How Disinformation Began

A tale from the Turkana Basin

Good Evening:

The New York Times reports:

A million and a half years ago, amid giant storks and the ancestors of antelopes, two extinct relatives of humans walked along the same muddy lakeshore in what is today northern Kenya, new research suggests.

An excavation team uncovered four sets of footprints preserved in the mud at the Turkana Basin, a site that has led to important breakthroughs in understanding human evolution. The discovery, announced on Thursday in a paper in the journal Science, is direct evidence that different kinds of human relatives, with distinct anatomies and gaits, inhabited the same place at the same time, the paper’s authors say.

It also raises questions about the extent of the species’ interactions with each other.

“They might have walked by one another,” said Kevin Hatala, an evolutionary anthropologist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh who led the study. “They might have looked up in the distance and seen another member of a closely related species, occupying the same landscape.”

Based on skeletal remains found in the region, Dr. Hatala’s team attributed the footprints to Paranthropus boisei and Homo erectus, two types of hominins, the group consisting of our human lineage and closely related species. Paranthropus boisei had smaller brains along with wide, flat faces and massive teeth and chewing muscles; Homo erectus more closely resembled modern human proportions and are thought to be our direct ancestors.

A Homo erectus and a Paranthropus boisei cross paths on a lake shore in a place that will eventually be named Kenya.

“Watch your step,” says the Homo erectus. “The mud is slippery today.”

He notices that the Paranthropus boisei is stepping rather gingerly through the mud, in a particularly careful fashion. “Watcha doing?” he asks.

“I’m trying to make sure that my footsteps get preserved for the next million-and-a-half years next to yours, so that later peoples can understand the differences between our anatomies and gaits and also see that we coexisted with one another,” she responds. “We wouldn’t want our progeny to be confused as to which of us were their direct forbearers or to think that we weren’t here at the same time.”

The Homo erectus is confused. “Why are you doing this?”

The Paranthropus boisei grins at her exceedingly distant cousin, bearing her enormous teeth. “For a dude with a big head, you’re not very bright, are you? This is my legacy,” she says. “I can’t explain things in writing to my offspring, because writing hasn’t been invented yet. Cave painting isn’t a thing yet either. So if we want to show the distant future that we were here, the fossil record is all we’ve got to work with.”

She explains that the fossil record is the means by which they can communicate with the distant future. The two walk together out of the mud and onto the dry soil.

The Homo erectus straightens his back—the straightness of which really is his best feature—and he considers the matter. “So you mean that a gazillion years from now, someone will find our footprints and learn about us from them?”

“Yup,” says the Paranthropus boisei confidently. She bids him a good afternoon and heads on home.

The Homo erectus hangs around the lake shore pondering her words. He gnaws on the leg bone of an antelope ancestor that he’s been carrying with him. Then he tosses it aside.

“Fuck ‘em,” he says.

He carefully wipes away three of the six footprints left by the Paranthropus boisei and then trods a second time through his own tracks, vigorously moving his big toes as he does so this time—thus creating footprints quite unlike his own normal ones.

“May her legacy be one of ignorance and confusion,” he says. And he goes off home. The giant stork hunt is starting soon. And he doesn’t want to be late.

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Eve Gaumond, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher, and I planned potential episodes for the next few weeks. We discussed what products we should start hoarding before the trade war starts, whom the Greek Chorus wants to hear from, and whom we might tap to talk about the Lebanon ceasefire:

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Yesterday On Lawfare

In my The Situation column yesterday, I lay out fourteen aspects of our democratic culture that I’m unironically thankful for—even as the second administration of President-elect Donald Trump fast approaches—from the separation of powers that stopped Matt Gaetz from becoming attorney general to the diversity of federal judges, civil society writ-large, and more:

That said, all are genuine parts of a fabric of legal, democratic, and civil life that make me optimistic that America has the tools to pull through this period as a vibrant, pluralistic democratic republic. They are the things for which, their warts and all, I am unironically thankful

Divine Madness

Andrew Koppelman reviews “American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order” by Jerome Copulsky. He describes the book as an “engaging historical survey” on the history of Christian theocratic opposition to liberalism in the United States that “unveil[s] the deep historical roots of contemporary postliberalism and national conservatism”:

The religious adversaries of liberalism are willing to sacrifice unity for the sake of Christianity. But would their political hopes really be good news for Christianity? A recurrent phenomenon, which Copulsky documents well, is the desire of some of the Christianizers to claim that the Constitution is already Christian and that nefarious secularists have been trying to suppress this truth. The First Amendment’s prohibition of establishment of religion is an inconvenience for this argument. It was put there largely for religious reasons.

Podcasts

On yesterday’s Lawfare Daily podcast, Molly Reynolds sits down with Donald Sherman, and Michael Stern to discuss the Senate confirmation process and congressional oversight in the 119th Congress. They talked about tools available to the Senate in dealing with President Trump’s nominees, legal questions around recess appointments, issues of congressional oversight to watch next year, and more:

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is this collective of skunks, who, despite being several separate beasts in body, clearly represent a single beast in spirit.