The massacre at Eulau

Oldest nuclear family 'murdered'
By Julian Siddle
Science Reporter, BBC News

All adult bodies were buried facing south
The graves contained mainly women and children

The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany.

I'm reading the PNAS paper that this comes from and it's making me cry. The two skeletons at the top of the photo are a man and a woman, buried facing south as was the custom in their culture. Their two little boys (confirmed to be their sons by DNA testing) were buried facing their parents.

In another grave lay a young brother and sister, and an unrelated woman with a baby girl in her arms. The boy had been buried with a man's axe blade. I can imagine some Stone Age man patting his son on the head saying "While I'm hunting, take care of your step-ma and little sisters, okay?" and coming back to find them slaughtered.

I don't know why this makes me so emo. I recently read a book about the civil war in nothern Uganda and yeah, it's terrible, but I didn't have an emotional reaction to it. And these people died over four thousand years ago...

Phallocracy

I've done so many influenza microneutralization assays by now that I can do them on semi-autopilot and my mind drifts to random topics.

Today I was thinking about a course I took in college called Women in Classical Antiquity. The class was about 15% blur cases like me who were just taking it to fulfil graduation requirements, about 75% underclassmen girls with feminist pretensions, and about 10% actual Classics majors who were almost groaning in pain at the dumb things that everybody else said.

Apparently a lot of hardcore porn during ancient times was painted on these big bowls that look sort of like punch bowls for drinking wine. I don't remember what they were called. Also, back then "symposium" didn't mean an academic conference. It meant a party where guys would get massively drunk and screw girl whores, boy whores, and each other. These were depicted quite explicitly on the wine bowls.

Obviously the lay public doesn't get to see these in museums much.

One of the books we had to read was called "The Reign of the Phallus" by Eva Keuls. That is the real title. I'm not kidding. Obviously Athens wasn't a great place to live if you were a woman - if you were rich, you got married off at puberty and spent your life as someone's little housewife. If you were poor, you were likely someone's slave. There were statues and paintings of guys with huge cocks in places that modern civilization would never put them. But, this author insisted that Athens was SO pervaded by the thrusting, turgid, masculine principle that she called it a "phallocracy".

I don't like it when people make up words for no good reason. Scientists have to make up words when they discover natural phenomena. I mean, you can't go around calling genes or species or minerals by some boring serial numbers forever. But, in the humanities people seem to just make up words arbitrarily for phenomena that some individual thinks is important. There's no consensus on whether this thing actually exists or not or is worthy of its own nomenclature. Each one of them lives on the little planet of "me".

Phallocracy just sounds plain silly. It conjures up a mental image of giant animated penises in Congress. Furthermore, it clouds communication. You shouldn't make up a word that nobody but you knows the meaning of when an alternative word or short phrase would do - for instance, in this case something like "male supremacy". I'm trying to think of a good one-word alternative, though.

I guess you could call it a dicktatorship.

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By the way, another book we read for that class was Sarah Pomeroy's "Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves" which was much more sane and helpful if you want to know what life was like for women in ancient Greece.

Melaka

So Melaka, the place where I suffered for two and a half years before going off to college - also known as "an overgrown fishing village where everybody is related to everybody else", and by its Anglicized name of Malacca - is in the news again since someone discovered a new bat-vectored reovirus there. Apparently the Chief Minister isn't too happy about a virus being named after his state, never mind that nobody minded the naming of Nipah virus back in the 1990s (Chua Kaw Bing, the leader of the Malaysian team, was also involved in the discovery of Nipah, if I remember correctly).

Viruses have been renamed in the past, most notably the Sin Nombre ("No Name") hantavirus that killed a lot of people in a Native American community. The researchers were originally going to name it after the place it was discovered, but the community objected, not without reason since a number of their best young people had just died.

Thinking about Melaka again, I can't say that this is the only thing I find interesting about it. Melaka has a great history, but the vast majority of Malaysian local governments wouldn't know what history was if it bit them on the bum. The vaunted Portuguese fort, A Famosa is a pile of rocks while beautiful old Chinese shophouses that have been around for generations crumble (warning: 鸟屋 [The Bird House] is one of those artsy movies where the ending makes no sense).

During my time in college, I read Shellabear's transcription (it was originally written in Jawi) of the Sejarah Melayu [The Malay Annals - or loosely, "The History of the Malays"] and finally finished it during spring break of senior year. We had been exposed to snippets of classical Malay through the last two years of secondary school, but never read a full text like how American kids have to swallow at least one Shakespeare. I wanted to taste at least one classical Malay book in its entirety...which was pretty much the equivalent in difficulty of an ESL speaker digesting the Lord of the Rings.

I was volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity build that spring break. Lying on the bottom bunk in a beach house in South Carolina, reading by torchlight, I wept over the terror and betrayal of the Portuguese invasion:

Setelah datang musim maka kapitan kapal itupun kembalilah ke Goa. Telah datang ke Goa maka, diwartakannya kepada wazir-wazirnya peri kebesaran negeri Melaka dengan makmurnya serta dengan ramai bandarnya. Pada masa itu wazirnya di Goa Alfonso d'Alberquerque namanya. Maka ia pun terlalu ingin menegar khabar negeri Melaka itu. Maka ia menyuruh berlengkap kapal tujuh buah, dan ghali panjang sepuluh, fusta tigabelas. Telah sudah lengkap, maka disuruhnya menyerang Melaka. Maka Gonzalo Periera nama kapitannya. Telah datang ke Melaka, make dibedilnya dengan meriam. Maka segala orang Melaka pun terkejut menengar bunyi meriam itu, katanya, 'Apa bunyi ini seperti guruh?'

Maka peluru meriam itupun datang mengenai segala orang Melaka: ada yang putus lehernya, ada yang putus pinggangnya, ada yang putus pahanya, ada yang pecah kepalanya; makin bertambah-tambah hairanlah orang Melaka melihat peluru bedil itu, katanya, 'Apa nama senjata bulat-bulat ini? Mana tajamnya, maka ia membunuh ini?'

[My crappy translation: When the season came, then the captain of that ship returned to Goa. When he reached Goa, he reported to the viceroys of the greatness of Melaka, of its sovereignity and its many towns. At that time, the Viceroy of Goa was named Alfonso d'Alberquerque. He greatly desired to hear more of Melaka. therefore he commanded that seven ships, ten long ghalis [dunno this word], and thirteen fustas [dunno also] be equipped. When all was ready, he commanded the invasion of Melaka. Gonzalo Periera was the name of his captain. When they reached Melaka, they bombarded it with cannon. Then all the people of Melaka were shocked to hear the cannons, saying, 'What is this sound like thunder?'

Then the cannonballs came and struck the people of Melaka: some had their necks broken, some had their waists broken, some had their thighs broken, some had their heads crushed; and the amazement of the people of Melaka grew watching those missiles, saying, 'What is the name of these round weapons? Where is their sharpness, that they kill like this?' -- Sejarah Melayu, WG Shellabear edition, p.184]

That is the history of Melaka. The history of Melaka cannot be conveyed by a bunch of lazy vendors selling trinkets made in China. The history of Melaka cannot be conveyed by painting all the buildings in the historical district brick red. The history of Melaka, for heaven's sake, cannot be conveyed by a giant revolving tower shaped like Hang Tuah's keris.

The history of Melaka is the history of a fallen kingdom whose conquerors themselves all fell in time. It comes to us through stories, read or spoken, and through the lives of the people whose ancestors were there - Malay, Chinese, Indian, Portuguese. In comparison all else is dirt.

OA research

About that Robin Weiss essay I blogged yesterday...something else interesting in it is that when he was trying to identify how far back in chicken lineages ALV (avian leukosis virus) became incorporated into the chicken genome, he went and stayed in the jungle with Orang Asli in Malaysia to take egg and blood samples from red jungle fowl (wild chickens).

I was interested to know if the chicken ERV was a recent introduction into domestic fowl, or whether it was present in the ancestor species, the red jungle fowl. In 1970, I made a field trip to Malaysia and lived with tribesmen (orang asli) in the Pahang jungle who knew how to trap these birds, in order to take blood samples and to collect eggs for cell culture.

This is one little anecdote, but it's a concrete illustration of how indigenous people's knowledge can contribute to science. No doubt if he had just gone there with a bunch of other urban-dwelling academics either from his UCL or from UM, it would have taken them months longer to find where the jungle fowl lived, develop trapping techniques, etc.

All the talk about biotechnology and bioprospecting that the government puts out is highly ironic in light of the fact that they're kicking some of these people off their ancestral lands, especially for a silly garden which is likely to be mismanaged and turn into a white elephant as usual anyway...

Really, really, retro

I was looking up feline leukemia virus on the Virus Taxonomy site for a reason that I hopefully will be able to write about later. Then I started browsing through the whole retrovirus section and remembered that I had been going to look up reticuloendotheliosis virus (it's something chickens get, don't ask) 'cos I need to find out if it's piggybacking on our fowlpox or canarypox samples. Then I got totally sidetracked because I found this cool paper by some old guy narrating the history of the discovery of endogenous retroviruses.

Science history is more interesting to read if you're a science student, I think, because it gives you an idea of the significance of technologies and knowledge you take for granted:

So the next step was to collaborate with Jim Payne to determine whether Env complementation and Gag expression were inherited concomitantly. Using inbred chickens, F1 hybrids and back-crosses, we found that both phenotypes were indeed inherited according to Mendel's first law and that they segregated together as a single locus [27].

My first reaction to this paragraph was "Why the **** didn't they just extract DNA from the chickens and run PCR on it to see fi the gag and env genes were there???"

Then I remembered...oh yeah hor, last time no such thing as PCR.

Nonetheless, the evidence that we accrued in the pre-molecular era has stood the test of time, and our hypothesis on ERV, which one reviewer described as 'impossible', proved to be correct.

And it's really impressive how much discovery got done back before the molecular biology explosion...like McClintock and her discovery of transposons by looking at blobby lumps on chromosomes under a microscope.

Back then...men were real men, women were real women and small fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri^*. Now we just buy reagents in kits and send our DNA samples off for sequencing and get a nice data file back.

*I think this is from Douglas Adams but I'm not sure.