Category Archives: Nature

Arts, Books, History, Nature, Science

Book Review: The Origin of Language

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: According to an evolutionary biologist, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s why we started talking to each other

THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by strutting and brawling males, with females tagging along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.

The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitute one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been thrown into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem. Unlike a baby chimp that can cling to its mother, a human infant is entirely helpless for years.

Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our “underbaked” newborns, because looking after and caring for a helpless human baby on the danger-filled plains of the African savannah required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare, and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. Social bonding meant language evolved to negotiate help, share information about infant safety, and for those bonds to be necessarily strengthened to keep “helpless” infants alive.

The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, but a lot of it is, as a matter of course, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism (walking upright and narrowing pelvises) and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies born early (before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed).

One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-developed human children. Another is that stone-age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.

Fortuitously, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more control and precision over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more complex and sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge. This nurtured infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.

Regrettably, critics are likely to highlight that Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She does spend about half the book laying the groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won’t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she says, but only in our line – not in those of our closest relatives. “We may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” she writes, “but I don’t think we had much to talk about.”

And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn’t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line – the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia – she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job. Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Perhaps, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn’t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children, and is still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.

Beekman presents a radical shift in how we understand the birth of human speech. While traditional theories often credit hunting, toolmaking, or warfare as the primary drivers of complex communication, the author argues that the true catalyst was the inescapable need for cooperative childcare.

– The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman is published by Simon & Schuster, 320pp

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Arts, Books, Environment, Nature

Book Review: Hedgelands

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Hedges are humble habitats that are a lively host to much wildlife – a secret safari providing a plethora of environmental benefits

THE humble and often-neglected British hedge, is described by author Christopher Hart as “an incredibly porous and self-sustaining feature of our countryside . . . one of the happiest accidents in human history.” It hums with bees and butterflies, is a rich haven for insects, birds, hedgehogs, shrews, voles, and bats, and also acts as a windbreak, stock fence, flood defence system, and an environmental barrier against soil erosion. The RSPB agrees; its research shows that hedges may be supporting up to four-fifths of our woodland birds, half of our wild mammals, and a third of our butterflies.

Hedges have been a feature of the British landscape since the Stone Age. The original ones were “dead hedges”, made from piles of branches and brushwood collected from cleared areas of woodland.

As the wood rotted, it was swiftly colonised by fungi and insects. Passing birds excreted seeds from trees and shrubs – such as hazel, oak, ash, hawthorn, dog rose, blackthorn, and bramble – which soon started sprouting in among the dead wood. From there, a living hedge was born. (A hedgerow, if you were wondering, is a hedge that includes features such as banks, trees, walls, fences, or gates.)

Our ancestors soon learned the best way to deal with an unruly hedge: by cutting half-way through a rising trunk and then to lay it back into the hedge sideways. In time, this creates a barrier so dense and tough that it can even hold back an amorous bull trying to get into a field of cows.

Yet as Hart rightly points out, these ancient hedges are much more than just a physical barrier. They mitigate flooding and soil erosion and give many animals an invaluable source of shelter from precipitous conditions. A hedge will protect smaller birds and mammals from predators like crows, magpies, sparrowhawks, and foxes – a dense hedge is difficult for predators to access and manoeuvre. This “narrow but incredibly complex ecosystem” is also an abundant source of food for wildlife, providing hips, haws, sloes, and blackberries for them to feast on.

Many of the countryside hedges we see today pre-date the Georgian era, some even being Anglo-Saxon. In a county like Devon, where the land is suited to sheep and cattle and less likely to be ploughed, at least a quarter of the hedges date back to Norman times.

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THERE are strong regional variations in Britain’s hedges. In the Midlands, traditionally cattle country, hedges tend to be mainly hawthorn, which is an excellent barrier to bullocks. The high rainfall in Wales and Ireland is just the thing for blackthorn, which happens to be a handy plant for snagging and restraining sheep.

The Somerset Levels typically have hedges made of osier, a small willow tree, while in Kent and Worcestershire you’ll find hedges of beech, poplar, and elder which tend to grow tall to protect prized orchards from the wind.

By 1820, there were 700,000 kilometres of hedges in England (and many more in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Today the figure is 400,000 which still sounds impressive, but many of these hedges are so degraded that they have become “little more than a blunt, dwarfish lined of scarred and wind-scoured stumps”, as Hart writes despairingly.

On arable land, hedges are often seen as an obstacle for tractors, while on pastureland, farmers find it easier to put up a barbed wire fence than have a hedge separating livestock. Hart is sympathetic to farmers, who are not “the cartoonish villains of the countryside but, rather, hard-pressed food producers just trying to stay in business”.

But there’s no denying that replacing a bountiful hedge with barbed wire is a disaster for wildlife, which results in “no wild foods, berries, nuts, wild greens, or herbs . . . no shelter or habitat for birds and mammals, [nor] beneficial pollinators and insect predators.”

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MOST of the damage to the country’s hedges was done from the 1960s onwards when, incredibly, government actually offered subsidies for their removal. After 1973, the EU’s damaging Common Agricultural Policy was even more zealous in paying farmers to destroy ancient hedges.

If all this sounds depressing to anyone who cares about the countryside and its wildlife, Hart offers some practical solutions. Many hedges in private gardens are a single variety, like privet or beech; the author suggests that you rewild yours, by weaving honeysuckle and brambles through your hedge, making it far more attractive to insects.

And if you leave a little verge around the bottom of your hedge, all sorts of wildflowers might pop up, from orchids and buttercups to cow parsley and bluebells.

Above all, we are urged to cherish our existing hedges. Instead of spending a fortune on planting millions of new trees, which Hart says are “of low ecological value”, he would like the Government to allocate a fraction of that money to restoring hedgerows.

With better management of hedges, “we might not need to worry so much about insects disappearing, bird numbers falling or our targets for carbon capture. Our lovely native hedgerows would do much of the work for us, if we only look after them.”

Hart has his own 300 yards of “beautiful, unkempt, pullulating hedgerow” at his home in Wiltshire, and he has seen for himself how endangered birds such as redwings and fieldfares will eagerly flock to a hedge which provides nutritious wild berries for them.

Christopher Hart has written an eye-opening and inspiring book which will leave the reader with a deep appreciation of these wonderful habitats – and perhaps a desire to create their very own hedge. As he says: “You don’t need to go to the Serengeti to see amazing animals. You just need a good thick hedge.”

– Hedgelands by Christopher Hart is published by Chelsea Green, 208pp

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Environment, Government, Nature, Society, United Nations

The COP15 agreement in Montreal was a success, but it needs to be acted upon

COP15

Intro: The historic global agreement this month at the UN conference in Montreal, Canada, to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 is just the beginning. Governments and businesses now need to carry out the pledges made

THE COP15 agreement in Montreal, Canada, earlier this month, commits countries to implementing and funding ambitious global targets and national plans that can halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity. Our hopes of reversing the global crisis facing the natural world remain alive with the release of the new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). It puts us on course for a nature-positive world.

By setting a target to conserve at least 30 per cent of land, freshwater and the oceans by 2030, and by restoring 30 per cent of degraded land – while respecting the rights and leadership of indigenous peoples and local communities – governments have chosen the right side of history. If the promises made in Montreal are delivered, history will truly be made.

During the early stages of the convention, hopes were high that negotiators could secure a “Paris Agreement for nature”. Just as the Paris Agreement targets guided subsequent actions on the climate, the GBF and its aims can now drive action to restore nature. This substantive agreement must be the catalyst for action from governments, business and society where we must transition towards a future with more nature, not less.

During the symposium, one of the most contentious issues arising was the finance package to support conservation efforts globally. It is a major achievement that negotiators forged an agreement that could pave the way for the mobilisation of at least $200bn a year in nature financing by 2030. The agreement commits signatory governments to eliminating subsidies to fertilisers and other products and practices harmful to nature.

The importance of the GBF affording full recognition to the rights and roles of Indigenous peoples and local communities cannot be emphasised enough. Indigenous peoples make up just five per cent of the global population, but they safeguard 80 per cent of the world’s remaining biodiversity. It was vital that they were recognised in the agreement and their rights protected.

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