Category Archives: science

The Bone Room

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Last week, my housemate’s friend, Yemisi Blake, asked if he could snap some photos of me in ‘my bone lab’. These would feature in his photography project entitled ‘Great British Youth’ which showcases British youth in their work environment.

Being neither of those things, I quickly acquiesced. The narcissist in me, only too pleased to play muse to a camera lens and unbothered by the small details, forgot to communicate my age and background until halfway through the shoot.

Since the photos will not be displayed in the exhibit, I’m showcasing them here instead, in my most self-indulgent blog post to date.

These photos are an homage to a 13 year-old girl, who once solemnly declared to her parents that she’d grow up to be a ‘paleoanthropologist’, and somehow, at 29, has managed to make a living out of playing with old bones.

This is my tribute to my love for bones, evolution… and all the worlds in between.

Thank you Yemisi!

[Photos by Yemisi Blake www.yemisiblake.co.uk]

Road to Rudabánya

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[Click here for the continuation: Anatomy of a Square]

Train Tracks

“Dear Anna, although it is short notice, if you can make your way to Kazincbarcika someone can pick you up there and bring you to Rudabánya.” – Professor David Begun
The taxi door slammed shut behind me. The hot sticky city air hit me like a mischievous wave. Before me, there was Budapest and its yellowish landscape peeling under an impossibly humid breath, like dusty hundred-year-old melted candles forgotten on a sacred altar. As I shuffled up and down some unpronounceable avenue, a row of buildings seemed to mumble a slow and tired hello, like anaemic and slightly unfriendly elderly folk.

Hungary, I would soon discover, is more than a country; it’s a state of mind. It is that place of permanent disquietude that lies inside the human soul, like a stage where long drawn-out suspense scenes take place in succession, with no climax, no closure, no dénouement whatsoever. Over there, just like a song that is imperceptibly out of tune, there prevails a sense of not-quite-rightness at every instant. This land was as real as it was imaginary, like a page ripped straight from an evil fairytale. Here I found all my feelings of unwellness sculpted unto its geography, like barnacles on a giant humpback whale. Hungary was some sort of twisted Wonderland, and I was some sort of Alice.

Despite my best efforts I had been unable for the past four months to work on my research project. My post-traumatic-hangover state of mind kept me away from my desk at university and just the thought of having to see this academic endeavour to its conclusion filled me with a mix of profound and almost physical laziness, angst and abysmal fear. I was trapped inside some Munchean canvas, screaming frantically to be released, except I didn’t know who to or what from. I needed the fieldwork.

Inside the hostel, the air was even hotter and stickier than outside. Clive, a statuesque Australian I had befriended, had just taken his first real shower in weeks. Towel around his waist, he expertly packed his bags for the next leg of his trip, while I adjusted the position of two fans directly over our beds, making sure the radius of both their motions moved synchronously and at mathematical precision so as to maximize breeze effect. We shared stories. He told me he was halfway through a four-month long bike journey across Europe, which explained his giddiness at the prospect of sleeping on a real bed. In turn, I explained how I was on my way to Rudabánya to dig for Miocene apes. In the dark, under the steady buzzing of the fans, we sat on the edge of my bed inspecting a map, like two lost strangers in search of some grand treasure. Bright yellow lines marked a route, which his hands travelled smoothly across the paper landscape. His fingertips swept gently towards its final destination, the Black Sea, directly across from my belly button. We were both half awake and half naked, trying unsuccessfully to survive the staleness of this Budapest room. While he spoke, I wiped little dew-like pearls of sweat off my chest at regular intervals. I looked at him, flashlight on his forehead, I could barely see his aqueous blue eyes through the rays of light flying in my direction; his voice was soft and deep and very Australian sounding.

The scene truly belonged in some version of Wild Orchid: Hungarian nights, except the main actress had suddenly forgotten her lines. Just like vibrations dissipating from the tinkling of a triangle, a steady but imposing wave of numbness invaded my whole body from the inside out. My skin was burning hot but my insides were ice-cold. An invisible force had transported itself into that room and had turned the volume on whatever it was I was supposed to be feeling, all the way down to muted. I said something nice that invited Clive to leave my side. I lay down on the bed that I now had all to myself, feeling the cool airflow of the fans taking turns sweeping heat off my feverish flesh. A subdued yet definite sense of contentment took over and I picked up my reading of David Begun’s “New catarrhine phalanges from Rudabánya (Northeastern Hungary) and the problem of parallelism and convergence in hominoid postcranial morphology.”

Yes, I had just chosen a dense scientific article over a man. Welcome to my experience in Hungary. If London was a coquettish and naughty middle-aged lady looking for trouble, Budapest was a wise-yet-slightly-broken young woman trying to make her way to some village in the mountains, except she’s tipsy and is carrying more baggage than she can handle.

Twelve pages into the article, and I was more confused than ever about the status of Rudapithecus among the Dryopithecines, about the ancestral locomotor repertoire of great apes, about my PhD research, my career choices, and also about myself. As my brainwaves fluttered between consciousness and pieces of a dream, disconnected thoughts played in random loops inside my head. Emerging from this noise, like an old recording from a 19th century gramophone, my friend Sara’s distorted voice asked unrelentingly: “What’s it like? What’s it like?” I imagined myself as an old yellowed peeling Budapest building on the side of a nameless avenue, frowning suspiciously at a tiny little Alice, and whispering in a slightly unfriendly tone: “You don’t find your way. You just learn to be ok with being lost all the time. You just accept it.”

PhD degrees often are as much about a personal voyage as they are about one’s academic maturing, and this trip, I knew from the beginning, was going to be as much about scientific inquiry, as it would be about an inner search. It was time for this lady to sober up and bury the excess baggage where it belonged, in a distant past, in a clay pit in Rudabánya, with its ten million year-old cousins. It was time to put away this dirt and dig up some fresh one. It was time to leave, to find this muted muddy fossil-ridden land of lost innocence and primordial beginnings.

On the morning of July 24th, I set forth to Keleti station, track number 13. In silence, I waved goodbye to the giant elderly folk now busy mumbling bitter insults at the hot Hungarian air. Down the rabbit hole I went. The destination was Kazinczbarcika via Miskolc. The road was to Rudabánya.

[Click here for the continuation: Anatomy of a Square]

King of the Canopy

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Darwin-Human-Phylogeny

Darwin’s 1868 primate phylogeny

Perspective is everything.

How far our eyes reach from the perch on our tree branch will dictate the angle at which the world will appear to us. Our take on life may be religious, and within that realm it can take many shapes. It can be that of a male or of a female, of a republican, liberal or anarchist. It can be that of a scientist, a human rights activist, an oppressed minority, a transgendered teenager, a child or parent. Our world’s panorama will depend on how high up or how far down we choose to make nest: what excites us, what hurts us, what matters to us.

Everything is about the distance at which we place ourselves between the sky and the ground: do I see a patch of green or can I make out the individual stems of the grass and its underlying soil? How well defined or plump do the clouds look? What shade of blue is the sky made of?

As humans, with our all-knowing brains and consciousness of our own consciousness, we go to great lengths to justify our right to the treetop. We are the evolutionary last-stop, the makers of this tree, kings of the canopy. From up here we see it all – how far the world spreads out around us, how many other trees surround us, and how vast the universe’s scope is.

Without an upwards reference, the view from the top can be quite lonely. For lack of a ceiling we sketch a whole dome to suit our cravings. Without humility, our orphaned souls like Narcissus fall over heels for the rippleless canvas and lose themselves in an all-knowing and perfect reflection that we fail to recognize as our own; we unfold ourselves into an alter-ego bearing all of the names but our own.


echo_narcissus
Echo and Narcissus: Richard Baxter, 1998

There is little wonder that the reprimanding  finger pointing back at us from across the sky appears so much more perfect than we are. We fail to see that it is a mere inverted extension of our own finger pointing at a glassy void in wonder. In our search of something bigger, we find ourselves staring at a distorted entity that we fail to see as made in our own image.

god_creates_adam_sistine_ch

The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo (Sistine chapel)

Caught in a lacanian mirror-stage, we are permanently captivated by our own image and are unwilling to let go from this quasi-libidinal relationship with it.

It is hard to swallow the red pill and plunge our fists into the gooey mirror we seem to look up to, without fear of what we may find, what emptiness, what beauty, what wonders may lie within it. The choice between our narcissistic love-affair with ourselves and truth-seeking is never an easy one, as exemplified by Neo’s blue pill/red pill choice:  “You have to understand that many people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”

matrix_neo_in_morpheus_glasses

Neo in The Matrix

Let us be unplugged.

Let us seek to understand our limitations and attempt to remove ourselves from our perch, to view things in a different light, to lose whatever illusions of self-aggrandizement and noblesse we may harbor and poke at the world with respect but without fear, with interest but without bigotry, with curiosity but without invasiveness, with gusto but not self-indulgence or sense of entitlement.

Yes, the more we poke the more our egos take a blow and the closer we come together with surrounding branches until we are no longer alone on our thrones. There is a thickening trunk connecting us all. Let us rejoice in that.

Let us stop denying ourselves the freedom to be free-spirited, to think critically and in depth about our condition and surroundings. Let us find purpose in the confines of our epidermis and not beyond it; let good and evil be in opposition to each other, not the bargaining chip of a third party; and let meaning sprout from itself and from the joy it gives us in itself, not as the creation of a ghostly entity. Let us be our own puppeteers, masters of our choices, not second-guessers of fickle imaginary matter.

A high school philosophy teacher once said that humans are bothered by silence. We fill our lives with noise, dizzying, insatiable, incessant noise, empty noise, white noise, numbing noise, chirpy twittering noise, in order to muffle the sound of the disconcerting questions, the important questions we try to avoid all the way to our deathbeds.

Let us find comfort in this silence.

Let us not find satisfaction in default explanations. Reason, intelligence, intent and design are indeed the perfect tools to create functional things, but these are workings of our very human minds; let us stop projecting these onto immaterial presences outside of it.

Our treetop is not lonely, nor special, nor solid, nor enduring and self-sustainable. Our treetop is very tall, and thick and old. It is still growing, slowly, at a rate we cannot perceive, that we will never perceive. Let us thank ourselves for this knowledge, and be humbled.

The feeling of an enlightenment from above placed us at the center of the universe, and filled us with entitlement to burn, murder, steal, enslave, invade. Removing ourselves from that position came at a cost and those who dared to suggest it, were condemned by the fearful.

Let us be enlightened from within.

Let us value the capacity of the human mind and spirit. A spirit that thrives on its own, as independent and self-sufficient as its body. A spirit with the power to heal, not with wishes but with actions, with the power to fly, not through gift but through craft, and with the power to realize the scope and breadth but also the limitations of its capabilities. Let us appreciate this with the knowledge that this capacity provides us with rights but more importantly with responsibilities. Responsibilities to educate, to help, to intervene, to let be, to move forward, to evolve.

Let us marvel in the wonders of the world with the knowledge that its mysteries are nor readily graspable nor divinely intangible, thus hampering our inquisitiveness in the process. Let us be brave and accept that pain exists, sometimes with no reason nor purpose, but let us also draw pleasure purely from pleasure’s existence.

Let us be free, but free in the knowledge that freedom of the individual comes as a price: the recognition and acceptance that we are alone amongst each other, with no one to report to but ourselves. Let us realize that this is the real and only source of morality, a sense of duty to ourselves and others around us.

Cosmic+Calendar

The Universe in One Year, inspired by Carl Sagan’s (1934-1996)  “Cosmic Calendar”

And finally, let us remain at the top of the tree, but put aside our arrogant crowns. Let us not look down with disdain or ownership, nor up with servility and blinding devotion. Let us not be lords of this tree, nor be vassals to its reality.

Let us have perspective.