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Science Tuesday - Evolutionary Psychology, Prehistoric Birds, and Epidemics
Basics: Skipping Spouse to Spouse Isn’t Just a Man’s Game
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, September 1, 2009
In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.
Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.
Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Unless forced to because some bounder has abandoned her, why would any sane woman choose another trot down the aisle — for another Rachael Ray spatula set? Spare me extra candlesticks, I’m a one-trick monogamist.
Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man’s game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates.
In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.
Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast, the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.
“We’re so wedded to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic situation goes up and down.”
The new analysis, though preliminary, is derived from one of the more comprehensive and painstaking data sets yet gathered of marriage and reproduction patterns in a non-Western culture. The results underscore the importance of avoiding the breezy generalities of what might be called Evolution Lite, an enterprise too often devoted to proclaiming universal truths about deep human nature based on how college students respond to their professors’ questionnaires. Throughout history and cross-culturally, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, “there has been fantastic variability in women’s reproductive strategies.”
Geoffrey F. Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, agreed. “Evolutionary psychology and anthropology really need to take women’s perspective seriously in all its dimensions,” Dr. Miller said. “You can construe sequential relationships as being driven by male choice, in which case you’d call it polygyny, or by female choice, in which case you’d call it polyandry, but the capacity of women across cultures to dissolve relationships that aren’t working has been much underestimated.”
Pimbwe culture has been too disrupted over the years by colonialism and government interference to serve as a quaint museum piece of how our ancestors lived, but the challenges the people face are more survival-based than how to get your child into an elite preschool program. The Pimbwe live in small villages, have few possessions and eke out a subsistence living farming, fishing, hunting and gathering. Virtually all Pimbwe get married at least once, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, and they do it without the blessing of judge, priest or Las Vegas. “Marriage is not formalized with any specific set of rituals,” she said, “and marriages break up by one or another partner leaving.”
Nor is there much formal sexual division of labor. “In terms of farming, men and women do pretty much the same tasks,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “The men will cook, do a lot with the kids.”
Unlike in the West, where men control a far greater share of resources than women do, or in traditional pastoral societies like those found in the Middle East and Africa, where a woman is entirely dependent on the wealth of her husband and in divorce is not entitled to so much as a gimpy goat, Pimbwe women are independent operators and resourceful co-equals with men.
This does not mean that mothers can go it alone, however. Again in contrast to the contemporary West, childhood mortality remains a serious threat, and it takes the efforts of more than one adult to keep a baby alive. A good, hardworking husband can be a great asset — and so, too, may his relations. The evolutionary theorist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy proposes that one reason the offspring of much-marrying Pimbwe women do comparatively well is that the children end up with a widened circle of caretakers. “The women are lining up more protection, more investment, more social relationships for their children to exploit,” she said. “A lot of what some people would call promiscuous I would call being assiduously maternal.”
The goose, like the gander, may find it tempting to wander if it means that her goslings will fly.
First Trace of Color Found in Fossil Bird Feathers
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, September 1, 2009
Birds, more than any other group of animals, are a celebration of color. They have evolved to every extreme of the spectrum, from the hot pink of flamingos to the shimmering blue of a peacock’s neck. Yet, for decades, paleontologists who study extinct birds have had to use their imaginations to see the colors in the fossils. Several feather fossils have been unearthed over the years, but they have always been assumed to be colorless vestiges.
Now a team of scientists has discovered color-producing molecules that have survived for 47 million years in the fossil of a feather. By analyzing those molecules, the researchers have shown that they would have given a bird the kind of dark, iridescent sheen found on starlings and other living birds.
This new method may allow scientists not only to reconstruct ancient birds more accurately. Birds evolved from ground-running feathered dinosaurs, and now it may be possible to determine some of the colors on them as well.
“I really do think we are moving from dinosaurs in black and white to dinosaurs in Technicolor,” said Julia Clarke, a University of Texas paleontologist who was a co-author of the new paper, published in the journal Biology Letters.
The new research got its start with squid. Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale, was examining a fossil of a squid when he discovered that its ink sac was packed with microscopic spheres. They were identical to the pigment-loaded structures that give color to ink in living squid, known as melanosomes.
Knowing that birds make melanosomes in their feathers, Mr. Vinther decided to look for them in bird fossils. He knew that unlike the spherical melanosomes in squid, birds make sausage-shaped ones. “When I zoomed in on the fossils, it was nothing but these little sausages,” Mr. Vinther said.
But Mr. Vinther had to rule out the possibility that the sausages were bacteria that fed on the feathers after the birds died and then fossilized. He and his colleagues did that by examining an unusual fossil feather from Brazil with a pattern of dark and white stripes. Last year they reported that they found the sausage-shaped structures only in the dark stripes and none in the white ones. It is unlikely that the bacteria would grow in such an arbitrary pattern.
Mr. Vinther and his colleagues then decided to look for fossil melanosomes that still preserved clues to the colors of the birds in life. Melanosomes produce colors not just with the pigments they contain, but also with their organization inside the feather. In the case of some birds, for example, their feathers bounce some light off the outer surface while allowing some to penetrate and bounce off an inner layer of melanosomes. Depending on how the melanosomes are spaced, the two waves of light can interfere with each other in different ways, producing different colors.
To find well-preserved feathers, the scientists traveled this May to a famed fossil site in Germany near the village of Messel, where exquisitely preserved 47-million-year-old bird fossils are regularly dug up in an old quarry pit.
The scientists inspected several fossils and removed small pieces from 12 fossilized feathers. They returned home to put the material under a scanning electron microscope. “You can see a surface of beautifully packed together melanosomes,” said Richard Prum, a Yale expert on feather colors. “This looks exactly like a grackle or a starling, where you have a dark glossy bird with a metallic sheen.”
The scientists now plan to shift from isolated feathers to a complete bird fossil. “We can document its plumage over its entire body,” Dr. Prum said.
David Martill, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth who was not involved in the study, said the research was exciting. He is especially interested in how this method might be used to understand how birds evolved from feathered, flightless dinosaurs. Birds today use their range of colors and feather patterns to set themselves apart from other species and to attract mates. It is possible that dinosaurs evolved these colors before they evolved the ability to fly.
Dr. Clarke said she and her colleagues hoped to explore that question. “This is just a proof of concept that this kind of color can be preserved in the fossil record,” Dr. Clarke said, “but we’re not stopping there.”
Essay: Finding a Scapegoat When Epidemics Strike
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, September 1, 2009
Whose fault was the Black Death?
In medieval Europe, Jews were blamed so often, and so viciously, that it is surprising it was not called the Jewish Death. During the pandemic’s peak in Europe, from 1348 to 1351, more than 200 Jewish communities were wiped out, their inhabitants accused of spreading contagion or poisoning wells.
The swine flu outbreak of 2009 has been nowhere near as virulent, and neither has the reaction. But, as in pandemics throughout history, someone got the blame — at first Mexico, with attacks on Mexicans in other countries and calls from American politicians to close the border.
In May, a Mexican soccer player who said he was called a “leper” by a Chilean opponent spat on his tormentor; Chilean news media accused him of germ warfare. In June, Argentines stoned Chilean buses, saying they were importing disease. When Argentina’s caseload soared, European countries warned their citizens against visiting it.
“When disease strikes and humans suffer,” said Dr. Liise-anne Pirofski, chief of infectious diseases at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an expert on the history of epidemics, “the need to understand why is very powerful. And, unfortunately, identification of a scapegoat is sometimes inevitable.”
A recent exhibition, “The Erfurt Treasure,” at the Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan, displayed a timely and depressing memento of this all too human habit. A chest with more than 600 pieces of gold jewelry, including a magnificent 14th-century wedding ring, was dug up during excavations in what was once a thriving Jewish quarter in Erfurt, Germany. It also held 3,141 silver coins, most with royal portraits; the last king depicted on them died in 1350.
That, said Gabriel M. Goldstein, the museum’s associate director of exhibitions, strongly suggests the hoard was buried in 1349, the year the plague reached Erfurt.
“Why put such a huge investment portfolio in the ground and leave it for 700 years?” he asked. “There was a major uprising against Erfurt’s Jews — records say 100 or 1,000 were killed. Seemingly, whoever hid it died and never came back.”
Dr. Martin J. Blaser, a historian who is chairman of medicine at New York University’s medical school, offers an intriguing hypothesis for why Jews became scapegoats in the Black Death: they were largely spared, in comparison with other groups, because grain was removed from their houses for Passover, discouraging the rats that spread the disease. The plague peaked in spring, around Passover.
But in every pandemic, the chain of causation is intricate. The historian William H. McNeill, author of “Plagues and Peoples,” suggests that ultimate blame may rest with Möngke Khan, grandson of Genghis, who in 1252 sent his armies as far south as present-day Burma, putting them in contact with rodents whose fleas played host to Yersinia pestis, the plague bacillus. After Yersinia returned with them to the flea-bitten marmots of the Eurasian steppes, it began creeping through the rodent burrows lining Mongol caravan routes, which stretched as far west as the Black Sea. That’s where plague-ridden rats boarded ships in the besieged Crimean port of Kaffa in 1346, taking it to Europe.
But that lets off the hook the Indian or Egyptian sailors who had presumably first moved the wild black rat out of India 1,000 years earlier. And then, whom in prehistory does one blame for first carrying Yersinia north from its original home in the Great Lakes region of Africa?
It is not uncommon for ethnic groups to have religious or cultural customs that protect against disease — but whether it was originally intended to do that or not is often lost in time.
Manchurian nomads, Dr. McNeill said, avoided plague because they believed marmots harbored the souls of their ancestors, so it was taboo to trap them, although shooting them was permitted. Butin the early 20th century, trapping by immigrants from China contributed to plague outbreaks.
And Tamils from India working as plantation laborers in Malaysia may have had less malaria and dengue than their Malay and Chinese co-workers did because they never stored water near their houses, leaving mosquitoes no place to breed.
The most visible aspect of blame, of course, is what name a disease gets. The World Health Organization has struggled mightily to avoid the ethnic monikers given the Spanish, Hong Kong and Asian flus, instructing its representatives to shift from “swine flu” to “H1N1” to “A (H1N1) S-O.I.V.” (the last four initials stand for “swine-origin influenza virus”) to, recently, “Pandemic (H1N1) 2009.”
Headline writers have rebelled, and ignored them.
Dr. Mirta Roses, director of the Pan American Health Organization, said that in the pandemic’s early days, she fought suggestions that it be named the Mexican flu or the Veracruz flu or the La Gloria flu after the country, state and town where it was discovered.
“We try to avoid demonizing anyone and to keep the focus on the virus,” she said. “It helps reduce the level of panic and aggression.”
When Dr. Roses was a girl, growing up in a small town in Argentina, her neighbors blamed city dwellers for polio. One summer, families took turns with the local police staffing roadblocks to turn back buses from the capital.
“No one wanted the people from Buenos Aires,” she said, “because they were bringing polio.” (There was some logic in it. Polio, an intestinal virus, peaks in summer, and is more common in cities with overflowing sewers than in rural areas with outhouses.)
“It wasn’t until I grew up that I learned that that was no way to fight it,” she said. “It was vaccinating 99 percent of the children that stopped polio.”
By the old naming conventions, the 1918 Spanish flu probably ought to be known as the Kansas flu. According to “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,” John M. Barry’s history of the epidemic, the first identifiable cases arose in Haskell County, in Kansas. They soon spread to Fort Riley, from there to other military bases, and then to Europe in troop ships. France, Germany and Britain had war censors controlling news reports; Spain did not. Spain got the blame.
Most human diseases originate in animals. While culling animals sometimes makes sense as a public health measure — for example, culling chickens to stop an outbreak H5N1 avian flu — animals are also sometimes “punished” pointlessly. In May, the Egyptian government slaughtered thousands of pigs belonging to the Coptic Christian minority, despite international protests that doing so was racist against Copts and medically pointless because the disease was already in people. When the swine flu arrived anyway — in a 12-year-old American girl, the first confirmed case — the government vowed to hunt down the last few pigs hidden by poor families and kill them on the spot.
In Afghanistan, Khanzir, the country’s only pig, a curiosity in the Kabul Zoo, was quarantined to keep him away from the goats and deer he had formerly eaten with.
And during the spread of the avian flu around Asia, Thailand’s government shot open-billed storks in its cities and chopped down the trees they nested in, even though the flu had not been found in a single stork.
Though the truth is that diseases are so complex that pointing blame is useless, simply deflecting blame may be more efficient.
During the Black Death, Pope Clement VI issued an edict, or bull, saying Jews were not at fault. He did not, of course, blaspheme by blaming God. Nor did he blame mankind’s sins. That would have comforted the Flagellants, the self-whipping sect who were the bull’s real target; they often led the mobs attacking both Jews and the corrupt church hierarchy, and were considered heretics. Nor did it blame Möngke Khan or Yersinia pestis. It would be 500 years until the “germ theory” of disease developed.
No, the pope picked a target particularly tough to take revenge upon: a misalignment of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, September 1, 2009
In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.
Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.
Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Unless forced to because some bounder has abandoned her, why would any sane woman choose another trot down the aisle — for another Rachael Ray spatula set? Spare me extra candlesticks, I’m a one-trick monogamist.
Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man’s game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates.
In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.
Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast, the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.
“We’re so wedded to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic situation goes up and down.”
The new analysis, though preliminary, is derived from one of the more comprehensive and painstaking data sets yet gathered of marriage and reproduction patterns in a non-Western culture. The results underscore the importance of avoiding the breezy generalities of what might be called Evolution Lite, an enterprise too often devoted to proclaiming universal truths about deep human nature based on how college students respond to their professors’ questionnaires. Throughout history and cross-culturally, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, “there has been fantastic variability in women’s reproductive strategies.”
Geoffrey F. Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, agreed. “Evolutionary psychology and anthropology really need to take women’s perspective seriously in all its dimensions,” Dr. Miller said. “You can construe sequential relationships as being driven by male choice, in which case you’d call it polygyny, or by female choice, in which case you’d call it polyandry, but the capacity of women across cultures to dissolve relationships that aren’t working has been much underestimated.”
Pimbwe culture has been too disrupted over the years by colonialism and government interference to serve as a quaint museum piece of how our ancestors lived, but the challenges the people face are more survival-based than how to get your child into an elite preschool program. The Pimbwe live in small villages, have few possessions and eke out a subsistence living farming, fishing, hunting and gathering. Virtually all Pimbwe get married at least once, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, and they do it without the blessing of judge, priest or Las Vegas. “Marriage is not formalized with any specific set of rituals,” she said, “and marriages break up by one or another partner leaving.”
Nor is there much formal sexual division of labor. “In terms of farming, men and women do pretty much the same tasks,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “The men will cook, do a lot with the kids.”
Unlike in the West, where men control a far greater share of resources than women do, or in traditional pastoral societies like those found in the Middle East and Africa, where a woman is entirely dependent on the wealth of her husband and in divorce is not entitled to so much as a gimpy goat, Pimbwe women are independent operators and resourceful co-equals with men.
This does not mean that mothers can go it alone, however. Again in contrast to the contemporary West, childhood mortality remains a serious threat, and it takes the efforts of more than one adult to keep a baby alive. A good, hardworking husband can be a great asset — and so, too, may his relations. The evolutionary theorist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy proposes that one reason the offspring of much-marrying Pimbwe women do comparatively well is that the children end up with a widened circle of caretakers. “The women are lining up more protection, more investment, more social relationships for their children to exploit,” she said. “A lot of what some people would call promiscuous I would call being assiduously maternal.”
The goose, like the gander, may find it tempting to wander if it means that her goslings will fly.
First Trace of Color Found in Fossil Bird Feathers
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, September 1, 2009
Birds, more than any other group of animals, are a celebration of color. They have evolved to every extreme of the spectrum, from the hot pink of flamingos to the shimmering blue of a peacock’s neck. Yet, for decades, paleontologists who study extinct birds have had to use their imaginations to see the colors in the fossils. Several feather fossils have been unearthed over the years, but they have always been assumed to be colorless vestiges.
Now a team of scientists has discovered color-producing molecules that have survived for 47 million years in the fossil of a feather. By analyzing those molecules, the researchers have shown that they would have given a bird the kind of dark, iridescent sheen found on starlings and other living birds.
This new method may allow scientists not only to reconstruct ancient birds more accurately. Birds evolved from ground-running feathered dinosaurs, and now it may be possible to determine some of the colors on them as well.
“I really do think we are moving from dinosaurs in black and white to dinosaurs in Technicolor,” said Julia Clarke, a University of Texas paleontologist who was a co-author of the new paper, published in the journal Biology Letters.
The new research got its start with squid. Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale, was examining a fossil of a squid when he discovered that its ink sac was packed with microscopic spheres. They were identical to the pigment-loaded structures that give color to ink in living squid, known as melanosomes.
Knowing that birds make melanosomes in their feathers, Mr. Vinther decided to look for them in bird fossils. He knew that unlike the spherical melanosomes in squid, birds make sausage-shaped ones. “When I zoomed in on the fossils, it was nothing but these little sausages,” Mr. Vinther said.
But Mr. Vinther had to rule out the possibility that the sausages were bacteria that fed on the feathers after the birds died and then fossilized. He and his colleagues did that by examining an unusual fossil feather from Brazil with a pattern of dark and white stripes. Last year they reported that they found the sausage-shaped structures only in the dark stripes and none in the white ones. It is unlikely that the bacteria would grow in such an arbitrary pattern.
Mr. Vinther and his colleagues then decided to look for fossil melanosomes that still preserved clues to the colors of the birds in life. Melanosomes produce colors not just with the pigments they contain, but also with their organization inside the feather. In the case of some birds, for example, their feathers bounce some light off the outer surface while allowing some to penetrate and bounce off an inner layer of melanosomes. Depending on how the melanosomes are spaced, the two waves of light can interfere with each other in different ways, producing different colors.
To find well-preserved feathers, the scientists traveled this May to a famed fossil site in Germany near the village of Messel, where exquisitely preserved 47-million-year-old bird fossils are regularly dug up in an old quarry pit.
The scientists inspected several fossils and removed small pieces from 12 fossilized feathers. They returned home to put the material under a scanning electron microscope. “You can see a surface of beautifully packed together melanosomes,” said Richard Prum, a Yale expert on feather colors. “This looks exactly like a grackle or a starling, where you have a dark glossy bird with a metallic sheen.”
The scientists now plan to shift from isolated feathers to a complete bird fossil. “We can document its plumage over its entire body,” Dr. Prum said.
David Martill, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth who was not involved in the study, said the research was exciting. He is especially interested in how this method might be used to understand how birds evolved from feathered, flightless dinosaurs. Birds today use their range of colors and feather patterns to set themselves apart from other species and to attract mates. It is possible that dinosaurs evolved these colors before they evolved the ability to fly.
Dr. Clarke said she and her colleagues hoped to explore that question. “This is just a proof of concept that this kind of color can be preserved in the fossil record,” Dr. Clarke said, “but we’re not stopping there.”
Essay: Finding a Scapegoat When Epidemics Strike
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, September 1, 2009
Whose fault was the Black Death?
In medieval Europe, Jews were blamed so often, and so viciously, that it is surprising it was not called the Jewish Death. During the pandemic’s peak in Europe, from 1348 to 1351, more than 200 Jewish communities were wiped out, their inhabitants accused of spreading contagion or poisoning wells.
The swine flu outbreak of 2009 has been nowhere near as virulent, and neither has the reaction. But, as in pandemics throughout history, someone got the blame — at first Mexico, with attacks on Mexicans in other countries and calls from American politicians to close the border.
In May, a Mexican soccer player who said he was called a “leper” by a Chilean opponent spat on his tormentor; Chilean news media accused him of germ warfare. In June, Argentines stoned Chilean buses, saying they were importing disease. When Argentina’s caseload soared, European countries warned their citizens against visiting it.
“When disease strikes and humans suffer,” said Dr. Liise-anne Pirofski, chief of infectious diseases at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an expert on the history of epidemics, “the need to understand why is very powerful. And, unfortunately, identification of a scapegoat is sometimes inevitable.”
A recent exhibition, “The Erfurt Treasure,” at the Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan, displayed a timely and depressing memento of this all too human habit. A chest with more than 600 pieces of gold jewelry, including a magnificent 14th-century wedding ring, was dug up during excavations in what was once a thriving Jewish quarter in Erfurt, Germany. It also held 3,141 silver coins, most with royal portraits; the last king depicted on them died in 1350.
That, said Gabriel M. Goldstein, the museum’s associate director of exhibitions, strongly suggests the hoard was buried in 1349, the year the plague reached Erfurt.
“Why put such a huge investment portfolio in the ground and leave it for 700 years?” he asked. “There was a major uprising against Erfurt’s Jews — records say 100 or 1,000 were killed. Seemingly, whoever hid it died and never came back.”
Dr. Martin J. Blaser, a historian who is chairman of medicine at New York University’s medical school, offers an intriguing hypothesis for why Jews became scapegoats in the Black Death: they were largely spared, in comparison with other groups, because grain was removed from their houses for Passover, discouraging the rats that spread the disease. The plague peaked in spring, around Passover.
But in every pandemic, the chain of causation is intricate. The historian William H. McNeill, author of “Plagues and Peoples,” suggests that ultimate blame may rest with Möngke Khan, grandson of Genghis, who in 1252 sent his armies as far south as present-day Burma, putting them in contact with rodents whose fleas played host to Yersinia pestis, the plague bacillus. After Yersinia returned with them to the flea-bitten marmots of the Eurasian steppes, it began creeping through the rodent burrows lining Mongol caravan routes, which stretched as far west as the Black Sea. That’s where plague-ridden rats boarded ships in the besieged Crimean port of Kaffa in 1346, taking it to Europe.
But that lets off the hook the Indian or Egyptian sailors who had presumably first moved the wild black rat out of India 1,000 years earlier. And then, whom in prehistory does one blame for first carrying Yersinia north from its original home in the Great Lakes region of Africa?
It is not uncommon for ethnic groups to have religious or cultural customs that protect against disease — but whether it was originally intended to do that or not is often lost in time.
Manchurian nomads, Dr. McNeill said, avoided plague because they believed marmots harbored the souls of their ancestors, so it was taboo to trap them, although shooting them was permitted. Butin the early 20th century, trapping by immigrants from China contributed to plague outbreaks.
And Tamils from India working as plantation laborers in Malaysia may have had less malaria and dengue than their Malay and Chinese co-workers did because they never stored water near their houses, leaving mosquitoes no place to breed.
The most visible aspect of blame, of course, is what name a disease gets. The World Health Organization has struggled mightily to avoid the ethnic monikers given the Spanish, Hong Kong and Asian flus, instructing its representatives to shift from “swine flu” to “H1N1” to “A (H1N1) S-O.I.V.” (the last four initials stand for “swine-origin influenza virus”) to, recently, “Pandemic (H1N1) 2009.”
Headline writers have rebelled, and ignored them.
Dr. Mirta Roses, director of the Pan American Health Organization, said that in the pandemic’s early days, she fought suggestions that it be named the Mexican flu or the Veracruz flu or the La Gloria flu after the country, state and town where it was discovered.
“We try to avoid demonizing anyone and to keep the focus on the virus,” she said. “It helps reduce the level of panic and aggression.”
When Dr. Roses was a girl, growing up in a small town in Argentina, her neighbors blamed city dwellers for polio. One summer, families took turns with the local police staffing roadblocks to turn back buses from the capital.
“No one wanted the people from Buenos Aires,” she said, “because they were bringing polio.” (There was some logic in it. Polio, an intestinal virus, peaks in summer, and is more common in cities with overflowing sewers than in rural areas with outhouses.)
“It wasn’t until I grew up that I learned that that was no way to fight it,” she said. “It was vaccinating 99 percent of the children that stopped polio.”
By the old naming conventions, the 1918 Spanish flu probably ought to be known as the Kansas flu. According to “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,” John M. Barry’s history of the epidemic, the first identifiable cases arose in Haskell County, in Kansas. They soon spread to Fort Riley, from there to other military bases, and then to Europe in troop ships. France, Germany and Britain had war censors controlling news reports; Spain did not. Spain got the blame.
Most human diseases originate in animals. While culling animals sometimes makes sense as a public health measure — for example, culling chickens to stop an outbreak H5N1 avian flu — animals are also sometimes “punished” pointlessly. In May, the Egyptian government slaughtered thousands of pigs belonging to the Coptic Christian minority, despite international protests that doing so was racist against Copts and medically pointless because the disease was already in people. When the swine flu arrived anyway — in a 12-year-old American girl, the first confirmed case — the government vowed to hunt down the last few pigs hidden by poor families and kill them on the spot.
In Afghanistan, Khanzir, the country’s only pig, a curiosity in the Kabul Zoo, was quarantined to keep him away from the goats and deer he had formerly eaten with.
And during the spread of the avian flu around Asia, Thailand’s government shot open-billed storks in its cities and chopped down the trees they nested in, even though the flu had not been found in a single stork.
Though the truth is that diseases are so complex that pointing blame is useless, simply deflecting blame may be more efficient.
During the Black Death, Pope Clement VI issued an edict, or bull, saying Jews were not at fault. He did not, of course, blaspheme by blaming God. Nor did he blame mankind’s sins. That would have comforted the Flagellants, the self-whipping sect who were the bull’s real target; they often led the mobs attacking both Jews and the corrupt church hierarchy, and were considered heretics. Nor did it blame Möngke Khan or Yersinia pestis. It would be 500 years until the “germ theory” of disease developed.
No, the pope picked a target particularly tough to take revenge upon: a misalignment of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.