Coffee this Friday, November 10, at the usual time and place.
(1) Bones of contention: Prior iterations of this newsletter looked at the emerging policy of “ethical return” at museums here at home and around the world. The Smithsonian announced such a policy last year. A recent article by Erin L. Thompson in Hyperallergic looks at this issue as it pertains to human remains:
[New Yorks’s American Museum of Natural History] was one of many museums that began collecting human remains as part of a “comparative racial project” in the late 19th century. Scientists were looking for physical evidence to substantiate racial differences. They measured the cranial capacity of skulls, on the theory that White Europeans had the largest brains. They also examined posture, hair texture, height, and anything else that might pin down just who was who.
One valuable source of comparative anatomy were the naturally mummified bodies from Indigenous graves in hot, dry areas of Chile and Peru. The AMNH holds the remains of at least 414 individuals taken from Peru. And one of the handful of bodies still on display at the museum is “Copper Man,” who died in the 6th century, when a mine shaft collapsed on him. Now, his body is part of an exhibit on early technology, lying in a narrow display case labeled “Mining and Smelting,” with a piece of the copper ore he was searching for perched on a ledge just out of his reach.
…
Representatives of the Atacameños, the Indigenous people who live in the area of Chile where Copper Man was found, have been asking for his return since at least 1991…. In 2008, AMNH curator Ian Tattersall told Chilean officials that the museum would surrender Copper Man only if Chile would keep him in the same temperature- and humidity-controlled conditions. In other words: no reburial, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of ongoing expense.
Brief aside: the fact that we dredge up human remains to display in museums has always seemed bizarre to me. That they are “old,” even “ancient” doesn’t make it less so.
(2) Interstellar space balls: Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb believes there is life elsewhere in the universe. Is he a mad scientist betraying the profession or a voice of truth crying out in a scientific wilderness? (Are the two mutually exclusive?) In summer 2023, he and a team of researchers dragged a magnetic sled across the ocean floor near Papua New Guinea, at a crash site for what he believes was an interstellar meteor called “IM1.” His paper, posted on Arxiv.org in August and titled “Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean Site of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) Bolide,” claims to have discovered iron spherules of extrasolar origin:
Mass spectrometry of 47 spherules near the high-yield regions along IM1’s path reveals a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern for 5 of them…. The unique spherules show an excess of Be, La and U, by up to three orders of magnitude relative to the solar system standard…. This evidence points towards an association of “BeLaU"-type spherules with IM1, supporting its interstellar origin independently of the high velocity and unusual material strength implied from the CNEOS data. We suggest that the “BeLaU" abundance pattern could have originated from a highly differentiated magma ocean of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system or from more exotic sources.
Hope to see you Friday.