Science Tuesday - Nomads, Marriages, and Medicine

[brdgt]

Artifacts Show Sophistication of Ancient Nomads
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, March 12, 2012

Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian steppes stretching from the Black Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant “roaming about for pasture.” They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were “the other” to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C.

As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. To their literate neighbors, they were the ubiquitous and mysterious Scythians or the Saka, perhaps one and the same people. In any case, these nomads were looked down on — the other often is — as an intermediate or an arrested stage in cultural evolution. They had taken a step beyond hunter-gatherers but were well short of settling down to planting and reaping, or the more socially and economically complex life in town.

But archaeologists in recent years have moved beyond this mind-set by breaking through some of the vast silences of the Central Asian past.

These excavations dispel notions that nomadic societies were less developed than many sedentary ones. Grave goods from as early as the eighth century B.C. show that these people were prospering through a mobile pastoral strategy, maintaining networks of cultural exchange (not always peacefully) with powerful foreign neighbors like the Persians and later the Chinese.

Some of the most illuminating discoveries supporting this revised image are now coming from burial mounds, called kurgans, in the Altai Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan, near the borders with Russia and China. From the quality and workmanship of the artifacts and the number of sacrificed horses, archaeologists have concluded that these were burials of the society’s elite in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C. By gift, barter or theft, they had acquired prestige goods, and in time their artisans adapted them in their own impressive artistic repertory.

Almost half of the 250 objects in a new exhibition, “Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan,” are from these burials of a people known as the Pazyryk culture. The material, much of which is on public display for the first time, can be seen at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, on loan from Kazakhstan’s four national museums. Two quietly spectacular examples are 13 gold pieces of personal adornment, known as the Zhalauli treasure of fanciful animal figures; and the Wusun diadem, a gold openwork piece with inlaid semiprecious stones from a burial in the Kargaly Valley in southern Kazakhstan. The diadem blends nomad and Chinese characteristics, including composite animals in the Scytho-Siberian style and a horned dragon in an undulating cloudscape.

Artifacts from recent kurgan digs include gold pieces; carved wood and horn; a leather saddle; a leather pillow for the deceased’s head; and textiles, ceramics and bronzes. Archaeologists said the abundance of prestige goods in the burials showed the strong social differentiation of nomad society.

Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute’s chief curator, writes in the exhibit’s catalog, published by Princeton University Press, that the collection portrays “a world of nomadic groups that, far from being underdeveloped, fused distinct patterns of mobility with apparently sophisticated ritual practices expressive of a close connection to the natural world, to complex burial practices and to established networks and contacts with the outside world.”

Walking through the exhibit, Dr. Chi pointed to nomad treasures, remarking, “The popular perception of these people as mere wanderers has not caught up with the new scholarship.”

Excavation at the Altai kurgans, near the village of Berel, was begun in 1998 by a team led by Zainolla S. Samashev, director of the Margulan Institute of Archaeology, on a natural terrace above the Bukhtarma River. Some work had been done there by Russians in the 19th century. But the four long lines of kurgans, at least 70 clearly visible, invited more systematic exploration.

Of the 24 Berel kurgans investigated so far, Dr. Samashev said in an interview, the two he started with were among the largest. The mounds, about 100 feet in diameter, rise about 10 to 15 feet above the surrounding surface. The pit itself is about 13 feet deep and lined with logs. At the base of Kurgan 11, he said, the arrangement of huge stones let the cold air in but not out.

This and other physical aspects of the pits created permafrost, which preserved much of the organic matter in the graves — though looting long ago disturbed permafrost conditions. Still, enough survived of bones, hair, nails and some flesh to tell that some of the bodies had tattoos and had been embalmed. Hair of the buried men had been cut short and covered with wigs.

The Kazakh conservator of the artifacts, Altynbekov Krym, said that remains in several kurgans were a challenge. “Everything was jumbled together, getting moldy almost immediately,” he said, and that it “took six years experimenting to create a new methodology to clean and preserve the material.”

Dr. Samashev said that his international crew, which is limited by climate to summer work, had excavated at least one kurgan a year. Several were burials of lesser figures. These were usually only a man and one horse. Kurgan 11 had a man who apparently met a violent death in his 30s; a woman who died later; and 13 horses, dressed in formal regalia before they were sacrificed.

So many horses, found in a separate section of the pit, affirmed the man’s lofty social status. Their leather saddles with embroidered cloth survived, as well as bridle and other tack decorated with plaques of real and mythical animals — like griffins, which had the body of a tiger or lion with wings and the head of a bird.

Soren Stark, an assistant professor of Central Asian art and archaeology at the N.Y.U. institute, said networks of contacts with the outside world were crucial to the political structure of the people throughout the Altai and Tianshan Mountains.

On the most basic level, they moved with the seasons by horse and camel, tending the flocks of sheep and goats that gave them the meat, milk, wool and hides of their pastoral economy. To make the most out of grasslands that were only seasonally productive, they went in small family groups into the highland meadows for summer grazing and returned to the lowlands in winter. They crossed broad plains to avoid overgrazing any one marginal pasture.

At their late autumn and winter campsites, herders assembled in large groups and engaged in tribal hunts and rituals. The exhibition includes bronze caldrons, presumably for preparing communal feasts, and several bronze stands, including one with a seated man holding a cup and facing a horse, that have the experts puzzled. Equally enigmatic are the symbols on rock faces that perhaps mark sacred places.

From the camps, parties of mounted warriors set out to raid settlements, both to supplement their meager resources and to obtain luxury goods coveted by their leaders. Dr. Stark said the nomad elite considered such goods necessities to be displayed and distributed to key followers “to build up and sustain their political power.”

As their networks widened, foreign influences, notably Persian, began to appear in nomadic artifacts from the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C. The griffin, for example, originated in the West by way of the Persian Empire, centered in what is now Iran; the nomads modified it to have two heads of birds of prey topped by elk horns.

Beginning in the third century B.C., Chinese luxury items, like the Wusun diadem, appeared in nomad burials, mainly associated with Han dynasty. According to Chinese accounts, the Wusun nomads may have furthered contacts between Central Asian nomads and Han China, at the time expanding westward and in need of horses in its campaign against borderland rivals.

For all their networking, the nomads of the first millennium B.C. never failed to apply imaginative touches to the foreign artifacts they acquired. Dr. Chi, the curator, said the nomads transformed others’ fantastic animals into even more fantastic versions: boars curled in teardrop shapes and griffins that seemed to change their parts in a single image.

By these enigmatic symbols, a prewriting culture communicated its worldview from a vast and ungenerous land that it could never fully tame — any more than these people of the horse were ever ready to settle down.

“Nomads and Networks” will continue through June 3 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th Street, Manhattan. Information is at isaw.nyu.edu.

Correction: March 14, 2012

An article on Tuesday about the excavation of nomads’ burial mounds in Kazakhstan misspelled the name of the society whose artifacts are the focus of the “Nomads and Networks” exhibition at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. It is the Pazyryk society, not Pazyrk.




Refining the Formula That Predicts Celebrity Marriages’ Doom
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, March 12, 2012

In 2006, Garth Sundem and I confronted one of the great unsolved mysteries in social science: Exactly how soon will a given celebrity marriage blow up?

Drawing on Garth’s statistical expertise and my extensive survey of the literature in supermarket checkout lines, we published an equation in The New York Times predicting the probability that a celebrity marriage would endure. The equation’s variables included the relative fame of the husband and wife, their ages, the length of their courtship, their marital history, and the sex-symbol factor (determined by looking at the woman’s first five Google hits and counting how many show her in skimpy attire, or no attire).

Now, with more five years of follow-up data, we can report firm empirical support for the Sundem/Tierney Unified Celebrity Theory.



The 2006 equation correctly predicted doom for Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock; and Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. It also forecast that Will Smith and Jada Pinkett would probably not make it to their 15th anniversary, in December 2012; so far, they’re still married, but gossip columns are rife with reports of a pending split.

On a happier note, the 2006 equation identified two couples with a good chance to make it to their fifth anniversary, in 2010: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, and Matt Damon and Luciana Barroso. Sure enough, they made it (and are still married).

As impressive as these results are, we believe even more scientific progress is possible. We have refined the equation by drawing on recent data as well as the research conducted by Garth in his fiendishly clever new book, “Brain Trust: 93 Top Scientists Reveal Lab-Tested Secrets to Surfing, Dating, Dieting, Gambling, Growing Man-Eating Plants, and More!”

While the 2006 equation did a good job over all of identifying which couples were most likely to divorce, some of the specific predictions proved too pessimistic. Because Demi was so famous — and much more famous than Ashton — we gave their marriage little chance of surviving a year, but they didn’t split until 2011. We were similarly bearish on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes (because of his fame, his two failed marriages and their age gap), but they’re still together.

What went right with them — and wrong with our equation? Garth, a self-professed über-geek, has crunched the numbers and discovered a better way to gauge the toxic effects of celebrity. Whereas the old equation measured fame by counting the millions of Google hits, the new equation uses a ratio of two other measures: the number of mentions in The Times divided by mentions in The National Enquirer.

“This is a major improvement in the equation,” Garth says. “It turns out that overall fame doesn’t matter as much as the flavor of the fame. It’s tabloid fame that dooms you. Sure, Katie Holmes had about 160 Enquirer hits, but she had more than twice as many NYT hits. A high NYT/ENQ ratio also explains why Chelsea Clinton and Kate Middleton have better chances than the Kardashian sisters.”

Garth’s new analysis shows that it’s the wife’s fame that really matters. While the husband’s NYT/ENQ ratio is mildly predictive, the effect is so much weaker than the wife’s that it’s not included in the new equation. Nor are some variables from the old equation, like the number of previous marriages and the age gap between husband and wife.

In the fine tradition of Occam’s razor, the new equation has fewer variables than the old one. Besides the wife’s tabloid fame, the crucial ones are the spouses’ combined age (younger couples divorce sooner), the length of the courtship (quicker to wed, quicker to split), and the sex-symbol factor (defined formally as the number of Google hits showing the wife “in clothing designed to elicit libidinous intent”).

Why is the wife’s sexy image dangerous? And why do her variables — her image, her tabloid fame — matter so much more than her husband’s?

“You could explain this two ways,” Garth says. “Either the guy’s powerless to predict the marriage’s fate, or he’s an enigma, indefinable by numbers. I prefer the latter.”

But the former explanation seems more plausible to the experts I consulted, like John G. Holmes, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who studies relationships. “Women initiate 70 percent of breakups, so perhaps that’s why their personality and image are more predictive,” he says.

David M. Buss, who analyzed mating strategies around the world in “The Evolution of Desire” and “Why Women Have Sex,” suggests several reasons the wife’s sexy image and tabloid fame mean trouble.

“Research has documented that women who wear skimpy or sexually provocative clothing tend to be higher on the trait of narcissism,” says Dr. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas. “My research on married couples found that the trait of narcissism predicted likelihood of sexual infidelity. Those high on narcissism feel entitled to have sex with others. Also, they oscillate between feelings of grandiosity and worthlessness, and the sexual attention helps keep them in the self-aggrandizing region of self-esteem.”

Sexual infidelity is also an excellent strategy for a narcissistic celebrity to get attention from the tabloids. And while the tabloids are happy to go after cheaters of either sex, Dr. Buss says that that research into marriage longevity shows there’s still a double standard: “Sexual infidelity by women is statistically more likely to lead to marital breakup than sexual infidelity by men.”

Of course, correlation doesn’t mean causation, says Betsey Stevenson, an economist at Penn who has studied marital longevity. “We know that people marrying young have a much higher chance of divorcing,” Dr. Stevenson says. “But what’s much harder to tell is whether the types of people who marry young are more likely to divorce, or whether the young age at time of marriage actually makes the marriage more prone to divorce.”

Either way, we can still use these variables to make predictions. (For a full list, go to nytimes.com/science.) The good news is that, aided by long courtships, a few couples have a better-than-even chance of lasting at least 15 years: Kate and Prince William, Calista Flockhart and Harrison Ford, Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky, and Beyoncé Knowles and Jay-Z.

Many others are likely to split between their 5th and 15th anniversaries (including Tom and Katie, now in their sixth year), and some aren’t likely to make it that long. After he crunched the numbers, Garth’s advice to Jessica Simpson and Ms. Spears is to avoid marriage anytime soon. And he doesn’t hold out much long-term hope for a Kardashian sister married to a pro basketball luminary.

“I’ve calculated the chance of Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom celebrating their golden anniversary,” he says, “Even when I extend it to 15 decimal places, the probability is still zero.”




Things Adult Medicine Could Learn From Pediatrics
By PERRI KLASS, M.D., The New York Times, March 12, 2012

Twenty-eight years ago, I wrote about drawing blood for the first time, about the pain of the patient and the self-doubt of the medical student. In my first clinical experience, I was learning a strange new color code: red-top tube for blood chemistries, purple top for hematology, green top, yellow top, and so on.

In pediatrics, I soon discovered, the colors were the same but the tubes themselves were much smaller. And instead of those big needles I had learned to use on adults, we used butterflies, tiny needles with plastic wings to keep them stable.

I thought: If you can get enough blood through a small butterfly needle filling a small tube to do the necessary tests, why must we jab big needles into adults and fill comparatively huge tubes to do the same assessments?

It wasn’t the last time I wondered why children were treated with more concern than adults. And now it seems that attitudes long taken for granted in the care of children might be working their way up the life span to become more standard for adults.



Take those big tubes. In a 2011 article in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers showed that adults hospitalized with heart attacks who had more blood drawn were more likely to develop anemia while in the hospital. Patients who develop such anemia have a higher risk of death.

Dr. Mikhail Kosiborod, one of the authors of the study, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., told me that the result surprised some physicians; the average volume of blood lost did not seem substantial enough to cause anemia in healthy adults. Patients in the study who developed anemia lost 174 milliliters of blood on average during hospitalization — just under six ounces — though some lost much more. A healthy adult might not become anemic after such blood loss, but the sick and debilitated may be at higher risk.

His own hospital, like many other institutions, is now using smaller tubes, he said — not the tiniest tubes, which require special handling, but a smaller size that can still be handled routinely by the lab.

So why had anyone ever used larger tubes if smaller would work? “It just hasn’t been brought up in the adult world,” Dr. Kosiborod said. “It hasn’t been made a big issue.”

Dr. Bradley Monash, an academic hospitalist at the University of California, San Francisco, who works on both pediatric and adult wards, said: “There’s something about the care of a child that touches people. There’s something about caring for children that people address differently.”

The pain and fear that children feel about having their blood drawn, for example, probably influence the frequency with which doctors order tests.

“Fear is acceptable in pediatrics much more than it is in adults,” Dr. Monash said. “There are a lot of things we could take from pediatrics and translate into medicine.”

When children get hospitalized, for instance, we understand that they’re scared. An unfamiliar place, painful procedures, strangers with needles — all are piled atop the underlying feeling of being sick or hurt. And we routinely expect parents to stay over in their children’s hospital rooms, providing cots and chairs that unfold to lie flat.

When children need surgery, we promise company and comfort.

The children are told that “the parents are going to be going with them into the operating room, and they’re going to stay with them till they fall asleep,” said Florencia Catanzaro, who coordinates the pre-hospitalization child life program at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

Parents are routinely allowed into recovery, so that children can see them when they wake up, or soon after. But really, are adults any less scared, uncertain or disoriented?

In adult surgery, it is not routine to promise that someone can be with you in the operating room till you go to sleep, or to have family members a standard part of recovery room care. Many hospitals will let a family member stay overnight with an adult patient, but policies vary hospital by hospital, ward by ward.

“We accommodate family members much more in pediatrics,” Dr. Monash said. “We don’t have visiting hours where everyone has to leave.”

Still, the trend in adult medicine is that new patient rooms are more likely to be constructed, as pediatric rooms are, to accommodate family members.

It seems to me we should be able to promise any hospital patient that a relative, a friend, can stay close at hand. We should be able to promise anyone going in for surgery that when she wakes up, someone familiar will be there.

It won’t always be perfectly convenient for hospital routine, but the lesson from pediatric care is that hospitals will adjust. This was all unthinkable in pediatrics, too, just over a half century ago.

The adage “children are not just small adults” is so basic in pediatrics that you can search medical journals and find it applied to treatments for facial fractures, liver failure and cardiac arrhythmias, for example. We have learned over time to fine-tune medical care to the differently wired physiologies of children, and to their emotional development.

But when it comes to certain aspects of medical treatment, especially hospitalization, perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that adults are really just big children. Illness, pain and the shadows of disability and death — all hospital familiars — make all of us vulnerable, at any age, and reassurance and comfort are welcome. Blood is a useful reminder: Every patient needs to be treated in a way that conserves every drop of strength and resilience.

Comments

[linaerys.livejournal.com]

All these articles were quite fascinating. I hope to visit Khasakhstan soon, and am glad to know more about their history.

And I love the idea of caring the scared child that all sick adults have in them. I hope that trend continues.

Thanks for sharing these!

[brdgt.livejournal.com]

I thought they were a good bunch as well! The pediatric care one caught my attention because I have very small veins and doctors have to use baby needles on me (and I can't donate blood). It's less painful, but it takes forever because they take so much blood.