Neanderthals, Denisovans and homo sapiens sapiens - and now the Monday Forum post as well

 The mystery of the Neanderthals has long fascinated people. What were they? Why did they vanish? Were they wiped out by homo sapiens? Now we know that human beings carry a proportion of Neanderthal genes that varies but appears to be an average of perhaps 2%. The Neanderthal survives within us.

Given such apparent inter-breeding, the question of when the two groups first had sex exercises a sort of fascination. We can see this in this Guardian headline:
Skull discovery suggests location where humans first had sex with Neanderthals.

The story is by no means as exciting as the headline would suggest. It refers to the discovery of a modern human skull in a cave in Northern Israel dating to perhaps 55,000 year ago, a time when the "region when it was already well populated with Neanderthals. Skeletons of Neanderthals from the same time have been recovered from Amud cave 24 miles (40km) to the east of Manot cave, and from Kebara cave 30 miles to the south."

The Neanderthal are far more ancient than that Johnny come lately homo sapiens sapiens  with a sophisticated tool using culture. Nor, as we now know through the miracles of DNA analysis, were they the only older human species co-existing with and interbreeding with homo sapiens sapiens. 

In March 2010, scientists announced the discovery of a finger bone fragment of a juvenile female who lived about 41,000 years ago, found in the remote Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, a cave that has also been inhabited by Neanderthals and modern humans.

Analysis of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the finger bone showed it to be genetically distinct from the mtDNAs of Neanderthals and modern humans. Subsequent study of the nuclear genome from this specimen suggests that Denisovans shared a common origin with Neanderthals, that they ranged from Siberia to South-East Asia, and that they lived among and interbred with the ancestors of some modern humans, with about 3% to 5% of the DNA of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians deriving from Denisovans.

DNA discovered in Spain suggests that Denisovans at some point resided in Western Europe, where Neanderthals were previously thought to be the only inhabitants. A comparison with the genome of a Neanderthal from the same cave revealed significant local interbreeding with local Neanderthal DNA representing 17% of the Denisovan genome, while evidence was also detected of interbreeding with an as yet unidentified ancient human lineage. 

In addition to the linked Wikipedia articles, you can find more on the Denisovans (and the Neanderthals too) on John Hawks blog.

Postscript

I had planned to bring up a post last night on the Finnish school system for the Monday Forum but events intervened. Now it seems that the Neanderthal theme has generated its own comments not connected with the post, so go for it in whatever direction you like! 

Edward S Curtis' photographs of the native North Americans

Edward S Curtis was a notable photographer of the native North Americans. This is a photograph of Kwakiutl canoes from British Columbia.

Mashable has put together a collection of his photos. Have a browse. They are quite spectacular.

Looking at the history of Curtis's life in Wikipedia (link above), he seems to have been a bit of a sad case. That may be wrong, of course. Certainly he doesn't seem to have been very business like in managing his affairs.

Still, with the financial support of J P Morgan, he left an unparalleled record of North American native Indian groups whose value survives to this day.

Sunday Essay – maps, myopia and the Aboriginal story

I have always been fascinated by maps. As a child, I had maps pinned all over my bedroom walls. Maps of country towns, road maps, a map of the world with the Empire and Commonwealth still marked in red as it was on the little globe of the world. Then there were the many atlases around the house of varying ages, some dating back to my parents’ childhood with their political boundaries of now vanished countries.

On wet Saturday afternoons, Brother David and I would sort our stamps, counting them, putting them in order. Here we used the Stanley & Gibbons catalogue as a basic resource,  Again, it was a geography and history lesson. This is the first Confederate postage stamp showing Jefferson Davis and placed in circulation in October 1861, five months after postal service between the North and South had ended.

This love of maps carried through into an interest in geography despite the sometimes boredom at primary school of having to draw maps of Australia or NSW with the rivers and boundaries carefully marked. Indeed, at one point that interest was so great that I expected to major in geography at university.

That was not to be. I was more interested in human rather than physical geography, The broad introductory nature of that first year course simply didn’t grab. In fact, I found it quite boring. I therefore put geography aside for history and economics, although my general interest in the subject continued.

Despite my interest in maps and in geography, my sense of spatial awareness was not well developed. By spatial awareness, I simply mean the geography of a place or area; size, distances, rivers, plains and mountains; I understood in a general abstract sense, but I didn’t feel it. This was a bigger weakness than I realised at  time. 

I am not a geographical determinist, but life is shaped by geography. I was researching and writing on the history of places and periods when I didn’t actually properly understand the geography.  These are the ruins of Ancient Thera on the Greek island of Santorini. It took a visit to the Greek Islands in 2010  for me to begin to properly understand the geography involved, including the importance of water; water to sail on, water to drink.

Just as I didn’t properly recognise my limited spatial awareness, I didn’t recognise the way that those maps I loved were affecting my sense of geography, creating hard lines in my mind based on boundaries and human constructions such as railway lines. Those lines helped determine what I looked at, how I interpreted things. Actually, the world wasn’t like that at all. Our obsession with hard lines, with order, actually distorts the way we see the past.

Today, we have a further very particular problem. Modern communications and transport patterns are actually destroying our sense of spatial awareness. The loss of MH70 is a case in point. There was genuine surprise at our inability to find the plane. People had simply forgotten how big the Southern Indian Ocean is. 

Our diminishing sense of spatial awareness combines with our interest in lines and maps to change the mental mudmaps we use to interpret the world. We see the world in terms of a series of dots linked by lines along which we travel. While the length of those lines is determined by travel times, instant communications effectively compresses the dots. The world outside those dots and lines progressively vanishes from our consciousness.

If you look, you can see this effect in operation in your own world.

Do you use Google maps? Ten years ago, you would have got a road map or street directory to plan your trip. You would have had to check the route in some detail, work out where to turn etc. Now many people rely on the GPS system and just do as they are told. It’s convenient, but it means that at the end of your trip your knowledge of the route is far less than it once would have been.

As an alternative, consider the expressway. Even twenty year ago, you would have wound through towns and villages, stopping as required. Today, the modern expressway bypasses all those places, with people stopping at the now ubiquitous service centres. The towns and villages that you once knew are progressively being expunged from memory unless, of course, you have a particular personal or business reason to go to them.  

These issues are on my mind at present for a number of reasons, partly professional, partly personal.

The recreation of the Aboriginal history of what is now Northern NSW before 1788 is like putting together a jigsaw made up of many fragments. It is not possible to be definitive, merely plausible. So long as you provide your evidence, your story can then be challenged by others.

I am often asked how do I know, how can I know, what is my evidence?  Part of the answer lies in the archaeological record, the material that survives from various periods of the long Aboriginal occupation of this continent. Part comes from early settler records or ethnographic studies. This material dates from the time of disruption and poses many problems, not least of which is our inability to draw any certain connections between the the position at the time of European intrusion and that holding in past aeons. This problem become progressively more intense the further back into the past we go.

A further complication lies in the way in that Aboriginal history, our views of the Aboriginal past, have acquired accretions, barnacles if you like, from evolving perceptions of that past within the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities alike. People always re-interpret history to suit current needs. It can be extremely uncomfortable for both historian and reader where the evidence fails to support or even conflict with current beliefs.

Geography is central to any navigation of this mine field. In his 1832 book, the writer William Breton refers to Corborn Comleroy as the name given to the large area occupied by what we would now call, among other things, the Kamilaroi. He notes that the Corborn Comleroy travelled to Port Macquarie for ceremonies.  So far so good, but where did they come from, how did they get to Port Macquarie, what does it tell us about links?

The Kamilaroi  language group occupied a large swath of inland NSW from the Upper Hunter probably into what is now Queensland. Michael O’Rourke considers that those attending the Port Macquarie ceremonies would have travelled from the Mooki or Peel Rivers up onto the southern tip of the New England Tablelands through the Nowendoc district, across the tributaries of the Manning River to the Ellenborough River and then down to the Hastings. This makes sense, but only if you know the complex geography of the area.

It is, by the way, remarkably difficult to avoid errors in all this. The Wikipedia entry on the Manning River given above suggest that the traditional custodians of the land surrounding the Manning River and its associated valleys are the Birpai people of the Bundjalung nation. That is factually incorrect. The Bundjalung lay far to the north separated from the Birpai by two other language groups.

To try to understand all this, I am constantly map checking. Herein there is now a problem. Whatever the strength of Google maps, it does not provide me with the right map size and detail that I need. What I really need is a good old fashioned Atlas that allows me to visually see the relationships between areas and especially rivers and mountain systems. Then and only then can I get full value from Google.

I accept that all this is probably a bit eye glazing, leading the reader to ask but does it matter? Yes, to my mind it does. If we can establish the broad pattern of Aboriginal life in Northern NSW and surrounding linked areas in 1788, then we have brought part of the Australian past into the light. If we do this, we have a better chance of interpreting some of the changing archaeological data, thus adding texture and depth to Aboriginal story over thousands of years.    

The Neanderthal within us

In January I referred (Lewis on the Indo-European controversy) to my feeling of discomfort that came from reading Martin Lewis' posts on the Indo-European controversy. My discomfort came from the realisation that elements of the controversy and the underlying models had affected the things I studied and hence my thinking in ways that I hadn't quite realised. On this, I said in part:

Lewis's central focus in this chapter is on linguistics and the way that linguistic analysis has influenced and been influenced by other debates. His time period extends to the present day. This is where the discomfort came in, for I studied some of the things he talks about at school and university. I used those atlases. I looked at some of the concepts in my studies. Now I wonder a little about the possible distortions created in my own thinking.

Anatomical analysis, the differentiation between peoples based on physical appearance and especially on skeletons, has always been problematic. It continues to be used because in many cases skeletal remains are the only evidence we have, despite the advances in DNA technology.  Yet the classifications used actually derive from and in turn influenced the debate that Lewis is talking about. You see my problem?

When I wrote this three weeks ago, I hadn't properly realised how much science had moved on, in so doing turning our views of the human past on its head.

Over on Helen Dale's Facebook page a commenter, Brian Hanley, directed me to a blog that I had never seen, John Hawke's blog. John described his blog in ways that I could identify with:

I started writing this blog for two basic reasons: first, because there are some really interesting issues in paleoanthropology that are not well covered in the mainstream science press, and second, because I needed a good way to organize my notes.

It turned out that the solution to the note-taking problem also made a nifty solution for writing about interesting issues. Blogging software is one of the best methods of content management around. It became very simple to take notes on things I was reading, spice them up with a bit of information and context, and blog about them. In large part, what you see here are my own notes, the very ones that I use to write my research papers and books.

This is a very, very good blog written by a highly skilled academic who makes the results of new work in his field accessible to the lay reader. And what work that is. It is turning our understanding of the evolution of the human species on its head.  As a simple example, Neanderthal man is not dead but living within us in our genes, if in varying proportions between human groups.

Do have a browse!

Anthropology, the Aborigines & the need to tell a story

There has been something of a spat recently in the American Anthropological Association over directions. The proximate cause was the deletion of the word science from a long term plan. However, it appears to have re-ignited a divide within anthropology.

In an article reprinted in the Australian Financial Review from the New York Times, Nicholas Wade quotes Peter Perigrine, President of the Society for Anthropological Sciences. Perigrine apparently suggests that the what he sees as an attack on science comes from two influences in anthropology: one is the so-called critical anthropologists who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism that should be done away with; the second the postmodernist critique of the authority of science.

The debate also seems to reflect a division between those such as archaeologists for whom science is central and those concerned with "soft" subjects such as culture or gender who see their role more in terms of overcoming perceived social or moral ills and who often adopt overtly ideological positions. One flash point in the debate has been the use of anthropologists in Afghanistan to support the war effort.

Whether anthropology broadly defined can ever be a science is open to question. However, and like history, anthropologists can and to my mind should apply scientific methods.

The issues raised in the United States are on my mind at the moment because of a post I have been trying to write for New England's History on future directions in my research on New England's Aboriginal peoples. As I wrote, I felt my enthusiasm draining away.

At a purely personal level, I don't like fire-fights and am suspicious of those who adopt overtly ideological positions. At a purely personal level, I think that research integrity demands that you follow the evidence even where you dislike the conclusions. At a purely personal level, I have been burnt by those who dislike my research because it challenges their own pet views and ideological nostrums.

When I first became involved with Australian prehistory all those years ago, it was still a clean slate. There were no special positions beyond the purely academic. Yes, we all thought that it was important than we illumine the Aboriginal past. Yes, it was impossible to study the evidence without become somewhat partisan, pro-Aborigine. But there was still a joy in doing something new, in extending the knowledge boundaries.

Four years, ago my private research drew me back into Australian prehistory. I was a bit appalled at what I found.

Public archeology - research for the sake of illumining the past - had been replaced by private, contracted, archeology driven by current needs. At one level this was good in the sense that it supported many more archaeologists. At a second level, it introduced distortions into the discipline in terms of what was studied, how it was studied.

The what was determined by things such as heritage requirements. The how by the need for consultation, the need to take stakeholder needs into account, the time horizons associated with the study, the placement of restrictions on what should be studied. Beyond these limitations, there was a further problem: the material generated from the studies was less available, less useable. Australian prehistory had been effectively privatised.  

As I looked at the broader material, I found the same problems. Prehistorians such as John Mulvaney, a doyen of the profession, now had to devote time to the question of what could, what should, be studied and how. I don't know that Professor Mulvaney would agree with my interpretation, but that's the way I saw it,

These types of problems are not unique to Australian prehistory, but affect all aspects of the study of Aboriginal history.

Take, as an example, the work that I have been doing on New England's Aboriginal languages. Some would argue, indeed do argue, that each Aboriginal language belongs to a particular Aboriginal group and that, consequently, I should not be researching in this area without explicit approval of the relevant elders. But which elders?  Further, how can I maintain research integrity if my work has to be vetted in some way independent of the standard of that work?

This is a very real problem. In his extremely good PhD thesis on Tindale tribes, James Knight states quite explicitly that there were certain aspects of research that he did not pursue because his respondents stated that they did not want him to do so. Isn't this, in fact, censorship? 

The key problem with Aboriginal Australia is that past and present are inextricably entwined. Non Aboriginal guilt and Aboriginal responses play out in a complicated pattern of official, cultural, legal and  political responses that affect every aspect of research and writing.

It is now over forty four years since I did my original honours thesis on the economic structure of Aboriginal life in Northern NSW. When I moved back into the Aboriginal history I was astonished, but also a bit flattered, to find that my work was still alive and being cited all those years later. There are not many honours students who can say that!

Part of the reason for the survival of my work is political. The growth in Aboriginal heritage studies and in land rights' issues meant that my work maintained relevance. However, part of the reason lies in shifts in fashion; people focused on the evils done stopped writing about the Aborigines as Aborigines. As best I can work out, my work has never been updated, although specific aspects have. 

My Aboriginal mentee argues that I should continue my research and writing. I now know, she argues, more than most. Aboriginal people need access to their specific pasts.

Certainly I now know more than most. I don't think that I am being egotistical when I say this. Certainly, I know that there is a deep hunger among Aboriginal people for the type of material I write. Yet it remains hard.

I get so tired. I really don't want to have to steer between all the reefs of current conflicts. I just want to research and tell a story, to follow the evidence wherever it may take me.

This brings me back to my starting point, the fight in the American Anthropological Association. I really don't want to go down that route. I accept that there are substantive professional issues. But really, I just want to write!

Sources on the AAA spat

• 25 November No Science, Please. We're Anthropologists.
• 1 December The Remains of the AAA
• 7 December Which Is In A Bigger Mess Over Culture—Psychology or Anthropology?
• 14 December Is Anthropology Scientific? Beats Me.
• 30 December Anthropology, social science, and science wars
• 5 January Nicholas Wade, Anthropologists on stand-off in science, Australian Financial Review (behind the pay wall).

Sport, cultural change and problems in Aboriginal research

I have got quite behind in my reading over the last week, including material by my fellow bloggers. This morning I devoted a little time to just catching up, reading papers and blogs.

I was in Bathurst when Australia played Germany in the world cup, and actually got up to watch. This became sufficiently depressing to send me back to bed. I felt that we were out-played, that the Germans were just so much faster on the field. It was actually quite a bit like some of the hockey I had been watching.

The reaction here to the loss has been a bit over the top. Unsporting might I say? New Zealand this time is where Australia was last time, just glad to be there. New Zealand's opening 1-1 draw with Slovakia rubbed salt into Australian wounds because of the sibling rivalry between the two countries. Australians were both glad and sorry!   

Back in May I used examples from New England to discuss the pattern of social change in Australia with a focus on the 1970s (here then here). The first post led to a conversation with Winton Bates about the room visiting imbroglio at the University of New England, something featured in Matthew Jordan's history of the University as a change marker. Winton has now read the book and responded in Does history give undue prominence to scribblers?. 

In his post, Winton included a quote from an editorial he wrote:

‘Perhaps the concept of freedom in a university needs further explanation. It is not a freedom to do what you want to, full stop; nor is it a relentless search after personal happiness. The college regulations in the “free” university would be framed by members of college with a view to restricting violation of the rights of others.

Surely this is an ideal worth working for. ...’

It seems hard to believe today just how much emphasis there was then on the role of universities. Not universities as training the vocational cannon fodder necessary for economic efficiency, not universities as economic entities, just universities as universities in an intellectual and cultural sense. 

Don Arthur had two interesting posts on Club Troppo - What the unemployment rate doesn’t show and Eat it and smile — Why unskilled men reject service work - dealing with the changing role of men in work. This is another aspect of the social change process, the way that economic restructuring combined with changes in social attitudes has had significant gender and specific human effects. 

Australia is in the midst of a growing election fever just at present. As always, I find The Poll Bludger interesting for its detail on the entrails. I generally steer clear of detailed analysis on electoral matters, although like most people I have a sort of morbid fascination with just how bad things are for Labor in NSW. This weekend sees the by-election in the NSW state seat of Penrith. The only issue seems to be just how much Labor's vote can fall. 

I have continued to monitor Aboriginal Art and Culture: an American Eye, although my heart isn't in it. Not that this is a criticism of Will, simply that I feel reluctant to write on Aboriginal issues. In a post last October, A fit of depression, I concluded:

As a writer, historian and sometimes policy adviser, I simply cannot deal with all the sensitivities and complexities involved in any form of research and writing about Australian Aboriginal issues. The most that I can do is to try to research and write in a professional manner following my own interests.

This issue is still very much on my mind.

In my last post I mentioned that I took a PhD thesis to Bathurst to read in gaps.

James Knight's 2003 UNE PhD is entitled Testing Tindale's Tribes: A re-assessment of Tindale's work on the Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, with reference to the written records of the south-east of South Australia. I know that this must sound very dry, and indeed much of the detail would be to the non-specialist. However, to my mind it is actually an important piece of original work along a number of dimensions.

Norman Tindale (1900-1993) was a pioneering Australian archaeologist and anthropologist who, among other things, attempted to map the distribution of Aboriginal "tribes" across Australia.

Tindale's "tribal" map has been very influential. Knight shows how it has affected other mapping efforts and had practical and very important effects on the approach to public policy at a conceptual and structural level, especially since the Land Right Acts. The only problem is that Tindale's "tribes" did not in fact exist. Indeed, there were no such things as tribes.

I will spell the argument out here in more detail in a later post, probably on the New England history blog. For the moment, the key point is that the structure of traditional Aboriginal life involved over-lapping sets of relationships between people and land such that many different and overlapping boundaries were possible. Further, those boundaries were often shaded and changed with time as relationships changed.

By imposing one set of geographically defined boundaries that then became built into thinking, Tindale's work effectively excluded other options. The use of Tindale boundaries in Government structures and in Land Rights cases, the Land Right Acts themselves have European style boundaries built in, created a straight jacket that in turn affected structures and relationships in Aboriginal communities.

From my perspective, one of the most difficult and problematic issues in Knight's work lies in his perception of the relationship between the researcher and Aboriginal peoples and communities. Again, this deserves a full post in its own right, for it lies at the heart of my discomfort in my own work.

We can think of this along two dimensions.

The first dimension is the way in which the results of any research work can become a player in current events and relationships. If I present evidence that group x, however defined, had different boundaries or relationships from those commonly accepted or argued, then this may flow on to have practical and current impacts.

In normal circumstances, a researcher might argue that he/she is concerned with evidence. However, this brings us to a second dimension.

Knight saw his work as a relationship, an interaction, between he and current Aboriginal groups. This transcended the research. Knight negotiated the scope of work (his phrase) as he went along with his teachers (again Knight's phrase). Implicit in his approach is the assumption that Aboriginal people own all aspects of their culture and that, consequently, those researching any aspect of that culture from whatever data source must have appropriate approvals.

I really struggle with this. I am presently researching New England's Aboriginal languages and hope to present a paper on this in Armidale in July. If I accept Knight's position, then I should not be writing on this without the explicit approval of the custodians of those languages, assuming that we can find who they are.

I really can't accept this. Yet I know that I might be challenged. You see why it takes some of the fun, the joy of discovery, out of the work?

Enough, for the moment. I have other things that I need to do. 

Australia's Confusion with Culture

One thing I have noticed in discussion in Australia across a broad spectrum of issues is the degree of confusion that appears to exist about the meaning of the word "culture". I thought that I would make a brief comment as much to clarify my own thinking as anything else.

When I first did prehistory we were taught simply that culture was nurture, not nature. In other words, all the things that we learned to do. Defined in this way, culture is a very broad concept. Because prehistory is concerned with physical remains - digging through the rubbish dumps of the human past as one archaeologist put it - culture, the differences between cultures, the patterns of cultural change are all linked to material evidence of what we do, how we do it.

This broad meaning of culture exists, too, in management theory. Organisational culture is often defined simply as the way we do things round here.

In teaching groups and teams as part of Frontline Management Training I tried to make the point that every group developed its own culture. In formal curriculum terms this lead to the point that a team was a directed group. However, I also wanted to get across a point that the process of cultural creation and maintenance was a natural part of any group or team all the way up to the huge modern organisation. To be really effective, you have to know how to work the culture.

This type of thinking came through in my role as a change agent, a role inextricably linked with cultural change. Most new brooms in fact fail. Those who are most effective link their approach to the existing history and culture of the organisation, treating this not just as an impediment but also as an aid.

Anybody who has studied culture or who has been involved with it in a practical sense soon learns a few things.

The first is that most human beings are quite capable of combining multiple cultures and cultural allegiancies within themselves. These may even conflict, a conflict that can be ignored until something brings it into prominence.

The second thing is that we all select groups and cultures that we are comfortable with unless events force otherwise.

One of the readings in today's NSW Higher School Certificate English paper was an excerpt from Geraldine Brooks. Reporting on her experiences of living in a small village in Virginia, she said in part:

You live differently in a small place. I had been a city person all my life: my homes had been in the dense urban tangles of Sydney, New York, Cairo and London. Though each of those cities is very different, I was much the same in all of them. People say cities breed acceptance of diversity, but I didn't learn that lesson there. It took a village to teach me tolerance and a measure of tact.

My wife, a Sydney Eastern Suburbs girl, found the same thing when she first moved to Armidale. It was not that Armidale was narrow, just that she had to mix with people with very different views. Certainly I have been forced to exercise tolerance since I returned the favour by moving to Sydney.

Because we select groups that we are comfortable with, it becomes very easy to forget or fail to recognise that the cultural attributes you support may not be shared by others. This was one of the messages I was trying to get across in my post comparing the Sydney and New England electorates.

The third thing is that cultures change all the time under the influence of events. Yes, there are continuities, I will discuss this in a moment, but there is also change. Changes that strengthen the group are absorbed relatively easily. Changes that affect attitudes, values, world views, happen much more slowly. When the pace of change becomes a threat, as happened in Australia during the first half of the nineties, you get a reaction.

This brings me to my last point, the longevity of certain cultural traits.

A US sociological study I read many years ago, I do not remember the reference, compared two suburbs in a US city. One was highly functional, the other highly disfunctional, yet both had begun in an apparently similar way. The study's conclusion was that the difference went back to differences in the establishment process, differences whose influences continued.

Now link all this to the discussion on our relations with Australia's indigenous peoples.

There is no doubt that traditional life was highly sophisticated and organised. Because there appears to be some doubt about this in some peoples' minds, I have started a post on the New England blog discussing Aboriginal economic life in New England at the time of European intrusion.

That life was not static in cultural terms, now was it uniform across the country. So when, as appears often to be the case, people start talking about traditional "Aboriginal" culture I want to know what they mean.

The arrival of the Europeans had a dramatic and adverse effect on traditional Aboriginal life, an effect that varied over time and across the country. Again, I do not think that there can be any argument about this. It is simply a statement of fact.

The first problem that I do have with some of the discussion is that it appears to suggest that the indigenous cultures vanished. They did not, they simply changed.

Now it may be, I think that it is, that the changes meant that traditional life was no longer possible. However, elements of that life certainly continued, now joined by new elements. This links to my point about the continuity of culture.

I feel that this process of change has, at least to my mind, been poorly charted. I need to know more. But I can surmise some things.

To begin with, the kinship, exchange and cooperative characteristics of traditional life carried over. This has many advantages, but it also has problems.

In 1970 I remember studying development economics for my masters in economics at the Australian National University. We looked at Fiji. A key point was the way in which the kinship and mutual obligation systems created fundamental problems for the development of indigenous Fijians. This is true for Australia's indigenous people.

Now here I would make two points.

First, cultures have to change or pay a price. That price is decline and ultimate extinction.

The second is the need for objective observation. Without this, none of us know what we are dealing with.

One of my personal heroes is Raymond Firth. One of that brilliant group of New Zealand intellectuals that made such a contribution to western thought, Firth was arguably the outstanding social anthropologist of the 20th century.

One of his key points as I understand them was the need for objective observation to understand and record. Being objective in observation does not mean being objective in a personal sense. It means simply that you try to prevent your own biases intervening in your professional analysis.

I won't go on at this point, except to note that I do try to follow what I see as Firth's approach on indigenous issues. And in this context I need a lot more information.

Postscript - Saturday Morning 20 October

My word, this post has already generated some useful comments. My especial thanks to Lexcen for pointing me in the direction of the Freeman/Mead controversy. I had forgotten this, and I found the reminder intensely interesting for a number of reasons.

By way of background to readers who may not be aware of this, Margaret Mead became perhaps the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century because of her writings on sexuality among young women in Samoa. Dr Derek Freeman later challenged her conclusions, igniting a global controversy that spread well beyond the discipline of anthropology itself. Nothing like sex to spark interest!

Without debating the rights or wrongs of the case, the controversy centred on the the relations in anthropology between the observer and the observed in interpreting cultural matters, and hence bears directly upon the point I was making in this post.

Did Mead's informants lie to her? Did she allow her own perceptions and values to affect not just the questions she asked, but the way in which she interpreted the answers? And, in any case, how does the very presence of the anthropologist distort cultural patterns?

Conversely, to what degree were Dr Freeman's observations affected by his own close relations with Samoans now aware of Mead's writings? Did the adoption of Christianity itself lead to another distortion?

These questions are all relevant in an Australian context. As I outlined in a post on the Australian anthropologist Malcolm Calley, Australian anthropologists have been very important in raising interest in indigenous issues when the matter was still being largely ignored by other professions, including historians.

I have another interest, too, the New Zealand connection.

In a short series of posts on the History of Australian and New Zealand Thought blog (first post here) I discussed the remarkable story of some of the early New Zealand economists.

This extends to anthropology, for the two were linked. Here I have already talked about Raymond Firth. Just as in economics there was a people chain that created a remarkable body of work for such a small country, so there was in anthropology.

My thanks to all my current contributors for making my early Saturday morning so very interesting.