I’ve just returned from a most interesting trip to Yorkshire. First I had to visit the Yorkshire consulate in London where a nice man called Willie Eckerslike renewed my visa and made sure my jabs were up to date, notwithstanding inasmuch as which I set third fifth forth.
My first port of call was York itself, where I attended the inaugural meeting of PALAEO. This is the interdisciplinary Centre for Human Palaeoecology & Evolutionary Origins run under the auspices of the Hull York Medical School.
Interdisciplinary it certainly is – so apart from lectures on the hardcore stuff I’m used to hearing about – basic anatomy, palaeoanthropology and palaeolithic archaeology – there were some fascinating presentations addressing the kinds of questions that I don’t usually think much about in the context of human evolution, such as why it is that people will go out of their way to – quite selflessly – help a little cardboard robot cross the road; why people first started to make pottery; and how it is that we human beings eat quite so many different kinds of animals and plants. I have this suspicion that humans only became humans when they started incorporating large amounts of seafood into the diet, a suspicion borne out by this wistful graffito I saw in York, which is actually quite a step from the coast.
Some of the new directions in palaeoanthropology aren’t quite as new as I like to think. I was struck by one presentation on ancient DNA. It’s been a generation, said the presenter, since the first ancient DNA work was published. Cripes and Heavens to Betsy, I thought to myself – a generation? I published some of that early work. Now I do feel old. I looked around the room and it struck me that there are people walking around with PhDs who weren’t born when I started work at Your Favourite Weekly Professional Science Magazine Beginning With N: and also that one can become accustomed to the pace of change. When I started at Your Weekly Etcetera, DNA sequencing was only possible by very ingenious people rigging up machines made from old jam jars, bicycle pedals, egg boxes and miles and miles of sticky-backed plastic, all controlled by Sinclair ZX-80s, and even then they could only manage three nucleotides in any given fortnight. And now, thanks to fifth third generation sequencing technology of the kind that they routinely give away in cereal boxes, you can get entire gnomes genomes of extinct species from really very small pieces of bone.
After a night in York I went to the University of Leeds to interview Professor Jane Francis and her colleagues (to whom many thanks for their time and a lovely lunch) about their fieldwork experiences in Antarctica, for an article I’ve been commissioned to write for the University’s Alumni magazine. Yes, indeed, I am an alumnus of that fine institution (Genetics with Zoology, 1981-1984). I regret to say that I hadn’t been back to Leeds for at least twenty years, and visiting it felt very peculiar. Alighting from my car in the visitor’s car park I felt a mixture of excitement and nerves. Walking around for a couple of hours my mind was a stew of recollection, mixed in with dreams, as I came to terms with a campus on which so many things were recognisable, yet so much had changed.
I remember the lecture theatre block in the background – but where did all those trees come from?
The nostalgia was so overpowering I was quite overwhelmed and had to sit down and play with my iPhone (which has also been quite overwhelmed by iOS5 – ever since the Ascension of St Steve of Jobs, my iMac and iGadgets have become a little wayward.) I have this recurring dream, for example, in which I am anxious to visit the Combined Studies in Science office to check for mail in my pigeonhole. I had planned to visit the office for real as a way to itch this particular nocturnal scratch – but it’s not there any more. Either that, or I couldn’t find it. So now my recurring dream of anxiety at my need to unclog my pigeonhole will be overlain with another, of failing to find the office, and wandering around the campus with a vague sense of deshabille grenouille disorientation and loss. O, tempura tempora; o fugit.
I was last on campus in 1999, when myself and the Other Half ate lunch in the Refectory, a place previously reserved in my experience for Rory Gallagher gigs. I’ve just had a flashback to the Genetics Department “Childhood Heroes” Christmas Party 1982, when I dressed as Andy Pandy and won a prize.
Tell me more about the cardboard robot, it could be important.
I remember that Andy Pandy costume. The prize was well deserved. I also remember standing next to you in the Refectory at a Motorhead concert when you removed the cotton wool from one ear and exclaimed “Henry! This one’s got a tune!”
Motorhead played the Refectory at your University? Way cool.
Oh, yes. Leeds University was very big on the college circuit in those days as our correspondent Judi will also recall. Apart from Motorhead I saw Gillan (twice), Robert Plant, ZZ Top, Lindisfarne and the Blues Band, to mention but three. But just in case you thought we were irredeemable rockers, I also saw Elvis Costello, and bands like Wham!, the Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen (I think) would also come to town.
I had a ZX-80 in my younger years. Loved it to bits. Also an Atari 2600, for which I argued quite convincingly that it’s computing capabilities were worth the purchase, in addition to the alien zapping feature. But, yes please do tell about the cardboard robot. Sounds far more interesting than ancient ancient sequencing. I too am appalled by my continuing discrepitude, so some youthful intervention via said robot would be good right about now.
The cardboard robot story came up in a lecture by Dr Penny Spikins entitled ‘Passions within Reason: an archaeological model for the emergence of pro-social emotions’ in a more general discussion on altruism. Dr Spikins was discussing a conceptual art piece in which a robot was sent wandering around a town with a label attached saying ‘I want to go to such-and-such a place’. The robot was a pepperpot-sized piece of cardboard with a small motor and some wheels. Amazingly, people would go out of their way to point the robot in the right direction. In the discussion some people wondered whether they’d have been so willing had the robot not had a simple smiley face drawn on the front – this control hadn’t been done, sadly, as it was an art piece rather than a scientific experiment.
Henry, knowing what’s behind those trees, I think it’s clear why they’ve appeared – the where is, I suspect “from the ground”. I once played lazertag in the Roger Stevens.
I was back in Leeds last year. I waxed lyrical to GrrlScientist about Bookside, the second-hand bookshop in Hyde Park (well, the Hyde Park area not in the park itself, of course). So I dragged her out there only to find it have been knocked down in a process of
de-studentificationgentrification.Oh, and I saw Mötörhead at the Refec too. And Fish, on the day Nigel Lawson resigned.