Still following ‘Pluribus’ but this is interesting way beyond that. First of all, an introduction. The Darién Gap is a hundred kilometre stretch of land straddling the more or less irrelevant border between Colombia and Panama, and its presence is what makes that border irrelevant. It’s inhospitable in various ways. Where to start?
Well, the longest road in the world stretches from southern Argentina to Northern Alaska and is thirty thousand kilometres long, meaning that flattened out it would go three-quarters around the planet. Except it doesn’t, because of this gap. It’s almost impossible to get between Colombia and Panama, at least for humans, even with high-tech transport methods such as ships and motor vehicles. As can be seen from this map, the roads run out either side:
As you can see, there are no railways, canals or roads between them. It is, however, occupied by people traffickers and drug smugglers, and there are two peoples, the Guna and the Emberá. Remarkably, the Guna flag looks like this:
The swastika needs some explanation. It’s a local sigil called Naa Ukuryaa symbolising the four corners of the world whence the Guna hail, so in other words it’s practically the opposite of the Nazi use. Olaf Stapledon once claimed that Homo sapiens would use this symbol with varying significance throughout our history. But a people is more than a flag. They mainly live on coastal islands and moved westward into Panama. Some of them are white and have a special role defending the Moon against a dragon. The Emberá have a larger population and like several other indigenous peoples have a tradition of FGM although they’re working to eliminate it. They traditionally live on river banks but then the same applies to the West. They’re an egalitarian society whose shamans are however revered. I just thought I’d mention these peoples because the rest of this post is going to be about other things.
Immigrants are constantly attempting to travel through the area, often ending up dead as a result. Even by the time they start, they’re not in good condition and are unlikely to have the equipment needed to survive. The situation is similar to the “small boats” plight in the Manche/English Channel, with many deaths and a lot of corruption, but the drug trade, currently illegal, makes it even worse. The transit of people from more Westernised conditions through the gap has led to economic interactions with the indigenous people which pulls them toward the money economy and there is also, quite startlingly, tourism in the region which has the same effect.
Another situation which comes to mind here is the one in the DMZ of Korea and around Chernobyl. These places deny access to most humans and consequently have gone back to a less interfered with condition, which for Chernobyl is deeply ironic. The ionising radiation in the latter also makes the situation less straightforward, with for example black frogs using it to warm their bodies and increase metabolic rate and fungi with high levels of melanin being favoured by the environment, but in the DMZ between the two Koreas the situation is more similar, since it’s human activity which has stopped the strip from being interfered with. In the Darién Gap, humans do things but not in a manner similar to the organised centres of many territories. The way international and smaller scale borders often exist, good ones at least, is that they’re placed in relatively inaccessible places. For instance, Loughborough, where I used to stay, is on the northern edge of Leicestershire and if you try to walk thence into Nottinghamshire through fields, you’re confronted not only by the unsurprising river which often forms a border but also by rather boggy, wet ground, which makes it a good place to put a border as nobody wants to argue over it. Likewise the border between Scotland and England runs through high, rocky heathland and is sparsely populated compared to, say, the Central Belt or the large cities of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Darién Gap is the same. Humans do live there but they have difficulty doing so unless they’re hunter-gatherers. Agriculture would be hard and the heavy rainfall is the cause of frequent flooding. It’s also mountainous, like much of Central America.
The wider political structure of the region shows the relatively large territory of Mexico to the northwest becoming the increasingly fragmented area to the southeast, and in fact this already existed in pre-Columbian times. This is associated with the volcanic, mountainous and also increasingly humid nature of the isthmus as one goes south. It’s also remarkable to consider that the area is also a bottleneck for the human population, as the descendants of the humans who entered the Americas via Beringia between Siberia and Alaska to the far north and most, though possibly not all, of the population of South America before 1500 CE were descended from people who had come through the Gap. I say not all because there may have been some between Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of South America, as can be seen in the cultivation of the sweet potato, human genomes on Easter Island and chicken bones dating from the fourteenth Christian century in the Inca Empire, or at least that area. But apart from that, everyone came through the Gap.
If you go a bit further west from Darien, nowadays you’ll come across the Panama Canal. This is of course economically very important and necessary due to the closure of the Isthmus of Panama, which I’ll mention again. Of course, this does depend on long-distance trade being considered important, which is probably not ecologically sound. There was a time before it was practically to dig canals of that scale, and in the late seventeenth century, before the Union, Scotland attempted to exploit this with the Darien Scheme, the establishment of the colony of New Caledonia, where the idea was to transport goods across the Gap from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and charge for each transaction there. Apart from the obvious colonialism (“A big boy did it and ran away”, but this is before the big boy), this might sound like a good idea, particularly when you consider that it’s a mountainous and rain-soaked area like a certain other country thousands of kilometres to the northeast, but it didn’t work. Scotland invested a heap of money in the scheme, taken from the purses of Scots of fairly limited means who invested their life savings. I’m going to try to summarise what happened.
William Paterson, Scottish founder of the Bank of England, began a company known as The Company of Scotland Trading To Africa And The Indies. Lionel Wafer talked Darien up to him and he decided to found a unique type of colony which would neither exploit the land or people on it nor produce goods for international trade, but simply move items between the oceans for a fee. The East India company unsuccessfully lobbied the English parliament to impeach the new company and then threatened to boycott anyone who traded with Paterson, who raised £400 000 from the Scottish people for the colony, to be called New Edinburgh. He took five ships which carried various items useful for the colony but also three carriages without horses to transport them, a large quantity of garments and also many combs and mirrors which he planned to use to trade with the Guna. Leaving without telling the settlers or anyone else where they were going until they were well on the way to avoid word getting to the East India company, they arrived having lost a remarkably small number of the initial 1200 settlers. Their initial attempt to build a settlement was hampered by the unsuitability of the land and the recalcitrant nature of the jungle, whose trees would need to be felled and cleared for it to work, so they moved to another site and tried again. In Spring 1699, torrential rain and tropical diseases killed two hundred within a month and they were losing ten a day at one point. The Guna were also not interested in the mirrors and combs and the land was unsuitable for farming, so they were forced to eat less than a pound of mouldy flour boiled in water each per week, skimming off the infesting maggots and worms in the process. They then attempted to trade with other nearby English colonies but William of Orange, English king at that point, forbade trade with them, and they also got wind of an imminent Spanish attack so they abandoned the colony and went back to Scotland. Only two hundred of them made it there. In August 1699, Paterson tried again with two thousand settlers who hadn’t heard about the disastrous first attempt. They once again suffered disease and malnutrition, accompanied by rebellion against the leaders and a local pastor blamed their misfortune on their revolt, which was seen as deeply sinful by the leaders. However, they then united with the Guna in an alliance against another threatened attack by the Spanish, who blockaded them by land and sea with cannons and ships until they surrendered in March 1700. The Spanish were gracious enough to let them leave for Scotland, but by the time they got back everyone hated them, they’d lost everyone’s life savings, they got disowned and ostracised and Scotland had lost all of its money. And of course a lot of them died. As a result, the English parliament agreed to bail the Company out to the tune of £398000 in return for the Union, which became known as the Price Of Scotland, because although they had enough money to pursue the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession, they also needed bodies and there were more men available as cannon fodder in Scotland than in England, so that’s what they did. Scots were also soon involved in running the Empire and keep the British economy going. Many Scots saw the money as a bribe and the Union as the result of corruption and incompetence. So that’s a rough sketch of the role of the Darien Gap in the downfall of Scotland and the Act of Union’s success, which as well as everything else was partly the result of the inhospitality of the region to European-style human settlement, and it also means that Scotland is morally compromised to some extent by being instrumental in keeping the British Empire going. Had this not happened, it isn’t clear that the Empire would’ve been as victorious as it turned out to be, so whereas Scotland has every right to gripe about its position, the rich and powerful of this nation played their part in putting it in that predicament although the relatively modestly off also had a role. The likes of crofters and fishing families, of course, got the short straw and can’t be blamed at all for it, as usual.
There’s one further aspect to the Darien Gap I want to cover, which is connected to climatic and other changes which led to the ice ages and also, in my opinion, the Biblical Fall of Man. You can ignore the last bit for now if you find it too off-putting, but this is how things went. Right now the Southern and Arctic Oceans alone stretch all the way around the world and in the case of the latter it isn’t bordered by land on both north and south, since there is by definition nothing north of the North Pole. The Southern Ocean, however, provides a vast swirl of current all the way round the planet. There also used to be another such ocean in prehistoric times, known today as the Tethys, which separated the northern and southern continents, and like the Southern Ocean it had an uninterrupted current passing all the way round Earth flowing east to west. Its remnants today are present as the Caribbean, parts of the Atlantic and Pacific, the Med, Black Sea, Caspian and certain other lakes through central Eurasia. Three million years ago, this ocean finally closed for the time being at least when the Americas collided. This had immediate effects on the wildlife of the two continents, with exchanges such as camels, armadillos, opossums and the extinction of much of the life on the southern continent in particular. It also caused the current passing across what was now the Atlantic to be blocked by the Gulf of MEXICO and the warm water to be redirected north, where it increased precipitation and warmed the lands around the North Atlantic. Snowfall also increased due to the humidity, which did two things: it increased the reflectivity of the planet overall, bouncing heat and light back into space, and it locked up a lot of the planet’s water in ice, making it drier and increasing the spread of grassland and desert while causing the rain forests to shrink. It also lowered sea levels, exposing continental shelves, ultimately making it possible for fauna, including humans in the end, to move between North America and Eurasia. However, all of this was less significant than Milankovitch cycles, which are beyond the scope of this post.
It’s also possible that the shrinkage of rain forests led to our ancestors having to leave them for harsher environments such as the savannah, where less food was available, threat from predators was greater and water was harder to come across. This is where the “Fall Of Man” comes in. I believe it’s possible that this harshness led to different, for instance more aggressive, behaviour in and between our communities due to having to compete for fewer resources and various deficiencies in our diets and the ability to deal with health problems, which led to two things: stressed out malnourished pregnant people giving birth to babies who were less than optimally behaved, and parenting and other activities which tended to traumatise them and lead to poor behaviour. In other words, the Fall. We’re all the victims of this and it’s handed down by the rather dystopian flavour of society. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is actually the absence of fruit, not its presence, and the serpent is our base desires and impulses being brought to the surface by these harsh conditions. I realise this sounds nuts, and the questions of free will and a benevolent God are compromised by this line of thought.
I want to end with Keats’s ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’: Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
I realise there’s a lot going on in this poem, but there’s one thing which I don’t think is at all and want to mention the unfairness of the criticism. I think Keats was fully aware that Cortez never went to Darien (which is not surprising since he had a successful career destroying the Aztec Empire and so on before going back to Spain to end his life in his early sixties as opposed to being bitten and killed by a puff adder or dying of dysentery) and was attempting to convey that he had vision enough to “see” the Pacific. It’s not erroneous at all to my mind. I just wanted to get that in.
In the meantime, this has given me a Thompson Twins earworm even though that song has nothing at all to do with Panama, and I haven’t thought about the fashion chain at all.
Gàidhlig is, as you know, a language I find phenomenally hard. I’ve said in the past that the best way of learning it is to know it already. It’s a bit like when you stop and ask for directions to somewhere and the reply is “Oh, I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”. Nonetheless it’s got to be done.
The above picture is of the Burns Centre in Dumfries. The obvious joke will not be made here as Doonhamers are thoroughly sick of it and have heard it a thousand times. It occurred to me the other day though, that although I know the Welsh words for “centre”, owing to almost getting a job at the Canolfan y Dechnoleg Amgen in Wales – they’re actually “canol” and “canolfan” and not speaking Welsh I have no idea what “-fan” does – I had no idea at all what the Gàidhlig word was. I do know the word for “middle” – meadhan – but “middle” is not “centre”. I’m also aware that the word in English is used figuratively as well as literally, which is also a usage of “canolfan” in Welsh, but wasn’t cognisant of such a usage or otherwise in Gàidhlig.
Well, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that it isn’t that simple, although the reasons it isn’t aren’t quite linguistic. It starts out fairly straightforwardly. The Robert Burns Centre is probably called something like An Ionad Raibeart Burns, assuming “Raibeart Burns” doesn’t need to be put into the genitive, and it’s even true that “ionad” means “centre” in figurative and literal terms, as well as meaning “location” and “situation”, although I’m still confused as to how it’s pronounced the way it is because there’s clearly a rule about whether the I or the O is pronounced, so I initially thought it was “yonnat” but apparently it’s “innet” (I’m not bothering with IPA at the moment because I’m on the wrong device for it and in any case it’s been said that the IPA is inadequate for transcribing this language, and there’s a whole other conversation to be had about that). So you might think you’ve got it sorted and everything’s very very good, but actually it isn’t, at least from about 2008 CE onward, because at that point someone did something subversive.
Technical language is often perceived as a barrier to understanding which maintains an in-group and an out-group. This is certainly sometimes true, but at other times not using it makes it almost impossible to talk about something. Cults, sorry, new religious movements, often seem to use language this way in order to exclude outsiders from understanding what they’re talking about and also often to make it seem to their followers that they know what they’re on about. When this isn’t done, which notably occurs in botany with the words “nut” and “berry”, people often object because it leads to bananas being called berries and peanuts not being nuts. In fact hardly anything is a nut. To hide this quandary away, scientists and mathematicians often draw on Greek or Latin as a kind of nice neat cover for the messy box of what to call things. Hebrew and Sanskrit are also sometimes used. In fact, Sanskrit is often formally used to refer to phenomena in Gàidhlig. Rather refreshingly, “ionad” is used thus, presumably as part of some kind of statement against the Latinisation or Hellenisation of technical terms.
Understanding this usage is possibly one of the steepest learning curves I’ve ever encountered. This is how it’s described when you type something related into Google:
As a Grothendieck topos is a categorified locale, so an ionad is a categorified topological space. While the opens are primary in topoi and locales, the points are primary in ionads and topological spaces.
Clear? Didn’t think so. It isn’t even as straightforward as being about topology or group theory. It sounds like a concept related to topological space but that’s only tangentially true, because apparently this is category theory. The idea seems to be to take various branches of maths and generalise the concepts and processes which exist and occur within them. It feels like a theory of everything but it isn’t. It’s kind of metamathematics although I’d prefer to reserve that idea for something like number theory. It involves three types of thing, one made up of the other two. Categories, made of objects and morphisms. To my rather naive brain, this sounds a bit like group theory and a bit like topology, and probably a bit like linear algebra if I knew what that was, which I don’t, so I’m going to wrestle with this here and try to understand it.
My first thought was the Canterbury Cross, which was used as the emblem for my secondary school and looks like this:
Back when I’d just started at that school, we were supposed to make an ashtray, because in those days tobacco smoking lacked the stigma it has now been allowed to acquire. This involved taking a square sheet of aluminium and clipping the corners inward to make a shape somewhat like this, then folding them inward. Being dyspraxic, my attempt to do this was catastrophic. I was shockingly bad at practical subjects, or rather the ones I was actually allowed to do, which is again another story. On one occasion I was simply sawing a piece of perspex into the right shape and it literally exploded very loudly in a puff of acrid smoke, to which my plastic teacher’s response was to ask, wearily, “What have you done now?”. I could go into the gender politics of all this but anyway, we’re talking about the Canterbury Cross. My initial attempt at understanding a ionad is that it’s like the middle portion of this cross in that you can trace a line from it to each of the arms, but not from one arm to another. This is not quite what I mean of course, because it never is, but there seems to be a sense in which this is true. It is in fact dead easy to draw a line from one arm to another, but it still seems to be connected in such a way that the others aren’t. This is probably not it though.
Category theory is apparently difficult because it’s an abstraction of an abstraction. Group theory and topology are already quite abstract, though still applicable quite easily. Category theory takes it a step further. I’m going to have another go.
Maths generally consists of objects and operations on those objects. 2+2=4. Addition is the operation there and the numbers are the objects. Likewise, the top slice of a Rubik’s cube can be turned clockwise through a right angle and then turned back, and there are twelve possible sets of arrangements of a Rubik’s cube which it’s impossible to reach from any of the other sets. These operations of turning are within these sets of arrangements and this is a typical application of group theory. The sets of arrangements are the objects. I’m currently trying to imagine a species of intelligent extraterrestrials who grasp group theory intuitively but can’t count, because they have five sexes. More on that another time. Anyway, geometry has this too. A shape can be reflected, magnified, rotated and so on. In each of these cases and many others, there are the operations and the elements. Category theory summarises branches of mathematics by turning them into a series of items joined together in various ways by arrows, so it aims to do to maths what maths aims to do to the world, and it does it with things like this:
Presumably, and this is just me, if you can find two branches of maths which can be summarised using the same diagrams, they’re really the same branch and if there’s another diagram which is known from one branch but not another all of whose other diagrams are the same, it’s worth looking into whatever’s represented by that extra diagram as it might well work in the other branch.
I seem to have gone rather far from the Canterbury Cross here and that might well be due to there being no connection between the two topics. In fact I think there’s bound to be a connection because of the nature of the shape, but it might not be what I think it is. For instance, you can take a Canterbury Cross and flip it horizontally, vertically or diagonally without changing the shape, and you can also reflect it, so there are clearly symmetry groups which can be applied to it which can’t to, for example, the conventional long cross used as a symbol of the Christian faith, so things can be done to this which are relevant to group theory. So it is relevant, but the thing is that you could do the same kind of thing with a Star of David, though different in detail because that shape can also be rotated to fit into itself in various ways which a Canterbury Cross can’t, and all that stuff you could represent very generally in a Category Theory diagram but there’s nothing special. So it seems I haven’t got anywhere near understanding what an ionad actually is, except that it’s something to do with Category Theory.
So, my next guess then, which might well be wrong for all I know, is that Grothendieck Topology is a way of looking at those diagrams which compares them so that one can generalise from them and make useful advances by comparing different mathematical fields. Is it that? I don’t know! And I seem to have to work out what that is in order to work out what ionad actually means in that sense.
So I seem to have arrived in some sort of state of conceptual splodge and confusion. It almost feels like I can’t bridge the gap between incomprehension and the holy grail that is the concept of “ionad”. I feel the same way about calculus, which in one of the two cases I consider to be the idea of being able to tell which way a wiggly line will go next and wonder vaguely whether astrologers use it to locate planets or whether they just use ephemerides, and that’s as far as I can get. With calculus, by the way, I’m aware of there being two mutually inverse types. With category theory, who knows? How do you get to the point where you can confidently say you can understand something? How do you know you haven’t got it completely wrong? Well, usually I suppose you can test it in the real world, so if I wire a three-pin plug wrongly I will briefly know when the electric shock throws me across the room and kills me, and if I make a (vegan) soufflé wrongly I will become aware of that when it collapses as soon as I take it out of the oven, but in this case, how will I know when I’ve got it wrong? It seems too abstract to test. I want to savour this state of personal bafflement and adumbrate its characteristics.
(Can you even make vegan soufflés?)
So to survey my mathematical knowledge, I can manage the following:
I scraped an O-level in maths. This probably doesn’t indicate much about how well I understand it though, because I’m fluent in French even though I failed the O-level but not in Spanish even though I have a B at GCSE.
At first degree level, I’ve studied statistics to the extent that I can see through deceptive practices which purport to employ it, use it in my own quantitative research and assess the quality of other quantitative research. However, stats is arguably not maths.
Also at first degree level, I’m very confident in the use of formal logic and have extended my knowledge beyond the mere understanding of sequents, truth-tables and well-formed formulae, and I also have a firm grasp of the foundations of mathematics, which extends into number theory.
I’ve pratted about a bit with stuff like fractals, non-Euclidean geometry and things which take my fancy on the lower levels of the kind of fun maths which crops up in the likes of Martin Gardner’s and Douglas Hofstadter’s writing.
Not sure if it’s maths but I’m kind of okay at coding provided OOP isn’t involved and it follows an imperative paradigm.
I’m also not scared of maths. I’m not wonderfully good at it but in the same way as someone who feels almost alien to me might enjoy a kick-about with a football of a Saturday afternoon as opposed to playing in the FA Cup, I dabble a little bit. For instance, I’m motivated to find a non-iterative algorithm for calculating square roots although I haven’t got round to it yet. I also find it incomprehensible how people can say that they’ve never applied most of the maths they learnt at school and wonder how hard their lives must be as a result, unless they don’t realise they’re applying it. Last night I used E=mc² and 4πr² along with a bit of trig to work out how much energy our solar panels are likely to get from the Sun today, and to me that seems useful although somewhat inaccurate owing to the fact that the planet inconveniently has an atmosphere, furthermore with clouds in it, and that really is not that hard although it takes quite a long time if you don’t use a calculator, and where’s the fun in that? I suppose that has the same role in my life as football does in someone else’s. But I still can’t understand this. I also wish I knew how close I was getting.
Let’s have another go.
There are these things called topoi, and other things called pre-sheaves and sheaves, and they relate to this situation. Topoi appear to be places set up to do particular kinds of maths comfortably. Is that what they are? Well, I just asked an AI and it may have been trying to please me because that’s what they do, but it agreed that that’s what a topos is. It also started talking about sheaves, so yikes.
Okay, so what’s a sheaf and why are there pre-sheaves? My initial thought here is that we have conceptual ring binders, we’re wandering all over a large warehouse covered in mathematical papers from all sorts of fields, and we’re collecting them together in the ring binders according to what category (there’s that word again) they’re in, and that the pre-sheaves are the empty binders and the sheaves are the full binders. Is that it? Plug that metaphor into an AI and see what it says. . .
Right, done that with two different AI chatbots and I’m wary that they may be eager to please, but both of them said that I wasn’t too far off although open sets are involved. I think of open sets as akin to the Bedeutungen of family resemblance definitions as opposed to those of definitions based solely on necessary and sufficient conditions, and to be honest I think I’m right about that. I could be confidently incorrect of course. And once again, leaving the sycophancy problem aside, although I’m not completely correct, I’m not one hundred percent wrong either. There also seems to be something about them sharing a corner.
As I’ve said, there was this guy called Alexander Grothendieck who was unlucky enough to be born in Germany in 1928. After a traumatic childhood, he became a mathematician, some say the most important of the twentieth century CE. At some point he actually left mathematical academia and became a political activist and a religious recluse, and he gave lectures in Vietnam while being bombed. I know very little about him but I wonder, given that limited information, whether his life indicates the potential role of maths in people’s lives as a source of inner peace, and also the affinity between mathematical beauty and the spiritual realm. I am actually trying to do that right now in writing this. I’m trying to escape, and I hope to provide others a temporary respite, from the vexing nature of current political developments. All that said, I also wonder if it is in fact germane to the current situation in some way. For instance, while I’m writing this I’m not worrying about Gaza, the rise of global fascism or the toilet problem. It may however be the source of a potential argument against the supreme court ruling on “single sex” spaces, but it doesn’t have to be to serve a therapeutic purpose.
And I’ll carry on. I’d say that Grothendieck was responsible for innumerably many mathematical ideas except that because he was a mathematician one must pick one’s words carefully and note that in fact the cardinality of his ideas is not the same as the power of the continuum and that, depending on how you count ideas, he probably had a finite number of them. On the other hand, it might depend on what counts, so to speak, as an idea. In any case, one of the many things he came up with is the aforementioned Grothendieck Topology. I’m abandoning this for now due to sheer bafflement and lack of mental energy.
Here’s a thought. England’s surface southeast of the Tees-Exe Line and the English coastline from the Tees to the Exe are very different in character to Scotland’s surface and coastline. Is it possible that the concept of the ionad is more useful or applicable to either of those aspects of Scotland than the part of England mentioned, and of course I’d like that because the concept itself is from Gàidhlig, or rather Q-Celtic. The big difference between the two coastlines, to start with, is that Scotland is more fractal than lowland England, and actually any of England but it’s more striking defined thus. Something similar also applies to mainland Scotland combined with its islands, to Scotland with the lochs and sea lochs and by extension to Scotland including the mountains. And this has practical applications: it’s harder to get around here than it is in lowland England and you get situations where Mull of Kintyre is seventy kilometres from Kilmarnock as the crow flies but 272 kilometres by road, mainly due to Loch Fyne. Here there could be steep slopes, lochs in the way and a very fractal coastline, or islands at varying distances from each other which may even exist intermittently according to the tide. Southeast England is much smoother and less complicated on the whole. At the same time it’s worth remembering that an ionad is a concept found in an abstraction of abstractions which may therefore still not apply very well to the physical geography of Scotland.
Except that I think it does. There are several aspects to this place resulting from its geology, which has consequences for its terrain, coastline, transport network, biomes, other aspects of ecology, dialects and presumably other cultural aspects. For instance, here’s the Scottish rail network:
. . .and this is the Central Belt’s rail network, found in the rectangle within the other map:
Due to the population distribution and engineering difficulties, the complexity of the rail network is the opposite of the complexity of Scottish terrain. It seems feasible that some kind of table of ratios between the fractal dimension of the surface in a particular area and the number of train stations or connections could be constructed, and there might also be some mileage, so to speak, in working out how long it takes to get between two places by rail, and then comparing it to how long it takes by road and separating that into walking, cycling, driving and taking the bus, or for that matter a ferry or plane. In fact all this analysis could reveal things about transport policy and decisions made by the Westminster or Scottish governments on these matters. Considering the fractal nature of the terrain and coastline together with the topology of various transport networks suggests also that it would be useful to find some way of unifying these two different mathematical ways of considering the country.
It goes beyond that too. The Gàidhlig language is, at least from the outside, characterised by remarkable variations in accent. Moreover, the distribution, both today and historically, of different dialects and languages in Scotland is likely to be connected to the terrain and accessibility of different parts of the country. In England, at least historically, there has been notable variation in accent in Lancashire in particular, and it seems that similar variation occurs in the Gàidhealtachd, to the extent that if your Gàidhlig is poor people might just perceive you as being from a different island rather than just not very good at it. This is because of the divisions caused by multiple islands and glens separated by peaks, a similar situation as obtains in New Guinea, and interestingly also in the sea around New Guinea, causing respectively great linguistic and biological diversity. It’s been said that Scotland is able to masquerade as all sorts of other countries, such as Norway, the Caribbean and maybe Austria. All of this variation is linked to the terrain, and I’m sure could be usefully modelled mathematically. I’d also be very surprised if this was irrelevant to ecology and biomes.
Therefore, there are several different fields of maths which could be used to capture and express the complexity of this country in various useful ways. For instance, anyone who’s played Britannia will be aware that it usually takes ages for the Picts to disappear, something reflected in real world history, and this is I guess because they were hunkered down in remote areas which couldn’t be easily accessed by other peoples, and maybe the living was also so hard there that they didn’t bother. This hypothesis could, I think, be tested using some kind of mathematical approach. There is also a very small tree line in the Cairngorms and there seem to have been glaciers there, again in a small area, until something like the seventeenth century. It took longer for wolves to become extinct here than it did in England. There are all sorts of things like this which result from the distinctive characteristics of the northwestern part of Great Britain and its associated smaller islands which can be modelled mathematically in different ways, and they’re practically very important. The logistics of moving things or oneself around the country, for example, or of understanding the locals in different places, are connected to this.
Here, then, are various mathematical ways of approaching the question of Scotland.
Firstly, the inverse correlation between rail network complexity and terrain complexity lends itself to graph theory, operations research and algebraic topology. In the last, islands and mountains constitute holes. The problem of finding the most efficient routes between places belongs to operations research. So with this there’s:
Graph theory
Algebraic topology (I hold my hands up here to say I only have a vague grasp of what this is).
Operations research (which was actually my dad’s job).
Secondly, the isogloss patterns in Gàidhlig accent variation could involve:
Graph theory again, regarding communities as nodes and communication links as edges of various weights.
Topological spaces, where dialect regions are open sets with isoglosses as boundaries between them.
Sheaf theory, apparently. Goodness knows how. I haven’t got to the point where I understand this much except to imagine lots of people wandering around with ring binders in a warehouse with scattered random maths papers all over the floor. I’m getting there.
Thirdly (this is stylistically frowned upon isn’t it?), biome variation:
Cellular automata of all things! The idea that in a particular area, there may be more or fewer resources required by particular species which determines whether they flourish or something else does, or perhaps something else flourishes on the corpses of what didn’t flourish.
Statistics: picks up the patterns of biomes. In particular I strongly suspect that there’s more biodiversity at boundaries between biomes than deep within large homogenous biomes, and Scotland of all places has those boundaries in spades, and I’d like to look into that.
Fourthly, climate:
Fluid dynamics (some of these things are just words to me, but not this one).
Differential equations (these definitely are).
Fifthly, the legendary fractal nature of the coastline:
Fractal geometry (who’d’ve thought?).
Chaos theory.
Something called Measure Theory.
The power law regarding the size of lochs, islands and their distribution:
This is again fractal geometry, as it’s essentially a vertical version of the coastline issue.
Statistical distribution along the lines of Zipf’s Law and, I’m guessing, the log-normal distribution, alias the 80:20 rule.
The phenomenon of clustering in random and pseudorandom distributions, manifested here on a plane.
In this case, deviations from these tendencies are themselves interesting. For instance, it might turn out that the areas of lochs are not distributed in such a way that the majority of them constitute together less than half of the water area in Scotland. For a start, nine-tenths of British fresh water is in Loch Ness.
The fields which come up repeatedly here are fractal geometry, topology and actually measure theory, which I mainly left out because I don’t know what it is. It seems that it arose out of the Banach-Tarski paradox, which includes such oddities as being able to dissemble a single ball and then build two balls of the same size as the first one out of a finite number of components, or taking a ball bearing apart mathematically and reassembling it into an object the size of the Earth. Clearly these things can’t actually be done, but they seem to be intuitively feasible when you look at the details, because spheres and balls are each infinitely large sets, and you can take an infinite number of items out of an infinite set and still be left with an infinitely large set. Measure theory tries to resolve this problem by providing a way to decide exactly how big sets are. I can’t take this any further.
So, there are these three areas of maths along with certain others which come up at least a couple of times: measure theory, topology and fractal geometry. Just in passing, Scotland is not unique in this respect because there are other countries and regions in the world to which these same features apply. These include the aforementioned Papua New Guinea, the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Japan (maybe Hokkaido even more than the whole of Japan), Switzerland, Norway and of course Nova Scotia. Not all of these have the full set, and it should also be borne in mind that there are also “anti-Scotlands”, including the Netherlands, countries which include bits of the Sahara Desert, most of Antarctica and Kansas. I’d also be very interested to know how North Carolina fits in. It isn’t either that these countries and regions are boring or even that the same mathematical fields don’t apply to them, but what doesn’t happen is that the fields in question apply usefully or interestingly to them. In British terms, the opposite of Scotland in these respects is probably East Anglia. Hence this comparison has already become meaningful and productive and hasn’t just been a waste of time. Also, seriously, no disrespect to the places which are “boring” in this respect, and in fact for all I know there are different aspects of those countries to which exactly the same mathematical fields could become relevant, such as the distribution of sizes of grains of sand in the Sahara.
All of these fields include concepts of dimension, open sets, functions and spaces. The concepts of sheaves and ionadan also come up, so at long last I might finally be able to declare myself ready to understand what “ionad” actually means.
An ionad, which is actually taken from the Irish sense of the word rather than the Gàidhlig but the word is the same barring accent and pronunciation, means “place” or “locale”. In that way it’s a little similar to the concept of locus in geometry, and it aims to mix topology and category theory in such a way as to allow one to reason spatially in a point-free and structured manner. An ionad is like a topological space whose open sets are the starting block and points can be derived from those open sets. If topology, category theory and sheaf theory are each thought of as circles in a Venn diagram, like red, green and blue in additive colour or cyan, magenta and yellow in subtractive colour, an ionad is the bit in the middle which is white in the former case and the infamous “brown splodge” in the latter. Of course I’m nowhere near understanding sheaf theory at this point and still have the Filofax people wandering all over the explosion in the maths warehouse in my head, but I’m closer. But apparently an ionad is useful in the following ways (and others):
It explains how different parts of Scotrail interact without assuming the points are primary, so presumably it could work as a way of explaining train delays and replacement bus services.
It helps to describe when native speakers of Gàidhlig are likely to perceive each other as speaking with different accents and when they’re likely to hear them as familiar, even when there are some differences in those accents.
It enables you to model what happens on the borders of two biomes such as peatland and Caledonian rain forest rather than having to think of the border as merely a line between two more easily understood biomes. There, it allows smooth models rather than sudden jumps.
You can spot scaling rules about the coastline of Scotland and understand its geometry without having to think of it as a series of straight lines or curves.
It does the same thing with the size distribution of lochs, which is hardly surprising considering the Scottish terrain is just a plane-based version of the line which is the coastline.
The idea over all of this is that you don’t start with the points but with open ideas about what categories might be needed, so you might think in terms of Highland and coastal towns, towns with active train stations and the Gàidhealtachd.
So to finish, whereas I still don’t really have a confident understanding of what an ionad is, I do very much feel that as a mathematical concept it seems to be particularly apt as applied to Scotland, and generally have a feeling that it’s like when oil floats on water or an air bubble rises through a burn, but paying attention to the boundary between them and the skin of the bubble in their own right and as primary. That, I think, is what an ionad is!
And I’m perfectly happy for someone to come along and explain why I’m completely wrong.
What does direction mean? It seems to be related to angles. For instance, north is often considered to be at zero degrees, partly for the sake of argument. Okay, so how about this?
(I don’t know how to draw a straight line in Gallery on this Chromebook).
This is a roughly straight line drawn on a north-centred azimuthal equidistant projection of Earth between the English Midlands and the approximate position of Tāmaki Makaurau, also known as Auckland, in Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand.
Now try it the other way round:
(Again, wobbly line). From these two maps, if you head roughly north from the English Midlands, you may well end up, eventually, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Likewise, if you head roughly south from Aotearoa, you might end up in the English Midlands. I should point out also that the first map is also how people who believe Earth is flat often view the shape of what we think of as this planet, so in a sense this isn’t even about what shape Earth is.
More conventionally, people are satisfied that Earth is round. Okay, so where is Aotearoa relative to the English Midlands according to the round Earth? Well, there’s this:
. . . and there’s this:
Hence this is something flat Earthers and globe Earthers can agree on for once: New Zealand is north of Britain, and Britain is south of Aotearoa. It isn’t exactly north-south of course, but it’s pretty close. It’s also true that New Zealand is further south than Britain, that Britain is further north than Aotearoa and, that New Zealand is south of the equator and that Britain is north of the equator.
Why am I saying this though? Isn’t it complete nonsense? How can I possibly say Aotearoa is north of Britain? Surely once you go past the North Pole from any location on Earth, you’ve started heading south, and likewise, once you’ve gone past the South Pole, you’ve started heading north? Well, yes. However, there is a good reason for this direction. I can’t vouch for the Antarctica-centred map and can only vouch slightly for the Arctic-centred one, but as far as Google Earth is concerned I absolutely can vouch for the fact that the route taken by that line across Earth’s surface is a good approximation of the shortest surface route between Britain and New Zealand. If you’d asked me before I tried, I would’ve said that the shortest route between the two archipelagos was probably one that went across Eurasia, which is incidentally where commercial plane flights tend to go I think, but it isn’t. No, the shortest route is across the Arctic and eastern Siberia, including Svalbard and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Hence Aotearoa is south of here, but it’s also in a northerly direction from here. If it were feasible to travel via the shortest surface route from here, one would have to head almost exactly north. It’s also notable that more than half of it is across the Pacific Ocean.
The reason for all this counterintuitivity, of course, is that New Zealand is practically on the other side of the world from us, but “only” practically. There is only ever one point on the opposite side of the planet at any one time, and mathematically speaking the probability of anything in particular being exactly there is zero. This is different from a disc, because the entire circumference of that shape is as far as it can possibly be from the centre, which is an infinite number of locations. Unlike a spheroidal Earth, there’s a difference between “as far as it can possibly be” and “on the other side of”. Aotearoa is close to being on the other side of Earth, and that’s the same as as far as it can possibly be from us, but that isn’t so on a disc. On the disc with the North Pole at the centre, the furthest possible point from England is somewhere in Antarctica, and the furthest possible point from New Zealand is likewise in Antarctica. On the South Pole-centred map those points are in the Arctic. However, they are in fact, in both cases, at the poles of a round planet.
Leaving all that to one side (or the other), this is why Aotearoa is to our north rather than to our south. The antipodes of New Zealand are actually mainly in Spain. Here’s a map of the world with its antipodes:
Zooming in on Aotearoa yields this:
Hence New Zealand is actually not, strictly speaking, on the other side of the world from Britain. There are even some settlements which are exactly on the other side of the world here, meaning that they are technically in all directions from each other – Jaén and Hamilton, for example, “surround” each other. This doesn’t happen very often because in spite of being dominated by our species, our planet is still almost empty of it. This is partly because in any case
But why is this important? Surely this is just a weird technicality which matters to no-one, isn’t it? Actually no. It’s practically impossible to travel from here to Aotearoa, or the other way, without causing a massive increase to one’s carbon footprint. As far as I know, the usual air route from London to Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau goes via Singapore and is roughly 19 290 kilometres, which is about five percent further, though still not exactly halfway round the world, which ought to be exactly 20 000 kilometres due to the way the metre is defined but is in fact not. Consequently Singapore is actually slightly north of east of London, but predominantly east even though it’s in the Southern Hemisphere and London is in the northern half of the Northern one. Once again this is counterintuitive. The difference between the two distances is almost exactly the same as London to Lerwick. You can almost fit a whole “British Isles” in that distance. Sadly, this still isn’t very much compared to the whole distance. However, if one were to walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats, which again is almost exactly that distance, it would be considered far more ecologically sound than travelling by plane. It’s like “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.
What about going by sea? Well, unsurprisingly, it depends. If you’re on a cruise ship, it’s not good, as they’re notoriously environmentally unfriendly. On a small yacht, the situation is considerably different, but it’s still really difficult, not least because one would either be going via the Cape of Good Hope or the Gulf of Aden, the former of which is dangerous because the Southern Ocean is such a beast and the latter because of the risk of piracy. That isn’t good either. Incidentally, I don’t know if it makes more sense to sail west or east.
Next option: overland. This is not really possible for a lot of people because of the danger of violence against people in marginalised groups. Being able to get there mainly overland is a sign of privilege. And I can also imagine a conversation where someone in such a marginalised group is attacked for going by plane by someone who is privileged enough to do that. Going by yacht is probably similar, though perhaps not always. Either method also takes a huge chunk of time which many people wouldn’t be able to manage. Another, unfortunately unavailable method would be to go by airship, which would be relatively slow. If available, it would take a week non-stop at the highest speed an airship can move.
There is, however, the possibility of mixed methods. Athens is 2450 kilometres from London, by a rather simplified route which accounts neither for rail travel nor shipping, but this actually takes off quite a bit more than the Arctic route would compared to the route via Singapore. It is, however, still 17 470 kilometres, which is the shortest possibility so far except that the sum of the distances is actually the furthest at 19 920, practically half way around the world. There would be a trade-off due to surface travel but it’s still only an eighth less. It gets harder at the other end because Aotearoa is so far from Australia.
What, then, is the actual damage? How big is the carbon footprint of a flight between Heathrow to Auckland airports? According to this site, a round trip would generate 6.4 tonnes of CO2 using economy class. That sounds like a horrifying amount, but proportionately it’s only a little more than a car would produce. The average car would do that after 52 000 kilometres, and the trip is effectively around the world, i.e. 40 000 kilometres (or forty megametres – why don’t we ever use that unit?). That said, it wouldn’t actually be a good thing to drive that far either.
The obvious response to this is carbon offsetting. Unfortunately this is kind of like Papal indulgences, as in, “I’m going to sin anyway so please help me feel better about it”. Carbon offsetting can be doubled of course, so it may not just leave one in the same position as if one hadn’t got on a plane in the first place. However, this is only one possible approach. It’s also possible to compensate for the trip by reducing one’s own environmental impact permanently and doing one’s best to persuade others to do the same. Doing one’s best is complicated. It doesn’t mean ranting on the street or social media to insist on getting people to do likewise in a self-righteous manner, and it might also be easier to do it if one has the right rhetorical skills. Being able to offset at all in this manner is once again a mark of privilege.
Thus far, this is rather consequentialist. Not everyone’s ethical universe looks like this. Rights and duties are another way of seeing this. One thing I haven’t mentioned at all here is why someone might travel from Britain to New Zealand and back. For instance, methinks it’s really mean to lay all this on someone whose mother is dying in Aotearoa and wants to see her child one last time. Less severe possibilities also arise. The whole time I’ve been writing this, I’ve felt like I was being too judgemental. Sometimes it’s just okay to do this. Sometimes one feels one owes another person something, but again this gets complex. It’s a sign of depression that one takes on too much responsibility in the sense that a guilt complex might follow one around for a minor or forgotten misdemeanour. What would be a sufficient obligation to lead to this? Clearly they do exist. For instance, it really could make sense for the British Prime Minister to visit New Zealand for the purposes of negotiation, depending of course on what they were negotiating, and assuming they couldn’t just do it via Zoom. Most people, however, are not prime ministers or heads of state, and much of what certain heads of state do isn’t actually good either.
Another reason for going there for some people might be asylum. In such a case, it really feels like there is no reasonable objection to flying there at all, since it could be life or death. But when might you know if it is?
I don’t have answers for this really. I could go on and on and frequently do. It’s often better to do something rather than overthink it, and I am very good at overthinking. In this case, maybe it really is better to overthink it rather than do it. In writing this, yes I have generated a fair bit of carbon dioxide, but I very much doubt it’s as much as a round trip to Aotearoa. But the jury is out.
Phosphorus has two main forms, or allotropes. When first extracted, it’s white and extremely toxic. The form illustrated above is red phosphorus of course. Left to itself, white phosphorus gradually turns into its red form, which is why the so-called “white” allotrope usually looks yellow:
This is not, however, supposed to be “all about phosphorus”. Rather, it’s about two issues which affect the element, both to do with life, one on this planet and one in the Universe generally.
I’ll start by explaining the importance of phosphorus to life as we know it. There are six elements making up most of the body of a living organism on Earth. These are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. Carbon is important because it can form chains and rings from which complex molecules can be built. It’s notable that even though silicon is far more abundant on this planet than carbon, life is nonetheless carbon-based. This is to do with things like carbon’s ability to link itself into chains, form double and triple bonds with other atoms, the fact that its atoms are small compared to silicon and the difficulty of getting silicon out of molecules such as silica which may be formed as a result of any putative biochemical processes. Carbon dioxide, the analogue of silicon, is a gas at fairly low temperatures and can be incorporated into other structures. It so happens that I do think silicon-based life is possible, but it would have to be created artificially and exist in some kind of closed environment whose contents were carefully selected. The chances of silicon-based life arising without intelligent intervention are very low. The greater terrestrial abundance of another element should be considered again here, but not right now. Hydrogen and oxygen are of course the constituents of water, a compound which is really unusual in many ways, such as its unusually high melting and boiling points on the surface of this planet, its ability to dissolve other compounds and the fact that it gets less dense as it cools below 4°C. These properties mean respectively that the chemical reactions needed for life as we know it can occur at a temperature where there’s enough energy for them to take place but not so much that they’d be unstable, that the compounds are in a liquid medium conducive to reactions in the first place and that the oceans, lakes and rivers don’t freeze solid from the bottom up. The two constituents are useful in their own right. Oxygen and hydrogen are components of countless compounds, including carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins and fats. Oxygen, unlike chlorine which has been considered as a possible alternate breathing gas for alien life, can form two bonds, meaning that it isn’t the dead end single-bonding atom which the halogens are. Nitrogen is a essential component of protein via its presence in amino acids. Amino acids have a carbon connected to a carboxyl group and an amino group, which can bond together to form chains, and a functional group such as a benzene ring or a sulphur atom which can have other biological functions. Proteins, in other words. There are also chemicals called alkaloids which occur mainly in plants and vary a lot, which have striking pharmacological effects, and the nucleotides are also rings containing nitrogen, encoding genes in DNA and RNA. Nitrogen is actually so reactive that it bonds strongly to other atoms, including other nitrogen atoms, and consequently it’s vital that various organisms can uncouple it and combine it for the benefit of the rest of the biosphere. This is known as nitrogen fixation and is performed mainly by bacteria and certain plants, and also by lightning, but if life had to rely on lightning to do this, it would not be widespread and nitrogen fixed by lightning would be the limiting factor in global biomasse. Sulphur is significantly found in a couple of amino acids and allows proteins to form more complex shapes as are needed, for example, by enzymes and hormone receptors, because they form bridges with other amino acids making the molecule tangle usefully together. It’s also found in hair, nails and various other substances such as the substances responsible for the smell of garlic and onions. Sulphur is actually a bit of an exception in the chief elements required for life because sometimes it can be substituted by either selenium or tellurium, and there are amino acids which have these elements in sulphur’s place, but both of them are much scarcer than sulphur.
Then there’s phosphorus. Phosphorus has more limited functions than the others but these are incredibly vital. It forms part of adenosine triphosphate, which organisms use to transfer energy from respiration to the other functions of the body. It also forms part of the double layers of molecules which form membranes and allow controlled and specialised environments to exist in which the chemical reactions essential to life take place, and also enables substances to be packaged, as with neurotransmitters. Thirdly, it forms the strands of sugar phosphate which hold DNA and RNA together, so even if it didn’t do anything else, some kind of method would have to exist to store genetic information. This is perhaps the least vital role though. A more restricted role is found in most vertebrates, in that it forms part of the mineral matrix of bones and teeth, but there’s plenty of life that doesn’t do this and the usual substances used to make hard parts of animals are silicates and calcium carbonate, among other rarer examples such as iron pyrite. Nonetheless, humans need phosphorus for that reason too, as do our close relatives. However, even the closely related sea urchins use calcium carbonate instead.
Hence several facts emerge from all this. One is that an apparently similar and more abundant element can’t necessarily be used for a similar function, assuming here that life can start from scratch. Another is that elements can get themselves into such a strongly bound state that it would take too much energy to use them for it to be worth it for life. A third is that life will sometimes substitute another element for the one it usually employs if it can. If a rare element is used, there’s usually a good reason for it.
Now the first problem with phosphorus is that it’s much more abundant inside a living thing than in its non-living environment, and the cycle that replenishes it is very slow. Phosphorus usually becomes available to the biosphere on land as a result of continental drift, the formation of mountains and erosion and weathering, and it’s lost to the land when it’s washed into rivers and the sea, where it disappears into sediment before becoming available again millions of years later. In the sea, it’s less of a problem but still a significant one because it’s only available to life as phosphates and it’s often found as phosphides instead. Ironically, there’s also an overabundance problem with phosphates in fertilisers being washed into bodies of water and leading to algal blooms, which can in fact be of cyanobacteria rather than algæ as such. Since some microörganisms can produce extremely powerful toxins, this can lead to massive marine die-offs and contaminated sea food. Where I live, a nearby reservoir was afflicted by an algal bloom and had to be closed off for quite some time, and this can also poison wildlife on land. These can also lead to high biochemical oxygen demand, which is where all the oxygen gets used up and the water becomes anoxic, which is incidentally a cause of mass extinctions, though on a much larger scale, in the oceans. This happens because phosphorus is relatively scarce and a significant limiting factor in how much life is possible in a given area, so a sudden influx of usable phosphate is likely to cause a chemical imbalance.
The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus, Joseph Wright, 1771 and 1795.
This painting is thought to refer to the discovery of the element by Hennig Brand in 1669. Brand discovered it when searching for the Philosopher’s Stone, by heating boiled down urine and collecting the liquid which dripped off it. It turns out that this is actually quite an inefficient process and it’s possible to extract a lot more of the phosphorus by other means. The allotrope illustrated in the painting is unfortunately the highly toxic and dangerous white variety, so the alchemist is putting himself in peril by kneeling so close to the retort. The point to remember in all this is that phosphorus is found in urine, not in huge amounts but enough. This points towards a particular problem, highlighted by Isaac Asimov in his 1971 essay ‘Life’s Bottleneck’, which points out that humans “may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal, and plastics for wood, and yeast for meat, and friendliness for isolation—but for phosphorus there is neither substitute nor replacement”. Urine goes down the toilet and is flushed into the sewers, processed in sewage farms and the phosphorus from it ends up in the sea. It does gradually return to the land in biological ways. For instance, a seagull may die on land and her bones may become part of the terrestrial ecosystem, or she might just poo everywhere and return it that way, but the occasional gull or tern conking out in Bridlington is no compensation for millions of people flushing the loo several times a day. By doing this, we are gradually removing phosphorus from the land and returning it to the sea, whence it won’t return on the whole for millions of years.
Two ways round this suggest themselves. One is to eat more sea food. For a vegan, this is unfeasible and in any case fishing causes a lot of plastic pollution and is unsustainable, but of course it is possible to eat seaweed, and I do this. The other is not to allow urine into sewage in the first place or to process sewage differently. I have been in the habit of dumping urine in the garden, although I haven’t done this as much recently. It also contains potassium, and in particular fixed nitrogen, so in diluted form it is indeed useful for raising crops. However, this is on a small scale and a better system might be to process the sewage differently and put it on the land, being careful to ensure that harmful microbes and medication have been neutralised before doing so. Regarding seaweed, dulse, for example, is 3% of the RDI of phosphorus by dried weight, compared to the much lower amounts in most fish. Cuttlefish is the highest marine animal source. Human urine averages 0.035%, so you’d have to eat a lot of seaweed. However, in isolation, if you don’t, there will be a constant loss of phosphorus to the land. Guano is one solution, but not ideal and only slowly renewable.
The other problem with phosphorus follows from the same scarcity and the same use in living systems, but is more cosmic in scale, and I personally find it more worrying: phosphorus is rare on a cosmic level. In a way, all atomic matter is rare in this sense because the Universe is, as the otherwise really annoying Nick Land once said, “a good try at nothing” (apparently nobody has ever quoted that before, so that’s a first!). The cosmic abundance of the different elements looks like this:
The Y axis is a logarithmic scale, so for instance hydrogen is about ten times as abundant as helium and even in terms of mass is more common than any other element except helium. One notable thing about this graph other than the clear rapid decline in abundance with atomic number (the X axis) is that it zig-zags because even-numbered elements are more frequently found than their odd-numbered neighbours. This is because many elements are formed by the collision of α particles, which consist of two protons and two neutrons. Phosphorus is flanked by Silicon and Sulphur on here, though it isn’t specifically marked, and its atomic number is fifteen, i.e. an odd number. Chlorine, which is quite common in living things because it’s part of salt, is less common still.
Elements are formed in various ways, and this relates to how common they are. The Big Bang led to the formation of mainly hydrogen and helium a few minutes later, as soon as the Universe was cool enough to allow their nuclei to hold together and their nucleons to form, although they would’ve been ionised for quite some time rather than being actual atoms. Small amounts of lithium and beryllium formed in the same way, and if the graph is anything to go by this looks like it might’ve been the main way beryllium in particular formed. Then the stars formed and the pressure inside them led to helium nuclei in particular being pushed together to form heavier elements. The crucial step in this phase is the formation of calcium when three helium nuclei collide. Then, a number of other things happen. The star may end up going supernova and scattering its heavier elements through the local galactic neighbourhood. It may also form new elements in the process of exploding through radiation. This was until fairly recently thought to be the main means heavier elements were formed, but another way has recently been discovered. When a star not quite massive enough to become a black hole collapses, it forms into what is effectively a giant atomic nucleus the size of a city known as a neutron star. When these collide, they kind of “splat” into lots of droplets. Neutrons are only stable within atomic nuclei. Outside them they last about a quarter of an hour before breaking down, and they often become protons in doing so. This means that many of the neutronium droplets form into heavier elements, which are then pushed away by an unimaginably powerful neutrino burst from the neutron stars and again scattered into the galactic neighbourhood. Two elements, beryllium and boron, are mainly formed by cosmic rays splitting heavier atoms. Some, particularly transition metals such as chromium and manganese, formed in white dwarf stars which then exploded, and technetium along with all the heaviest elements, have been generated by human activity.
At first, the abundance of phosphorus didn’t seem to be a big problem. However, after studying supernova remnants, scientists at Cardiff University seem to have found that there is a lot less produced in supernova than had been previously thought. This means that phosphorus is likely only to be as common as it is here in this solar system in star systems which formed near the right kind of supernova to generate it in relatively large amounts. Couple this with the essential function of phosphorus in DNA, RNA, membranes and ATP, particularly the last, and it seems to mean that at this point in the history of the Universe, life as is well-known on Earth is likely only to be found in initially localised areas, surrounded by vast tracts of lifeless space. The systems containing life would gradually separate and spread out through the Galaxy due to the migration of the stars as they orbit the centre of the Milky Way, but they would remain fairly sparse. However, as time goes by and the Universe ages, there will be more such supernovæ and phosphorus will slowly become more common, making our kind of life increasingly likely. If life always does depend on phosphorus, we may simply be unusually early in the history of the Universe, and in many æons time there will be much more life. This possible limitation may have another consequence. We may be living in a star system isolated from others which are higher than average in phosphorus, meaning that to exist as biological beings with a viable ecosystem around us elsewhere, we would either have to take enough phosphorus with us or make our own, and even the several light years between stars which we already find intimidating is dwarfed by the distances between phosphorus-rich systems in the Galaxy, which may once have been near us but no longer are, and not only do we have to schlep ourselves across the void, but also we have to take a massive load of phosphorus with us wherever we go.
But that is biological life as we know it. A couple of other thoughts occur. One is that there could conceivably be life as we don’t know it. This doesn’t work as well if the substitution of phosphorus is the main difference, because if that could happen, it presumably would’ve happened with us, and it didn’t, because other elements with similar functions would’ve worked better if they were more abundant and out-competed with the life which actually did arise unless there’s something about this planet which does something else like lock the possible other options away chemically or something. However, there could just be drastically different life, based perhaps on plasma instead of solid and liquid matter on planets and moons, which has no need for phosphorus or even chemistry, on nuclear reactions taking place between nucleons on the surface of a neutron star as suggested by Robert L Forward’s SF book ‘Dragon’s Egg’, or even nuclear pasta inside neutron stars. Maybe it isn’t that life is rare in the Universe, but that life as we know it is, partly because it needs to use phosphorus.
There is another possibility. We are these flimsy wet things crawling about a planet somewhere in the Galaxy, but we’ve also made machines. In our own history, we are the results of genes, and perhaps also mitochondria and flagella, concealing themselves inside cells and proceeding to build, through evolution, relatively vast multicellular machines to protect themselves. Maybe history is about to repeat itself and we are going to build our own successors, or perhaps symbionts, in the form of AI spacecraft which go out into the Universe and reproduce. Perhaps machine life is common in the Galaxy and we’re just the precursors. There is an obvious problem with this though, mentioned a long time ago: what’s to stop swarms of self-replicating interstellar probes from dismantling planets and moons and making trillions of copies of themselves? If this arises through a mutated bug in their software, it would be to their advantage, and they could be expected to be by far the most widespread “life” in the Universe. Yet this doesn’t seem to have happened. If it hasn’t, maybe the beings which built these machines never existed either. Or maybe they’re just more responsible than we are.
I’m not entirely satisfied with the title of this post but I’ve been fishing around for a better one which isn’t forthcoming. This isn’t actually about whales at all, or not primarily so.
I should point out first of all that I do happen to be brewing an appropriately big whale thing, but this here is not that thing. Rather, this has been stirred up by an observation someone made that penguins are not fish. Well, in a way they are.
There are a number of “scientific facts” which are often trotted out which could be argued with given contemporary scientific practice, and they’re along the lines of Pluto not being, or being, a planet. Here are several examples:
Whales, dolphins and porpoises are not fish but mammals.
Humans are apes
Apes are not monkeys
Birds are dinosaurs.
The last thing is not like the others. Before I go onto that, though, I want to mention something else which is slightly similar. Behind my head, I have a zoology textbook published in I think Victorian times. It’s an appealingly brown cloth-bound tome with illustrations in mezzotint. In days of yore, though perhaps not yore enough, I used it to write two ten thousand word essays in A-level biology about arthropods and chordates, the problem being that actually a lot had changed in the world of zoology in the previous eight decades. Incidentally, the reason I ended up writing such long essays is that one of the other students had insisted that the biology teacher never gave more than seven out of ten because he never had a mark higher than that, and I wanted to prove him wrong. I succeeded. Funny what motivates you, eh? I was also motivated by his homophobia, which I felt made him a nasty person. Anyway, in this two-volume work animals are classified quite differently to how they are today. For instance, arrow worms, now considered to be deuterostomes and therefore quite closely related to vertebrates, were thought to be a form of nematode. Another conflation is between what are now called entoprocts and ectoprocts. These are sessile animals who live in colonies and are superficially like sea anemones or coral. They turn out not to be related to each other at all closely but were once placed in the same phylum. Entoprocts look like wine glasses, and yes they’re transparent like them, with tentacles around the rims. They’re related to arthropods such as insects. Ectoprocts sometimes look quite similar although they vary more and there are more species. They usually live in colonies and are related to brachiopods, the uncannily bivalve-like animals which are in no wise molluscs. The “-proct” bit in their name is the same as the “proct-” bit in “proctologist” – it refers to the anus. Entoprocts have their ani inside the circle of tentacles, ectoprocts outside. They’re really quite similar to each other but are in fact no more closely related to each other than they are to humans. The former phylum, “polyzoa”, included both but it was later realised that they had nothing to do with each other. The ectoprocta, also known as the bryozoa, is the largest minor phylum. Animals have about seven major body plans organised into phyla, and about four or five dozen minor body plans. Some of these are only found in a couple of species, and there’s a big gap between the diversity of the minor and major phyla, but ectoprocts are the largest phylum that isn’t enormous. It’s like Leeds – the largest British city which isn’t enormous.
All that said, entoprocts and ectoprocts have similar lifestyles and it’s fair to group them together. But small flower-like animals living underwater could be hard to relate to. Humans like things with backbones, or at least most of what we seem to be able to relate to has a face and a bony internal skeleton. Some people tend not to dignify most of the animal kingdom with that monicker. Ironically, most organisms called “animal” are actually just mammals apart from one species, and this is where cladistics become manifest, because in fact although everything conventionally called an animal is one, but so are lots of other species. When the book in question was published, there was an order of mammals called the edentates – mammals without teeth. In fact this is in any case a misnomer since in fact one family under this heading, the armadillos, have more teeth than any other mammal. Sloths and anteaters were also considered edentates. In the past, pangolins and aardvarks were too, even though they lived in the Old World and other edentates lived in the New. All that said, it’s undeniable that they’re similar.
ArmadilloPangolinGiant anteaterAardvark
I’ve already said that I wonder if people know more about aardvarks than other animals because they come early in the dictionary or encyclopaedia and therefore fatigue has yet to set in. But anyway, look at this set of four animals. Do they not seem to be closely related? The first two are armoured and able to roll up to protect themselves. The other two have degenerate teeth and dig into insect colonies to eat them with powerful claws. Nonetheless only the first and third are closely related, In fact these animals along with sloths form a sister group to all other placental mammals. Pangolins are most closely related to carnivores and aardvarks to the likes of elephants. Cladistics completely sunders this group.
All that said, there is a “type” which includes only distantly related mammals such as numbats, echidnas, tamanduas and aardvarks as related in terms of being similar in form, and another “type” comprising pangolins and armadillos, though more loosely. I’ll come back to this because cladistics are what leads to peculiar, “common sense”-type results in some situations, one of which has already been noted.
A clade is defined as a group of genetically related organisms. Clades can occur within species. For instance, my mother line forms a clade which is most common among Libyan Tuaregs and my father’s line among people in the Gaeltacht. Like other individual organisms of sexually reproducing kinds, I am in several clades. Like all living humans, I’m also in other clades. I’m in Y-chromosomal Adam’s clade and in mitochondrial Eve’s, whereof the aforementioned Gaels and Tuaregs also are respectively. However, clades are more often used to group entire species. A clade is a group comprising all evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor, usually understood to refer to an entire community rather than an individual or pair, although it could.
This is why, first of all, birds are dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are defined cladistically as something like “the most recent common ancestor of the house sparrow and Triceratops and all of its descendants.” I find this definition slightly confusing because it used to be taught that there were two taxa of dinosaurs, the saurischia and ornithischia which were not particularly close to each other. The taxon “Dinosauria” had been retired. The sauropods are also included by mentioning Diplodocus in that definition. The fact that ornithischia means “bird-hipped” and saurischia “lizard-hipped” is also odd because it means birds are lizard-hipped rather than bird-hipped even though their hips are obviously those of birds. In terms of the actual form of their bodies, as opposed to their DNA, dinosaurs are archosaurs whose hind limbs are vertical and stay under their bodies when they walk. This is not true of other archosaurs such as crocodiles. The really big change in the perception of dinosaurs was probably when it was realised that many of them had feathers, although not all of them, and the presence of hair-like skin appendages might even be a primitive feature as pterodactyls, strictly “pterosaurs”, who are not dinosaurs but are related, , have a hairy covering. This means that not only were many non-avian dinosaurs feathered but that they often looked a lot more like birds than their classic depictions do.
Then there’s the rather startling whale situation. If I remember right, at some point, possibly in the 1980s, whales were thought to have evolved separately from two different lines of terrestrial mammals, one for the baleen whales such as the Blue and the other for the toothed ones such as the Sperm. This is no longer accepted, and in fact I might have remembered it wrongly. Whales are now considered artiodactyls. That is, they’re in the same order as giraffes and gazelles. Even-toed ungulates, i.e. animals with an even number of hoofs on each foot. This is an old-fashioned definition as obviously whales don’t have hoofs at all (“hooves”?). In fact one way of spotting the resemblance is to look at the ankle bones of primitive whales and terrestrial even-toed ungulates, which have a distinctive double-pulley form into which the tendons fit, found in no other mammals. Another way of looking at it is to consider the hippo:
It’s been recognised for ages that hippos are ungulates, but it was also thought that they were most closely related to pigs. In fact it turns out that pigs are not that close to them but are fairly clearly related to peccaries. Hippos are descended from much less bulky animals, basically lightweight hippos which were already amphibious but not heavily built, and although they spend a lot of time in the water they entered it separately from their relatives the whales, and the adaptations they have evolved independently. Another big difference between the ancestors of whales and hippos is that the former were predators. Whales were originally like mammalian crocodiles, waiting for prey in shallow water, possibly to ambush them, and with long jaws filled with teeth, but of course mammalian. Although they aren’t that basal, river dolphins, who have evolved separately more than once, give a good impression of what whales previously looked like:
It does seem very far from obvious that giraffes and dolphins are in the same order though, and this is one consequence of cladistics. There is, however, another consequence which falls into the category of accidental correctness. It used to be trotted out regularly that whales and dolphins are not fish but mammals, because they have no scales, are “warm-blooded”, give birth to live young whom they suckle, and breathe air There is a bit of an issue with several of these points, because there are fish with no scales such as catfish, “warm-blooded” fish such as opahs and tuna, fish who give birth to live young such as swordtails and guppies, and fish with lungs who breathe air, and in fact in the last case the condition of having lungs is found in very early, fully aquatic fish such as the Devonian arthrodires. Also, although as far as I know there are no fish who secrete milk, sharks do provide food for their offspring from their bodies when they eat the eggs of other embryonic sharks within their mothers. Technically there’s no reason why there couldn’t be a “warm-blooded”, air breathing, scaleless fish who gives birth to live young, and when I say “fish”, I do mean the things that are closely related to salmon and cod, and not some exotic definition.
However, cladistically whales are fish because mammals are fish. The first fish to develop limbs with digits who was ancestral to all land vertebrates and also all vertebrates descended from land vertebrates such as ichthyosaurs, penguins and seals, was a fish. We are descended from fish and to fish some of us have returned, in terms of gross physical appearance, and cladistically, everything descended from a fish is also a fish, just as everything descended from a dinosaur is also a dinosaur, even if she’s a humming bird. Therefore, whales are fish. This is a bit annoying for pedants because they can’t now go “um, actually. . . ” in a stereotypically nasal voice about it any more. Nevertheless it is so. They’ve taken away our toy. But whales are fish in the same sense that kangaroos are.
There’s another, similar consequence to this though, or rather a couple of related ones. It’s best to start at the end here. Humans are apes. This is actually true in a couple of ways. Humans are descended from apes, so in a cladistic sense we are apes. In more detail, we really, really are apes. Considering the great apes, which consist of two species of orang utan, two species of gorilla, humans, bonobos and chimpanzees, the three species mentioned last are closely related to each other and more distantly related to the gorillas, but the real outliers are actually the two species of orang utan, not the humans. This shouldn’t be that surprising considering that orang utan are east Asian whereas the rest of the surviving great apes, including humans, are Afrikan in origin. In that sense, then, we are apes. We’re actually basically the “third chimpanzee”, as Jared Diamond puts it. I find this a little difficult because I think we more closely resemble gorillas physically than we do chimps or bonobos, but this is probably just because we’re larger than the other two and therefore have a more similar build to gorillas for biophysical reasons. Another aspect of human biology which is a little surprising is that certain features of our bodies are more primitive than those of other apes, so in fact we aren’t just great apes but also in some ways quite primitive great apes compared to the other species. Specifically, gorillas, chimps and bonobos have hands adapted for knuckle-walking, whereas human hands are more like those of Miocene apes who hadn’t gone through that process yet.
We are also cladistically apes, in the sense that we are members of the clade including the species mentioned above and our common ancestor would very obviously have looked like an ape to us. This also means there’s no missing link between apes and humans, because the apes who evolved into humans are also the apes who evolved into other apes. The exact lineage of humans is hard to identify because there was a huge “thicket” of ape species in the Miocene, when apes were much more common and diverse than non-human ape species are today. It also usually turns out that when a fossil organism is found, it can’t be definitively said to be a direct ancestor of anything alive now. Humans actually tend to be an exception to this. For instance, Homo heidelbergensis seems to be straightforwardly the ancestral species to all living humans. It can also be difficult to find fossil apes because they’re less likely to die accidental deaths. A rhino might wander into a tar pit and suffocate, or a sabretooth tiger might see a pile of dead animals killed by poison gas from a lake and be poisoned herself, but an ape is more likely to notice the corpses, become suspicious and avoid the hazards. All that said, here’s an example of an ape who is close to our common ancestor:
This is Proconsul africanus, who lived from twenty-three to fourteen million years ago around Lake Victoria and on islands in that lake, eight million years before “Lucy” and dying out around the time orang utan diverged from the other apes, all of which had a common ancestor at this point. Gorillas diverged from other Afrikan apes a couple of million years later and then chimps and bonobos from humans six million years ago. Bonobos and chimpanzees then split less than a million years ago, by which time our own genus existed. Proconsul was more quadrupedal than today’s apes, and as can be seen from the image, the hands are more like ours than other apes’, this being a “primitive” feature.
There are things to be said about primates and their relatives, but before I can get to them it would probably help to look at another example of a mammalian order which, unlike primates, we don’t belong to. There’s no particular reason to select them except that a lot of their species are familiar to us, but the carnivores are worth looking at, as would rodents and a load of others, but why not? First of all, carnivores have a significant point in common with the artiodactyls in that they’re divided into terrestrial and aquatic forms, seals being carnivores too. They’ve been called fissipeds and pinnipeds, that is, carnivores with split feet, i.e. digits, and carnivores with feather-like feet, in other words flippers. Concentrating on the land-lubbers gets us two main divisions, into the feliforms and the caniforms, i.e. cat- and dog-like animals. Some animals are in unexpected places. For instance, hyaenas are considered cat-like and there used to be animals which were like a cross between dogs and bears, which diverged early from the other caniforms. There is a more obvious basal versus derived distinction among the feliforms than the caniforms. That is, the feliforms do still have more notably “primitive” types than the caniforms. These are the vivierrids, including the genet, whom Sarada and I once witnessed rummaging around in bins in France when we were sleeping rough. On the caniform side, there’s a group called the mustelids, which includes badgers but also animals like ferrets, minks and stoats, and it’s easy to see how they blend into otters and seals. As far as cats and dogs themselves are concerned, whereas there are people who prefer one or the other, it wouldn’t be sensible to see either as “more advanced” than the other. They’re simply different kinds of carnivore. There is a trend of specialisation within each group, which among the caniforms seems to peak in something like bears or walruses, but it still doesn’t seem like there could be a ladder of different species of carnivores with something at the top. We’re invested emotionally in carnivores because we bond with dogs or cats, or we see bears as charismatic or pandas as cute, but we can still be objective about them.
The way we think of primates tends not to be like that. The standard popular narrative seems to be dominated by a hierarchy, beginning with tupaias, which are not actually officially primates but are related along with rodents, lagomorphs (including rabbits and hares) and colugos. I’m going to permit myself a slight digression here: lagomorphs and rodents are distinguished and considered to be in different orders, but are also closely related, and if the division was placed a little higher than it currently is, they would be in the same taxon. So, there’s a superorder of mammals I tend to call the Euarchontoglires but is also known as the Superprimates, consisting of lagomorphs, rodents, colugos, primates and “tree shrews”. The rodents and lagomorphs are called Glires and belong together, and since it used to be thought that primates were closely related to bats, the “ladder” idea hasn’t been imposed on them and they aren’t seen as of a rank in that hierarchy. To get back to the point, the way it generally goes is that we see tupaias – tree shrews – as at the bottom, prosimians as a bit further up, tarsiers as further up still, then New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, lesser apes and great apes, in that order. That isn’t how things are. There is a sense in which tupaias are similar to ancestral primates who were around at about the time the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out, but beyond that the prosimians, though older than the simians, have been around ever since simians evolved as well. It’s just that one set of prosimians turned into tarsier-like forms and then into monkeys.
So: humans are apes, but despite the insistence to the contrary, apes really are monkeys. We are a special kind of monkey, but so are marmosets. Old World Monkeys form a clade, defined as catarrhines, and include apes. Although we think of monkeys as living in trees and having long tails, on the whole, exceptions being many such as macaques and baboons, and of course apes, we are Old World monkeys. For instance, New World monkeys tend to be smaller, have prehensile tails and are platyrrhine – their nostrils are on the sides of their noses. Humans are not like that. We’re bigger, tailless on the whole, and are catarrhine. Hence the similar insistence that apes and monkeys shouldn’t be confused is as unscientific in its own way as the idea that whales are not fish. Whales are fish, and apes are monkeys.
There is, though, a problem with this insistence, or rather there are two problems. The more obvious one is the overtly and actively racist use of apes and monkeys as terms to refer to Black humans. As a White person, it would be distinctly dodgy for me to go up to a Black person and call them a monkey or an ape, and equally the AI face recognition algorithms which identify Black human faces as gorillas are the product of racism. Therefore, there’s a separate problem with even using the words “monkey” and “ape”. The words “catarrhine”, and “simian” for the whole lot including New World monkeys, and the word “hominoid” for apes might be better. In fact, there’s even another problem with the English term “New World monkey”, because the New World is arguably only new for Europeans, although it’s also true that humans got there later, after evolving in the Old World.
Besides all this, though, there is a potential issue with the idea of cladistics being somehow more fundamental than the older form of biological taxonomy, which was invented before evolutionary theory. Obviously I’m not creationist, but I do feel that evolutionary theory has been allowed to dominate in a similar way to how orbital dynamics was allowed to dominate astronomy, leading to Pluto’s demotion. Yes, Pluto’s orbit is not like that of Jupiter’s or Venus’s, but it’s a big spherical lump of rock and ice thousands of kilometres in diameter. Likewise, a whale is a fish, but an odd fish because of having mammary glands, a four-chambered heart, blubber, no scales or lateral line, and so on. But there is another sense in which aquatic vertebrates with streamlined bodies, dorsal fins, feather-like limbs and tails with “foils” on them really are similar to each other, and this needs to be acknowledged because it has ecological and physical significance. Taking this to humans, genetically humans are closer to chimpanzees than gorillas, but because we are also closer in size to gorillas than chimps, we kind of form a group with gorillas which excludes the more closely related chimpanzees and bonobos. Likewise, pigs and hippos aren’t as closely related as hippos and whales, but pigs and hippos are similar in other ways.
In philosophy, there’s a concept of the “natural kind”. This is the idea that there are categories out there in the world which exist whether or not we realise it. It’s tempting to look at clades not only as natural kinds, but also as somehow more important than other biological natural kinds, based on genomes. This priority runs the risk of ignoring equally valid natural kinds in the form of ecological niches and physical similarity. It is actually important for whales and sharks to be streamlined in similar ways, and for echidnas, tamanduas, numbats and aardvarks all to be mammals who eat social insects as the main part of their diet. This sort of natural kind doesn’t seem any less valid to me than clades, and to be honest I think we should have a second taxonomical system which groups these together as well. Otherwise, imagine this. Humans discover a very Earth-like planet on which there are organisms who move around of their own accord on land and in the water, have hard internal skeletons and a segmented hard structure along their backs carrying nerves to the organs of the body. Some of them dig in the ground and have long noses which they used to eat small motile organisms who live in colonies. Some of them are fish-shaped and descended from land-living organisms of this kind. Some of them are bipedal, have large brains and are about 170 centimetres in height as adults. All of these organisms give birth to live young and suckle them with milk which they secrete themselves. However, life appeared on this planet from non-living processes as it may have done here, or alternatively was seeded, as may have happened here, from elsewhere. Hence there is no genetic link between these fish-like “warm-blooded” organisms and whales, between the long-nosed small colonial organism eaters and anteaters, or between the bipedal one with hands and big brains who make spaceships. None of these organisms are animals according to cladistics. Nor are they mammals, even though they tend to be furry, suckle their young and give birth to offspring without laying eggs. Is this a sensible way of carrying on?
There is more than one kind of natural kind which is equally valid and scientific and can be applied to the same field of knowledge, if natural kinds exist. And whales are fish after all, in two different senses.
For many years I laboured under the misapprehension that it made sense to lump amphibians and reptiles together under the same heading. This contiued until 1992, when I was organising a library of resources for an environmental charity, and a co-worker made the observation that although the two classes of vertebrate were dissimilar, they kind of belonged together, and the scales fell from my eyes. All the information before me, with which I was already well-acquainted, fell into place all at once and I realised that for most of my life I’d plonked the two together when they absolutely did not belong and were as different as birds and mammals. In fact there’s even a sense in which birds in particular are in fact reptiles.
The reason for this is quite easy to understand. We used to be encouraged to think of life as a ladder and of evolution as progress, probably due to older natural philosophy and history such as that of Aristotle and Biblically-influenced views, which were centred about the idea that the history of the world was oriented around creating human beings as the pinnacle of God’s earthly kingdom, and that certain creatures were superior to others. It’s not difficult to challenge this. For instance, we tend to think that the tendency mammals and birds have to generate an internal temperature higher than their environments via metabolic processes makes us superior to other animals. In reality, it burns calories at a heck of a rate and means we have to eat constantly, and in temperatures close to our bodies’ we have to expend energy keeping ourselves cool enough. Also, many animals who don’t do this can practically or even literally freeze for months on end without coming to any harm. It’s selected for in certain habitats, but against in many others. Another assumption often made about “warm-bloodedness” is that it only applied to birds and mammals today, when in fact many fish warm parts of their bodies internally too, and flying insects also generate their own heat through their frenetic muscular activity. “Warm-bloodedness” doesn’t put us at the top of any tree. Incidentally, it’s also the case that the very earliest mammals, unlike some of their close relatives, were not endothermic, as can be ascertained from their ages at death, which are more typical of lizards than the likes of shrews or mice. Endothermy reappeared in mammals later and also existed in our ancestors, but apparently wasn’t advantageous enough in the late Triassic to continue.
Endothermy is only one thing of course, but we impose these ideas on a world with either no agenda or its own, very alien to how we think. With that ladder idea imposed, vertebrate classes look like they can be organised into a kind of “hit parade”, like this:
Mammals
Birds
Reptiles
Amphibians
Bony fish
Cartilaginous fish
Jawless fish
There are huge problems with this list. The first thing to mention is that there’s no such thing as a fish. This is, however, only true if you regard being closely related as of overriding importance and imposing natural kinds. In fact there is another way of looking at organisms which notes their similarities imposed by evolutionary pressures such as having a streamlined body shape and living in water which allow us to think of whales, ichthyosaurs and tuna as similar, though few would call all three fish nowadays. Speaking of fish, it’s also worth observing that category number 7 is particularly peculiar because it lumps lampreys and the invertebrate though craniate hagfish together, the latter being a sister group of all vertebrates, though possibly not when one looks at their DNA.
Another notable thing about the list is that reptiles and amphibians are next to each other, suggesting an association. In a sense that association does exist, and amphibia and reptiles as we understand them have a fair bit in common, such as ectothermy, no significant insulation on their skin and a splayed gait. In fact there is a kind of archetypal “herpet” which looks like a lizard or a salamander. For instance, this is a palmate newt:
. . . and this is a lizard:
I think that’s an agama but I’m probably wrong. I am, in fact. Other reptiles also look similar, such as crocodiles and tuataras:
In fact there’s a wide range of different animals which all resemble the lizard/salamander external body plan, and to some extent the internal. They are also all ectotherms and certain details of their internal workings are also similar. There are also worm-like forms in both classes, such as the Congo eel, which is a urodelan (I’ll explain that later) and caecilians among the amphibia and the snakes, amphisbaenids and limbless lizards such as the slow worm among the reptiles. All of these are serpentine animals and some also lack eyes. This particular body shape is unsurprisingly widespread among animals in general, as with lampreys, hagfish, eels, and in non-chordates segmented worms and the various other kinds of vermiform animals. However, it’s largely ruled out if an animal generates its own internal heat because the relatively large surface area causes too much heat transference for the animal to compensate for. The closest we mammals get would be something like a weasel.
Then there are the others, and I’m talking about this in terms of surviving forms rather than the large number of species which died out at the end of the Mesozoic. These include chelonians, i.e. tortoises, turtles and terrapins, and anurans, that is, frogs and toads. The German names for the former suggest a superficial similarity with the latter which I can’t personally perceive, but they are dorsolaterally compressed and don’t have long tails. Nonetheless, in terms of their appearance nowadays, there does seem to be substantial similarity between many of these animals although the adaptive radiation in the past means this has not always been so. Going back further, the earliest amphibians and reptiles were more similar in appearance to each other and of course reptiles did evolve from amphibians initially.
Even among mammals there are similarities. The first time I saw baby mice, when I was about six, I was struck by their similarity to lizards. They basically looked like pink reptiles to me, although later observations revealed that they were fatter, facilitating insulation and reducing surface area. The same does not apply to birds of course.
The situation as it stands today is that what we think of as reptiles and amphibians are often superficially more like each other than other classes, but this is partly an illusion created by the extinction of their less similar members. However, this could be more to do with our own biasses than any deep similarity. My impression, though, is that amphibians never really got their day, in the sense that the reptiles evolved from them quite soon after they appeared in terms of a geological time scale. The earliest known reptile, Hylonomus, existed 312 million years ago, and one of the earliest amphibia, Acanthostega, is 365 million years old. Fifty-three million years is a very long time, of course, almost as long as the time since the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out, so amphibians did become fairly diverse over that interval, but they were relatively confined to small, specialised habitats for some of it. They were also the only land vertebrates with more than five digits per limb on a regular basis, although this changed quite early on, possibly at the Late Devonian Extinction Event which only tetrapods with five-digit limbs survived. The number of digits as a dominant characteristic of a particular species is never more than five, and this has been so for 360 million years or more.
It’s also not entirely fair just to say herpets are separate, because reptiles did evolve from them. In fact there came a point where the only real difference between certain amphibians and their reptilian relatives were that the former didn’t lay shelled eggs. Although all today’s amphibia mainly respire through their skins, and there are in fact salamanders living on the land with no lungs at all, their distant ancestors did mainly breathe through their lungs. In fact they had a number of characteristics no living amphibian has: heavy ribs, herbivorous diet, powerful lungs and often impermeable skin. This contrasts drastically with modern amphibia, who often have no ribs, are carnivorous as adults, use lungs for communication more than breathing and breathe through their skins. Today’s amphibia also tend to be small and compressed vertically because otherwise gas exchange wouldn’t be efficient enough. So drastic is this difference that there used to be a theory that lissamphibia, the modern amphibia, were not descended from the ancient ones but had evolved independently, from fish. This is, however, not so, as can presumably be determined by their DNA.
Reptiles are also an issue as such, because just as there’s no such thing as a fish, nor is there really such a thing as a reptile, though for more complex reasons. If dinosaurs are considered reptiles, so are birds. In fact, as a child I not only assumed birds were reptiles but was surprised when they turned out to be warm-blooded. This is a little odd considering that they can often fly, because they would need to be able to get through a lot of energy in a short period of time to do so, which would either generate heat or require it to happen. This implies that pterosaurs would be warm-blooded even if other evidence didn’t already show them to be, such as possessing fur.
There is a reptilian grade rather than a reptilian clade. A clade is all organisms descended from a particular common ancestor, so for example mammals are a clade. Reptiles are, though, not a clade. Considering birds as non-reptiles means they exclude certain animals sharing common ancestry with them. Crocodiles are more closely related to humming birds than to monitor lizards. Nonetheless, being a reptile seems to be a real thing.
Archaeothyris, the ancestor of mammals, looks so much like a lizard it’s untrue. Moreover, it evolved only six million years after the first reptile, which is the same amount of time since we and other Afrikan apes had a common ancestor, so the chances are it’s descended from an amphibian rather than a reptile or it would be much closer to other reptiles. This means that they are physically similar rather than closely related. They do have a common ancestor, but it’s probably among the amphibia.
Tuataras are in fact closest to snakes and lizards although they diverged in the Permian, long before the dinosaurs appeared, so humming birds are more closely related to crocodiles than tuataras are to iguanas in spite of their appearance. Reptilianism is a phase animals go through. It isn’t a group consisting of closely related animals. That’s slightly misleading in fact, because it partakes of the idea of a ladder. Many animals are “still” reptiles and that’s absolutely fine. If this planet’s climate gets warmer, the advantage mammals have over current reptiles will be considerably smaller and the reptiles could gain on them and confine them to smaller niches. Nonetheless, there is something of a tendency for lizard-like or salamander-like animals to become less lizardy as time goes by, as can be seen with frogs, turtles, birds and mammals.
This brings me to a peculiarity I can’t quite put my finger on. The currently surviving orders of amphibia are the salamanders (urodela), frogs and toads (anura) and caecilians (gymnophionta). These are each morphologically quite distinct. Urodela are often lizard-like although their bodies can become very elongated and they include tadpole-like forms who breathe through external gills. Anura lack tails, sometimes have long back legs and occasionally have frilly gills on their rear ends. Gymnophionts are blind and worm-like, but with gills. In other words they tend to be quite unlike each other. By contrast, reptiles include crocodilians, lizards and tuataras, who are all usually rather similar in form, and mammals include rodents, shrews, possums and hyraxes, all of whom are again somewhat similar although unlike all reptiles and amphibia. Well, it so happens that there used to be a fourth order of amphibia until fairly recent times known as the allocaudata, a name which translates as “other tailed”. These were very similar to salamanders but not closely related, and their last representatives lived in Italy just before the recent ice ages. In other words, there were still allocaudates when genus Homo had already evolved.
Allocaudates shared the world with non-avian dinosaurs, then dropped out of the fossil record for millions of years, only to reappear in Europe by the Neogene, which is the current geological period (as opposed to epoch like Pleistocene). Unlike all living amphibia, they had fish-like scales. It’s probably worth mentioning that although reptiles and fish are both scaly, those scales evolved independently. Fish scales are basically teeth. Reptile scales are horny and appeared as they evolved from amphibia. Allocaudate scales are bony and like fish scales, so it’s as if their bodies are covered in teeth. They were able to capture prey by shooting their tongues out like chamaeleons and frogs. Some salamanders can also do this. Their teeth were three-pointed and they had the ability to move their heads around by shaking and nodding, which salamanders and other amphibia can’t do. In other words, they were quite a bit lizardier than salamanders. I find it saddening that Homo sapiens missed them by a geological whisker, even though these differences are fairly arcane. They may also have been lungless. Their history is oddly patchy, with a gap in the Eocene followed by reappearance in the Oligocene. The final genus, Albanerpeton, probably died out because the climate of Italy ceased to be cool and humid and became Mediterranean. They were most similar to lungless salamanders generally, but not at all closely related. A reconstruction of Albanerpeton starts this post.
Therefore, it can be seen from all this that once fish needed to navigate shallow water low in oxygen, they were wont to become salamander-like in form, and this form was likely to be stuck to by many of their descendants because it was flexible and suited to a wide variety of environments.
This post is about to lurch in an unexpected direction, rather like David Icke a few weeks after I met him and was disturbed by his wide staring eyes.
So, reptilian humanoids then. It’s important to note first of all that this is used as code for anti-Semitism. Since it’s no longer acceptable to be anti-Semitic, people use this to promote racist ideas by another name. All that said, just as I chose to talk about the merits and considerably greater demerits of the Welt Eis Lehre a few weeks ago, it’s possible to talk about reptilian humanoid conspiracies in a similar way, for there are several. The basic idea is that reptilian humanoids either originated from a star system in the constellation of Draco, the Dragon, or from Earth itself. In the latter case, they may have stayed here or left and then come back again.
I feel the need to state up front that I’m confident no version of the reptilian conspiracy hypothesis is true. I also think an effort should be made to rename the concept “conspiracy theory” to “conspiracy hypothesis” unless the claim has been tested in a similar way to scientific theories and is falsifiable. Some effort needs to be made to pass these ideas through a testing process. And some of them do in fact pass, such as the Tuskegee syphilis scandal and Cambridge Analytica, so the term “conspiracy theory” is entirely respectable and applicable. Getting back to the subject, and bearing in mind its potentially anti-Semitic nature, the reptilian conspiracy hypothesis is not literally true.
The idea varies somewhat but the basis is roughly as follows. Intelligent life forms referred to as “reptoids” or “reptilians” either originated from Earth or a star system in the Draco constellation. If terrestrial, they left Earth and returned, and if not, they settled here. Their purpose is either to take our gold or to feed on our negative emotions. To this end, they sustain a world order which fosters suffering. The ruling elites are all related and have two tiers, the higher of which are shape-shifters and the lower either genetically modified or hybrids with humans. They may also be in allegiance with the greys (flying saucer folk) and be from another “dimension”, which means from another realm which is separate from the physical universe as we understand it such as the spirit world, Hell or Heaven. Ordinary people are programmed not to recognise them. They tend to be hypotensive, intelligent and into science, with Rh negative blood, and colonised the world along with their human allies from a location in the near East. I don’t know how accurately I’ve described the situation as it’s generally understood by people who believe in it. It doesn’t seem to be a coherent, fixed set of beliefs and is reminiscent of the variations found in left wing politics and established religions.
One notable thing about this belief system is its apparent parallel to radical politics at both ends of the spectrum, in that it’s associated with racism on the one hand and the idea of an unjust, self-sustaining concentration of power and privilege at the other. Were it not for the connections with White supremacy, these people could be allies of socialists. When David Icke came out with all this stuff, which didn’t originate with him, it did occur to me that it would constitute a neat way of discrediting radical politics to have an apparent psychotic involved at the top of the Greens, but as usual my response to this is to avoid speculation, think about the consequences and how to address them.
It’s tempting to use the fallacious argument from incredulity here to object to the hypothesis, but that’s probably not necessary. The easier view to criticise is the extraterrestrial origin version. If the reptiloids are literally sentient reptiles, there is the issue of whether reptile-like animals could evolve elsewhere in the Universe. There are two contrary tendencies here. One is that vertebrates seem to constitute an improbable body plan, so reptiles as such are more improbable than that. The issues are that many phyla are improbable in any event, that the dominance of vertebrates may be down to luck and that vertebrate bodies are particularly unusual. There are three types of skeleton in the animal kingdom: exoskeletons, hard endoskeletons and hydraulic endoskeletons. Shelled molluscs, sea urchins and insects are examples of animals with hard exoskeletons, and these facilitate movement in some cases and are merely protective in others. Hydraulic endoskeletons support the body from inside using fluid and can also aid movement. There seem to be two phyla with hard endoskeletons in the animal kingdom, among vertebrates and sponges. Some sponges have hard mineralised endoskeletons like our own, but they serve to anchor the animal rather than help it move: they’re scaffolding, like ours, but scaffolding which is there to prevent things from falling off or shifting. Vertebrate skeletons are unique among Earth animals because they actually help us move as well as having a protective function, among other functions such as being a reserve for certain elements and producing blood. Features of other phyla are often shared, in particular the possession of a hard, jointed covering, and the sheer success of insects suggests that if the arthropod form is probable in the first place, it’s likely to be successful. Limitations on their size can be overcome by swarming or by the possession of different respiratory organs such as the arachnid booklungs, and it’s conceivable that if complex animal life does exist elsewhere it could be insectoid and consist either of groups of small insects or just large arthropods like giant lobsters. This evolution could crowd out any vertebrate-like phyla which exist and although they might still occur, they could be minor like brachiopods or priapulids. There was also a point when chordates were rare and priapulids, a particularly small phylum, were more widespread than they were. All of this counts against the idea of literal reptiloids being out there somewhere.
On the other hand, it’s also apparent that if land vertebrates do evolve, reptiloids seem to be probable. As I mentioned before, the reptilian state is a grade rather than a clade, i.e. a phase that vertebrates tend to pass through rather than a specific class of closely related animals, and this could mean that on other worlds this is a common fate for the descendants of ichthyoids, their own bodies being somewhat constrained in form by the need for streamlining in a liquid. Straight-shelled cephalopods are, however, also streamlined. There are, then, two contrary “forces” here. One seems to make dominant vertebrates improbable but the other, conditional on their existence, seems to make the reptile grade probable. I suppose this means there are a lot of small snakes in the Universe, and maybe lizards, but everywhere they’re found, they’re quite rare, except here on the Planet Of The Snakes.
A simpler idea, in a way, is that the reptoids came from Earth in the first place, left and came back again. I think some claim they hide inside the planet, i.e. underground. There’s also the question of the “schism”. There is a belief that the copious and world-wide myths and legends of dragons, many of whom can talk, and serpents, reflects a memory of a time when the reptoids lived among us. Moreover, the Biblical legend of the Nephilim are taken to imply that they “interbred” with humans. This last cannot literally be true because it would entail them and us being at least closely-related species, so genetic engineering would be the only true possibility there, even theoretically. It’s rendered much less likely with the sequencing of the human genome, since although we share plenty of genetic material with reptiles and amphibia, so do all other vertebrates. There is nothing particularly reptilian about the human genome compared to other apes, although our hands are more primitive than theirs and therefore more similar to the forelimbs of many reptiles.
The terrestrial origin version has the virtue that it does not posit the independent evolution of life elsewhere in the Universe unless we are ourselves from elsewhere as an entire biosphere. In that sense, it’s more parsimonious than the version where the reptoids have alien origin. The idea is presumably that at some point in prehistory, some reptiles evolved sentience and tool use, and left the planet. Perhaps surprisingly, this isn’t beyond the realm of feasibility. If we’re talking about dinosaurs, there are now species such as African grey parrots and crows who have human-like intelligence, so brain size is not the only factor here. The problem is that no non-avian dinosaurs survived the Chicxulub Impact, so it would either have to be other reptiles or they would have had to have done it before that event. There are several signatures in the rocks suggesting widespread use of technology in the Eocene, something like twenty million years later, but this is to some extent the Age of Mammals. It should also be said that the terms “Age Of Reptiles” and “Age Of Mammals” are somewhat misleading, as relatively large mammals and mammaliforms were common before the end of the Mesozoic and there were also large reptiles throughout the Cenozoic until humans came along and presented them with problems of survival, either directly or through competition or habitat destruction. The absence of fossilised artefacts is insufficient evidence for their absence, since in a few million years’ time no such traces of human technology will have been preserved either.
Even so, it’s a big leap from the idea of intelligent reptiles evolving on Earth in the Eocene and leaving the planet to the idea that they have come back and are dominating human beings from behind the scenes fifty million years later. “Reptoids” aren’t that similar to real reptiles. For example, they are supposed to be shape-shifters capable of screening human perception so that we continue to perceive them as human even though they’re said to be larger than we are. It’s true that some animals are camouflaged and some change colour, blending in with their surroundings. Although chamaeleons change colour, its main function is social signalling, although with reptoids it could be technological in nature. What I’m getting from all this is that reptoids really aren’t much like actual reptiles and it leads me to wonder why they are referred to in that way. They seem to be conjectured to be an intelligent tool-using species which evolved on this planet in the past, used to be overtly involved in human lives and is now covertly so. Philip K Dick once mentioned a concept he called “zebra”, which was the idea that just as other species were unable to perceive potential predators or prey due to their camouflage, so might there also be a form of camouflage which humans were unable to detect, meaning that there could be uncanny entities hidden in plain sight. This is an unfalsifiable claim again, but one I find highly appealing, maybe for a fictional scenario rather than in reality.
When it gets taken further, the resemblance to reptiles gets even smaller. It’s sometimes believed that reptoids feed on negative energy generated by their creation of a dystopian society and that they’re native to another dimension and in league with the saucer people.
To be honest, I have subscribed to a similar belief myself with the negative energy thing, because we live in a world where there is simply no need to exploit people any more, and yet there are still poor people and I think this is for two reasons. One is that it isn’t enough for some people to feel successful and be rich. It’s also necessary for some of them to have other people to look down on. It’s a kind of mass sadism. The other is that the creation of an underclass scares people and makes them less “uppity”. Like many other aspects of this conspiracy hypothesis, there’s a germ of truth in the belief system, and if it were acknowledged to be metaphorical rather than literal it wouldn’t be so questionable.
Can we pull this all together then? Herpets are not a single clade but a phase of evolution, and they are superficially very similar. It’s even possible to assert reasonably that they’re a natural kind even if they aren’t closely related, but by approaching them in a more ecological and biophysical way than in terms of genetics and evolution. In the meantime, reptoids are also in a sense herpets since as they stand they partake of a quintessence of reptilianism without literally being reptiles. The conspiracy hypothesis lends itself to being encoded racism, or perhaps racialism in the sense that it’s an organised and conscious set of ideas based on notions of ethnicity. At the same time, it could be shorn of all its racist elements and be seen as a “cry of the oppressed creature”, as Marx once put it: a kind of quasi-religious set of beliefs which through special pleading is not allowed to fail. It’s also a distraction from consequences, as so many things are. There also seems to be a lot of incomplete understanding in it. For instance, what exactly is a dimension if it is neither a direction nor temporal? Are they referring to non-causally related parallel universes?
To conclude, then, herpets are cool and our instincts cause us to malign them unfairly like a cat jumping at the sight of a cucumber. They’re also special because even if life in the Universe is common, reptiles probably won’t be. The people to be afraid of, if such a category exists, are the mammalian primates, including ourselves, whose motives are suspect, and the revolution starts from within and our control of our own lizard brains, not “out there” against the reptilian King.
Back in 1987 CE, I finally got round to joining Leicestershire public library. In a way this was entirely superfluous as I was also a member of Leicester University library (and still am, because that’s how it works, although I lost my card a long time ago and last used it in the late 1990s), but the kind of books were different. I used it to get a quick overview of subjects I needed to study in more depth as part of my degree, and also for novels and art books. One of the first books I took out, after Hugh Cook’s ‘The Shift’ which incidentally I highly recommend, was Brian Stableford’s and David Langford’s offering ‘A History Of The Third Millennium’, which is an unfiction book whose image I shall now try to retrieve from the dark recesses of the web:
(actually that’s just Wikipedia). The illustration of the nautilus shell you see on that cover is in fact one of several options, including the acorns which I’ve seen on mine and the library copy, and is a hologram rather than a two-dimensional photograph. There was also a paperback version which I used to own:
The big, hardback version (whereof there was also a large-format paperback I think) scored over the small paperback in the lavish, full-colour illustrations and of course the hologram on the front cover. I don’t know if anyone reading this remembers UB40’s 1982 album UB44:
This was the earlier, limited edition, bearing a hologram, replaced soon after by this:
I actually quite like the second cover as well.
So the thing is, if you were living in Britain in the ’80s, you might have got the impression that the future would have lots of holograms in it. Oddly, the only holograms we seem to see regularly are on back cards. I do not know why this is. It seems to me that they’re still pretty groovy (geddit?) and that they ought to be all over the place, but they aren’t. They do have their drawbacks. For instance, this form of hologram doesn’t display real colours but shows a spectrum of them across the image. There are ways around this but not with printed still images. Nonetheless, representational holograms at least were a fad which went out of fashion and I don’t know why. They were probably replaced by Magic Eye images, also known as random dot stereograms:
I’ve made a few of these, on a Jupiter Ace. They’re quite easy. Another possible visual replacement is the Mandelbrot Set, in a sense.
Just as holograms have gone out of fashion, but seemed like the future at the time, some of Langford’s and Stableford’s book also, unsurprisingly, proved to be highly inaccurate and projected the trends of the time unrealistically, as it turned out, into the future, but other aspects were bang on. There’s also something about the illustrations not being CGI which forges a connection between the reader now, when we are very accustomed to it, and the fact that some of them, although obviously manipulated in an analogue way, had to be based on real models at some point, which gives them a vividness lacking in computer graphics. I almost feel sad to say this because I was very into CGI as a teenager and my main motivation for interest in computers was their possibilities in that direction, but the idea has a kind of soullessness to it which is quite saddening. It isn’t about whether they’re convincing but the need to feel an anchor in the physical world. There’s also artistry in how the images must’ve been created when they are fake. It’s a little like the ingenuity of helical scanning on video cassettes to make it possible at all.
The most glaring anachronism is that the world depicted has the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact persisting for centuries, although it also sees Stalinism as dwindling to nothing very quickly. It was published around the time Gorbachev came to power and after a short period it became obvious that he was going to take the USSR in a very different direction. However, it also predicted that entrepreneurial capitalism would come to an end and that planned economies would become the norm, and this is really what’s happening, particularly in the wake of Covid. What we have now, quite possibly, is a situation where small businesses go to the wall and are replaced by corporations. For instance, a small takeaway could close down due to lack of footfall but its facilities would be bought up by a fast food franchise, siphoning off the income to where it does no good for anyone significant and effectively taking it out of the economy, at least locally. In the book, this process is envisaged as being driven by technological change, where manufacturing becomes more specialised and the division of labour becomes more sophisticated, and this does happen to some extent and may be responsible for the impression I get, at least as an outsider, that individual jobs are often incomprehensible to the people holding them. However, governments are also seen as having to exercise more control over the owners of large enterprises, which I don’t see happening, and I’m also not sure what the writers mean when they say “owners” because of the nature of shares. One thing which does seem realistic to me is the purchase of small nations by multinationals. I can absolutely see this happening and wouldn’t expect it to be confined to small nations either. The description of the real interests of multinationals also seems entirely accurate. They are described as constituting great cartels with no interest in competition, but more in avoiding taxation, protecting their markets and maintaining stability. On the other hand, governments are seen as in opposition to them because they try to avoid taxation, but this is the opposite of the real situation, which is that they prefer to tax the poor and leave the rich to enjoy their stolen money, and perhaps find new ways to take money off the poor. It all seems a bit idealistic really, but still.
An interesting chapter covers a series of epidemics, not really pandemics, which broke out from 2007 to 2060. The first leads to the overthrow of apartheid because it incapacitates all ethnicities in South Africa but because the Whites are in the minority this enables the others to mount an uprising against them. South Africa then disintegrates into a number of small self-governing republics. There is a theme of deniability here and it’s explicitly stated that none of the epidemics are necessarily genetically engineered although many of them were convenient. Several of them seem to be aimed at particular ethnic groups, and it has been mentioned that this might be possible although I suspect it wouldn’t work very well because of the mixture of genes we all have. One seems to be instigated by the US against Latinx immigrants, and not only succeeds but spreads into Mexico, Central and South America and kills many millions, beginning from Los Angeles. This one is rather poignant. It happens in 2015, is limited to a year and is quickly contained in the US by a vaccination program which only takes three weeks. This is amazingly different from the real situation with Covid-19. The attribution, though plausibly deniable, that the viruses involved in all of these are genetically modified is an interesting parallel to the real world conspiracy theory that Covid was genetically modified by the Chinese. In fact, the book also depicts a Chinese virus from Wenzhou (温州) causing sudden hepatitis which kills 38 million. In fact it would be possible to identify genetic modification because entire genes would be spliced in, meaning that long, continuous stretches of genetic code would differ from the wild strains, and at the time of writing genetic fingerprinting was being developed at my alma mater, so in a sense the authors missed a trick. It is in fact the case that we are likely to be plagued by a series of pandemics due to deforestation over the next few decades, and it’s notable that the predictions of death toll are far smaller than the real numbers of casualties we’re currently experiencing. A new variety of AIDS is predicted for 2032, whose long incubation period helps it spread, and it also causes sterility and arose in Poland. The US “triplet plagues” are three simultaneous viruses, one causing paralysis and neuropathy, a second causing leukæmia and a third solid cancers. These kill ten million within a year. By 2060, the viral plagues have ceased, apparently because they hurt the perpetrating groups as much as the intended victims. This particular chapter is interesting to compare and contrast with the reality of Covid and the probable reality of future plagues, although there’s no need for any conscious instigation for this to happen. Also, they were right about the overthrow of Apartheid although not about the cause or the timing – it’s a quarter of a century later here. Another thing they got right, sadly, was that pandemics would be better managed in the developed world than the global South.
The chapters on energy use are interesting. They seem to be based on accurate projections of fossil fuel and nuclear power use although the likes of COP didn’t exist at the time. Coal and oil use peak in 2025 and 2000 respectively, but the cost of fuels relative to inflation rises thrice as high for the latter. It’s a little hard to understand how a fuel used for transport and manufacture is able to rise in price that fast independently of the prices of other goods, but there might be an explanation somewhere in the text. The reason for the rises in price is that increasingly marginal sources are used, particularly for oil, such as oil shales and sands. It can be assumed that fracking is going on given the perspective we have. Coal also becomes more expensive because of deeper mines having to be dug. Imports of oil also get harder due to countries wanting to hang on to their own supplies. This leads to biofuels, mainly ethanol, being developed in countries without these resources. Fission power is if anything less popular than in reality, mainly due to Green parties,which achieve a modicum of power. There is a meltdown in Vologda in 2004, which is probably close enough to other European countries to be significant, and the issue of enforced internationalism is also mentioned, this case being an example of pollution leading to neighbouring countries being concerned about each others’ activities.
The US President Garrity, 2024-32, introduces restrictions on commercial plastic use and fossil fuel automobiles and conspicuous consumption ends. This is unpopular and blamed for a recession, but fuel shortages have already led to a recession by this point which is sufficiently severe that the additional measures make little difference. In fact I wonder if 2024-8 will prove to be Trump’s second term, in which case none of this will happen, and I’m also sure nothing this pronounced was agreed at COP-26. The expense of manufacture and energy leads to the maintenance rather than disposal of equipment, which encourages manual labour again. This again is the opposite of what has happened so far. Built-in obsolescence is a major issue, although there is the Right To Repair movement, and if this succeeds this could lead to the possibility of maintenance and repair becoming more popular by the end of this decade. This chapter also notes that uranium mining suffers from the same unsustainability problem as fossil fuels, but doesn’t mention thorium reactors.
Stableford and Langford blame the energy austerity measures imposed on consumers in the mid-century on profligate use of energy from the mid-twentieth century onward, and we would probably all agree with this. Energy use for individual consumers is rationed and large-scale energy use concentrates on public utilities. Property taxes are based on heating inefficiency, smart meters monitor consumption and issue on the spot fines and long distance ‘phone calls are cut off after a certain period. All of this is intrusively surveilled. Although I can imagine such things becoming necessary, I can’t see them being implemented. Nor can I see steps being taken to prevent us entering this predicament, so there are a lot of questions here about what will actually happen when it comes to the crunch. It is, however, clear that governments are able to exploit xenophobia resulting from this kind of situation, so whatever else happens it seems clear that right wing populism will be fuelled, so to speak, by this kind of crisis. On a side note, it predicts the Roomba in this bit.
Three necessities are mentioned for fusion: an accurate simulation in advance of changes in the plasma in order to continue containment; more powerful and efficient magnetic fields; and, a form of shielding which would absorb most of the neutrons and protect the outer casing. All of these things are solved, and they do seem in my rather naïve view to capture all the issues. The simulation problem is addressed as an outgrowth of what we now call the Human Genome Project, which is referred to as “Total Genetic Mapping”, as software was needed to achieve this. I’m sure that’s true but I’m not sure how this would be relevant, which isn’t to say that it isn’t. In the book, the efficiency of the magnetic fields is achieved by the invention of room temperature superconductors. Finally, the alloy which acts as a neutron sink is manufactured in orbit because only in zero G can metals of different densities, such as aluminium and lead, become an alloy without gravity separating them. I see this bit as an attempt to demonstrate the benefits of zero gravity manufacturing conditions but it is also an attempt to address the problem of the casing being so heavily irradiated that it becomes radioactive waste in its own right and also needs to be replaced. Room temperature superconductors do now exist but only under immense pressure, so another problem has been created. Previously the issue of creating magnets powerful enough to contain plasma under sufficient pressure to cause fusion was addressed by using liquid helium to cool the magnets and circuitry almost to absolute zero, which led to a mind-numbing temperature gradient because the plasma itself was at 150 million Kelvin. Now the problem is pressure, but there may be a hint at a solution when you realise that both the plasma and the superconductor need to be under very high pressure. This is too big a subject to talk about in this post really. Incidentally, fusion reactor efficiencies are misquoted in two ways. Firstly, the ratio of energy input to the plasma to its energy output is not the whole story because total energy input is greater, and secondly the conversion of heat to electricity is only fifty percent efficient at best. There’s also energy input to the tritium extraction process and tritium is also scarce, at one hydrogen atom in 32 million. The alternative is to use helium 3, which is abundant in lunar regolith, but we are not anywhere near managing it at the moment anyway. It’s looking like I’m going to have to blog about this subject separately, but this brings home the interesting topicality and relevance of the book to contemporary events, because all the things mentioned are current issues in fusion research.
By the time fusion power becomes practical, the public and government perceive it as having been dangled in front of them for so long that they’re sceptical and people have also readjusted to the new energy régime. Biotech is also getting all the money because it’s more glamorous, so it isn’t until the 2090s that fusion generators come online at all. Once they have, there are further delays. It’s realised that neutrons emitted by fusion can be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, there are squabbles over the sitings of the reactors because it’s felt that some redress is needed for the global South for the previous amassed wealth achieved via fossil fuel use by the North, and given that they are located there, the cost of building an electricity grid sufficient to carry the power out of the countries considerably offsets the benefits. Deuterium plants also have to be located in or near the sea, so it doesn’t help landlocked territories. There are also teething problems, such as damage to the plant from the intense heat and radiation, meaning that the reactors need to be redesigned and rebuilt.
All of this section feels remarkably grounded in reality and practical considerations. There is nothing waffly in this. I can completely buy the idea that should fusion power ever prove practical, this is very much along the lines of what would happen. We can already see Third World nations objecting to what they see as the North pulling up the ladder after themselves by changing the energy goalposts, and this reluctance is basically the same thing. This accords with the general tone of convincing politicking combined with speculative, but not wildly so, conjectures regarding technological and scientific change. This is definitely hard SF.
Unsurprisingly, an issue following on from this is that of anthropogenic, or otherwise, climate change. The emphasis is on global warming and sea level rise although it is mentioned that changes in ocean currents and rainfall patterns lead to unanticipated results such as a general reduction in crop yields accompanied by sporadic increases in some areas due to shifts making land more suitable for particular crops such as cereals. This can be seen in reality today, for instance with the increasingly friendly English climate for grape-based wine production. It’s also uncertain, in the book, how much fluctuations in solar activity contribute to the situation, but again as in reality, they’re generally thought to mitigate the effects of climate change. Ocean acidification hadn’t been identified as a problem at the time and is therefore ignored, as are the risks from clathrate hydrates releasing methane.
The prediction of sea level fluctuation is that it will rise sixteen metres between 2000 and 2120 at a maximum rate of twenty-four centimetres a year and then drop once humanity gets its act together to a stable level two metres above the 2000 level by 2200. Shanghai is the first city to be affected by the rise, starting in 2015 and being obliterated by 2200. Tokyo and Osaka are similarly threatened but this is overtaken by events because in the late twenty-first century Japan is practically destroyed by quakes and the population disperses throughout the globe. Speaking of quakes, attempts to protect Los Angeles and San Francisco are hampered by seismic activity in California. All of this is quite well thought-through, although I have yet to check the elevation of the relevant cities. More widely in the US, attempts to rescue New York City and Los Angeles are the main focus, leading to resentment in the South, particularly Florida and Texas. The bicentennial of the Civil War in the 2060s leads to civil unrest in the Southern States because of the focus on settlements outside the area. This is a little similar to the Hurricane Katrina situation.
Comparing this with real life, Shanghai is indeed very low-lying at 2-4 metres above sea level. China is also disproportionately affected by sea level rise for a continental nation, as is much of East Asia. In Shanghai, there was catastrophic flooding killing seventy-seven people in 2012 and there are attempts to create mangrove swamps to increase resilience. For some reason I don’t understand, sea level is rising faster in East Asia than elsewhere. How is this possible? Clearly there’s something about the oceans I don’t understand. As for New York City, I don’t know what’s been done yet but there are plans to fortify the shoreline in Manhattan. The devastation of New Orleans also occurs but from flooding due to sea level rise rather than the hurricane, and of course this is still on the cards.
Another successful prediction is made concerning public response to climate change. People take it personally and realise it’s about their children and grandchildren. Having said that, it often seems to me that people are remarkably unconcerned in reality about it and I find this puzzling. But we do have Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.
The destruction of Honshu occurs in 2084-85 and starts with an earthquake followed by the eruption of Mount Fuji and the emergence of a new sea volcano. This leads to a Japanese diaspora and the blurring of cultural and ethnic distinctions. Clearly this is an unpredictable event although the nations of the Pacific Rim are all at risk. In order to tell a story, the authors have to commit themselves to a particular date and location, but there’s a more general principle here. It’s a bit Butterfly Effect, because it’s equally feasible that it could happened to California, which would have different consequences because of it being somewhat integrated with the rest of the States.
There follows a to me rather depressing chapter on genetically modified food, where the reduction in yields caused by climate change is only mitigated to subsistence levels by the engineering of more suitable varieties for the new climatic conditions. This leads to the production of SCP – Single-Cell Proteins – initially as fodder but illicitly eaten by vegans as a meat substitute until it’s legalised for human consumption later on. Complete foods are also created in the form of grains which contain all essential nutrients, off which the inventor lives for a decade but is accused of cheating. This reminds me of Huel and also breatharianism to some extent. Then there’s a description of all the small-scale subsistence farmers who have been forced off their land by megascale monoculture agriculture growing patented crops, which balances the rather technocratic tone of the previous chapter. These are known as the “Lost Billion”, the number of people affected (short scale), no longer able to farm what used to be their land and reduced to the status of refugees. Some of them resort to armed struggle and others join apocalyptic religious cults as a coping mechanism for the destruction of their way of life. Sea farming also expands greatly, something I personally strongly believe in, in the form of algal and blue-green algal farming, which would serve to satisfy many nutritional needs while redressing the phosphorus imbalance. Seaweeds are also grown, particularly by Australia due to its extensive shallow seas, but also along the entire west coast of South America. This is from the 2060s. In my mind, I envisaged just ordinary seaweed but their version of it is genetically modified seaweed, which is also used for biodiesel. It often isn’t realised how much oil there is in algæ, which I presume is to enable them to float near the surface and photosynthesise. As the authors point out, more than two-thirds of sunlight falls on the sea and it is an underexploited resource. Not that it’s ours to exploit necessarily as it would have an impact on the ecosystem there, but it’s a question of minimising that impact elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly, the most predictable thing ever, the internet, is, well, predicted. Amusingly, ebook readers are for some reason only introduced in the 2060s after false starts from 2005 onward. There are also wall screens. I don’t know if domestic wall screens will ever become popular. In theory we could have them now, as larger screens exist in public places for such purposes as advertising and as whiteboard replacements. All anyone need do is buy one and put it in their home, but people don’t do this. Maybe they will one day, and it’s important to remember that this is supposed to be about what happens in the next 979 years. Speaking of which, it also speaks of financial transactions going through a cycle of security and insecurity, which is entirely feasible if quantum computers develop the capacity to hack encryption through fast factorisations.
Then they talk about employment. They see it as eliminating white-collar jobs faster than manual labour because of the need to maintain new technology and the damage done by climate change. Hikikomori are also mentioned, though not by name. It’s described as “TV withdrawal” and as affecting mainly people in poorer countries, who seek to escape from the reality of life into the more idealised version, particularly in advertising, seen on television. There is resistance to home-working and people continue to commute because they see working at home for pay as unnatural. I can see some of this to be sure, and for the real world there’s the issue of economic support for ventures which are used by commuters and people going to work such as fast food stands and sandwich shops, among other things. City centres also stayed expensive. An interesting phenomenon which as far as I know hasn’t happened is an organisation known as Speedwatch, starting in 2004, which begins as a mutual support group for the victims of dangerous drivers and develops into a vigilante group assassinating motorists who exceed the speed limit or otherwise drive dangerously, which although it ends in the perpetrators being imprisoned is argued to make roads safer by introducing a deterrant. Restrictions on private vehicles increase while the leaders are in jail, and in 2021 on being released, they claim to have won. Public transport is boosted. Now this would be sensible, which probably explains why it hasn’t happened. Electric cars are introduced but are underpowered. The Sinclair C5’s successors, planned in reality, are more successful. The time frame is approximately correct, with petrol cars ceasing to be manufactured in 2030, by which time there is in any case more home-working. Airships come back too, for obvious reasons. I really want this to happen but don’t think it will.
That, then, is the first part of the book. The wider sweep of the worldbuilding, which extends far beyond the third millennium, was used as the basis of much of Brian Stableford’s fiction, such as the Emortality Series and his short story ‘And Him Not Busy Being Born’. His earlier novels bear no relation to all of this as far as I can tell. David Langford mainly writes parodies, such as ‘Earthdoom’, which I have read, but also came up with the idea of the brain-breaking fractal image known as “basilisk”, which leads to online images being made seriously illegal. He writes the newssheet ‘Ansible’ and also the Ansible Link column in ‘Interzone’, and has won more Hugos than anyone else ever. The rest of the book is also interesting but tends to branch out beyond what’s relevant today. There is a first contact towards the end, but since humans have been so genetically modified by then, it doesn’t really feel like one. They also remove the natural limit on the human lifespan, so there are no longer such things as disease and old age, and this is an important issue in much of Stableford’s work.
It isn’t so much about accuracy and datedness that this work is interesting as the focus on Realpolitik and the quality of the research put into it. Yes, it’s dated and yes it reflects the time it was written in (these are not the same thing), but it’s also believable and quite frank about the risks we present ourselves with, particularly in the area of climate change and fossil fuel use. I highly recommend it, even now.
It’s very common to do two things when veganism is discussed. One is to associate it strongly with soya. The other is to criticise it on that basis as environmentally unsustainable. Further down the line is a common equation between soya and phytoëstrogens (how do you spell that?), leading to a whole gender politics thing about “soyboys” which is a load of b0ll0x. Today, or whenever this sees the light, I’ll be talking about this stuff.
In a way, I should be saying “plant-based”. The reason I didn’t is that veganism is not the pursuit of a plant-based diet. Rather, it’s an ethical position akin to pacifism with practical consequences. A plant-based diet is merely one which eliminates the intentional consumption of animal products, and as such the term is a misnomer as it may include fungi. It’s arguable that a plant-based diet including soya is optimally vegan, although I personally eat soya products and I am going to defend their use as well as criticise them. This is somewhat similar to the palm oil situation, which was declared non-vegan by some although it seems to me that a whole load of other foods could be equally seen in that way.
I’m going to start with a similar kind of botanical breakdown of what soya plants are. Soya, 大豆, Glycine max, is a member of the Leguminosæ along with lentils, peas, clover and so on. This family is “green manures” because they contain nodules in their roots with symbiotic bacteria which can fix nitrogen. Hence they are extremely useful in agriculture and horticulture. Some of them are also high in hæm, which is the porphyrin found in hæmoglobin, which they use to bind to oxygen, I think increasing the nitrogen concentration around the roots and therefore the efficiency of this process, and as an aside this hæm is used to make more convincing veggie burgers, which may however not be vegan because they have been safety-tested on animals, although don’t quote me on that – do your own research. Soya is unusual among plant protein sources because it contains large amounts of all essential amino acids. In general the sources of bulk protein in a plant-based diet are either low in sulphur-containing amino acids or low in others, but soya has an unusually high quality. That said, the idea of quality in amino acid content is now somewhat passé for reasons I don’t fully understand, although it is true that you needn’t combine protein sources in a single meal and also, I haven’t investigated this but it’s long seemed likely that digestive enzymes from further up in the gastrointestinal tract would end up being digested and absorbed further down, so I’ve long had my doubts about that idea. Soya is also the source of a fixed oil used in cooking and to make margarine, and in the manufacture of soap (which I have done incidentally), plastics, paint and biofuel. This last in particular is ecologically significant and I’ll be returning to it. The Latin name seems to be the origin of the name of the amino acid glycine, which is the only non-chiral and simplest of that family of compounds and is found in the interstellar medium, unlike all other amino acids as far as I know. Glycine is also a neurotransmitter, like some other amino acids. Maybe the name is just a coincidence. Soya sauces are also derived from it. It seems to have originated from southwestern Asia, although its traditional use has been greatest in the Far East. However, today something like four-fifths of the world’s production is in the Americas, including North America. It cannot be grown in the British Isles because it’s susceptible to frost, although climate change might mean it will be possible at some point. It grows from four dozen centimetres to two metres high and produces pods containing three or four seeds each up to around seven centimetres in length.
Like Cannabis, soya is one of those species which tends to get focussed on in a biassed manner due to its social position, and information on it can therefore be seen as fairly obfuscated. There are two main sources of criticism. One regards environmental impact and the other influence on the reproductive function. This of course edges yet again into herbalism, but I’ll cover it here anyway. Soya is œstrogenic on account of its isoflavones, genistein and daidzein, and has been blamed for increasing the risk of breast cancer and reducing male fertility. This is potentially part of a narrative where plants are problematised rather than seen as nutritious and beneficial, which is also rife in anti-herbalist rhetoric. In fact, considering that soya has been high in diets in east Asia for centuries, this is almost certainly baseless unless the processing of soya as an ingredient in more Westernised diets does something significant. There are also elements of sexism in this, because it portrays œstrogen as something foreign to the human body which is likely to cause problems. In fact I can testify that there are much stronger œstrogens elsewhere in the plant kingdom and that soya is extremely weak in this respect, and that xenoestrogens, that is, compounds organisms have not encountered until recently, are far more significant in this respect because the liver is less able to deal with them and they are lipid-soluble. Having said this, it is true that the processing of biological matter can change its profile and action, so it really depends on whether there’s a significant difference between industrial and pre-industrial treatment of soya.
For a long time. soya didn’t constitute a significant part of my diet, even as a vegan, because I tried to source my food as locally as possible and I simply had no need for it. Whereas there certainly are hidden ingredients in processed food, very little of my diet was in this form. Probably the main heavily-processed item would’ve been pasta. There is an issue with abrogating responsibility when you hand over the preparation of food to strangers, particularly if they are part of large organisations. I have generally tried not to do this, though not so much recently. I also didn’t take the approach of substituting æsthetically similar products for animal products, so for example when I gave up milk and cheese I didn’t replace it with anything that seemed similar although I did research the nutritional value and replaced it in that sense. Hence soya milk hasn’t played much of a rôle in my life, for example. Tofu and tempeh, however, have, so it has had an indirect rôle in that way since both are involved in the production of soya milk. It is, incidentally, possible to prepare a similar food from peanuts, since like soya beans, peanuts are pulses. I’ve never done this though. All that said, nowadays I do eat a fair bit of tofu, for my sins, which is an æsthetic choice rather than a nutritional one. Therefore in the following, I am as culpable as anyone else, but probably less culpable than carnists who eat farmed meat.
Since 1970 CE, soya production has increased four dozenfold. Almost one and a quarter megaäres of land is devoted to soya farming, much of it in the Americas. Brazil, Argentina and the US are the leaders here, the Argentine being a distant third compared to the equal production of the other two. It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that one of these countries is known for a certain biome. Therefore, unsurprisingly, soya farming is associated with deforestation. Soya plants are annuals, so the ground needed for them constantly increases. It is true that the conditions for soya are better in savannah areas than rain forests, but the area of Brazil used for the plant is still special and unique in terms of biodiversity. Farming it has resulted in soil erosion, as it often does.
Although it’s true that soya farming is environmentally destructive, this cannot be used as an argument against vegetarianism and veganism for two important reasons. One is that five-sixths of global soya production goes to feed farm animals. This is where the bulk of Brazilian soya bean exports go. The other is biofuel. Soya can be used to make both biodiesel and ethanol, so it’s actually a source for two different fuels. The biodiesel produces a by-product which can be used for farm animal feed. The oil itself is reacted with methanol and the glycerol is extracted and fed to farm animals along with the beans themselves. Most American biodiesel is from soya oil. China imposed a 25% tax on American soya for this reason, which will have driven up the cost of soya as food generally. Hence much of the world’s soya production goes either to feed farm animals or to produce biodiesel and by-products thereof, including farm animal feed, and since tropic levels mean that soya for meat production is hugely inefficient, carnists are in no position to point at non-carnist consumption of soya unless they also intentionally avoid meat which comes from animals who have been fed on it. That said, soya doesn’t deserve a halo and it is better to avoid it, not least because you’re supporting an industry that profits from animal farming, although I’m not sure what you could do to avoid that, bearing in mind that self-sufficiency involves having enough money to own land and where did that money come from?
To conclude, then, although soya is by no means wonderful, it isn’t riskier to the health than most foods and carnists can’t use consumption of it as a stick to beat vegans and vegetarians unless they too make efforts to avoid meat fed on it. And to be fair, some of them do, and ecologically there is a difference between eating road kill, for example, and having a Big Mac. But on the whole the argument is invalid for the vast majority of carnists. At the same time, we should all probably be making some effort to reduce our consumption of soya, directly or indirectly.
In Northeastern Niger, now deep in the desert, there is a life-size rock carving of two giraffes, the largest piece of rock art in the world. Dating from Neolithic times, they and many other carvings strongly suggest that the Sahara region at the time was not a desert at all, but more like the Serengeti. There are many other carvings throughout the Sahara of bovids, including a genus called Pelorovis. Later rock art includes drawings of horses and chariots. All of this indicates that quite recently, perhaps into historical times, the Sahara was not a desert. This is the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, and is considered important to a number of aspects of human history.
The vast desert that now exists all across North Afrika would seem to present a considerable barrier to the exit of humans from the continent. Controversially, we may have evolved on an island in the Gulf of Aden, spread into the Horn of Afrika southward. The earliest known representatives of the genus Homo known date from Ethiopia 2.8 million years ago. Homo habilis is found in East and South Afrika from about 2.3 million years ago although they may not be directly ancestral to us. Homo erectus, on the other hand, is found not only in Afrika but also all the way across Eurasia, including “Java Man”, found in 1891, and “Peking Man”, in 1926. These people must have managed to get out of Afrika somehow. It’s been suggested that they did it by moving along the Nile Valley, but if the whole of North Afrika fluctuated between desert and more humid conditions, their movement is not so unusual. After all, if there used to be giraffes and other typical savannah fauna in the Sahara, why should that not include humans? Moreover, considering that there used to be hippos in the Thames, isn’t it likely that they would’ve got there because there wasn’t a desert in the way?
I feel quite strongly that White people tend to use the Sahara Desert as a way of marking off the more southerly portion of the continent as a kind of “Darkest Africa” (with a C of course) where all the Black people come from. Perhaps we like to imagine there’s always been a line in the sand, as it were, between us and the majority of human genetic diversity found south of it, a view which the Tuareg, for example, do not consider significant. I can’t speak for the Tuareg of course, but those who live in Mali compared to those who live in Libya are considerably darker-skinned but all of them consider themselves as part of the same ethnicity, because they are. However, this is not the main focus of my post today.
The Sahara Pump Hypothesis is generally known as the Sahara Pump Theory, and whereas it certainly rings true to me it is apparently not currently considered rigorous enough to be regarded as one. This raises the Kuhnian view of scientific change in my mind. Thomas Kuhn claimed that the social dynamics of academia were the most significant factor in the acceptance and rejection of theories, so that it was only when the younger people who came up with new theories reached positions of influence that their theories became accepted by the discipline concerned. There may also be other factors. I, for example, believe hominins had an amphibious phase, living in or near beaches, hence my belief that we may have evolved in the Gulf of Aden, which is Elaine Morgan’s belief, not widely accepted by palæontologists, possibly because its emphasis includes the evolution of women rather than focussing solely on men. Hence “Sahara Pump Hypothesis“, even though to an outsider it looks pretty convincing.
There are said to have been a number of phases. The earliest was in the Plio-Pleistocene, a concept used in palæoanthropology to demarcate a period between about five million to twelve thousand years ago which focusses on the evolution and ecology of large vertebrates and the cooling trend which marks this stretch of time, even though it doesn’t work well for more broadly-based palæontology. As far as hominins are concerned, however, there is no firm shift in our history with the onset of the Pleistocene more significant than other events in our story. There are two phases considered here. The first is around 3.2 million years ago, and the other a two hundred millennium period starting about half a million years later. Both of these are well before the start of the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials. One event that happened at this time was that goats spread from Afrika into Eurasia. Another primate than humans, the macaques, also increased their range around then. Geladas, on the other hand, found their range reduced.
Later on there were two waves of Homo erectus migration. The first got all the way to the Far East but the second only reached as far as South Asia. This can be determined by the kind of tools used at the time. There are also signs in the caves, where the likes of stalagmites and stalactites grew during certain periods and halted at others, because water wasn’t entering the systems. Later on, Homo heidelbergensis also managed to spread out of Afrika, and finally Homo sapiens, followed by three more events, one associated with the 8.2 kiloyear event which I’m planning to cover in more detail below, another with the 5.9 kiloyear event and the most recent with the Late Bronze Age Collapse and ensuing Dark Age.
Ice ages generally increase the sizes of hot deserts because a lot of water is locked up in the ice. Consequently, in general during the last few ice ages the Sahara has been both a desert and larger than it is now. The immediate cause of the shrinkage of the desert is increase in the strength of the monsoons in West Afrika, which leads to more water arriving from both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic off the western coast of the Sahara. This is driven by the gradual shifts in the orientation of this planet’s orbit such that we end up closest to the Sun in different seasons. Currently, the Northern summer is when we’re furthest from the Sun, but that very gradually shifts and when the perihelion is in the summer, this triggers more evaporation from the North Atlantic and higher rainfall. Another factor is that the doldrums, the belts of latitude where there is little wind, shift away from the Equator due to warmer temperate regions and this pushes the monsoon region north in the Northern Hemisphere. There are many other factors.
The sea bed off the West Afrikan coast is currently rich in dust from the Sahara and also preserves pollen. Samples at various depths below that sea bed show fluctuations in the levels of dust and pollen types. When there is less dust, there’s also less Ephedra pollen, which prefers drier conditions and more sedge and grass pollen, which need more rain, and this reverses when there’s more. There have in fact been two hundred and thirty periods over the past eight million years when the Sahara was more humid, although when you get to that time scale continental drift becomes significant and Afrika as a whole was in a different position. When there’s more vegetation in the Sahara, it holds on to more water and also reduces the amount of sunlight reflected compared to sand or bare rock, so there’s a feedback effect. In the Sahara during these periods, there were larger lakes and/or more wetlands. These lakes were also linked by a more extensive river network and the rivers which are still there would have carried more water, particularly the Nile and the Niger. The shorelines of these lakes, and in one case, Lake Tchad, a sea, can be plotted using the contours of the land, and are further supported by the presence of rock art only above these levels, piles of fish bones and also the prevalence of fish hooks. Lake Tchad, sometimes referred to today in that prehistoric state as Megalake Chad, had an estimated area of 340 000 square kilometres and a depth of up to a hundred and sixty metres, which is about the size of the Caspian Sea. Other “megalakes” included the Megafezzan, Ahnet and, just barely cut off from the Mediterranean, the Chotta. This last has an interesting history as there was once a French plan to reflood the area by digging a canal from the sea to the basin. The Romans undertook an expedition in search of spices to the Tchad, where they encountered hippopotami. Also in these lakes were turtles, Nile perch and crocodiles. The presence of the rivers would also have eased movement into and out of the area. Just outside Afrika was the famed “Arabia Felix”, the south of the Arabian peninsula which is now uncontroversially desert but back then was perceived by the Romans as a fertile and lush environment where many spices originated. Although this is in the realm of “travellers’ tales”, there certainly would’ve been a time when the Arabian peninsula was like this.
The words for “hippo” in widely separated North Afrikan languages tend to be similar. In Aiki, spoken in Tchad, the word is bùngùr, in Songhoyboro Ciine, spoken in Niger, it’s bàŋà, and in the Nara language of Eritrea it’s àbà. That doesn’t sound that close to me, but there is also a theory which seeks to explain the distribution of the Afro-Asiatic languages in terms of the Sahara Pump. The current spread of these languages looks like this:
Hearing the word “Afro-Asiatic” may make them sound rather more obscure to Europeans than they in fact are. These are in fact what used to be called the Hamitic-Semitic-Kushitic language family, and includes the liturgical languages Ge`ez and Coptic as well as Hebrew, Arabic, Maltese and the Berber tongues, as well as Amharic, an important language of Ethiopia, the significant Hausa language of West Afrika, and Ancient Egyptian. There are 350 surviving Afro-Asiatic languages, spoken by a total of five hundred million people, Arabic being of course the most successful. Usually, when an attempt is made to reconstruct a parental language from a language family, such as Indo-European, it seems to date to some time in the Bronze Age. Not Afro-Asiatic though, I presume partly due to the fact that Ancient Egyptian is so, well, ancient, being over 5 500 years old. The other written language recorded at this time, Sumerian, and also the slightly more recent Elamite, are difficult or impossible to relate to any other known languages because they’re so ancient the chances are their relatives are all long-since extinct. By contrast, Proto-Afro-Asiatic may have been spoken between 18 000 and 12 000 years ago, which is pre-Neolithic, probably in Northeastern Afrika.
These languages occupy a special place in linguistics. Because of Biblical literalism and the importance of the Abrahamic faiths, Europeans used to believe that all languages were descended from Hebrew. After all, if you take Genesis literally, all of the speech quoted in it, including what Eve and Adam said, is in Hebrew, and if the Bible is literally true that implies that the first language was Hebrew. Also, the vast majority of modern scripts derives from Phœnician, even including the South and Southeast Asian ones, some exceptions being the Far Eastern, West Afrikan and Native American forms of writing, so these are the people who invented writing and their languages were some of the first to be written. Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic and Ge`ez are also liturgical, so are considered special within their faith communities.
The period during which Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken is pre-Holocene and during one of the more humid Saharan ages. There are a number of theories about where it originated, including one popular among Egyptologists that it was along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. This of course places it outside of Afrika already, and therefore presumes that it spread into the continent. It’s associated with the idea that languages spread with agriculture. The idea that it originated in the Horn of Afrika is based on the greater diversity found there, since more diverse languages tend to be found near their origins. An English example is the wide range of English accents found in this country in a relatively small area compared to the relative uniformity of North America and Australasia. The other two theories, which could involve the Sahara Pump Hypothesis, are that it originated in North Afrika and that it started in the southern Sahara and northern Sahel. DNA evidence among speakers of these languages suggests either the Horn of Afrika followed by an early spread into Asia followed by a return to the original region from Arabia, or the Middle East, the problem there being that the DNA in question arose by mutation after the spread had already happened. Also, linguistic and genetic histories can be completely different. One of the subgroups, though, is very high in both Tchad and Semitic language speakers, over ninety percent in fact, suggesting that both have an intermediate origin, perhaps over a very wide area of North Afrika, also known as the Sahara!
Hence I prefer to think of the origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages to be somewhere in the Green Sahara in the late Palæolithic. Whereas I don’t want to set too much store in the idea that ancient mythologies are inerrantly reliable sources, the Tanakh puts the origin of the whole human race in the Garden of Eden in Western Asia. If this is related to the idea of an Afro-Asiatic homeland it could mean that the Levantine theory is the correct one. However, if it isn’t, it kind of means that the Garden of Eden might in fact be the Sahara in a more humid phase, and that the stories told in Genesis relate to this area. Is it possible that the perception that land would become more hostile to growing crops because of what Christians think of as the Fall is actually due to the increasing harshness of the climate in that region. However, the clemency of the climate probably shouldn’t be overstressed since it still wasn’t exactly like France or some other “perfect” location. Placing the original land in North Afrika would also mean there was a movement of the people similar to the Exodus, but at a much earlier date which had nothing to do with the Ancient Egyptians.
The Afro-Asiatic languages as a group are largely uncontroversial except for the Omotic languages, which may not be related but simply have borrowed a lot of features from nearby languages which were genuinely Afro-Asiatic. These are written in the Ge`ez script like Amharic, or sometimes Latin, and are found in Ethiopia. They’re agglutinative – they inflect by adding separate morphemes to the stem – and also tonal, like most Afrikan languages spoken south of the Sahara. They’re the least like the other members of the family, and share vocabulary related to honey but not to bovids (“unto a land flowing with milk and honey” – “אֶל-אֶרֶץ זָבַת חָלָב וּדְבָשׁ”), suggesting that any split which may have occurred preceded pastoralism. If they are related, they’re closest to Cushitic, which is of course the group spoken in Kush, as mentioned in the Tanakh.
Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Maltese are all clearly closely related to each other, as anyone with a smattering of any of them can tell. Maltese is unusual as a Semitic language spoken in Europe today, and used to have a wider range as Siculo-Arabic, spoken in Sicily until the thirteenth Christian century. Uniquely for a Semitic language, it’s written using Latin script and has borrowed a lot of Italian vocabulary, but is still thoroughly Semitic in grammar. As well as being spoken all across the Maghreb and into the Middle East and being used as a liturgical and technical language over an even wider region, Arabic was, as I’m sure you know, spoken in Iberia and Arabic words have even made their way into French as a result. The importance of Arabic cannot be overestimated. Hebrew is of course the language of the Bible and Israel, and I’ve talked about it copiously elsewhere. Aramaic is still spoken as well, and is also used here and there in the Bible. It was the language of Jesus and its script was adopted all across Asia, even forming the basis of the cursive Mongolian script. It’s still spoken today and has an uninterrupted history of three millennia.
The Berber languages are spoken in the Sahara and have their own script, called Tamazight, which I learned a couple of years ago and used to write a long plan I mentioned which I didn’t want anyone else to read at the time. Berber language and culture has been adversely affected by Arab hegemony in the Maghreb because the countries involved pursued Arabisation on independence from France, not enabling the Berbers to have much influence. As can be seen from the map, whereas the Berber-speaking communities in the northeast of the continent are fairly scattered, they form a pretty continuous area over most of Mali, much of southern Algeria and some of Niger.
The Berber language Tawellemmet, the largest Tuareg language, is spoken in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, and overlaps in territory with the not very closely related Hausa. Hausa is important. It’s a Chadic language spoken by a total of 75 million people, often as a second language, and due to the rapid growth in the population of Nigeria this is likely to be a considerable underestimate. It’s used as an auxiliary language in the country. It’s spoken in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, Tchad, Ghana and Cameroun. Some of Hausa is tonal, some not, depending on the dialect. Nowadays Hausa is written in Latin script although it previously used Arabic, like many other Afrikan languages such as Kiswahili and even Afrikaans. It also has at least three other scripts. It has implosive as well as plosive consonants, pronounced with an influx of air rather than an egress from the lungs. There are a couple of dozen ways to pluralise nouns.
Related closely to Hausa are the other Chadic languages, spoken of course in Tchad but also Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Cameroun. There are about a gross of these, whose speakers are thought to be descended from the people who dwelt on the shores of Lake Tchad when it was a sea in the mid-Holocene seven thousand years ago. Although Hausa is by far the most widely spoken, another eight languages have at least 200 000 speakers, which is more than Gàidhlig by far. They’re all tonal and lack consonant clusters, and suffix agglutinatively. Ngas is the second most widely-spoken Chadic language, found on the Jos Plateau in Nigeria.
The southernmost Afro-Asiatic languages are the Kushitic ones spoken in the Rift Valley in Tanzania, including Iraqw which is currently expanding through absorbing nearby groups. Along this southern border of the family’s native area there are many Niger-Congo languages spoken too, which don’t mix with the Afro-Asiatic ones. For instance, in the Jos Plateau, there is a language completely surrounded by Ngas which is not under threat.
It would be a bit of an omission not to mention Ancient Egyptian. This is not entirely extinct because of being adopted by the Coptic church early in the Christian Era. By this point it was written in a modified Greek alphabet with a line over some letters for a certain vowel and the use of several demotic characters to represent sounds not in Greek. It must surely be the oldest surviving language in the world, being at least five and a half thousand years old. Very early on, it adopted signs standing for individual sounds in its hieroglyphics, although a wide range of different signs were used representing several consonants together, whole concepts, gender and status. The number of signs used actually increased as time went by and as technology changed the appearance of signs standing for tools also altered to make them more like the contemporary instruments. Although like most other Semitic languages Egyptian didn’t write vowels, some of them can be worked out from the fact that Coptic, using as it does the Greek alphabet, does. Hieroglyphics became hieratics when written on papyrus and were slightly more sketchy, and eventually the cursive demotic, which is basically a handwritten script like many others but retaining many of the conceptual features of hieroglyphics. Ancient Egyptian and Coptic have a lot in common with other Semitic and Afro-Asiatic languages.
Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from Coptic, Arabic or Hebrew, most Afro-Asiatic languages are tonal. Their scripts tend to relegate vowels to a secondary importance relative to consonants, which reflects the fact that they use a “root and pattern” system, where the consonants carry the basic meaning of the words and the vowels inflect it. This happens with English strong verbs and mutation plurals so it isn’t as foreign as might at first appear. They usually have two genders, feminine and masculine, which include human beings, and the genders of each noun tend to remain the same in most of the languages. They also usually distinguish gender in second person pronouns as well as third, though not in first. One of the mysterious things about them is that they share many grammatical features with today’s Celtic languages, which are completely unrelated, and nobody knows why.
I realise I’ve gone off on one regarding language here, but to finish I want to return to the basic thought that the Sahara is not always a desert. If human influence on the climate is sufficiently weak, at some time, probably about thirteen millennia from now, the Sahara will once again cease to be a desert for thousands of years, the megalakes and river network will return and vegetation will once again cover the region. During the Roman period, the focus and concept of Europe was in some ways subservient to the idea of a Mediterranean region which consisted of that sea and its hinterland. This also erodes the concept of Afrika as a separate set of regions, and removes the geographical barrier which White Europeans are so keen on as a way of separating the “Blacks” from the “Whites”. It’s a mere accident of time and geography that we happen to be living at this point where they are separate. Not only is it thought that darker-skinned people than currently inhabit the region lived all the way up to the Mediterranean, including Ancient Egypt to some extent, but the Western Hunter-Gatherer population was not fair-skinned and nor were Caucasians in general up until a few thousand years ago. The presence of hippos in the Thames and straight-tusked elephants in the Thames Valley brings home the point that Europe, Britain included, and Afrika are geographically continuous, and if they were connected back then, how much more connected are they in this age of globalism?
First of all, a confession. I don’t know a huge amount about history in the Dark Ages and most of what I do know is biassed towards what is now England. Moreover, much of what I do know is based on linguistics rather than straightforward history. Nonetheless I’m going to have a go at this.
Roman Britain had been one edge of the Empire, and it has that in common with very far-flung parts of Afro-Eurasia such as the northern Sahara, the Middle East and the Caucasus. There is still to some extent a cultural unity between the areas which used to be part of it and I have only ventured out of the former territory of the Empire to the north and west, namely Ireland and Scotland. The rest is unknown to me, and that emphasises, I think, how huge it really was. There have been bigger ones of course, notably the Mongols and the British had them, and the Songhai Empire in Afrika was twice the size, but this is more about the sheer size of this planet than celebrating their “achievement”, although there were positives.
There are of course many hypotheses about the Fall of Rome. I read Gibbon as a teen and am therefore aware of what he said about it, but I don’t know if it stands up to contemporary scrutiny. I do strongly suspect that Christianity had a rôle because it only lasted about a century after the Empire became Christian, so I would agree with some others in saying that because the Empire had adopted the Christian faith, they turned their backs on doing things in this life in the expectation that they would be in Paradise, from their perspective, soon after death. The offence of suicide was, I understand, created by the Church in order to stop people from rushing it and getting to the Hereafter more quickly at about that time too. I also disagree that this is a sensible interpretation of Christianity, although it is one which has plagued the world ever since and there’s a case for saying it helps people cope in dire personal situations. Other hypotheses include the idea that the army had recruited so many Germans (that’s “us” by the way, to a limited extent, but it would’ve included people the first speakers of our language would have easily understood and been able to have conversations with) that they effectively had an enemy army on their own soil, that the Empire had to feed Rome and was doing so by conquering ever more distant territories and having to bring stuff back over ever greater distances (that seems to be what Asimov thought), and even that the barbarian invention of the horseshoe enabled them to fight back against the Empire and invade it more successfully. I neither know what happened nor if there’s a consensus on this matter.
I’m going to start with the Caistor-by-Norwich astragalus. This is a bone from a roe deer dating from between 1175 and 1225 AUC – okay, I’ll explain that dating. AUC is ab urbis conditæ, “from the founding of the city”, the dating system used in the Empire, and numbers its years from 753 BCE, so those dates are in the fifth Christian century. Anyway, this bone has runes from the Elder Fuþark scratched on it, reading “ᚱᚨᛇᚺᚨᚾ”, “roe” or “RAIHAN”, and notably has only one bar on the H or Hagalaz (“hail”), meaning that it predates the appearance of English runes, which have two bars on it. It may have been imported from Scandinavia or be a sign of Germanic presence in Britain. There is also evidence that Germanic tribes were settling along eastern rivers from the mid-twelfth century AUC onward, so the transition may not simply have been belligerent or a dramatic conquest.
This next bit I remember learning at school, so I presume it’s practically common knowledge for any Sassenach. Some time around the turn of the thirteenth Roman century or about 450 CE, Britain made a final appeal to the Roman army for defence against the Picts and Scots, but Rome couldn’t spare any resources. It reads as follows:
Agitio ter consuli, gemitus britannorum. […] Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.
To Agitius [or Aetius], thrice consul: the groans of the Britons. […] The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.
Vortigern, a Celtic chieftan, then invited Hengist and Horsa to this land to aid him in defeating the Romans. Hengest and Horsa may in fact have been the same person – this is all from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, written around 731 CE (incidentally, Bede is also responsible for inventing the current calendar dating system from the birth of Jesus and got it out by about four years, so that year number is his fault and reflects his considerable influence on the human world). I’m not now going to rely on anything but my own memory. My understanding is that Hengist and Horsa came over with a number of German tribes, substantially from the area around Angeln, hence the name “England”, including the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, the last being inevitable but not mentioned in chronicles of the Dark Ages for some reason, fought alongside the Celts and then with them, after which they settled here and proceeded to have the audacity to call the Celts living here the “Welsh”, meaning “foreigners”. I think this may say a lot about the White English mindset, and it reminds me of the stereotype of our own emigrants going over to the Med and refusing to learn the language, and basically just enjoying the sunshine while feeling the place is infested with “furreners”. It’s a bit like Basil Fawlty’s opinion that his hotel would run just fine if it weren’t for all the guests.
Anyway, what they call Sub-Roman Britain would’ve been an interesting place. It would’ve included, for instance, Christians and also Black people, and people able to write in the Latin script as we do today. Britain had had a Black governor and the Empire a Black emperor by this stage, because racism was not based on skin tone or anything else like that in the Roman world. There are known to be Black people in Roman Britain because DNA tests on remains dating from that era demonstrate that this was so, and there are still families, in rural Yorkshire for example, which have no significant genetic input from outside the area for many centuries and yet could only have had ancient Black ancestry. Again using my fairly unreliable memory, I think people identify reliably as Black once at least a quarter of their genes are of Black Afrikan origins. The concept of ethnicity was different in any case back then, and there was certainly active racism – for instance, the word “barbarian” is racist and similar to “Hottentot” in that it mocks the sound of the language spoken by a particular group – but wasn’t centred around skin tone. Given the twenty-five percent genetic characteristic, a Black person born in Roman Britain in about the year 400 CE, assuming they conceived children with a White person, could have notably Black grandchildren born in around the year 460 CE who could have survived into the mid-sixth century. I mention this to emphasise that sub-Roman Britain would have been ethnically diverse to some extent in modern terms. Remains of a young Black girl have been found in a tenth century grave and Vikings are known to have brought Afrikan slaves back in the ninth, who were referred to as “blue men”. Black people have been here for longer than the Germanic tribes have.
Concerning religion, although Roman Britain had been officially Christian, there were pagan temples in the West of Great Britain, and once the Germans had invaded it returned to paganism. There was also a firm division between urban and rural environments, in that the towns were more Roman and the countryside more Celtic. Hence Canterbury, Wroxeter, London and a few other places would still have had people in them speaking British Latin, of which there’s practically no trace. British Romance is one of several “submerged” Romance languages which have disappeared completely, leaving hardly any written or other record, the most important other one being in Africa and Libya, which seems to have been a little like Spanish. British Romance is likely to have been very radical compared to Classical Latin because it was so isolated from the rest of the Empire and also quite distant, so it may have had features in common with the ancestor of French, Gallo-Romance. The rest of the populace would have spoken a Celtic language similar to Welsh rather than Irish. It used to be thought that there were non-Indoeuropean tribes as well but that’s now been discredited.
The population of Britain at the end of Roman occupation was around 3.6 million, but suffered a sudden crash in numbers as Rome fell. 125 000 of those were Roman military and their families, so the Latin contribution to British culture might be thought considerable, but one of the differences between much of the continental Empire and Britain was that the former continued to be Christian and was therefore preserved to some extent by the social structure of the Church hierarchy, whereas in Britain this was destroyed by invasion. This also led to the rapid “Germanisation”, to coin a phrase, of the settlements as there were no longer any clergy. One reason for the population crash may have been a series of epidemics, including the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and smallpox, which arrived from India at about that time.
There are a couple of linguistic quandaries about Britain stemming from this time. One is the question of why a Romance language didn’t develop here, but it’s fairly easy to explain that because of the general trashing of the Roman element. Harder to explain is the absence of a Celtic tongue spoken over the whole island today, because at the time, even after the Germanic tribes settled here, many people would’ve been speaking British. Celtic culture, such as it is, is reflected in the presence of Cambria, modern-day Cumbria, in the northwest of what is now England, and Yr Hen Ogledd into Strathclyde up to the Antonine Wall in what became Scotland. Cornwall and some of Devon also stayed Celtic. These regions were all P-Celtic rather than Q-Celtic, and spoke a language now referred to as Cumbric, traces of which survive in placenames and the counting rhymes used by shepherds in the North of England, from which it can be gleaned that it used a virgesimal system like other Celtic languages – base twenty.
Before the emergence of the Heptarchy, there were more than two dozen nations in Great Britain, although this is probably better understood as loose agglomerations of tribes. In the south and east of the island up into today’s Northumberland, they would’ve spoken various dialects of Anglo-Saxon, although they were heavily influenced by the fact that they had been different tribes already before they crossed over into Britain. They were aware that there had been a great fall from the Roman condition. The imperial level of technology was about the same as it would be just before the Industrial Revolution. For instance, there is even a third Christian century printed version of the Bible in Gothic, they were able to make concrete and there were rudimentary mechanical computers for navigation, automatic doors, vending machines and so forth. All this knowledge was lost, and this is expressed in the poem ‘The Ruin’, composed in the eighth century:
Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon; burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc. Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras, hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime, scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene, ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafað waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene, heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum, ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas. Wunað giet se …num geheapen, fel on grimme gegrunden scan heo… …g orþonc ærsceaft …g lamrindum beag mod mo… …yne swiftne gebrægd hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre. Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige, heah horngestreon, heresweg micel, meodoheall monig mondreama full, oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe. Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas, swylt eall fornom secgrofra wera; wurdon hyra wigsteal westen staþolas, brosnade burgsteall. Betend crungon hergas to hrusan. Forþon þas hofu dreorgiað, ond þæs teaforgeapa tigelum sceadeð hrostbeages hrof. Hryre wong gecrong gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed, wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan; seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas, on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan, on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices. Stanhofu stodan, stream hate wearp widan wylme; weal eall befeng beorhtan bosme, þær þa baþu wæron, hat on hreþre. þæt wæs hyðelic. Leton þonne geotan ofer harne stan hate streamas un… …þþæt hringmere hate þær þa baþu wæron. þonne is …re; þæt is cynelic þing, huse …… burg….
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed. Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed. Still the masonry endures in winds cut down persisted on__________________ fiercely sharpened________ _________ ______________ she shone_________ _____________g skill ancient work_________ _____________g of crusts of mud turned away spirit mo________yne put together keen-counselled a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound the wall with wire brace wondrously together. Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls, high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude, many a meadhall full of festivity, until Fate the mighty changed that. Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came, death took all the brave men away; their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed. The rebuilders perished, the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate, and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior, joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour, proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings; looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones, at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery, at this bright castle of a broad kingdom. The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat in wide surge; the wall enclosed all in its bright bosom, where the baths were, hot in the heart. That was convenient. Then they let pour_______________ hot streams over grey stone. un___________ _____________ until the ringed sea (circular pool?) hot _____________where the baths were. Then is_______________________ __________re, that is a noble thing, to the house__________ castle_______
This is widely believed to be a description of Bath or Chester. In other words they knew what was possible but they didn’t know how to do it. To me, this poem comes across as rather like ‘Ozymandias’, and it may be enlightening to remember that for a very long time everyone was expecting the world to end quite soon. Much has also been forgotten, or was at least unknown to the poet, as the description of mead-halls for example clearly indicates they are projecting quite an English image of what life must’ve been like back then. But this is still in the future of my narrative, and living memory of Roman Britain would have persisted until the late fifth Christian century at least. Judging by my own family history, the earliest heirlooms I’m aware of as a fifty-three year old in 2021 date from 1778, so that gets us to the mid-seventh century CE. By that time, the future England had become Christianised. It’s quite something to contemplate what it must’ve been like living in a time when one was fully aware of the heights from which civilisation had crashed in such a short interval. The scenario is almost post-apocalyptic.
Writing persisted in a limited form as runes and oghams, carved on stone, wood, bone and ivory. Oghams were in use in the west, particularly in Pembrokeshire, and there are said to be Druidic alphabets, but these are probably invented in modern times. Anglo-Saxon developed its own runes from the Elder Fuþark, a script in which I’m as adept as Latin due to an intense interest in my adolescence. Each letter has a name referring to a concept in the Rune Poem, which was Christianised after the arrival of Augustine in 597 CE, and they were for a time used as ideograms in English Latin script writing, after the manner of the ampersand and Tyronian “et”.
The Frisians are obscure and forgotten, but show up in analyses of our DNA. They had problems with the Franks and their land tended to get flooded, so they colonised the Kent coast, but their genes mainly show up in the English Midlands. They are in fact genetically indistinguishable from most of the White population of the Midlands. A different issue affects the Jutes. This folk was from Jutland, which is the modern Danish peninsula also including Schleswig-Holstein. The name is cognate with “Goth” and also the “Geats” of Beowulf. The Jutes also settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and Solent, but seem to have suffered some kind of genocide after being invaded in the seventh century CE. The Kingdom of Kent was originally Jutish. The “Maid Of Kent” and “Kentish Maid” division, much eroded nowadays by the growth of Greater London into the county, is thought by some to be derived from the Jutish presence in the east of the kingdom and this is also said to have been reflected in dialect differences through the county, although nowadays this is not very strong. I think there probably was a genocide practiced by the West Saxons on the central South Coast and I suspect it was to do with their reluctance to convert to Christianity.
At this point I’m acutely conscious of my ignorance of British history beyond what has become England. I’m aware of a trans-insular kingdom called Dal Riata in the north between Ireland and Scotland, but I can’t presume to know much more than that. In the future England the Heptarchy arose. This consisted of seven kingdoms: Wessex, Mercia, Kent, Essex, Northumbria, Sussex and East Anglia. One thing I don’t understand about this is where Middlesex came from, because it sounds like it ought to have been a kingdom on a par with Essex and Sussex (Wessex was much bigger) but apparently it was a province of Essex, which was ruled over by two kings at a time, so possibly Middlesex was the western king’s territory. It’s also notable that there’s a concentration of small kingdoms in the Southeast and the others are much larger, which I’d put down to differences in climate and terrain along with proximity to the mainland. The idea that there was a four-century period of seven easily identifiable kingdoms is an imposition made in the later Middle Ages, as is perhaps evidenced by my confusion over Middlesex. There were smaller kingdoms such as the Middle Angles, Magonsæte and Hæstingas, in Leicestershire, Worcestershire and Sussex respectively. It’s said that it would still be possible to consider the kingdoms separate into the tenth century. But there is another process to be considered in English history at this time: the Christianisation of this island.
Augustine arrived in Kent in 597 CE, becoming the first Archbishop of Canterbury, famously because of a pope’s pun about the Angles looking like “angels” and then discovering that they weren’t Christian, or so it’s said. At the same time, Irish missionaries were converting people in the northwest. There had also been a Pelagian civil war in late Roman times in Britain. The Pelagians were a heterodox religious movement which rejected the notion of original sin and believed in salvation by works, and therefore had a more positive view of human nature, believing, for example, that unbaptised babies didn’t go to Hell. This was long gone by the time Augustine got here. It’s worth bearing in mind that less than two centuries passed between the fall of Rome and his arrival. He is also said to have founded the King’s School in Canterbury, which is therefore the first place since Roman times that Latin script was taught.
Due to invasions by the Norsemen from the late eighth century, the English people found it necessary to unite against a common enemy, although both Wessex and Mercia had become very strong by that time. Most written English from this period was in the West Saxon dialect, which is not the direct ancestor of Modern English, which is Mercian. Moreover, insofar as there was a capital, it was for some time near Winchester rather than in London. The Danes invaded and succeeded in settling in the modern Midlands, establishing five boroughs known as the Danelaw. These were Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham and Derby, and can be identified by the use of the “-by” suffix in many of the place names in this area. Due to the facts that the Danes settled here and that English as spoken today is descended from this dialect, which incidentally is not now considered standard, present-day English contains many Danish words and constructions, and it’s even been argued that English is not West Germanic at all but Scandinavian.
One fairly common way of marking the start of English history is by considering the accession of Egbert to the throne of Wessex in 802, because he ended the dominance of Mercia and Northumbria, then united all of England under Wessex, which persisted for the next two centuries. The famous Offa of Mercia’s son in law Beorhtric had exiled him to France, where he may have married one of Charlemagne’s relatives. Most people of European descent today are descended from Charlemagne. This wife then poisoned Beorhtric and Egbert returned to Britain and claimed the crown of Wessex. In 825, he defeated the King of Mercia at the Battle of Ellendune in present-day Wiltshire, claimed Essex, Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and then East Anglia. Having taken control of the mint in London, he was able to issue coins in his name as the king of Mercia, and Northumbria accepted his lordship. Then in 830, Wiglaf took control of Mercia and wrested some of the power back from Egbert, but by that time the Danes were becoming a greater threat and Egbert fought several battles with them. He conquered Cornwall in 838. Once he’d done that, he summoned a meeting called the Council of Kingston where he gave lands to the sees of Canterbury and Winchester in return for the Church’s recognition of his son Æþelwulf. At the time, the Church was responsible for writing the wills of kings and determining their heirs. That, then, is how England began, although at this point a great deal of it was under Viking rule.
Æþelwulf became king on Egbert’s death in 839 and gave Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex to his son Æþelstan. He defeated the Danes in Surrey in 851, then married his daughter Æþelswiþ off to the Mercian King Burgred, thereby uniting the Mercian and West Saxon monarchies. While he was on the mainland marrying Iudiþ his daughter to Charles the Bald and sending his youngest son Alfred to Rome, Æþelstan died and was replaced by Æþelbald, his brother, who forced him to abdicate, who then married his sixteen year old stepmother Iudiþ. I have to admit I find this bit very confusing and disturbing although that marriage was later annulled. Æþelbald died in 860 and was succeeded by his brother Æþelberht. The word “æþel”, by the way, means “high-born”, and is often written as “ethel” in these names. The next brother to become king was Æþelred I in 865, not to be confused with the later Æþelred the Unready who came a century later. It’s notable here that the succession preceded “horizontally” rather than “vertically”, which I’m guessing is due to deaths in battle and perhaps other causes. When he died in 871, which didn’t seem to be in battle so maybe I’m wrong, he left two sons who, had they lived to adulthood, would probably have become kings, but instead Alfred became king – Alfred The Great.
By Alfred’s rule, the Mercians had bought the Vikings off by ceding them the Danelaw. Alfred’s English is to me and probably most people the standard dialect of Old English although it is now long since dominated by Mercian English. Some of its features survive in the Yeovil area, though even that style of the language cannot really be said to derive directly from it. Nonetheless it had its day in the Sun. Alfred is well-known for being educated and scholarly, and this still shows, but because the kingdom was under attack he didn’t end up getting to do much with it. He’s also known for accidentally letting some cakes burn a woman had asked him to take care of who didn’t realise he was king because he was distracted by the fact that he was in the middle of waging a war. She took umbrage at him and was then mortified when she found out who he was, but he said he was the one who should apologise. He’s also the only king in English history to whom the epithet “The Great” has ever been applied. He idolised Charlemagne and tried to model himself after him.
I’m aware that the bloke was probably a typical patriarchal tyrant, but I have a soft spot for Alfred because I’ve read a lot of his words. He translated various works into English, including Bede’s. This may have been because the Viking raids were perceived as divine punishment and he wanted to rekindle reverence through learning. It’s an odd juxtaposition to today’s sensibilities. He also supervised ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, which was copied and circulated, and continued to be updated until 1154 in Peterborough, and advocated for education in English. He even translated parts of the Bible.
Anglo-Saxon handwriting and calligraphy is much clearer than some later hands. It isn’t cursive and resembles printed matter in some ways. Alfred’s English has a kind of rustic sound to it which would be absent from Mercian or Northumbrian of the time. Y and I were still distinct, unlike later in the millennium when they began to be used as if they were the same letter. The Latin alphabet as written by him borrowed “Þ” and “Ƿ” from runes, as opposed to some other versions of English which used “UU” for what is now written as “W”.
Anglo-Saxon literature is mainly verse. It includes a number of extremely bawdy riddles which use a lot of double entendres, which seems to be the start of the long kind of “smutty” tradition which we know from the Carry On films, and whereas they’re nothing to be celebrated they are at least the last gasp of a tradition leading up to them which began over a millennium previously. There’s also the very obvious epic ‘Beowulf’, which has always puzzled me because it seems to portray the Danes in a really positive light, and I can’t imagine that going down well with anyone. English used a lot of kennings at the time, like the Icelandic Eddas, where “hron-rad” – “whale-road” – and many other coinages means “sea” and “heofen-candel” – “heaven candle” – for “Sun”. There’s also a poem called ‘The Wanderer’ which puzzles me as it refers to a retainer’s woe that his lord and companions were killed in battle and he is now alone, because there’s a very strong sense of passionate love and longing in it which is refreshingly divorced from a sexual or romantic context but seems to me to be a kind of idealised view of how someone might view their better. It makes me wonder whether our way of looking at such relations between nobility and serfs, and the like, far from being romanticised, actually fail to capture the genuine feeling of care and love which the poor may have had for the rich, which is a very foreign idea to a twenty-first century mind.
Alfred the Great died in 899 and was, for once, followed by his son Edward, whose name is interesting as it’s the first time a regnal name is familiar to us from lists of monarchs post-Conquest. He recaptured first Mercia and then Northumbria. His son and successor Æþelstan became king in 924 and fought the Battle of Brunanburh, where he defeated an alliance of Olaf Guþfriþson of Dublin, Constantine II of Scotland and Owen, King of Strathclyde. This didn’t unite the island of Great Britain but did ensure the integrity of England. I’m aware of two things here. One is that it’s a shame that we only ever seem to hear about battles. The other is that I like to hear the other side on this. I don’t expect the other kings to have been particularly magnanimous to their own subjects, and this is probably about people fighting over land while the majority of the country continues in penury and misery, and again that calls the oddity of ‘The Wanderer’ to mind.
Æþelstan was succeeded by his half-brother Eadmund in 939, known today as Edmund I, as opposed to the later Edmund Ironside. During his rule, Olaf Guþfriþson conquered Northumbria and invaded Mercia, but was confronted at Leicester and a peace was brokered by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. He took the territory back after Olaf’s death. Then, in 945, he captured Strathclyde and handed it over to Malcolm I of Scotland, establishing a peaceful relationship between the two nations which kept the border relatively stable for a while. I don’t know much about history but it sounds like this ended up being honoured in the breach more than the observance. Then, in 946, a convicted robber and outlaw called Leofa attacked Eadmund’s seneschal and as the king defended his servant, he got stabbed to death in the ensuing fight. However, this is disputed and it’s also claimed he was assassinated.
His brother Eadred then came to the throne and two years later Erik Bloodaxe, who had killed two of his brothers to get Norway and was ejected by a third brother, seized Northumbria. Eadred forced him out but the Northumbrians then sided with Amlaíb mac Sitric, a Norse-Gael who was king of Denmark and Ireland, then deposed him in 952 and invited Erik Bloodaxe back in. In 954, they pushed him out again and he died in battle soon after, leaving Eadred with the nation once again. Eadred then came down with a chronic gastrointestinal complaint that forced him to survive by sucking the juices out of his food and died at the age of thirty-two.
Since he had been unmarried and had no children, his nephew Eadwig took the throne. At his coronation, Eadwig left the ensuing banquet with a female relative and her daughter Ælgifu, apparently to engage in a threesome and when Archbishop Oda the Severe remonstrated with him about disgracing himself at his coronation, he sent both him and St Dunstan into exile. He then married Ælgifu but Oda annulled the marriage on account of them being too closely related. He then purloined the other royals of their possessions, gave away ninety pieces of land and plundered the Treasury. He only ruled for four years but by the time he died at the age of nineteen, the kingdom only extended as far as the Thames.
Edgar, his younger brother, was already king of Northumbria and Mercia when he took over, thus reuniting England. He was also very young, becoming king of England at the age of sixteen. He brought Dunstan back and founded forty monasteries, so it sounds to me like he was trying to make up for what his brother had done. His time was free of Viking raids but he plundered Thanet and may have killed a romantic rival by “accidentally” impaling him with a javelin. He also humiliated six kings of Scotland, Man and Wales by having them row across the Dee and introduced press-ganging for the navy. Although he presented an image of piety to the public, he married his sixteen year old stepsister Eþelfleda Eneda and got a nun, Wilfrida, pregnant. After that, Dunstan suggested he do penance by not wearing his crown for seven years, with which he complied. The nun’s daughter and his, Eadgyþ of Wilton, herself became a nun and was famed for her beauty, sanctity and learning. Dunstan had a premonition that she would die in three weeks and she did so, after which she was said to appear in a vision to her mother, and both of them were made saints. Edgar was known as “The Peaceable” by comparison with his predecessors.
After Edgar’s death in 975, his son Edward was king for three years until he was apparently murdered by his stepmother Eþelfleda at Corfe Castle in Dorset. His kingship was disputed despite him being Edgar’s eldest, with some wanting his legitimate half-brother Æþelred to be king, but he was supported by Dunstan and Oswald, the archbishops of Canterbury and York. He was only sixteen when he was murdered, later became a saint, and was followed by the much better known Æþelræd The Unready, who was ten at the time.
Æþelræd’s name is a pun. “Æþelræd” itself means “nobly advised”. “Unræd”, on the other hand, means “badly advised” because the “un-” prefix could be used not only to negate but also to judge negatively, so it’s kind of pejorative. The reason he was “unready” was that he left his brother unburied for three years and didn’t punish his brother’s murderer, which made him very unpopular. It was rumoured that he might have been involved in the murder. He was also afraid of candles because his mother used to beat him with them. The public disquiet at his becoming king allowed the Vikings to take advantage of the poorly-defended country and Æþelræd sought to pay them off to leave it alone. This only encouraged them to continue to invade and he was forced to flee the country to Normandy. Sweyn Forkbeard successfully took over England in 1013 but died after a fall from his horse on 3rd February 1014, enabling Æþelræd to return as king. He then died during a series of battles with Cnut (Canute), enabling Cnut to become king of England.
Cnut is of course famous for his publicity stunt of attempting to prove that God was sovereign over all by pretending to order back the tide, which may not have happened. He was then said to have hung his crown on a crucifix and never wore it again. A less elaborate version of the tale says that he just did the last bit. Although he was Danish, he became considerably Anglicised during his time, and filled his court with English nobility. He also agreed to “rule according to the law of Edgar”. It all sounds a bit like the Georgian Era to me. Unlike any of the Georges though, he tried to conquer Norway but was opposed by a Swedish-Norwegian coalition, although he did succeed in a way. He then got fealty from Scotland, meaning that at one point he was King of Britain and all of continental Scandinavia.
Cnut died in 1035 and was replaced by Harold I, also known as Harold Harefoot. This is not Harold who was killed by William the Conqueror. Cnut’s son Ælfred Æþeling made his way from Normandy, where he had been born to his mother Emma of Normandy, to claim the throne but was captured and brought to Harold, who had his eyes taken out and he died in the process. Hardicanute, another of Cnut’s and Emma’s sons, took over when Harold died in 1040 and was buried at Westminster, the first monarch to be interred there. Hardicanute, however, had him dug up and thrown into a bog. Hardicanute was unpopular. He imposed heavy taxes to pay for his ships and when two tax collectors in Worcester were killed, he gave orders that all men in the county be killed and had Worcester burned to the ground. He was not generally healthy and in 1042, he died of alcoholic poisoning owing to overindulgence at a wedding reception. By that time, he had sent for his brother, Edward, later known as “The Confessor” from Normandy to take over the kingdom. As Edward had been brought up in Normandy, he had a lot of Normans in his court, which annoyed the royal houses of England. The Earl of Wessex, Godwine, married his daughter to Edward in an attempt to get the English houses in with the King again, but in 1051, with Leofric or Mercia’s help, Edward had the earl exiled and the couple separated. The year after, Godwine returned to England with supporters and forced Edward to compromise, allowing Harold II, yes, that Harold, to be the successor. Edward the Confessor was made a saint because he was the first monarch to touch for the King’s Evil, a practice which continued until James II of England. William III of William And Mary, who I mention here, refused to do it, but it was practiced for over six centuries.
Harold II became King on 4th January 1066 and the rest is history. Unfortunately, Edward the Confessor had promised the crown to two different people. The population of England in 1066 was 2.5 million.
I want to turn my attention now to the wildlife of Great Britain during this period. The Romans had introduced the house mouse, which is why it has a Latin name in English, but there were no rabbits at this time, since they are Iberian. The only native lagomorph here is the mountain hare, although the Romans had also introduced the brown hare. British wolves were not affected by insular dwarfism and were therefore disproportionately large relative to the other animals. Either Æþelstan or Edgar imposed a fine of three hundred wolf skins a year on the Welsh king Hywel Da, although that was in Wales. Some criminals were expected to provide a certain number of wolf tongues per annum on pain of death. Wolves in Scotland probably died out in about 1400 although it is claimed that there was a wolf in Morayshire killed in 1743.
Brown bears have a rather complex history here. The Romans imported them for fighting but there may also have still been native bears at that time. There is evidence of bears in caves in Yorkshire around a century after the Roman Empire fell. They were rare in Scotland, Wales and the East Midlands of England but more common in Yorkshire, these being today’s divisions of the island. Bear claws have been found in Anglo-Saxon funeral urns and the arrival of the Romans caused the bear population to increase. After the Norman Conquest they were used for bear-baiting, but apparently not during the Anglo-Saxon period, and they were also kept for medical purposes.
Wild boar have a somewhat similar history to bears, with a native population waxing and waning but being replaced or topped up by escaping pigs. They seem to have died out in the seventeenth century, but have been back for a while since then. They were becoming rare by 1066, as William the Conqueror introduced a law forbidding the killing of wild boars.
Beavers, who have been reintroduced here recently, died out in about 1600. They were last referred to in 1526.
There are probably a lot of other aspects of the Dark Ages I haven’t covered, and I’m acutely aware that I haven’t talked much about Scotland or Wales, which is entirely because I know practically nothing about their history during this period. I also focussed rather heavily on royalty because that tends to be more clearly recorded. The term “Dark Ages” wasn’t invented until the fourteenth century, so unlike the Iron Age, people didn’t actually think they were living through it when it happened, although they did seem to be aware of a materially better standard of living before their own time. There’s also a Protestant bias in describing them as such, due to the Church being so dominant and mainly unchallenged. I have to say I’m pretty much fine with that idea. Later on, the main reason was the lack of written records. This seems to apply to Britain during the time runes and oghams were the main scripts in use here, and it is quite difficult to tell what was going on except through archæology. As I’ve mentioned though, the actual period during which there were apparently no continuous texts lasted less than two centuries and during that time oral history would’ve bridged the gap to some extent. It isn’t clear to me whether the situation was in fact more brutal than later in the European Middle Ages, but certainly the way royalty behaved in the tenth and eleventh centuries seems to have been pretty extreme.
Writing this has really revealed to me how little I know about this time. In particular, I would like to know more about the climate and ecology, and the lives of ordinary people. I’m aware, for instance, that the Danelaw was supposed to be less oppressive than the Anglo-Saxon system, but that could just be rumour. So for now I’ll leave it there, but there might be more.
A Box Of Chocolates 