The Most Important Thing I Learned in the 8th grade….

 

I grew up in the northernmost regions of Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Superior. I also grew up a relatively long time ago. There were no wealthy people around – you were either a working-class family with a regular pay check or a working-class family with an irregular paycheck. It all depended on the work.  My father was a railroad fireman (he shoveled coal in steam engines) and later an engineer on diesel locomotives.  Even though he was in his forties work was very irregular due to the seniority system used by railroads.  The oldest people got their selection of jobs and there were more people than jobs. Many people at the top refused to retire creating a lot of anger and controversy by younger people wanting to work more hours.

The entire population of my home town was from European ancestry – everyone was white. Irish and Scandinavian derived families clustered on the west side of town and eastern European, German and Polish families on the east side of town.  We lived on the east side about 7 blocks from the lake.  

The town was located between two reservations inhabited by the Red Cliff and Bad River Tribes of the Lake Superior Chippewa. It was rare to encounter anyone of Native American ancestry unless you played sports and competed against some of those teams or until you were in middle school or high school. I used to fish on the Bad River Reservation with my grandfather and we got to known some of the men who ran a local boat landing.

Racism was overt and it was everywhere.  That may sound odd given my description of the place, but it would not take much to set people off.  An image on television like Muhammad Ali talking in his usual provocative manner or Willy Mays showboating in center field was all that it took. Racial epithets followed at a rate and intensity that was quite unbelievable.  There were a few cooler heads.  My grandmother was one.  All that she could do was to insist that people not talk like that in her presence.  As a boy – it was a mystery to me that the rest room facilities on trains were segregated – even though we were practically in Canada and there were no black people around.  I asked my father why the porter had to have a separate bathroom and he could not give me an answer.  At the time I had never seen a porter.    

The time frame of my youth coincided with the American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968) but there was no discussion of it in schools, churches, or the public discourse.  The only place where it came up at all was in my 8^th grade biology course.   On a day back in 1965 – I learned the best lesson I ever learned in high school and possibly in my life.

I was a definite nerd back then and extremely interested in science – especially biology.  It was the only class that seemed to be interesting.  That was probably fueled by being a neurotic kid and always wondering if I had an undiagnosed disease or not.  My imagined symptoms at the time seemed limitless and I would find myself in the library researching rabies and various cancers primarily.  It seemed that cancer was always a dinner table topic for my parents.  A relative with exploratory surgery and the ultimate ending: “They just sewed him back up – there was nothing more they could do.”  There was not a lot available to an 8^th grader with those interests so I ended up picking up a lot of biology on the side. That could be useful or not depending on who the teacher was – so I kept most of it to myself.

I can still recall the excitement of learning that our biology course had been changed to Modern Biology and there was a new textbook (1). Our teacher told us the course would be more relevant and it could also form the basis for a college trajectory.  All I can remember about it today is frog dissections, the genetics of taste testing and tongue rolling, and the idea that race was a social construct that had nothing to do with biology.

That’s right – the social construct bomb was dropped in the middle of the Great White North in 1965 and it did not make a sound. There was no emphasis about it.  There were no lessons seeking to connect it to the culture at the time and the Civil Rights Movement.  There was no controversy at school board meetings. It was right there in the book.  A biological definition of races and a description that the isolated groups that were called races would probably intermix at some point and the artificial, color-based designations would just disappear.  We would all be one big happy Homo sapiens family. That information was as rational as it was profound when I read it the first time and witnessed how the idea was repeatedly violated over the next 50 years.  I had seen it violated so many times I went back and found the original biology text that I read in the 8^th grade.         

Some of the key quotes from that text are on the following graphic.  The basic idea is that the species originated and subpopulations migrated over thousands of years and were geographically isolated. During that isolation mutations occurred in those populations that led to some alterations in physical appearance but the genome wide similarities were still much greater than any between population differences. One standard species definition is the ability to interbreed between populations and that was sustained.  Even though populations were named by different physical characteristics they were biologically identical. In the modern era, the longstanding physical barriers to population mixing are no longer present and we should expect a more homogeneous population over time.

Flash forward to 2024.  I just read a paper (2) that should be read by everyone and combined with my personal experience is the impetus for this post. The additional impetus is the recent election in the US and a political cultural movements that are overtly racist, anti-racist, and anti-anti-racist. There are some common interests.  As a clear example, the overtly racist and anti-anti-racist movements coalesce around the central idea that the white race will be “replaced” by non-white races and this will result in significant loss of political advantage. That theory is called the Great Replacement Theory and it plays out at several levels not the least of which is the claim that one party seeks to use it to their advantage to get more voters and they will do this by illegal immigration. Never mind the fact that non-citizens cannot vote.  And never mind the fact that the current political landscape is a small blip in geological time. 

The paper is written by two evolutionary and theoretical biologists.  Expectedly it contains an abundance of modern theory about human genetics, evolution, and most importantly modes of transmission between individuals in populations. The most interesting focus for biologists and physicians is that there are ways to transmit behaviors between generations that are outside genetic transmission and that there are potential interactions between these modes and individual genetics.  The authors use an example of dairy farming and the persistence of lactase alleles.  Dairy farming can select for those alleles in the population but cultural adaption like the use of milk fermentation can also be successful in the absence of lactase persistence.  The main drivers of non-genetic inheritance are depicted in the graphic at the top of this post from the authors’ paper. 

In the body of the paper, they discuss cultural evolution (CE) and gene culture coevolution (GCC) models.  The lactase allele in the context of dairy farming is an example of GCC.  They discuss common errors made in suggesting that race is biologically based and introduce how cultural factors explain some of the differences attributed to genetics.  Intellectual differences are cited as one early example that was attributed to genetics – but modern genetic studies and combining cultural factors shows that there are no clear genetic differences between comparison populations and that all of the differences in educational achievement can be attributed to cultural factors like cultural role models, parental expectations, resources, social roles, and environmental niche.  Negative factors like racial discrimination and adverse life experiences can also play a role.  This paper is a reminder to carefully look for other sources of variance in large in genome wide association studies (GWAS) and whether cultural factors were studied.  My speculation is that the commonest cultural factor in play these days is childhood trauma because the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) checklist is available and considered a measure. This paper would suggest that is only part of the story.      

So here it is nearly 60 years after I read that race has no biological basis and that it is a social construct - it is still being used to divide citizens, suppress the vote, ration resources, stereotype people, direct violence at people, and actively discriminate against them.  I don’t know if reading this paper will be helpful at all so I provided the slides comparing my 8^th grade biology text and a current state of the art paper in abbreviated form.

I did not touch on the rhetoric involved and that is long, detailed, and discussed in other places on this blog.  Very briefly – philosophers and other rhetoricians have taken an anti-science stand in the past because they believed that science was given too much power.  That came about as philosophical musings gave way to more predictable scientific explanations. The problem is that science is an evolving process rather than a book of clearcut answers with some areas less evolved than others.  Eugenics and even more recent claims that race and associated cultural characteristics and endpoints are genetically based could be considered part of that process.  But many of these arguments still persist and like other areas of science have been politicized.  The authors here present all the reasons those arguments about race as a biological property are wrong.      

It was known in 1963 and it’s even more well known today.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Supplementary 1:  In terms of cultural factors and educational attainment I was reminded of one from my background - the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).  Back when I took it there was a general knowledge section that was supposed to show that the applicant had a knowledge base outside of science.  It was heavily weighted to the arts and humanities.   It was eventually eliminated because it was shown to favor students in large cities where there was access to art galleries and museums.  The closest museum was 200 miles away.  My family rarely left town.  When they did it was usually to pick up my father from a train station about 30 miles away.  

Supplementary 2:  It is interesting to consider the political rhetoric of the last election as it applies to the concept of race as a social construct.  It was common to see minority groups that in some cases were extremely small being scapegoated for political purposes.  Some of it had to do with long standing racism and some of it had to do with cultural factors.  The whole point of this blog post is how can any of that be acceptable if we are all members of the same race with trivial differences in appearance and behavior?      

 

References:

1: Botticelli CB, Erk FC, Fishleder J, Peterson GE, Smith FW, Strawbridge DW, Van Norma RW, Welch CA (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study). Biological Science: Molecules to Man. Revised Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963: 671-674.

2: Lala KN, Feldman MW. Genes, culture, and scientific racism. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Nov 26;121(48):e2322874121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2322874121. Epub 2024 Nov 18. PMID: 39556747.        

3:  Creanza N, Kolodny O, Feldman MW. Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Jul 25;114(30):7782-7789. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1620732114. Epub 2017 Jul 24. PMID: 28739941; PMCID: PMC5544263.

 

Graphics Credit:

From reference 2 Copyright © 2024 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).

 

News From Africa

 

 

Some readers of this blog may recall posts in the past about human origins from Africa. I first became aware of the migratory pathways of early humans and the archaeological and genetic evidence from participating in a National Geographic test. That test looked at haplotypes and how modern humans migrated from East Africa to essentially around the world. The test also estimated the percentage of Neanderthal heritage. Since that original sample I have been tested at 2 other laboratories. One of them confirmed the National Geographic analysis and the third test is pending. My original intent was to highlight the fact that all Homo sapiens are from East Africa, and that the distinctions we like to consider “race” mean a lot less than most people think. Genetically human beings from different races are much more similar than different.  If we all share common ancestors, similarities would seem to be intuitive, but the events that have occurred since my original post suggest otherwise.  Racial and tribal biases have been with her since prehistoric times and continue in modern societies.

Despite those biases, evidence continues to flow from Africa. In the may 6 Nature there was a research paper on the discovery of a 78,000-year-old gravesite in Panga Ya Saidi, Kenya that contained the body of a 3-year-old child. The body and gravesite had evidence of burial practices including intentional placement in an excavated grave, specific positioning of the body, and wrapping of the body in a perishable material.  The authors exhaustively review the evidence for those conclusions. They and the author doing the commentary on this article (2) also review the meaning of these rituals.

The editorial first and the commentary by Louise Humphrey (2) from the Center for Human Evolution Research. Dr. Humphrey sets the stage in the Middle capstone Age (320,002 30,000 years ago). The research question is the first evidence of modern human behavior during that era. Various human innovations were discovered during this timeframe in Africa. The earliest human fossils were also discovered in Africa during this timeframe. One of the key indicators of complex behavior is how the dead were prepared and handled. Anthropologists considered this to be a marker of increased symbolic capacity and thought. Dr. Humphrey reviews existing fossil records of mortuary treatments done by humans and provides a map in her paper (2) where the archaeological sites are mapped ranging from 50 to 780 thousand years ago. Given the time range the hominid species identified included Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalis, and other species of the genus Homo.  The critical work of the scientist involved is to “reconstruct a series of human actions associated with the deposition of the body”. What does the planning suggest? What meaning can be inferred from the site? Time and effort involved in the ritual suggest that the treatment is more meaningful. In the literature reviewed that included a dedicated site, wrapping the body, and positioning the body. Her conclusion was that the paper suggested the burial in the main paper was “symbolically significant”.

The research article (1) is a detailed description of the excavation and analysis of gravesite of a 2.5 to 3.0-year-old child. The researchers named the child Mtoto – a Kiswahili word for small child.  Estimated age of the gravesite was about 78,000 years ago. There is a detailed drawing of the preserved skeleton that includes a large portion of the cranium, spine, ribs, right clavicle, left scapula, left humerus, and proximal femurs.  There were 5 teeth present and they were felt to be consistent with H. sapiens, although some other features were present suggesting that there may have been regionally distinct populations. The evidence for placement of the body in a specific location was reviewed. The skeletal remnants were minimally displaced. The body was in a flexed position. The body present position was consistent with wrapping. This was interpreted as “more elaborated involvement of the community in the funerary rite…”. The evidence for intentional burial included an excavated trench and settlement patterns consistent with burial.

The authors review the scant evidence for mortuary practices during this era. They conclude that H. sapiens was probably preserving corpses of the young members of their groups between 69 and 78 thousand years ago.  That is contrasted with burial practices in Eurasia by Neanderthals and other modern humans dating back 120,000 years.  Infant and child burials in the sites were described as “ubiquitous”. The authors see the lack of mortuary practices during the middle Stone Age in Africa in general as being inconsistent with “modern-like conceptions of the afterlife and/or treatment of the dead”. They do point out that the absence of the behavior is not the same as the lack of capacity.

This paper was important from a number of perspectives. Overall, it is apparent that archaeological/paleobiological evidence of burial practices during the Stone Age is limited. East Africa is commonly viewed as the cradle of civilization. In 2 of the DNA analyses I have had done on myself, all my ancestors retraced back to East Africa. The data about Neanderthals mortuary practices is interesting because in the past decade, archaeological evidence supports the idea that they were conceptually more sophisticated than they had previously been given credit for.  One of the questions I came away with from this paper is why so few burial sites or other evidence of mortuary practices exist in Africa.

The inferences about human cognition based on mortuary practices are interesting to consider even in modern times. Over the course of my lifetime, funerals have changed significantly. Embalming and displaying the body, was fairly typical in the families I have been affiliated with until the turn-of-the-century. That mortuary practice was primarily grief focused. There was a religious service that was often a divine explanation of what had occurred and what was to be expected. Over the years I grew to become very interested in what the clergy from different faiths would say during the funeral. Other people would frequently speak with varying degrees of effectiveness. A common meal or reception would frequently follow the religious service there is often a separate burial with the graveside religious service the next day.

In about the year 2000, things seem to change significantly. I remember attending a funeral and being shocked that the body had been replaced by a small box of ashes. Cremation suddenly became the rule rather than the exception. The funeral service was focused on being a celebration of the deceased’s life rather than strictly grief focused. There were often photographs and video displays relevant to the deceased person’s life. The eulogies were also more lighthearted. Jokes or humorous vignettes about the deceased were more common. I don’t know what lead to these changes and have not been able to find a good analysis of why it occurred. The archeological elements of ritual, respect for the dead, the existential balance of the meaningfulness of their life in contrast to death, and the promise of a spiritual afterlife is all there. With cremation there is an added element of remembering the deceased as they were in real life and that theme is more consistent with a celebration of their life.  All of these elements are fairly implicit and embedded in ritual. An obituary is written and proofed several times. In the Internet era, it is posted on several sites and is eventually routed to sites when ancestry analysis occurs.  I have seen direct evidence that Internet obituaries exist in cyberspace much longer than they could be viewed in a newspaper. There is no doubt that multiple people have carefully planned the event.

The most important aspect of the death of an individual is their impact on the conscious states of others.  That is often simplified as a “memory” but it is more complex than that. For decades the grief process was considered to be a closed process. The person grieving goes through a number of cognitive-emotional stages and at some point they reach a stage where there baseline emotions return and they are left with memories of the individual. In the common vernacular that was described as closure.  In reality, the process is typically more open ended and the relationship with the deceased lives on. Any one of us who has lived long enough can recall at will or by association what those relationships and that person was like, why they are missed, and how they are still affecting us.  The increasing lifespan of modern humans leaves us all with a lot more time for those thoughts.

An additional consideration is the pattern of mortality and how it differs from the Stone Age to modern times. The average age of a person in the Stone age is estimated to be in the 25-35 range but that is skewed by considerable (45%) infant mortality. Did that have an impact on mortuary practices and the grief process?  Some experts suggest that more care was taken in attending to deceased infants and children implying that our ancestors had a selective thought process about those deaths. Given the time and scant evidence we may never know what our ancestors were thinking with a high degree of certainty. We do know that in the Middle Stone Age – our ancestors engaged in rituals that reflected their thoughts on death in general and that specific person.

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

 

References:

1:  Martinón-Torres M, d'Errico F, Santos E, Álvaro Gallo A, Amano N, Archer W, Armitage SJ, Arsuaga JL, Bermúdez de Castro JM, Blinkhorn J, Crowther A, Douka K, Dubernet S, Faulkner P, Fernández-Colón P, Kourampas N, González García J, Larreina D, Le Bourdonnec FX, MacLeod G, Martín-Francés L, Massilani D, Mercader J, Miller JM, Ndiema E, Notario B, Pitarch Martí A, Prendergast ME, Queffelec A, Rigaud S, Roberts P, Shoaee MJ, Shipton C, Simpson I, Boivin N, Petraglia MD. Earliest known human burial in Africa. Nature. 2021 May;593(7857):95-100. doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03457-8. Epub 2021 May 5. PMID: 33953416.

2:  Humphrey L.  Burial of a child during the Middle Stone Age in Africa.  Nature. 2021 May; 593(7857): 39-40.

3:  Ponce de León MS, Bienvenu T, Marom A, Engel S, Tafforeau P, Alatorre Warren JL, Lordkipanidze D, Kurniawan I, Murti DB, Suriyanto RA, Koesbardiati T, Zollikofer CPE. The primitive brain of early Homo. Science. 2021 Apr 9;372(6538):165-171. doi: 10.1126/science.aaz0032. PMID: 33833119.

4:  Beaudet A. The enigmatic origins of the human brain. Science. 2021 Apr 9;372(6538):124-125. doi: 10.1126/science.abi4661. PMID: 33833107.

5:  Olden K, White SL. Health-related disparities: influence of environmental factors. Med Clin North Am. 2005 Jul;89(4):721-38. doi: 10.1016/j.mcna.2005.02.001. PMID: 15925646.

6:  Brotherton P, Haak W, Templeton J, Brandt G, Soubrier J, Jane Adler C, Richards SM, Der Sarkissian C, Ganslmeier R, Friederich S, Dresely V, van Oven M, Kenyon R, Van der Hoek MB, Korlach J, Luong K, Ho SYW, Quintana-Murci L, Behar DM, Meller H, Alt KW, Cooper A; Genographic Consortium. Neolithic mitochondrial haplogroup H genomes and the genetic origins of Europeans. Nat Commun. 2013;4:1764. doi: 10.1038/ncomms2656. PMID: 23612305; PMCID: PMC3978205.

7:  Fu Q, Rudan P, Pääbo S, Krause J. Complete mitochondrial genomes reveal neolithic expansion into Europe. PLoS One. 2012;7(3):e32473. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032473. Epub 2012 Mar 13. PMID: 22427842; PMCID: PMC3302788.

 

Supplementary:

Additional references above are for a more expansive essay on paleobiology, genetics and the importance recognizing a common ancestry.