including the hominin remains — landed safely an hour after take-off. But the fossils’ journey has drawn extraordinary rebuke from archaeologists, palaeoanthropologists and other researchers. They say that it was an unethical publicity stunt that put priceless hominin fossils at risk, raising questions about the protection of cultural heritage in South Africa, as a government agency signed off on the mission.”
Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact
By Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta Magazine
“Then there’s this notion of objectivity — of being sure that what is claimed is right, of feeling like you have an ultimate truth. But how can we know we’re being objective? It’s hard to take yourself out of the context in which you’ve made a statement — to have a perspective outside of the paradigm that has been put in place by society. This is just as true for scientific ideas as it is for anything else.”
Humans Have Crossed 6 of 9 ‘Planetary Boundaries’
By Meghan Bartels, Scientific American
“The analysis builds on a 2009 paper that first outlined nine planetary constraints that keep Earth’s environment similar to that of the world humans lived in during the preindustrial portion of the Holocene epoch. This period lasted for about the past 10,000 years, until the industrial revolution began and humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels and sending heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In the new research, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers raise the alarm about what the potential consequences of this departure from humans’ baseline might be.”