Antipodes

Friday, May 7, 2010

Neanderthal genome has been sequenced

Researchers have finally succeeded in using tiny samples of powdered bone, 40 thousand years old, to sequence the Neanderthal genome. The team included the Swede Svante Pääbo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig), the American Richard Green (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Hernán Burbano (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá).

This achievement—whose conclusions have just been published in the journal Science—comes a decade after the successful sequencing of the human genome, and five years after the publication of a draft genome sequence of the chimpanzee. It's henceforth possible to compare the three genomes, to determine which genes are shared, and which genes are found uniquely in Homo sapiens.

It's particularly fascinating to find genetic evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals. This lends weight to the idea that we might be two subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, rather than two distinct species. This, of course, is good news for observers who like to imagine (as I do) the use of cloning techniques to bring Neanderthals back into existence.

Neanderthal clones might enable old men leading solitary lives in the mountains to find charming female companions for Scrabble on winter evenings in front of the fireplace. But this wishful thinking could well be illusory.

The ladies would insist on using old-fashioned Neanderthal spelling, and arguments would soon break out…

Separation of church and state in the USA

It was the archaic evangelist Billy Graham, a sort of circus mesmerizer of crowds, who succeeded in convincing the US Congress, in 1952, to establish a National Day of Prayer. I once listened to him out in Sydney, when I was a boy, and I remember feeling embarrassed, as if I had sneaked into a throng of idiots ready to be hypnotized by a snake-oil salesman.

America's official day of prayer is clearly an unconstitutional absurdity, which should have never come into existence. It's as if there were a special day on which the common folk of the nation were expected to attempt to perform miracles upon their fellow citizens, or to chase out devils from their souls, or some other absurdity of that religious mumbo-jumbo kind.

The Secular Coalition for America, whose executive director is Sean Faircloth, represents atheists, agnostics, humanists and freethinkers in US politics.

Their advisory board includes outspoken intellectuals of international renown such as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker and Salman Rushdie.

Click the photo to see their video concerning the urgent challenge of revoking the ridiculous National Day of Prayer.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Cournouze weather report

All France has been damp and dismal for the last week. In my recent article entitled Wet world [display], I explained that the Cournouze mountain in Châtelus, seen on the other side of the Bourne from my house at Gamone, is a kind of barometer concerning the current and forthcoming weather situation. Well, here's what the magic mountain has been looking like this morning:

It's only at rare moments like this that I can distinguish the cute little pointed hill that lies just above the white blob of the church and municipal hall of Châtelus. At my home in Choranche, it's not yet the right moment to envisage eating lunch out on the lawn. Meanwhile, in my garden, with all the moisture that has dropped upon Gamone, the foliage is getting greener and more abundant, but the rose and peony bushes have gone on strike, refusing to blossom in such conditions. I wouldn't say they're exactly hot under the collar, merely fed up with the chilly wetness. I must try to calm them down and cheer them up, if I can, with a few warm words.

Onion News Network

There's some nice funny stuff on this website. Click the banner to see a great piece of live reporting concerning a landslide in the Philippines.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Exotic elsewhere

I've always been intrigued by the way in which the curious mammals of the species Homo sapiens, known for their almost hairless skins and their bulky brains (whose weight obliges them to walk upright), often imagine their brethren who live elsewhere on the globe. When art was the only means of recording visions of Antipodean creatures, it was inevitable that a degree of weirdness should creep in. Here's how a European imagined a Tahitian couple:

An indigenous couple in the conquered territory of America merited better treatment than this:

Photography, when it arrived on the Antipodean scene, should have normally made things better. Sometimes, alas, the outcome was worse.

The cropped hair, fancy clothes, woolen stockings and shiny boots of these allegedly "wild Australian children" (in fact, a pair of microcephalic female adolescents) reflect the fact that equally monstrous specimens—unscrupulous and immoral businessmen—were exploiting these unfortunate individuals lucratively in the USA, in the late 1860s, as circus freaks. As they say in the classics: It takes all sorts of people to make a world.

Girt by sky

The Dutch airline KLM has been operating commercial flights between Europe and Australia since before World War II.

Judging from its graphic style, I would imagine that this ad dates from the late 50s… at a time when air hostesses looked a bit like this:

Six years ago, a merger took place between Air France and KLM. Europeans still visualize Sydney as a place with a vast harbor and a big bridge. But a new visual icon has slipped into the picture. Incidentally, there's an aspect of Sydney's Opera House that has always amused me. When tourists see a spectacular structure such as the Notre-Dame Cathedral or the Tower of London, they usually imagine stepping inside it for a visit. But I'm not sure that many tourists in Sydney would envisage buying tickets to see an opera!

In Sydney, visitors wander around the opera house in order to look up in admiration at the bridge, just as they walk over the bridge in order to be able to gaze down upon the opera house. It's a closed circuit.

I have frequent opportunities of confirming that French folk continue to imagine Australia as an exotic wonderland on the other side of the planet. Countless people tell me they dream of going there… but it's a bit like saying they want to take a ride in a hot-air balloon, or go on holidays in a horse-drawn caravan, or cross the canal system of France in a houseboat. It's something that people say they want to do, while rarely going one step further and deciding to actually do so.

When I look at the nice old-fashioned KLM poster, I'm convinced that this graphic style would still be perfect for modern publicity concerning Australia, because foreigners like to imagine it as a picture-book land. And Australians are surely happy to believe this, too. Indeed, the tourist authorities could attempt to persuade the municipality of Sydney to paint the arch of the bridge blue, the pylons pink and the waterside buildings yellow. Boat-owners would be encouraged to adorn their craft with dozens of brightly-colored flags. And the opening line of Dorothea's Mackellar's celebrated poem could be slightly modified to reflect our wishful thinking:

I love a colorful country.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

An ancestor who published Cinderella

Yesterday, I wrote about my great-grandfather William Skyvington, who must have spent a particularly nasty period of six months in a notorious London prison. Even to be able to lie down there on something looking vaguely like a bed, you had to have friends on the outside with money, to purchase that privilege… otherwise you spent the night sitting around with crowds of poor inmates on the freezing muddy floors of the jail's stinking rat-infested cellars. And that was just over a century ago, in the grand capital city of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother Eliza Mepham, aged 34, was dying of tuberculosis behind the façade of this posh little house at 16 Marriott Road in northern London.

As for my future grandfather Ernest Skyvington, cared for by his Mepham aunts in another house, he carried on going to school in Woodstock Road, probably unaware that his father was in jail.

He once told me that his constant dream, at that time, was to get aboard a cargo ship of the kind on which his uncle William Mepham was a captain, and to sail away to the Antipodes… where he would be able to ride a horse through the bush. In 1908, the 17-year-old lad finally found such a ship, the SS Marathon, whose master was a colleague of Captain Mepham.

The SS Marathon reached Sydney six weeks later... which meant that it was quite a rapid vessel for that epoch. Ernest Skyvington set foot in Sydney on Christmas Day 1908, and William Mepham and his wife Gertrude Driscoll were waiting on the wharf to welcome the young man to his new land. The Mephams lived at Rushcutters Bay, which was the site at that time of Australia’s best-known boxing stadium. The fighters Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson were to meet here on Boxing Day 1908 (an ideally-named day) for the world heavyweight title. That Saturday, Ernest woke up on Australian soil for the first time in his life, and it so happened that he was rambling around in sunny Rushcutters Bay at the moment that Burns and Johnson arrived at the stadium. But the boy from London did not yet have enough money in his pocket to pay for a seat at such a boxing match.

WARNING INSERTED IN NOVEMBER 2016

I was recently informed by a friendly English fellow that the rest of this blog post is totally erroneous. My ancestor John Harris [1756-1846] certainly existed, but he had nothing to do with another individual, of the same name, who published the Cinderella stuff. I hope that true descendants of the publisher will forgive me for this silly blunder.

Today, as an outcome of lengthy Google searches, I discovered a lot of interesting stuff about a Londoner in the ancestral line of my paternal grandmother. I'm speaking of John Harris [1756-1846], who was my 4xgreat-grandfather. He was a publisher, specialized in children's books, with a bookshop alongside St Paul's Cathedral, seen here:

I was thrilled to learn this afternoon that he had published a wide variety of high-quality works, many of which can be downloaded today from the Internet. One of the nicest publications I found was his Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper (John Harris, London, 1827), which contains beautiful hand–colored woodcuts.

The Cinderella story is so familiar that we can more-or-less figure out what's happening for each of the following woodcuts:

These splendid illustrations remind me of the celebrated Epinal images created in France by Jean-Charles Pellerin [1756-1836], who was a contemporary of John Harris. I have spoken already of this famous French tradition of simple and colorful graphic work in my article of 6 March 2007 entitled Epinal images [display] and in my article of 17 May 2007 entitled Upside-down world [display].

Food for the Antipodes

I found these reproductions of old-fashioned French-language publicity cards on the web. These charming images were designed to sell Liebig meat extract to Australians.

I couldn't find any mention of dates, but the Liebig brand—designed for the marketing of the famous meat-extract product—came into being in 1865. The inventor of this stuff was a German chemist, Justus von Liebig. The illustrations evoke a colorful land of adventure, with Aborigines shown wearing bright garments in the style of Pacific Islanders. It's hard to say whether Liebig's graphic artist had ever set foot in Australia… but I don't think so. In view of the distinctly rural themes, I'm wondering what kind of potential customers they had in mind. Did they imagine that they might feed their meat extract to the Aborigines, or to Outback bushmen? Now, if only they had been advertising Vegemite, I'm sure they would have achieved more spectacular business results. Maybe a Liebig specialist, reading my blog, might tell us whether this advertising campaign was successful.

Justus von Liebig won fame, above all, as the "father of the fertilizer industry". No, that doesn't mean that surplus stocks of their meat extract were spread out over the fields to grow better vegetables and crops. It evokes the inventor of the so-called Law of the Minimum, also known as Liebig's Law, which states that plant growth will diminish as soon as a single required nutrient is missing, even if all the other nutrients are present. He likened the situation metaphorically to a wooden bucket with a stave that's too short, causing a lot of yield potential to be lost.

It's amazing, the sophisticated notions you can come up with when you start out making soup.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Family-history shock

For the last 24 hours, I've been trying to analyze a surprising item of genealogical information that dropped out of the blue when I was playing around with the web in order to clarify some London data. I noticed that the Central Criminal Court of England has a good online website providing information on old court cases (up to 1913). Almost out of fun, I wondered what might come up if I used my own surname as a search argument. Here's what I got:

Now I definitely hadn't planned on this, because I'd always considered naively that my paternal line consisted of God-fearing law-abiding English citizens. And who was this 26-year-old William Skyvington condemned to six months' hard labor (no doubt in the notorious Newgate Prison) for fraud? I compared the details with my archives. Shit, it was my great-grandfather! Through the few facts I'd obtained about him, I'd always held him in high esteem. How on earth could he have been tempted to turn to crime?

The archaic courtroom of the Old Bailey looked something like this when William Skyvington was tried:

The prison (demolished in 1902) was located alongside the Old Bailey:

It was a place of terror. Up until 1868, public hangings were carried out in front of Newgate Prison, and Londoners paid big sums of money to watch the spectacles from neighborhood windows. Inside the overcrowded prison, once described by Henry Fielding as a "prototype of hell", lack of ventilation and hygiene brought about the death of countless inmates. Charles Dickens was fascinated by this foul place, and wrote of it in Barnaby Rudge, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations.

Here is a photo of William Skyvington with his wife Eliza Mepham and their son Ernest, my future grandfather:

I've found a lot of basic facts concerning this William Skyvington, up until about the time that this photo was taken, around 1892. But he then disappears from the scene, and we know nothing more about him. In particular, I've never succeeded in finding his death certificate. So, when I learned yesterday that he had been thrown into prison in 1898, I immediately imagined that he had probably died a miserable stealthy death at Newgate. That idea started off a chain of reflections in my mind and, by the end of the evening, I had ended up—through a purely cerebral activity of reasoning—with a rich set of plausible speculations… which I shall now outline.

First, if he had indeed died in prison, then it was very strange that the authorities had made no record of that death. In my Australian research concerning convicts and bushrangers, I discovered that individuals in these categories are among the most highly documented folk you could imagine, for obvious reasons. So, I soon concluded that it was unthinkable that William Skyvington might have died during his short stay at Newgate without leaving behind a death certificate.

Next, the aspect of this crime and imprisonment that annoyed me the most was the fact that my grandfather in Australia had never, at any moment, told us that his father had run into trouble of this kind. Why had he decided to keep this sad affair secret? Little by little, I found this idea, not only annoying, but frankly unlikely. If my grandfather had never told us about the imprisonment of his father, the most likely reason was that he himself had never been aware of this event. In other words, when he arrived in Australia as an adolescent in 1908, not only had my future grandfather lost his mother to tuberculosis, but he was no doubt totally unaware of events in the life of his father, including the fact that he had been in prison. At that moment, an important question jumped into my mind. Could William Skyvington have in fact abandoned his son, and established another family, with a new wife?

No sooner had I asked that question than I searched through my archives (collected over a quarter of a century) looking for an individual with a similar name and age, but associated with a new wife and family. Sure enough, I soon came upon such a situation… down in Cornwall, far away from London. Everything started to fall into place rapidly and convincingly. By the end of the evening, I was convinced that I had discovered, for my great-grandfather, a plausible "second life"… which he had probably started to lead straight after his release from prison.

It will take me a while to obtain all the necessary records, to confirm my speculations. But I'm sure I'm on the right path.

In other words, just as I was shocked yesterday to learn that William Skyvington had been a criminal, he too might well have been sufficiently shocked by that experience to abandon his son and start out on an entirely new life. In fact, the word "abandon" must be relativized, in that Ernest Skyvington had been cared for perfectly by his late mother's Mepham family, with whom he remained in contact after he settled in the Antipodes. But he reached Australia as if he were the last of the Skyvingtons. And everybody tended to believe him. As of yesterday, for the first time ever, I'm convinced that this was not the case. Both his father and his Skyvington grandfather were surely still living in southern England.

Wet world

When I look out my window of a morning and see the Cournouze shrouded in mist, it doesn't take much imagination to realize that the landscape is wet, if not water-logged.

It's not the same dampness as in Brittany, caused by a constant delicate drizzle. Here, the humidity seems to be present in the earth and rocks, and it has to escape upwards into the sky. Just as it's said that an Eskimo has many specific words to designate all the different varieties of snow, I think there should be a linguistic distinction between the various kinds of wetness. I must meditate upon that theme...

The nearby cliffs of Mount Barret, seen through my bedroom window as soon as Sophia wakes me up of a morning, are a kind of barometric litmus paper.

When there's lots of humidity in the air, the primary hues of the rocks—the creamy limestone, the brownish ferrous patches, and the vast dark-gray surfaces of weathered rock—all become more intense… as if I had turned up the contrast level with Photoshop. Incidentally, in that last photo, there's a glimpse of a recipient that I obtained a few days ago from my ex-neighbor Bob: a galvanized steel water trough for the donkeys.

Curiously, the donkeys rarely seem to want to quench their thirst. Their relationship with water is strange, quite unlike that of a horse. A donkey won't normally wade through a shallow creek. They seem to be afraid of a flowing hose that's being used to fill up a trough, as if the jet of water might hurt them. On the other hand, they get a thrill out of dragging an empty hose far from its normal position, and they like to use their powerful jaws to drag plastic troughs and turn them upside-down, emptying any water.

The other day, Bob and I were amused to see that Mandrin had invented a new game. A flexible plastic water container was held in place by two long steel rods, passing through handles on its rim, and hammered into the ground. In this way, the donkeys couldn't simply knock it over, or drag it away. But the container could still be raised vertically along the rods. Well, Mandrin got involved in a weight-lifting exercise. He would drag the container as far up along the rods as he could, and then he would let it drop, creating a big splash. He seemed to be proud of his invention. It was funny to see him repeating this exercise until nearly all the water had splashed out of the bucket.

The other day, I erected a makeshift support for half-a-dozen tomato plants, alongside the little fig tree.

Now, guess what this is:

It's my strawberry patch… but it's in urgent need of weeding, as soon as the ground is not quite so wet. (I like to crawl around on my hands and knees when I'm weeding.)

By far the best barometer at Gamone, to determine whether the wetness is likely to hang around for a while, is the visual aspect of the end of the valley.