"The First Indo-Europeans" from Lilly to Dory

Hello, sister mine!

We've had a few conversations lately concerning the Indo-Europeans, so I'd like to share some of the things we've been discussing in class about them that you might find interesting.

But first, some overview for our readers who may not be familiar with the subject matter:

Almost all the modern European languages can be linked together linguistically, first into categorical branches, and then to a single historical common language, known as Proto-Indo-European.  Here's a diagram posted by Dory in one of our earlier posts (click for the post and a more in-depth description) that shows these connections:

It's called "Proto-Indo-European" because it's been reconstructed, based on ways of tracing the history of words (known as etymology) to find words in other languages which share a common historical root.  Because of this type of analysis, we know it has to have existed, but until recently relatively little was known about the people who actually spoke it.  However, you can tell quite a bit about a culture from its language!

First, we know through the archaeological record that the Indo-European culture originated in what is now Ukraine.  This is supported linguistically, as the modern Ukrainian language is the most similar to the reconstructed Indo-European language as compared to the other branches.

Here is where it starts getting cool, and why I love Anthro-linguistics...

We know the Indo-Euros were a pastoralist society, meaning their sustenance was based around herding some kind of animal (like sheep, cattle, goats, etc).  Typically, this "type," if you will, of culture will fall into certain patterns as far as its societal organization and spiritual beliefs.  In this case, the hierarchy follows thus: the shepherd watches over the flock as the father watches over his family (they tend to be male-dominated) as the leader watches over his tribe as a father-like deity watches over his people.  This is seen in many modern-day societies, and indeed can be spotted in the organization of Western culture and the terminology of modern Christianity (which stems from Judaism, which originated within a pastoralist group); "the good shepherd;" "sacrificial lamb;" "guide your flock;" etc.  The Indo-Euros are thought to have worshiped a god called "Sky Father," or "Diaus Pater" in it's reconstructed form, which is the root of words like "Dios" (Spanish), "Zues" (Greek), "Deu" (French), and "Dyw" (Cornish).

Now, the Indo-Euros weren't just ANY pastoralists.....

They were horse lords.

And, they had iron weapons before anyone else, making it easy for them to go around conquering all of their agrarian neighbors which is how their culture, language, and belief system spread across Europe so fast.  The blending of Indo-European and the languages of the groups they conquered is probably what kicked off the separate dialects that later evolved into the different language branches.

So, there is a certain mysterious culture that has been in Europe as long as anybody and whose language is very mysteriously indeed NOT a descendant of Proto-Indo-Euro.  They are the Basque.

My thoughts concerning this are largely centered on the idea that perhaps the ancient Basque were isolated enough to escape the notice of the conquering Indo-Euros, and so were able to keep their language where others were not.  What I'm wondering is, how did the ancient Basque live?  Were they agrarian, or were they perhaps nomadic?  This would link them to another European group who also speaks an independent language and managed to escape Indo-Euro influence: the Gypsies.

So, what are your thoughts?  Do you know something about the Basque or Gypsy cultures that would support this hypothesis, or am I completely off?

Love, Lilly

"Gust" from Dory to Lilly

This will be a short one, but I just wanted to tell you something neato.

So I was pondering the word "disgusting" the other day.  There are three parts to the word: "dis," "gust," and "ing," two of which we know the meaning of. "Dis-" means something along the same lines as "un-" or "not."  "-ing" turns a word into an adjective or gerund (or a verb if you want to get less technical.)  Basically, the word tells us that the thing we're describing is not...whatever "gust" means.  Which means "gust" meant something at some point in our language's history, probably something to do with taste.

At this point in my thought process, the very similarly-sounding French word "dégoûtant" (pronounced day-goot-on) popped into my head--it's the French word for "disgusting," and if you recall my post about the accent circonflexe, the accent circonflexe, seen here above the 'u,' indicates pretty reliably that there used to be an s right there.  AND, the cool thing about the word "dégoûtant" is that "goût" means "taste" in French.

So, if you followed all of that, you may decide to hypothesize along with me that there used to be a word in English, "gust," that meant "taste."

Having brought my thought process that far, it occurred to me that I should, like, test this theory.  So I consulted our best friend the Oxford English Dictionary and found this:

SUCCESS.

:D

"Visualization" from Dory to Lilly

Lillah, something happened in my Teaching Literature class today that made me question myself.

This is a good thing, I suppose, since we should always question our most dearly held assumptions when striving for more education.  But still, I feel extremely uncomfortable in thinking that I may not be as awesome a reader as I thought I was.

Namely, I don't visualize while reading.  There is no movie playing in my head.  We've been talking a lot in class about how to teach various "reading strategies"--stuff like predicting, making inferences, activating background knowledge, and visualizing.  I am ready to accept that visualizing can indeed be a useful strategy while reading, but personally I don't find it terribly useful.

Now, this is strange, because in other areas I'm an extremely visual person.  I like photography and art.  I draw comics to help me make sense of hard concepts.  My notes in class usually look something like this:

When I write in books it looks like this:

And when I plan out essays it looks like this:

So, I have no idea why I don't visualize what I'm reading--it's not something I ever did, or considered necessary for understanding or enjoying a book.  When I admitted this to a couple classmates, one of them asked, "Wait, so what IS going on in your head?"  Well,  other stuff.  It's not that I'm not engaged with the text, it's just that the visual details aren't terribly important to me in the face of things like emotions, relationships between characters, and the craft of the words themselves.

It seems to be this very closely-held tenant of teaching literature that students MUST LEARN HOW TO VISUALIZE THE TEXT, and I'm rather questioning that.  Am I just weird, or are there other people out there that find visualization not only unnecessary, but distracting?

Because seriously, having a movie playing in my head while reading sounds terribly distracting.

So, do you visualize?  Is it really like a movie constantly playing in your head?  I just can't even imagine that....

Explain this to me please, sister. o_0

Love, Dory

"Domestication" from Dory to Lilly

Lillah, I'm thinking about pets.  What does it mean to be domesticated?  Easy answer: an animal is domesticated if it can't survive without humans.  But there seems to be a grey area there.  I'm thinking especially about food. Are they domesticated when their body literally doesn't function right without a human there to take care of them and do things like regulate their food intake?

I'll look at our family's pets for examples.  This hypothesis is prompted by Benvolio Fish:

I left for the weekend, and when I came home, Benvolio was, like, horrifyingly fat.  Unfortunately, I forgot to tell one roommate that the other roommate was feeding him, so he got fed twice a day.  And I think the one roommate, whom I did not instruct on how to feed him, fed him rather a lot.  AND HE ATE ALL OF IT.  This led me to a realization: Benvolio can't tell when he's eaten enough, or too much, so I have to regulate that for him.  My hypothesis is based on the fact that bettas are ridiculously overbred. Soooo many health problems can result from the slightest change in water temperature, or pH, or food intake, or stress level.  He wouldn't last a week in the wild.  I think that somewhere along the line of single-trait breeding for longer fins and specific colors, the instinct to regulate their own diet got bred out of bettas.  Weird crap like that can happen when you breed for one or two specific traits.  (Ask me for more on this if you want, cuz it's interesting but kind of a tangent.)

In contrast, Spats:

She is a growing kitty, and she eats SO MUCH.  When we first got her, she ate more than Smudge and Bubblegum combined, and she hasn't really slowed down since.  But she knows what she's doing: she's perfectly healthy, not overweight at all.  For the enormous amount of energy she spends playing all day and not sleeping 18 hours a day like a normal cat, she knows that she needs a lot of food.

This is what makes me wonder: are cats fully domesticated?  They still know how to take care of themselves.  I don't know, though, whether they would be able to survive without humans.  Even feral cats still eat out of humans' garbage.  They still have the instinct to hunt, but would they be able to catch enough food to live off of?

I've heard that dogs (wolves) started being domesticated (several thousand years ago) when they started following humans around and eating their scraps.  Eventually, they started being friendly enough to form a symbiotic relationship with humans, helping them hunt and then sharing the meat. And then we got these things:

I don't think this is a symbiotic relationship anymore...

What do you think?  You quite possibly know more about this than me.

Love, Dory

"The momentous importance of childhood" from Lilly to Dory

Hello, sister mine!  It's been rather long since I've posted, and for that I apologize.  I've been meaning to bust out an epic piece on the subject of early humans, to incorporate some of the fragmented bits of hypotheses that have been floatin' around in my mind as of late.  I'm super excited because I've finally stumbled across the perfect article to tie it all together!

National Geographic published this article back in '06, entitled "Dikka Baby."  It's about a fossil discovery made by an Ethiopian scientist, Zeresenay Alemseged, in Africa's Great Rift Valley (a place where a goodly number of hominin fossils have been found -- our early ancestors liked to hang out there, as it's a well-sheltered and fertile river valley.  And, luckily for us future folk, tends to preserve remains quite nicely).  What's totally spectacular about this fossil is that it consists of a nearly complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton -- that of a three year old child, dubbed the Dikka baby.

A. afarensis was one of our very early ancestors, and lived more than three MILLION years ago.  I know you're somewhat familiar with H. habilis and H. erectus on, so here's a handy timeline for reference:

The most famous example we have of A. afarensis is "Lucy," a partial skeleton found in 1974.  Much of what we know about this species comes from the largely (somewhat dubiously) reconstructed parts of Lucy's skull and body, so having a complete skeleton is fantastic.  Also, Lucy was an adult when she died, so with the Dikka baby we have some insight into what this species was like as a child.

What's particularly special about this stage in human evolution is that it marks a transition into one of our most distinct trademarks: a relatively long span of time between birth and self-sufficiency, known as the infant-dependency period.

For some background:

Primates have some of the longest infant-dependency periods of all mammals, and among primates, humans have the longest.  There are a few likely reasons for this; the foremost being our large brains.  We actually can't stay in our mothers' wombs for long enough for our brains to completely develop, because if we did our heads would be too big to fit through the birth canal!  So instead of coming out all chop-chop-ready-to-go like a baby deer, we have this period following birth in which we are totally dependent upon our mothers and the larger group so that we can mature to the point that some animals are just born at.

The Dikka baby's brain case (yes, that is a scientific term for the skull) is not quite modern human- sized, but still rather larger than a chimp's.  This is indicative of a prolonged childhood.  Now, this is where things start to get interesting.  A. afarensis was bipedal, meaning they walked on two feet.  While their upper bodies were still fairly ape-like, their hips and spine were positioned to allow upright walking, and instead of the grasping toes of their cousins, they had flatter feet and shorter toes to help propel the body forward in a walking motion.  Without grasping feet, a baby can't cling to her mother like a chimp, and so has to be carried.  This would have inhibited the mother's ability to provide for herself, and in turn caused her to depend more upon the larger group than her earlier ancestors would have.  This dependency served to strengthen family bonds, and is the predecessor to the family structure that we modern humans identify by.

Now, the reason for which humans developed bipedalism has been the subject of great speculation among anthropologists.  Some say it was to allow endurance; it expends less energy than "knuckle-walking," and while we can't move as fast as our knuckle-walking ancestors, we can go for longer distances.  Some say a higher vantage point was beneficial in the sub-Saharan grasslands where we originated.  All agree that freeing up our hands to be able to carry things was a really great idea.  But to carry what?  What could be so important for us to be able to carry that our entire physiology would rearrange itself in order to accommodate?  Well, babies of course.  But if you think about the way evolution works, this theory doesn't make much sense.  People have to reproduce in order to have babies to carry, and if they're surviving long enough to have babies then obviously their physiology isn't going to have much incentive to change.  However, try thinking about it like this: what if the only babies who are surviving are the ones whose mothers are able to carry them?  These mothers must have the inclination towards bipedalism in order to do so, and therefore their progeny are going to have a higher chance than the last generation to carry this mutation as well.  So in this way, the traits that allow bipedal walking have the advantage; it's like evolution in reverse!

Of course, no anthropological study is complete without input from the linguists.  And they have hypothesized this big-brain-induced lengthy dependency period actually prompted the development of speech itself!  Think about the way a mother coos and comforts her baby, and the way the baby makes noises in response.  Combined with the group dependency I mentioned earlier, this could very well be where the forms of communication that led to speech really got started!  I'm very interested in what you think of this model, as well.

The point all of this leads up to is really quite profound; that the very logistics of having a physically large brain are responsible for such staple human characteristics as bipedalism, social bonds, and speech, rather than our intelligence per se.  It opens up the possibility of our earlier ancestors being much much smarter than we have assumed.  All that was needed was the ability to pass on information, and the mental incentive to actually share knowledge with our peers, to point us in the direction that led to where we are today.