Latter-day escapism

I recently attempted to temporarily ward off the boredom of a long solitary vacation by by a visit to the movie theater. That very idea was a sign that I was desperately in need of some distraction since I'm usually not into mainstream works of fiction. Wavering between the movie posters, I finally settled for 10,000 BC knowing deep inside it was going to be a waste of money. And it indeed it was, but I appreciate the self-inflicted reminder that Hollywood productions, or rather their consumers, still haven't reached a certain level of intellectual maturity (me included in this case for the sake of completeness). The reason I chose 10,000 BC is that, me being a paleo-anything junkie, I expected to glimpse at least some "artistic" rendering of what the late Mesolithic could be like. That said, I was prudent enough to allow for some distortions of historical reality to keep the proles entertained. I was overly optimistic. Beside the computer simulations of woolly mammoth and the barren landscapes vaguely reminiscent of a the late ice age, everything else turned out to be a grotesque jumble of anthropology (Egyptian pyramids -- too early by 5000 yrs), zoology (Phorusrhacids -- too late by 2 Myrs), and climate (from ice to tropical jungle in less than 50 km). All in all, the movie shamelessly tramples the most basic concepts of chronology and certainly added to the confusion of those still wondering if Adam and Eve ever ran around with dinosaurs. To add insult to injury, the movie rehashed the usual Hollywoodian spiel of the alpha-male delivering a beautiful girl from bad [read non-European] guy. And if that weren't enough, they topped the film with a scene of resuscitation that could only be found, pardonably, in toddlers' fairy tales.

What I don't understand about 10,000 BC is that the producer may very well have made a good movie which could have been both entertaining and historically accurate. But for some reason which eludes me, he instead engaged in the sleazy enterprise of an animated pulp fiction. 10,000 BC is just an example. Had I been an assiduous moviegoer, I would probably have found a plethora of such brainless kitsch streaming from movie studios everywhere. (A notorious example that drags archeology in the dirt is Indiana Jones. Another is The Mummy from 1999 which was positively ignoble and hardly short of racist.)

Having said that, there is nothing wrong with "quality" fiction in parsimonious amounts. I simply deplore that it all too often debilitates and impoverishes our imagination in precisely the opposite way of what is expected of it. I think many fiction books can be funny (Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn) or can provide food for thought which may have timely connections with reality (George Orwell's 1984 seems to me to be the best example, or as far as movies are concerned, Das Leben der Anderen on Stasi Germany). Fortunately, every now and then, some odd movie pops out of Hollywood unscathed by the alpha-male stereotype while still recounting a self-contained beautiful story with no collateral damage to the intellect (Forrest Gump comes to mind).

I say, burn'em all tabloids and gaudy paperbacks. Our ancestors talked about fairies and gods to nurture the imagination of the young. They could not know better for they themselves did not understand the universe. We now significantly know more about the origins of life and the confines of the cosmos to be able to release the beautiful yarn of Science from the stern and unimaginative fetters of academia. It's high time to blend story-telling and scientific accuracy for indeed, reality surpasses fiction.

Human diversity

The diversity of mankind and its phenotypes of unimaginable richness have sadly turned into arcane curiosities in a world built by and around European ethnocentrism. For example, very few people know that blond phenotypes occur frequently among Australian aborigines. It is to boot heart wrenching that many of us have the initial reaction to dismiss these occurrences of blond straight hair among black people as pathological idiosyncrasies.

The Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands

The Sentinelese is the last human tribe to be completely isolated from civilization... up to this day. They are truly fascinating folk confined in an island of the Indian Ocean. They still haven't learned to make fire and their language has never been decoded. Although they have some rudimentary canoes, they are far from being seasoned seafarers and how they winded up on Andaman adds a shroud of mystery to their already obscure origins. It is however likely that they are key actors in the age-old saga of the human colonization of Australasia.
The lifestyle of these beautiful jet-black people, who number in the hundreds at most, is remarkable in that they have consistently been hostile to any foreign intrusion. Even the most friendly gestures from foreigners have been met with a hail of arrows. They have been described in a delightful book by Adam Goodheart (an excerpt can be read here). An exclusive video of one the rare encounters they've had with the exterior world is available from survival-international.org.

Our Lady of Flores

18000 years ago isn't that much on an evolutionary scale. The climate has changed, many species have disappeared, but none have really evolved. The last contender to the status of Human, the Neanderthal, was by -18000 long gone and forgotten. And so, not content to consider great apes as our relatives, we were left alone at the onset of history. Or... were we really alone?

I recently stumbled on a set of articles on Nature that left me flabbergasted. Up until 18000 years ago, there used to be a species of dwarf hominids to which an advanced level of tool-making was attributed and who may very likely have had a language of their own. This discovery was made in the southern Malay Archipelago, on the island of Flores. These little men and women of the jungle fed on dwarf elephants and giant rats. They had no chin and unusually long arms. The Indonesian folktale of the Ebu Gogo, a legendary hobbit-like peoples with hairy chests and a mumbling speech, may be the folk memory of Homo Floresiensis from a time of cohabitation between the two species of humans.

Did they too disappear at the hands of Homo Sapiens? In what way would we perceive our navels had the Lady of Flores survived to this day? The implication would have been profound since there would then be two species of humans capable of speech.