Ancient aliens: America's divine intervention genesis myth about civilization and life itself

Having looked at the distinctly American genesis myth of our prehistory -- inhabiting the same land as dinosaurs and missing links, threatened by a volcanic rather than a diluvian apocalypse -- let's look at the other distinctly American genesis myth about our even deeper history. How did life itself ever come to be on Earth? It's actually the same myth regarding the birth of terrestrial civilizations, at a far later stage of our species' history -- being seeded by aliens!

In contrast to the creation myths of most cultures throughout the world and over time, ours does not dwell on the creation of the Earth itself, the stars, sky, oceans, and so on and so forth. You can believe in the Abrahamic universe-creation myth of the Old World, the Big Bang, or whatever else. Those inanimate things are taken for granted. What we really want to know is, how did life begin and get to where we human beings are today? And for us compared to other animals, how did civilized societies begin and get to where they are today?

The myth is not interested in evolution as much as the initial birth from apparent nothingness. Notice that the "cavemen and dinosaurs" myth doesn't say where primates came from -- they're just there, in media res of their drama. And the myth about the origins of life itself doesn't concern itself with any particular species that is present far later on, human or otherwise. Evolution is boring, while creation from nothing is interesting.

This is another stark contrast with the Old World creation myths, where human beings are created in their more-or-less current form (e.g., Adam and Eve). Sometime in the distant past, a creation of some kind occurred -- whether it was creating life where there was none before, or primates where there were only non-primate animals before, or hominids where there were only apes before, or human-like cavemen where there were only missing links before.

Somehow -- it doesn't matter how -- that initial creation led to us here today. We did evolve from earlier forms, but how that happened is irrelevant. How far back does the creation process go? And who if anyone was in charge of the initial creation?

Notice that this creation myth accommodates the 19th-century debates on the evolution of human beings. Not being an Old World culture, we never felt very threatened by the idea that homo sapiens evolved from earlier primate forms, rather than being created as we are now, back in the Garden of Eden, according to Abrahamic myth which took root in Europe during the Middle Ages via Christianization.

We have never had a national church, de jure or de facto (although during the mid-20th C., the United Methodist Church came the closest). Nor, therefore, any hierarchy of national church officials who could enculturate Americans in the Genesis creation myth. And no, contrary to clever-sillies, nothing is a "church" outside of Christianity. Academia is not a church, and the two most popular creation myths held by the general public -- Genesis for Christians, ancient aliens for non-Christians -- have taken deep root *in spite of* constant pressure by the hierarchical officials in the schooling sector to kill them off.

Nor is civic philosophy and dogma a "religion", let alone a "church". Church refers to a Christian institution, in contrast to mosques for Muslims, temples for Buddhists, etc. And all stripes of American civic philosophy and dogma are entirely silent about creation -- of the Earth, of life, of homo sapiens, etc. There's no primeval narrative of how things began, let alone one bringing supernatural or at least more-than-human actors and supervisors into the cast of characters.

And so, because we're not committed to where contemporary human beings came from, we can avoid the whole controversy arising from Darwin, who only says how things evolve once life-forms have existed, not whether or not there is a first created form of life and how that came into being. That controversy vexed all Old World religions, but not ours -- we're so new, we could just build in an agnostic stance regarding evolution at the beginning!

The Mormons -- America's global religion -- are also famously equivocating on evolution, with high officials officially saying don't ask, don't tell, it doesn't matter. What matters is the creation of life, the creation of god-like beings, the creation of civilizations in the New World, the appearance of Jesus in the New World, and so on and so forth. Don't worry about whether or how today's human beings descended from earlier primates.

Our creation myth also avoided the controversy about the Big Bang vs. static universe from the early 20th C., right as our myth was starting to take shape. Ours is not about cosmogenesis, unlike many other major religions and folk cultures, including Christianity. We could already sense that controversy as it was developing, so we built in an agnosticism about it from the outset. Only focus on the creation of life, humans, civilizations -- not the universe itself, stars, planets, and all that other inanimate and non-societal stuff.

* * *

The ancient aliens myth only began -- when else? -- during the 1890s, after our integrative civil war was wrapped up, and our ethnogenesis could get going for real, as in the lifespan of every empire. And where else could it have been born but out West? -- Flagstaff, Arizona, to be exact. Although hailing from a Boston Brahmin family, Percival Lowell used his wealth to build a world-class observatory in Arizona, where viewing conditions would be superior than back East -- but also because it would be more Romantically American to explore the next frontier of outer space, from our defining meta-ethnic frontier out West (against the Indians and later Mexicans).

Although later famous as the site that discovered the ninth planet Pluto, whose existence was predicted by Lowell, it was initially dedicated to the study of Mars -- specifically, what Lowell thought to be its canals. The overview of his vision of Mars can be skimmed in the Conclusion section of his book Mars (1895).

The canal structures suggested that not only was there water on Mars, there was life, it was intelligent, and it was advanced enough technologically, and organized in a socially complex way, as to complete irrigation projects.

If anything, he thought they were more advanced than anything on Earth -- inventing and using technology far beyond our own, and rising above petty partisan politics, to undertake such a planetwide project. He says that human beings are not even the highest of the mammals, putting us in our lower place relative to Martians. And he says Martians and their civilizations are far older than ours, Mars being an older and dying planet. These elements of the narrative are all necessary for the next step, where they intervene in Earthly matters.

He does explicitly state that life on Mars will likely have evolved into different forms from life on Earth, owing to the different environments they're adapting to. But that doesn't contradict a belief that they could have visited us in the past, seeded our civilizations, or even seeded life itself on Earth. It only requires them to have a somewhat different superficial form, and that we were not made entirely in their own image -- rather, at the abstract level of "life-form" or "intelligent life-form" or "civilizational being".

Although Lowell didn't go that far in his non-fiction work, a contemporary of his -- also a popularizing astronomer -- did in an early work of science-fiction, Garrett Serviss' novel Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898). Here, Martians are hostile to Earth, engaged in a War of the Worlds kind of battle with it. During one of their missions to capture slaves from Earth, 9000 years ago, they built the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Egypt (the Sphinx being made in the image of their leader).

While the Earth-battling Martians hardly resemble the benevolent steward / supervisor gods of later versions of the myth, this is still the beginning of the myth of ancient aliens directly intervening in the course of events on Earth, seeding a major civilization.

And true to our Europe-obscuring identity, Serviss located the ancient alien intervention in Egypt, not even an Indo-European culture like the Greeks, Romans, Celts, etc. That would have been too much of a Euro-LARP, so if it has to be set in the Old World, it must be within the Saharo-Arabian sphere (Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, etc.). This was decades before the Egyptian craze of the 1920s -- it's simply the most obvious solution to "Old World civilizational ancestor of America that is not related to Europe". The only others would be from the Far East, and that's too much of a stretch of the imagination, compared to the Fertile Crescent.

If you're an American, and want to learn a dead language to study our civilizational ancestors in the Old World, you want to learn hieroglyphics, cuneiform, or maybe Biblical Hebrew / Aramaic -- not Greek and Latin (back-East Euro-LARP). I'm sure the Saharo-Arabians find this imagined heritage of ours comical -- "you Faranji people come from Europe!" But we are American, and Americans are fundamentally not European, so no, we do not come from Europe. Where else could we have derived from in the civilized Old World? -- China? C'mon, the Fertile Crescent is far more believable than China...

* * *

After the European empires, aside from Russia, bit the dust after WWI, and became occupied by America after WWII, the American myth of ancient aliens began to take root in Europe as well. This process reached maturity by the late '60s, when Erich von Daeniken wrote Chariots of the Gods? It was soon made into a feature-length documentary movie, whose English dub you can watch on YouTube here.

This is far and away the best audio-visual telling of the narrative, with amazing photography, ethnographic portraits, voiceover, and conveying the sublime nature of the archaeological record. It's superior to the more plodding, meandering, and less artistic renditions associated with Rod Serling from the same time period (In Search of Ancient Astronauts, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, and The Outer Space Connection, all available on YouTube as well, but you can stick to the last one, which incorporates the first two).

I think von Daeniken being Swiss was important, since he was not part of a collapsed empire, and was not subject to the hangover effect that had wiped out native cultural innovation in the collapsed Euro empires. Similar to Le Corbusier in architecture, who was a footnote to the American pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright of many decades earlier, yet still more original and influential than the Bauhaus people from Germany and Austria (like Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer).

You can tell how well the Europeans had incorporated the American framework by their avoidance of their own European ancestors. The focus is on ancient Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, and New World cultures like the Maya, Tiwanaku, Easter Islanders, and so on. Nothing about China, nothing about Greece or Rome. The book, but not the movie, does include Stonehenge among its examples. Indeed, in the movie there's only a single passing mention of any Indo-European culture -- purported descriptions of ancient astronauts in the Ramayana of the Indo-Aryans.

From the ancient aliens narrative, you'd hardly know that there were people and civilizations in Europe during ancient and Medieval times! But that's unsurprising given its American origin.

Some local adaptations did work in their own history, such as the British movie Quatermass and the Pit (1967), in which contemporary people discover a Martian spaceship in the London Underground from millions of years ago, along with skeletons of primate ancestors just as old, the preserved remains of the insectoid Martians, and the revelation of Martian intervention in the evolution of the hominid lineage on Earth. That could be totally American, but the story also uses this Martian spaceship's effects to explain historical accounts of the devil, spectral phenomena, and other witchy goings-on -- within England, during the Medieval and Early Modern periods.

* * *

How about further back, to the creation of life itself on Earth? This view, strangely titled "directed panspermia", goes back to an American and Soviet collaboration (as in many other areas of 20th-C. culture, the only two empires left standing coincided, both sharing outsider status vis-a-vis the Early Modern Euro empires that defined high culture up until then). Namely, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovsky, whose 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe raised the possibility that extraterrestrial life-forms could have purposefully delivered life to Earth.

Where *those* life-forms are supposed to come from, who knows? And who cares? The genesis myth is only meant to account for the ancestry of us, the story-tellers, and perhaps our fellow animals. Just as we are not interested in cosmogenesis, we aren't interested in whether the alien race that seeded life on Earth was itself seeded by a third alien race, and if there was a prime mover alien race, and so on and so forth.

Likewise, American culture is not really concerned with the other direction of panspermia, whereby we would seed life on other planets. That is about our future, whereas this concept is really to account for our distant past.

For my money, the best telling of this myth is the 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Chase" (from the amazing season 6). It's not just a high-concept "what if?" story, but brings to life the excitement of high-stakes archaeological fieldwork, collecting clues, solving puzzles, and trying to stay one step ahead of your competitors in the race to the finish. This version is about the spread of humanoid life, not life in general, but that is to keep the focus on the ultimate subject of narrative interest -- us, not plants or viruses or whatever. If aliens could seed humanoid life, certainly they could send mold spores to other planets as well.

* * *

Redditards, Wiki-brains, and other midwits love to deride the ancient aliens creation myth -- creation of life itself, of humanoids, or of civilization -- as a "pseudoscientific hypothesis" or "conspiracy theory," terms that they never use for Adam & Eve, Noah / the Flood, the World Tree, Persephone and the harvesting cycle, and so on. By now, so many Americans believe, or are at least open to the possibility, of the ancient aliens story, that it cannot be a hypothesis -- common people don't know what a hypothesis is, how to test it, how to analyze results, weigh in on counter-arguments, etc. It's a story that you believe or don't, and science has nothing to do with it.

None of the most popular entries in the genre present the concepts in the manner of a scientific method, experiment, etc. On the surface level, they're trying to make sense of seemingly unbelievable phenomena, while on a deeper level they're trying to connect us with our distant ancestors through narrative, myth, and storytelling. And as such, there's little that "science" can do to push or pull anyone.

Very few people have "beliefs," let alone a system of beliefs. It's not about belief, in the sense of a theory. It's about whether the story gives meaning to that person, not individually, but as part of something larger than themselves -- to their distant ancestors, the chain of transmission up to the present, and the universe beyond our own world. It's more about emotional and social and cultural satisfaction, which nerdy arguments, "data", etc. cannot move one way or the other.

Exactly like Adam & Eve, Noah and the Flood, and other such myths from the Old World. It's just that, as with most clueless back-East academics and media-ites, they deny that America is a different culture from anything in the Old World. But just cuz we're a young civilization, doesn't mean we aren't distinctive, and these various origin myths -- Cavemen and Dinosaurs and Volcanos, Ancient Aliens, and the Book of Mormon -- are all a testament to that. They're as American as burgers and blocky buildings.

The rAtiOnAL SkEPtiCs who think they're smart or insightful for trying to deboonk origin stories involving aliens, are the same who labor fruitlessly to convince Americans that cavemen and dinosaurs never lived at the same time (somebody's never watched the Flintstones), that there was not a worldwide flood that destroyed all life except for Noah's Ark, etc.

The haters' arguments require no math, problem-solving, pattern recognition, specialized knowledge, breadth of knowledge, or anything like that. Any idiot can make them -- and plenty of total numbskulls and ignoramuses do.

What they are is autistic, not able to empathize with normal human beings, who have a deep need for the social / cultural / emotional satisfaction of belonging to something beyond their individual personal private self, across both time and space. Autists have a broken social lobe in their brain, and being incapable of empathy, they project their broken social lobe onto everyone else as well.

"Why would anyone want to feel connected to others across space and time? Nah, they must be making scientific-method claims subject to experimental testing..."

There's a heavy overlap between know-nothing rational skeptics and libertarians, both highly autistic and clueless. Libertarian morality is only about "avoiding harm and fraud", excluding matters of purity, sanctity, and taboo (Jonathan Haidt, The Moral Mind). So when they see a sacred narrative, they don't mind pissing all over it -- not as a vindication for their side of a debate, since there is no debate. They're cluelessly assuming the other side is involved in scientific claim-making, rather than cultural bonding through narrative and myth.

This is why no one regards them as smartypants or intellectuals, who happen to use their big brains for sacrilegious purposes -- they're just clueless midwits or dum-dums. It takes no IQ to piss on something sacred, it's entirely a matter of attitude.

And like typical self-centered semi-children, they pat themselves on the back for how clever they are, when it's only a matter of their attitude, not brainpower or knowledge, which are middling and spoonfed from some online midwit clearinghouse / group chat like Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.

Normal-brained Americans will keep alive the stories of "When dinosaurs towered over cavemen," "When Martians visited ancient Egypt," and the like.

Dinosaurs, cavemen, and volcanic disaster: America's prehistoric genesis myth

The root problem in American ethnogenesis is that we just got here, and where we came from was host to rival empires with their own already elaborated cultures. The solution has been to push into the background the period of time when those empires grew. So, ignore the Early Modern and most of the Medieval periods, and a good amount of the Ancient world as well.

As I've detailed earlier, American culture does allow some exceptions -- provided they avoid our European lineage. Mainly, this means drawing on our imagined connections to the Saharo-Arabian sphere rather than the Indo-European one. Ancient Egypt and Israel / Judah are more fundamental to American identity than Ancient Rome or Greece, and not because we're all Christian fundamentalists -- none of the Egyptian part of our culture is from Greco-Roman times or later, it's from the times of the pyramids, mummies, death masks, scarab beetles, hieroglyphics, etc.

But even Ancient Egypt falls within the historical record -- where did we come from before then? What is our prehistoric genesis myth?

Not in the Garden of Eden, not Adam and Eve, or anything else that is distinctly Old World-oriented, let alone from an existing Old World genesis myth (from the Old Testament). That would contradict our New World identity. Sure, maybe we ultimately came from the Old World, but our origins back there must somehow feel as though they were also right here. More lush and tropical, more beachy. And so far back in time that it trumps the Old World vs. New World population split -- perhaps so far back that the continents were all one big Pangaean landmass anyway, where the Old vs. New World distinction doesn't even exist.

But in any case, a stylized imaginary location much like the Garden of Eden, which does not come with a latitude & longitude measurement to pinpoint it for the audience. Shrouded in the mysteries of prehistory, but clear enough to be seen in its outlines.

In the American genesis myth, the land is lush and tropical, along with rocky mountainous areas, ringed by beaches, with no seafaring technology to take anyone far off into the ocean. Crucially, there is a volcano somewhere, whether it is prominent in the landscape or its downstream effects are (like cooled & hardened lava making up the rocky terrain).

Our primitive caveman ancestors do not inhabit this island alone -- an endless variety of dinosaurs tower over us, mainly as apex predators who prey on the cavemen (and lesser dinosaur species). Our caveman ancestors didn't have very advanced technology, for defense or offense, so they / we were always underdogs, unlikely Davids against the terrifying Goliaths.

In fact, there were other human-like primates there as well -- depending on the telling, some far more primitive and ape-like than our caveman ancestors, some a bit more advanced. But not human, in either case -- a rival hominid species.

As though there were not enough drama from the negotiations and battles among caveman tribes, and cavemen woo-ing cavewomen, and the struggle for survival against the dinosaurs -- when a climactic, apocalyptic event is called for, it is not water-related like the flood of the Old Testament, and there is no water-related vessel like an ark to navigate it.

Rather, it is fire-based -- a massive volcanic eruption, with lava flowing freely, fireballs raining down from the sky, the earth splitting apart to open fiery pits below, and depending on how long the event is followed, ash and smoke clouding the sky, depriving the lush vegetation of sunlight, and wreaking havoc on the landscape long after the initial explosion. In this large-scale destruction, the lumbering dinosaurs are left with nowhere to hide and sadly go extinct, while the nimble and clever cavemen -- some fortunate subset of them, anyway, who lend a helping hand to each other -- eke out an existence in the aftermath, ultimately to populate the entire world with human beings. (Likewise the other cute and clever mammals, though little attention is given to their fate.)

* * *

There is no single author or work that provides the outline for this genesis myth, but legends rarely do trace back to a single author. Similar stories are told, they catch on, are reworked, and nobody remembers exactly where they came from, or who they came from.

But in the interest of scholarly documentation, this genesis myth comes -- when else? -- after the integrative civil war in American imperial expansion, when our ethnogenesis really gets started. The earliest example I can find is D.W. Griffith's short film "Primitive Man" (AKA Brute Force), from 1914, following up on his dinosaur-free short film "Man's Genesis" from 1912. In a comical vein, there was also the 1915 short, "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy". Later animated shorts include "Felix the Cat Trifles with Time" from 1925, and "Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur" from 1939.

The myth would not be fleshed out in feature-length form until 1940, in the American movie One Million B.C., which was later remade in 1966 in American-occupied Britain, as One Million Years B.C., with Raquel Welch and Martine Beswick (now that'll get the ol' caveman nature a-goin'). The Brits, still under American influence after their own empire and culture bit the dust after WWI, followed up on their remake with a new example of their own, 1970's When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (starring recent Playboy Playmate of the Year, Victoria Vetri).

In between then, from 1960 to '66, the iconic TV series The Flintstones standardized the key element of dinosaurs and homo sapiens co-existing.

By the time of the 1983 Iron Maiden song "Quest for Fire", about primitive man, it had become obligatory to introduce the story with, "In a time when dinosaurs walked the earth..."

In later media, Japanese video games series of the 1990s like Bonk's Adventure and Joe & Mac depict cavemen and dinosaurs side-by-side, with dinosaurs as predators upon cavemen, and prominent volcanic landscapes (Bonk's transformation animation shows his head exploding like a volcano, too).

By now, this myth is so widespread and taken for granted that Wikipedia editors feel the need to "correct the record" -- to no avail -- by stating that it's an anachronism to depict hominids and dinosaurs living in the same time period. So clueless -- in American cultural works, it is *required* to show dinosaurs and cavemen side-by-side! They are fiction, legends, myths, not claiming to be pedantic documentaries or audio-visual textbooks. And so, the "dinos and grugs" image remains.

* * *

The stark differences between the American genesis myth and all others from our closest historical relatives (actual, not imagined) are obvious. That includes the Garden of Eden, the World Tree, or the Titans (dinosaurs only bearing a weak resemblance to them, due to their sheer size and ferocity, not in being proto-gods or super-humans).

But it also differs crucially from other European stories about dinosaurs and hominids found together, such as Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864-'7) or Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912).

For one thing, those stories never spawned an endless chain of development within Europe. Instead, they took root and multiplied in America, beginning with Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan (*not* a dino-centric series), who developed them in his Pellucidar series and Caspak series of pulp novels during the 1910s. He also pioneered the other side of our primitive-futurist cultural identity, in his Barsoom series, also from the 1910s, about life and adventure on Mars (including dinosaur-esque prehistoric beasts).

The main difference, though, is that the Europeans were not writing genesis myths -- they were set in the contemporary world, albeit in some undiscovered part of it, where prehistoric creatures had managed to survive into the present day. Perhaps far under the Earth's crust, perhaps some remote island -- but still, today. The American works I mentioned in the last section are all set in the very distant past, as part of an origin story. Lost world vs. prehistoric genesis.

Why didn't Jules Verne or other Europeans hit on the genesis approach? Because they already had secure genesis myths, from the Garden of Eden, the Roman Empire, Medieval chivalry, Early Modern gunpowder, global exploration, etc. They had no need to set their origin story 1 million years ago.

But Americans, needing to obscure our European and even Indo-European lineage, had to set our genesis myth in the very distant past, when dinosaurs walked the earth, alongside our caveman ancestors, with that volcano always looming in the background.

It also played up our out-West cultural origins, following the meta-ethnic frontier between us and the Indians, and later the Mexicans in the Southwest. There are no volcanoes back East, but there are closer to the Pacific Ring of Fire, Yellowstone, etc. Crucially, there are no active volcanoes in Europe proper, only in some Mediterranean islands. There are hardly any inactive volcanoes in Europe, for that matter. Western America is also where the dinosaur bone beds are. Not to mention earlier stages of human culture and civilization, among the Indians. Whether or not a given Indian tribe is hunter-gatherers, it's a hell of a lot closer to "primitive man" than any group of people in former European empires.

* * *

The centrality of these elements in our conception of who we are and where we came from, is shown by what questions we start asking about the Christian genesis myth, which itself is borrowed from the Second Temple Judaic myth.

What does the Bible have to say about dinosaurs, huh? Or "the fossil record" -- which means "dinosaur bones," not fossils of intermediate stages in evolution. Adam sure doesn't seem like a caveman -- are you *sure* this is the first human being? And what's all this about a catastrophic flood -- everyone knows the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor impact and/or volcanic eruptions.

This is not a midwit attempt to defeat mythology with empirical facts, evidence, science, reason, etc. -- it is one myth vs. another myth. Skeptics and atheists foolishly thought that Americans not buying into the Garden of Eden or Great Flood myths meant that they were fellow reddit-brains, when it really meant Americans had developed their own genesis myth that was sharply at odds with the Old World one. That's why we ignore the Wikipedia nerds complaining about the aNaCHroNiStIC depiction of cavemen and dinosaurs in the Stone Age!

Mormonism, the distinct American religion, still relies on the Garden of Eden myth, although being a young religion, perhaps they have enough time to issue "clarifications" or addenda to work the "cavemen and dinosaurs and/or other hominids" into their canon. They are much more neutral about evolution and missing links and our relationship with primates, and do not have many Young Earth types. So they could probably work dinosaurs and cavemen into their mythology better than Christians could.

Instead of Lucifer tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he's influencing one tribe or another among the population of One Million Years B.C., to act in evil ways to benefit themselves while harming others, acting in defiance of God's will in order to get a leg up in the competition against other tribes... perhaps killing too many dinosaurs, without being able to eat their meat, use their bones for construction, and so on. Irresponsible relationship with animals, especially if God had told them the dinos were sacred and not to be messed around with unnecessarily.

And by this point, dinosaurs *are* sacred animals in American culture, not only from our genesis myth, but lost world stories from King Kong to Jurassic Park, not to mention other icons like Godzilla (imported from Japan, who understands us more than any other foreign nation does), Barney, Yoshi (another one from Japan), the all-American '90s family sit-com Dinosaurs, "rawr means 'I love you' in dinosaur," and even the Dino Gura costume for the most famous vtuber (rivaling her shark theme in popularity).

Not too long ago, kids' snacks were made to resemble zoo animals -- but by now, they have to be dino nuggets, dino chips, dino egg candies, and so on and so forth. All part of enculturating our future generations into respect for the dinosaurs.

More than the bald eagle -- our nominal national mascot -- it is the dinosaurs who are our spirit animals. No one else had claimed them, since they had only recently been understood, as of the late 19th century, especially during the American "bone wars" between rival paleontologists (a term that still refers to "dinosaur bones" in common speech). Just the right opportunity for a young nation that wants to mythologize its prehistoric origins!

Bigfoot, our national cryptid, shows out-West center of American ethnogenesis

Returning to a favorite theme here, the western frontier as the incubator for American collective identity, have a look at this map of the most famous cryptids (legendary creatures) of each state.

Only one of them is nationally renowned -- Bigfoot / Sasquatch, from the Northern California / Pacific Northwest region, way out on the West Coast. No matter how hard the locals try to shill their own state's cryptids, the American people as a whole simply do not pay them any attention. Outside of the state in question, 99% of Americans have never even heard of these names, let alone what their defining features and narrative legends are. There is only Bigfoot.

Indeed, he is so central in our consciousness that the only foreign cryptid we have incorporated into our own culture is a variation on the Bigfoot theme -- the Yeti or Abominable Snowman, from the Himalayas. There is no historical continuity between the two, it's just that we're so obsessed with Bigfoot, we naturally chose something similar to popularize when we learned of it from a totally unrelated culture.

And contrary to lazy claims that all cultures have some kind of legendary figure like this, and that such legends trace back hundreds or thousands of years, Bigfoot did not exist in American culture before the mid-1800s, when we reached the West Coast and began interacting with the natives there, absorbing some of their legends, while putting our own spin on them over time -- and absorbing their proper names, like Sasquatch (from a Salish people's language). Bigfoot, with that name, became popular during the mid-1900s, and has since become an icon of American folk culture.

Why did Americans settle on an anthropomorphic cryptid for their national legendary creature, rather than a reptilian, avian, ghostly, plant-like, or other form? I think it's because Americans have shallow roots in this land, and we have always been insecure about the lack of ancient or prehistoric signs of human existence. We lack a compelling Genesis-esque origin narrative older than a few hundred years.

This has led to an American obsession with placing ancient Near Eastern civilizations in North America from ancient times themselves, thereby linking today's Americans all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, Israelites, and so on -- just their off-shoots that came to the New World before the Western European colonists of the Age of Exploration a mere 500 years ago. This is most notable in the origin narratives of the Freemasons, and one of their off-shoots that became America's only native global religion, with a mythological origin narrative in the New World -- Mormonism, which is yet another out-West innovation.

But that is human civilization. We are also insecure about the lack of ancient non-human ape-like creatures. Our European cousins have the Neanderthals, not to mention far older hominids inside and outside of Africa. To feel rooted in the deep history of this land, we really need some kind of "cave man" native to the New World, yet don't find much evidence, and certainly not one who we resemble.

Bigfoot allows us to both feel like we live where ancient hominids once lived -- or in fact, still do -- while not feeling out-of-place, since Bigfoot is not characteristically Native American, Amerindian, Eskimo, or anything like that. He resembles us, the descendants of European colonists, as much as he does the Native peoples who were here before us. Compared to Bigfoot, Native Americans and European colonists are equally newcomers, alleviating our anxiety about the Native Americans settling North America before we did by thousands of years -- which is an eye-blink on the deep historical time-scale where Bigfoot, or his ancestors, originated on this continent.

* * *

There's another anthropomorphic big hairy beast who acts as a protector of nature, and has been an American cultural icon ever since he was created in the 1940s -- Smokey Bear (who I always heard called Smokey *the* Bear), the mascot of American nature conservation, reminding us that "Only YOU can prevent forest fires". And sure enough, his origins are out West, signaled by his campaign hat, blue jeans, and bigass belt buckle.

Wide-brim hats, and his style specifically, are an out-West innovation in America, adopted by cowboys and the frontier military (including as well the frontier paramilitary in Canada, the Mounties, who originated in the Wild West of the Northwest Territories at the same time).

Blue jeans were created for cowboys and miners out West, spearheaded by Levi Strauss in San Francisco CA. Lee jeans originated in Kansas, and the only old jeans manufacturer from back East is Wrangler (NC).

Large decorative belt buckles come from cowboy culture as well, beginning at rodeo performances and other ritualistic events, but by now common in everyday wear.

These clothing markers all originate in the westward expansion against the Indians in the Plains and Rocky Mountain regions, during the second half of the 1800s. They are central to the construction of American national identity during that time and place, they are not some timeless trope that has found its way into our present culture.

Physical anthropology of orchestral musicians: jocks, not nerds

It's been a very long time since I got to see a professional orchestra IRL, probably the first time in adulthood. And in a Roaring Twenties picture palace, no less, where I could see them fairly well.

I was simply amazed at how corporeal their body types are -- perhaps not surprising if you think of playing a musical instrument as a kinesthetic activity, but I don't think most people do. And if they do, they don't think of a symphony orchestra as "that kind" of musical performance -- so much more brainy, therefore the performers should look the part, right?

All the women were butt women, not boob women -- and not just like they had relatively more around back than up front, we're talking bubbles and thighs so thicc you couldn't help but notice them from 50 feet away. I thought it was a group of gymnasts, dancers, shot-putters, and field hockey players. They were built like jocks, not nerds.

Some were more heavy-set, some more slender, but all were butt people. The strings section was more corporeal than the brass or woodwind section -- bigger butts, more corpulent bodies overall. Still, even the wispy French horn player was conspicuously bending over to arrange things on her chair, with her back to the audience, just like the butt girls in high school bend over their desks to get attention from boys (or the hot guy teacher).

I attribute that difference to how physical the activity is -- strings involve larger / longer motion of the limbs, namely the arm used for bowing. Brass and woodwind motor activity is more fine than gross, you can barely see them moving around at all.

I didn't notice any big difference within the strings section, as though the ones with a cello between their legs had to have more developed bodies than the violinists, or as though the upright bass players needed more leg & butt muscle to put into their standing activity. All of them have the same range of gross motor activity, i.e. their dominant arm that's bowing. Sitting vs. standing doesn't involve motion, and neither does opening vs. closing your legs while sitting.

Naturally the harpist was a meaty butt woman -- that instrument is huge, and requires full extension and contraction of both arms. While executing a glissando, she looks like one of those women who can start a pull-cord lawnmower. I'm guessing the women who play a lyre, which fits on your lap, don't look like they hang out at the squat rack in the gym.

I couldn't help but think of a certain WASP-y Twitter persona who mentioned how much she wanted to learn the harp, and also mentions her weightlifting activities and being a dumptruck ass-haver, all of which are out-of-place on the cerebral platform. (Except for being a Millennial, she'd fit in better with the TikTok accounts.) I won't name her because she probably blushes easily, this is just to provide further confirmation of the correlation. She would stand out as the blonde in the orchestra, though, so maybe she would opt for small cozy recitals, as blondes are evidently more prone to stage-fright.

The guys were similar to their female counterparts in the section, with a fair share of the cellists and bass players -- and the conductor himself -- having pot bellies, while the flautist looked like a twink. This is the only respectable profession that suits fat people.

Hardly any blondes, and this is the Midwest, so there's an ample supply of them in the general population. At least one fiery redhead, although I couldn't make out some of those toward the back, so there could have been another here or there. Blonde hair reflects a recent domestication event in Europe, so brown and red-haired Europeans are the wilder back-to-nature type. Neanderthals had red hair, too. I'll bet that, just like the case with popular music, the elite orchestral musicians in Sweden are way more brunette than the highly-blonde population at large.

Music is inextricably linked with dance, and both of those activities are kinesthetic and put us back in touch with our grug-brain past. Even the forms of it that are intended for -- and performed by -- an elite stratum of society, and are more graceful than lumbering, reflect the animal side of human nature, not the cogitating symbol-manipulating side.

The symphony and the ballet are ways for the modern commercial / financial elite, who are supposed to suppress their brute ancestry, to still indulge their animality -- on occasion, and provided it has the all-important gracefulness to keep the libido from getting out of control once it's started up.

To end on, after figuring out who was present, I was struck by who therefore was absent -- skinny queens, big-naturals, nerds, and all the other people who populate 95% of online platforms. Specifically, the type who if they do make or listen to music, it's always something with minimal musicianship behind it, and never danceable / moshable / headbangable -- indie, punk, lyrics-heavy rap (as opposed to crunk), etc.

Who also makes up 95% of music critics at any media outlet? Yep, the same two-left-feet-having cerebral type who sneer at fat people (anyone with a BMI over 20) as morally unclean and creatively bereft. So delusional -- but what else would you expect from people who are literally lost in their own thoughts for their entire lives?

Wordcels vs. shape rotators: differences in musical composition styles, favoring melody vs. harmony, and modern vs. primitive humans

The wordcel vs. shape rotator discourse makes me feel like we're right back in the late 2000s heyday of psychometrics blogging. So what better contribution to make than a dive into the archive?

Here is the first post, as well as a follow-up post, showing that a group's average cognitive abilities profile (i.e. wordcels vs. shape rotators) predicts their musical compositional style. Namely, the more wordcel they are, the more they emphasize melody, and the more shape rotator they are, the more they emphasize harmony. Click on those ancient links, which still work unlike most links of their age, to see which groups were surveyed (teaser: one of them is Ashkenazi Jews).

Homo sapiens are distinguished by our linguistic faculties, so all of us are wordcels to some degree, and all musical traditions have some degree of melodic emphasis. Being a shape rotator is more of a holdover from our pre-linguistic hominid history, more animalistic or savage or primitive. Not every group has a lot of it, and not a lot of musical traditions emphasize harmony or the "vertical" aspect of music.

To throw out some new ideas since those posts from 15 years ago:

Looking around the animal world, it's unusual for them to employ melodies to the exclusion of harmonies -- songbirds being the only major exception. Typically their musical-ish vocalizations are more like layers stacked in a chorus, without much of a serial change in pitch, no elaborate riffs or phrases. Crickets chirping, wolves baying, even human-domesticated species like sheep baa-ing and cows moo-ing, and so on and so forth.

It makes me wonder whether spatial ability and harmonic music were gifted to certain human populations by the Neanderthal and Denisovan species (cousins of Neanderthals) with whom they interbred after leaving Africa. Those species were big-skulled, big-brained shape rotators with comparatively meager verbal abilities.

Sub-Saharan Africans have none of those non-human admixtures (they have a different archaic admixture, from within sub-Saharan Africa), and they're the least harmony-focused in making music. Perhaps something in their distinct musical traditions (polyrhythms?) owes something to the archaic species with whom they interbred as well, though we don't know so much about that one as we do about Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Although humans are distinguished by our verbal abilities, when taken too far to the extreme, we become disembodied minds, no longer corporeal bodies. It leads to Rube Goldberg machines that end up doing in their clever-silly creators. We need some degree of rootedness in our pre-linguistic animal past, in order for our lives to feel meaningful and fulfilling.

That's why New Age music is so heavy on the harmonic aspect of composition -- it's not just the inanimate ambient sounds that lack melody (rain falling, waves lapping, wind gusting, fire crackling, etc.), it's the "music" of other non-human creatures that are mostly layers of a chorus. Re-connect with the primitive animal within, by sliding that Gregorian chant disc into your CD player, as a chorus of raindrops comes to sing a lazy-day carol at your window...

Insect-borne pathogens enrich picture of dynamics of diseases spread by shared medium, not encounters between sick and healthy

In this next installment of the revival of anticontagion theory, we'll zoom out to see how broad the class of diseases is that are described by the model. We want as general of a picture as we can manage, so that aspects of one sub-group can clue us in to what's going on in another group that's less well understood.

We've already covered a classic non-contagious disease like cholera, which is transmitted via a contaminated shared medium (i.e. water), into which the sick shed pathogens, and from which the healthy consume them, not through a sick and a healthy individual having an encounter. And we've shown that coronaviruses infecting humans and bats -- including the one causing SARS-2 -- are another textbook case, where they are spread through the medium of indoor air, not encounters between sick and healthy.

Now we return to the other major diseases that motivated the 19th-century debate over how diseases were spread -- plague and yellow fever. These are borne by insects (fleas and mosquitoes), which bite a sick person and thereby become carriers of the pathogens in the sick person's blood, then travel to a healthy person, bite them, and transfer these pathogens, making this person sick. We can add malaria and others to the list.

But first, there is one insect-borne disease that was classified as contagious -- i.e., spread through encounters -- even by the anticontagionists way back in the 19th C., which means we ought to consider treating it as such today as well. That is typhus (not to be confused with typhoid fever), which is spread by the human body louse. It was known to spread from one person to the next who were in close contact with each other in crowded settings like jails, hence the nickname "gaol fever".

What distinguishes typhus from all the others is that its insect carrier is not very mobile between human hosts -- unlike fleas that jump long distances, and which are riding on the backs of rats from one place to another, and unlike mosquitoes and flies that can fly long distances. The body louse only walks or crawls around a single host (their body and their clothing), so that the next host must be very close in order to crawl from one to the next.

This requires an encounter between a sick and a healthy person, so it behaves like other contagious diseases. For example, it does spread more as a function of higher population density, like in jails.

So technically, the diseases described by the shared-medium model are "mobile" insect-borne diseases, but I will drop that qualifier as too cumbersome, now that it's understood.

* * *

Recall what the shared-medium model is tracking -- not only susceptible, infected, and recovered individuals, but also the concentration of the pathogen within the medium. I'll put up the formal mathematical model, and analyze it, later. First we're just getting all the conceptual stuff covered, so that the model will be motivated and make sense the first time around. Presenting the equations etc. first, and then explaining the details of it all, is putting the cart before the horse.

What, then, is the "medium" for an insect-borne disease? Why, the entire local population of the relevant insect. It may sound strange to describe it as a medium, since unlike water and air, people do not rely on mosquitoes, flies, and fleas to go about their daily business. However, those insects do rely on us for their survival -- so we very much come into inevitable contact with those species, even if it's them seeking out us rather than the other way around.

And by adding up a bunch of individual insects into an entire local population, they are like drops of water that add up to the entire local public water supply, or molecules of air that add up to the entire local volume of indoor air. The number of insects carrying the pathogen, as a share of their entire local population, is the same as the concentration of cholera particles in the water supply, or coronavirus particles in the indoor air of some locale.

A sick person "sheds" their pathogens into the medium by getting bitten by the insect, like someone with cholera excreting into the water supply, or someone with a coronavirus breathing into the air of an indoor building. Then a susceptible person comes into contact with this medium by being bitten by an insect. If it is a carrier, it's as though the person were drinking contaminated water or breathing contaminated air. If it's not a carrier, it's as though they were drinking a virus-free cup of water or breathing from a virus-free pocket of air.

Not every insect is a carrier, just as not every drop of water in the system contains cholera, and not every pocket of indoor air contains coronavirus. But as the concentration of the pathogen in the medium increases, it becomes more likely that a susceptible person will become infected by "consuming" or coming into contact with the medium.

There are differences among these shared-medium diseases, such as those whose medium is mobile -- running water in a public supply, jumping and flying insects -- vs. fairly fixed in place -- stagnant indoor air, slow crawling insects. But this is only a difference of degree, not kind, so we don't need multiple models to cover them. There will be a parameter for how frequently a sick person, or a susceptible person, comes into contact with the medium -- which will be higher for the mobile-medium diseases, and lower for the fixed-medium diseases.

* * *

What lessons can we learn from insect-borne diseases, when looking at the prospect of dealing with SARS-2 or other respiratory diseases? Crucially, a vaccine is unlikely to solve the problem, and solutions will have to affect other parts of the environment to purify the medium -- or eradicate the medium altogether, if it's not beneficial for us anyway (like fleas and mosquitoes, and unlike air and water).

Even the non-mobile insect-borne disease, typhus, lacks a vaccine. And so do the other big ones spread by mobile insects, like malaria and plague.

The sole exception is yellow fever, but that vaccine is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent outbreaks. The US and places under its control -- like the Panama Canal and Cuba -- eradicated the disease during the early 1900s through changing the environmental conditions. Namely, improved sanitation, spraying residences with pesticide, preventing stagnant water from forming (where the mosquitoes lay their eggs), and disrupting stagnant water by spraying it with oil. Control or eradication of the insect species remained the primary method of combating the disease during the Midcentury, when DDT was widely used.

A vaccine was developed by the 1940s, but was secondary at best even then, and did not play any role during the eradication of the early 20th C. It was beaten back in tropical regions as well, primarily through changing the parts of the ecosystem affecting the mosquitoes, not through mass vaccination of the human population.

Yellow fever has in fact reemerged as of the 1980s, despite availability of the vaccine, which does well in clinical studies but whose effects are evidently overwhelmed in the changing real-world ecologies of the past several decades. Since the most parsimonious explanation of the rise and fall of the disease up through the early 20th C. does not include the vaccine in the picture, we don't need to invoke it during the recent resurgence either.

Over the past 30 or so years, urbanization has skyrocketed in tropical regions, and since humans are the food source for mosquitoes, this has led to a surge in the mosquito population in those areas. With more mosquitoes swarming around, people come into contact with the medium far more often than before. Overcrowding strains the public water supply, so more people store their own water in large tubs near their house, which makes them stagnant and perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Overcrowding strains sanitation services as well. These regions are a lot filthier than they used to be.

And perhaps just as importantly, pesticide use has fallen off a cliff, especially DDT. Pesticides are like a vaccine in that their widespread use will trigger a co-evolutionary arms race, where the target adapts by becoming resistant to the obstacle. Pesticides and vaccines also have side-effects on people, which must be weighed against their benefits.

Why shared-medium diseases are so hard to control via vaccines is a separate matter, which I'll speculate on sometime later. The point for now is simply that they are, and therefore we should not expect vaccines to do much work in controlling respiratory diseases, which spread through shared indoor air volumes, whether SARS-2 or anything else.

Improving sanitation and disrupting other parts of the transmission cycle -- before a susceptible person comes into contact with the already contaminated medium -- is the only reliable way to solve these problems. Draining stagnant water areas so mosquitoes can't breed, poisoning the rat population so plague-carrying fleas have no vehicles to get close to people, separating outgoing and ingoing water supplies to prevent cholera from passing from sewage to drinking water, and ventilating indoor spaces as much as possible to prevent respiratory pathogens from filling up the air.

SARS-1 and MERS coronaviruses spread via contaminated medium (indoor air), not encounters; beating respiratory "diseases of civilization" requires superior ventilation

Brief navigating note: I've added a new category tag for all posts in this ongoing series about diseases that are supposedly transmitted via encounters, but which are in fact transmitted via a contaminated shared medium. It's "Neo-Anticontagionism" -- "contagion" referring to contact and touching, i.e. close encounters, as the way diseases are spread. It appears at the end of every post in the series, as well as in the sidebar on the right called "Category Index". I don't know how long the series will be, but it's important and distinctive enough to put it all in one convenient place.

This post will look at the two most famous coronaviruses aside from SARS-CoV-2, which also cause acute and severe respiratory symptoms in human beings, namely SARS-CoV-1 (causing the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak of the 2000s), and MERS-CoV (causing the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak of the 2010s).

I'm sure the broad lessons about transmission from these three well-studied cases will generalize to other coronaviruses that infect humans, it's just that these three have received a lot more attention and funding to study compared to the coronaviruses that cause less severe symptoms.

* * *

If SARS-CoV-1 were spread through encounters, then it should have crossed the species barrier outdoors, since bats (the virus' reservoir) have encounters with other species outdoors. In fact, of all their inter-species interactions, most take place outdoors because when they are indoors roosting, they are far within the depths of their protective caves, where only their fellow bats and some cave-dwelling animals live.

Also, the list of species to whom bats transmitted the virus should resemble those whose habitats are close to, or overlap with, the habitats of bats. Those would be the species with 1 degree of removal from the reservoir -- of course it could then be spread to other species in contact with the 1-degree species but not the bats themselves. But a 1-degree ring of species around bat-colonized caves should be identifiable.

In reality, the other species that bats gave SARS-CoV-1 to were localized within a single market in Guangdong, China (see here). These multiple inter-species crossovers could not have easily happened in the wild, given their vast and not-so-overlapping range of habitats. But when they are all concentrated into a single place, by people who trade in wildlife of various habitats, then these crossovers with multiple species are easy.

The market was not for dead animals being sold for food or their pelts, but a live-animal market for wildlife. It was enclosed and informal, not an open-air market, nor one with advanced HVAC and filtration systems to achieve aircraft-levels of ventilation. So an infected individual was alive, exhaling into the fairly stagnant air volume, from which all the other individuals -- of whatever species -- were inhaling.

As we saw with SARS-CoV-2, the alternative model of "high population density and more frequent encounters" can be ruled out by the specifics here. Namely, because the animals were being sold, they were all caged and grouped by species -- here's a section with a bunch of palm civets, there's a section with raccoon dogs, and so on. Some sellers would only have one of these species for sale, preventing contact with other species.

The density / contact model could only explain the spread among individuals grouped tightly together -- this particular grouping of palm civets in this particular seller's stall. Or if that seller had palm civets and raccoon dogs grouped next to each other, then among that combined population. The animals are not roaming around the market, so they cannot spread it through encounters with any other animals in a different stall.

The only mobile species that could transfer the virus from one place to another within the market is humans -- some guy spends a lot of time in close contact with animals in one place, wanders somewhere else, and spends a lot of time in contact with other animals. However, that would implicate customers or shoppers who spent a long time browsing around the market -- but in fact, it was the workers of the market who made up most of the SARS cases, and they spend most of their time in their own stall tending to their own population of animals. They are the least mobile and free-ranging of the humans in that market.

These facts can be explained, though, by the model of a contaminated shared medium, namely a poorly ventilated indoor air volume. The virus particles get an initial impulse when pushed out of the lungs during exhalation, so they can coast or glide for awhile, in addition to their movement by diffusion. They can -- and do -- travel through space, without needing an infected individual to move around as their vehicle. When an animal, of whatever species, inhales these particles that have traveled far from their source, they get infected in turn -- without an encounter.

That explains why multiple individuals of one species get it, why the same species gets it no matter whose stall they're in, and why multiple species get it -- all of them are connected by the shared volume of enclosed, stagnant air. It also explains why workers get it more than shoppers -- they spend far more time immersed in the market's enclosed air volume.

* * *

MERS-CoV got less attention because the SARS-1 outbreak happened in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax outbreak, which primed everyone to be more vigilant about a novel respiratory disease that could be spread by terrorists or hostile foreigners. That post-9/11 mood had faded by 2005 or so, and by the time of the MERS outbreak in 2012, it had all but dissipated -- even though this new disease was coming from Saudi Arabia and had the phrase "Middle East" in its name. And ISIS was chopping off heads, not using bioweapons, so there was nothing big in the background to make people pay special attention to MERS.

But it did get scholarly attention because it was another new coronavirus infecting humans, so maybe it could shed light on SARS and help us prevent any further coronavirus epidemics. Nope! They drew the wrong lessons, based on the reigning false model of diseases spread through encounters, and here we are now with SARS 2.0. Again, the current coronavirus is not deadly enough to need to stop society in order to solve it, but the people investigating SARS and MERS should have been able to prevent it, or at least deal with it based on reality after it was already unfolding, rather than continue to treat it as a person-to-person encounter disease, instead of the contaminated shared medium disease that it so obviously is.

MERS' reservoir is a microbat species that prefers shelter while roosting, as usual. (It does have an unusually cool name, though: the Egyptian tomb bat.) The main species it has crossed over to is dromedary camels, and to a lesser extent humans.

With their usual contagion-theory blinders on, researchers focused on the fact that a man who had died of MERS had been in close contact with a camel that was also infected, indeed he had been applying medicine to its nose which showed strange secretions. The inference is that the virus was present in the nasal secretions, the man touched these secretions, and then his own nose or face, which sent it into his lungs, spreading the disease through a close-contact encounter.

But how the hell did the camel get it from the bat? Did a healthy camel sniff a sick bat's secretion-oozing nose? Or maybe the bat felt mischievous and targeted the camel, smearing its nose on the poor camel's nose, while taunting him with, "Now you got my gerrrrms, now you got my gerrrrms!"

C'mon, people.

One team came close to the truth, when they found MERS-CoV in an air sample collected from the barn of a camel-owner who had come down with MERS, and whose camels were sick with MERS (see here). This proved it could be airborne, that it could stably aerosolize, and that it was at the scene of the crime at the right time.

But as usual, airborne or aerosolized respiratory diseases were treated as spread through close contact, i.e. the proverbial "cough or sneeze in the face". "Proverbial," and yet an act which has never actually happened between two individuals of any species, at any time in our planet's existence. However, it is required by the ideology of ballistic / encounter-based models, so it simply must happen so frequently as to be proverbial.

And again, how could the camel get it from the bat? The human owner was close to the camel -- close enough to be applying medicine to its nose. OK, maybe it spreads directly in an airborne way over a distance of several feet. But bats roost way up on the ceiling of the barn, or high up on one of the walls. The bat was not roosting within several feet of the camel's head. Therefore, close contact (airborne or otherwise) is ruled out.

Only the shared medium model explains the multi-species crossovers. The bat finds a structure where it can roost, and this camel barn is poorly ventilated like all houses for livestock. While roosting, it exhales into the stagnant enclosed volume of air in the barn. While not roaming around outside, the camels stay in the barn breathing that air. The human owner of the camels also spends time in the barn doing various chores, breathing that air -- whether or not the bat is there at that time (it could be out foraging), and whether or not the camel is there at that time (it could be out grazing). Other humans could enter the barn, for that matter (such as a guest who is just chatting with the owner, while both are inside the barn).

Since the aerosolized virus particles get both an initial boost during exhalation, as well as diffusion, they can travel from way up where the bat is roosting, to where the camel is resting, or where the human is doing his chores. The stagnant indoor air connects them all.

A later review article (see here) provides further confirmation of the shared medium model, although it is not aware of that. It looks at various factors to explain why MERS is emerging in the Arabian peninsula during the 2010s. One major factor they point to is the sedentarization of nomadic pastoralists, owing to the immense wealth that the Gulf states (such as Qatar) began to enjoy after nationalizing their oil and gas supplies (mostly completed by the 1970s), and as they began to spend some of that wealth to encourage the nomads within their populations to settle down, so the state could better administer them.

Camels that are part of a nomadic herd do not spend any time at all inside of an enclosed volume of air. There are no permanent structures for dwelling or gathering, and even the tents that are put up temporarily are for people and their things, while the camels rest outside of them. Only when nomads begin to sedentarize, do they build permanent dwellings for their livestock, like barns.

Bats are not drawn to roosting near nomadic herds, since there is nothing for them to hang from on a regular basis. Perhaps their tents -- but those are only good for a short while, and then they're gone. Bats want a reliable den to provide security, not having to tag along with a nomadic group, which would be far and few between. Only the sedentarization of the nomads would bring a structure that would tempt the bats to roost inside of -- the barn (and perhaps the human owner's home, although that space is more vigilantly policed by its dwellers).

Notice again the inability of the contact / encounter model to explain these facts that attend sedentarization. Camels and their owners are in close contact all the time when they are nomadic -- being ridden, being tended to, being shown affection, being milked, and so on and so forth. Whatever pathogens infect camels, have ample opportunity to cross the species barrier to humans. And yet, no MERS-like crossover events among nomadic camel-owners -- only when they settle down and build barns, which does, however, introduce a shared medium that could become contaminated (indoor air).

Contact theory could explain why bats don't spread disease to camels in nomadic settings, because they have no close encounters outside of barns. But the shared medium explains this as well, in addition to all the other crucial facts.

* * *

Let's end with a return to the grand historical view, in which I think most respiratory "diseases of civilization" adapted themselves to the shared mediums that only arose with sedentarization, such as the indoor air of buildings (akin to waterborne diseases arising with public water systems). The case of MERS shows this in-tandem development unfolding in real time, as nomads settled down and instantly got stricken with an infectious respiratory disease.

Pathogens that travel through a respiratory route have almost no chance of spreading in epidemic fashion among nomads, because the currents of a fresh-air environment will scatter them quickly, rather than allow them to build up within a highly-visited space.

Adapting ourselves, and our livestock, to these sedentary environments requires sanitizing them. Not by spraying antibacterial disinfectant on all surfaces -- that's not how they spread. But by treating the medium with a pathogen neutralizer (that has no bad side effects), or creating some kind of current that will carry the pathogens quickly away, or separating outgoing from ingoing channels of that medium.

In the case of contaminated indoor air, the solution is improving ventilation and filtration, to such an extent that earlier times will look as backward as we presently view the public water systems of the pre-20th-century West.

Coronaviruses spread via enclosed air, from bat caves to indoor buildings, not via encounters: a window into respiratory diseases of civilization

To recap the project I've stumbled onto, most diseases thought to be transmitted through personal encounters are in fact spread through a contaminated shared medium, into which a sick individual emits pathogens, and from which a healthy person takes them in -- without needing to be in the same place at the same time, perhaps never coming close to encountering each other during their entire lives. See here for the overview based on the case of 19th-C. cholera in Europe, and here for the contemporary example of SARS-CoV-2 (causing COVID-19).

This post will briefly look at the non-human origin of coronaviruses that now infect humans, and how their transmission dynamics can shed light on how they circulate within a human population.

Recall the most important fact about the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 -- it never occurs outdoors, but only indoors, especially where ventilation is poor. This means the particles are suspended in a stagnant air volume, much like a pond of stagnant water. A sick individual exhales particles into the enclosed air volume, and at some other time, perhaps after the original sick person has left the building, someone else enters the building, immerses themselves in the now-contaminated air volume, and breathes the particles in, becoming sick in turn.

All of these coronaviruses that infect humans ultimately come from pathogens infecting bats. (A separate family of coronaviruses originated in rodents, and infect pigs and other livestock, but via a fecal-to-oral route).

What do bats do? They roost -- hang upside-down while not active, and seek shelter when they are so vulnerable. The large bats that could take on predators may roost in forests, but the microbats that are too small to defend themselves mano-a-mano, roost in more defensible environments like caves. Human-infecting coronaviruses come specifically from these microbat species.

What is a cave? A great big "indoor" enclosure of air, with minimal ventilation inside, and whose opening to the outdoors is small relative to the size of the interior. Ventilation is basically zero where the bats roost -- not right inside the entrance, which would make them easy pickings for predators, but deeper back into the recesses of the cave.

Crucially, these caves are communally shared -- it's not like each bat or its family has its own detached bat-cave like Batman does. There are a whole bunch of them in there, coming and going without any bouncers to regulate the entrance. So the cave air is not only stagnant, but acts as a public medium that connects all of the individual bats that exhale into it and inhale from it, much as a stagnant pond of water connects all of the fish that swim within it -- or all of the ducks that feed from it (but that's for a later post on the non-encounter-based spread of influenza!).

So, one infected bat exhales while roosting in the cave, and the virus particles become aerosolized -- they are part of that air volume, just as inseparable from it as the oxygen. Healthy bats inhale air from this now-contaminated medium, not necessarily right next to the original sick bat. The virus particles travel by diffusion, which is slow, but they also start off with an initial impulse coming from the pressure that the lungs exert to expel the air from within the bat into the surrounding air (even more oomph in that initial burst if the sick individual has a cough or sneeze, as in humans).

The end result is that virus particles spread to regions of the cave far away from the source bat. It doesn't matter if it takes awhile for this spread to happen -- the sick bat is holed up in there roosting for hours on end, day in and day out, and the same is true for the healthy bats. A healthy bat may have a preferred roosting spot that is "far" from the roosting spot of the sick bat -- outside of the distance that a typical breath, cough, or sneeze immediately reaches -- but given some time, those particles can travel to reach him, too. Proximity is not needed.

However, couldn't you explain this indoor transmission by appealing to population density, which is required by the direct contact / encounter model? I.e., if transmission happened through encounters, such encounters are more likely when individuals are packed more tightly into the same space. So a bunch of bats roosting in clusters could be spreading it to each other through close encounters, not through a medium like the stagnant air.

But there are two facts that rule against this alternative explanation. First, it only says that transmission would be greater inside the cave than outside of it -- not that outdoor transmission would be near zero. And bats do in fact encounter other bats, and other species, outside of caves, for enough time to breathe near them and pass along pathogens. And yet spillover from bats to other species only takes place where the two species share an indoor air volume (typically poorly ventilated), such as an indoor market or restaurant. Not out in the wild.

And second, these coronaviruses should also be endemic to the macrobat species that roost in trees rather than caves. They also hang around for hours on end, and in clusters where they are in close proximity to one another. The difference is that these environments have superior ventilation, being outdoors. A really dense forest with leaves enshrouding the branches, or that form a canopy and "walls", could be somewhat of an enclosure, blocking the totally free flow of air. But even that is much more open to air currents than caves.

And forget about it if it's anything other than a tropical rainforest. Bats that roost in trees like you see in a typical park are not immersed in an enclosed volume of stagnant air at all. No structure is enclosing the trees, and the branches and leaves of the tree itself leave lots of open space in multiple directions to the "outside" world.

So much else is shared between the microbat and macrobat species' physiologies, that it should be trivial for coronaviruses to plague the tree-roosting macrobats -- and yet it's only the poor cave-roosting microbats who are beset by coronaviruses. Only the model of a shared medium can account for that, not the encounter / density model.

If some disease were spread among macrobats in trees, it would be the tree that was the public medium connecting all of the individuals. Perhaps if a pathogen they picked up on their feet penetrated the tree bark and spread from one branch to another, where it infected another bat who was roosting far from the original sick bat. But not a pathogen that travels through the respiratory route -- there's no enclosed medium of air in a tree.

That wraps up the proof that coronaviruses among bats are transmitted not through encounters, close contact, and higher density, but through a contaminated shared medium.

We can draw a further lesson, though, by noting that a pathogen is far more likely to cross a species barrier if the new ecology is similar to the old ecology. Fewer selective sweeps of random mutations would be needed to adapt the pathogen to its new host species.

So, is there any similarity between the environments that cave-roosting bats inhabit, and human beings? Well, if those humans have sedentarized and spend enough of their time within enclosed structures, especially ones that are shared with multiple other people. Not hunter-gatherers, and probably not nomadic pastoralists. But agrarian and industrial societies? Absolutely. I think that's what the respiratory class of the "diseases of civilization" are -- pathogens adapted to stagnant indoor air of shared buildings, scarcely different from those infecting untreated public water supplies that arose with sedentary agrarian societies.

And sadly for the animal species we have domesticated, these conditions apply to their structures as well. Unless they belong to purely nomadic pastoralists, they spend a fair amount of time within an enclosed building of some kind -- a barn, a stable, a doghouse, something. Both to corral them into an easily manageable place, rather than chase after them individually, but also to protect them from predators, and provide shelter from the elements.

And in an even sicker twist of fate, their human owners spend a decent amount of time in those animal buildings as well -- they aren't like a detached guest house, where the livestock do their own thing and take care of themselves. Human beings enter those animal buildings to tend to their needs, spending a fair amount of time immersed in the same stagnant volume of air as their animals. Crucially, humans enter the animal building even when the animals are not there -- to clean the place up, to restock the animals' feed, and other barn chores.

That sharing of stagnant air is the route through which a respiratory pathogen crosses the species barrier between humans and their domesticated livestock -- not direct contact or close encounters, since the sick animal could be outside the barn at the time their human owner is inside it doing chores. But the stagnant volume of air containing aerosolized virus particles is still there, even when the animals are out and about, due to limited ventilation.

In the next post in this series, we'll look specifically at two more coronaviruses that have crossed from bats to humans, and perhaps some intermediate species along the way. Namely SARS-1 and MERS. Both cases confirm the model of transmission through a contaminated shared medium rather than encounters between the sick and the healthy.

Standard national dialect arises from those undergoing ethnogenesis along meta-ethnic frontier

National languages, such as Spanish and English, are spread by imperial expansion across nations. But within the home nation, how does one dialect of Spanish become the standard one within Spain, or one dialect of English the standard within Britain (or within America)?

This post will present the overview, and future posts in this series will be case studies of a specific expanding group and their standard dialect.

First, what causes some peoples to launch expansionist empires is covered by Peter Turchin in his mass-audience book War and Peace and War — namely, soaring levels of in-group solidarity (asabiya, borrowing a term from Ibn Khaldun). It requires massive cooperation to conquer other nations and maintain an empire, and lack of cooperation makes you vulnerable to being conquered. That solidarity itself is a response to conquering pressures bearing down on them for a long while. As various neighboring groups all come under the pressure of a single invader, they are forced into gradually banding together for common defense.

Crucially, such groups lie at the enduring boundary between the invader and the native groups. If they get quickly swallowed up by the invasion, they submit and become subjects, however much they may grumble about it. And the effect is most potent when the boundary is a meta-ethnic frontier — where the difference between Us and Them is extreme rather than minor in degree. Different language, different clothing styles, different subsistence mode (e.g., agrarian vs. pastoralist), different religion, different anything salient between an in-group and an out-group.

For example, the people around Rome were forced into solidarity in response to the expanding Celts, particularly after their hometown got sacked. The Alps were a boundary or buffer — those on the mainland European side of the Alps were all overrun by the Celts, but those on the other side, in the Italian peninsula, had some breathing room and time to prepare. Once the Celts crossed the no-man's-land of the Alps, it sent the Romans into panic mode. Those further to the south did not have to worry as much about the Celtic invasion, and they did not consolidate the peninsula behind them.

The area around Rome also bore the brunt of a separate invasion from the south, from the expansionist Carthagenians (Phoenicians who had set up base across the Mediterranean from Rome, in North Africa). That only accelerated the trend of Roman ethnogenesis that had begun in response to Celtic pressures.

Both out-groups were highly different from Romans — it was not as though the marginally different southern Italians were invading central Italy. The Celts spoke a language from a separate branch of Indo-European, and the Carthagenians did not speak Indo-European at all (Semitic). Likewise their religions: Celts and Romans shared a distant ancestor due to being Indo-Europeans, but they had differentiated by that point, not to mention the Greek influences on Roman religion that were absent among Celts. And Carthagenians were even more different, following a Levantine religion, without the Indo-European core. Romans were more sedentary, Celts were semi-nomadic pastoralists, and the Carthagenians were semi-nomadic along the coastline as sea-farers.

Being caught between these two wildly foreign invaders forged the Romans into a strongly cohesive nation, from the 4th century BC onward. They were the ones within the Italian peninsula to unite the rest of the neighboring groups, to repel both sets of invaders, and to ultimately launch an expansionist empire of their own, which would conquer the lands of their former invaders.

That expansion spread their national language, Latin, across a wide swath of territory, and in a fair amount of those lands people still speak a descendant of Latin (the Romance languages). This is the simple observation to make about how imperial ethnogenesis relates to linguistic influence on other speakers. That is, one nation spreads its language to the people of an entirely different nation.

What is difficult to see, and as far as I can tell has not been discovered yet, is how imperial ethnogenesis affects linguistic relations within the expanding in-group itself. Not everyone is on the frontlines of the Us vs. Them conflict — some of Us are closer, while some of Us are more comfortably removed. And as it turns out, those who are closer to the meta-ethnic frontier spread their dialect to the speakers of other dialects, all being within a single national language, or loose dialect chain at any rate.

So, the intense pressures of the meta-ethnic frontier cause the group undergoing ethnogenesis to spread their cultural influence not only over the starkly different out-groups who they conquer, but also over their neighboring in-group members who they unite behind them.

Ethnogenesis is primarily an Us vs. Them phenomenon, but secondarily it is a matter of who among Us is the most Us-like? Every in-group of an expanding empire is somewhat culturally diverse internally — they start as an amalgamation of neighboring groups. How can a single unified national (and later, imperial) culture arise out of that initial diversity? Hypothetically, they could average each constituent culture into a melting pot, or maybe draw lots. In reality, one of their cultures will serve as a model, which the others follow and mold themselves toward.

So then, which one of Our cultures is the most representative of who We are? Naturally, the culture of those who are leading the charge on a material and demographic level, facing the greatest risks of invasion, pillage, rape, murder, theft, and so on, along the meta-ethnic frontier. You other groups are still clearly one of Us, but you're not right there along the faultline. If you're not leading the charge materially, we won't follow your lead culturally either. The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

In modern usage, we would call this a "standard dialect" of a national language, and most of the cases I will examine in future posts will be modern languages. Far back into the past, it may or may not have been a standard dialect of a single national language, but it was still the leading member of a closely related group of languages, all of which were opposed to those of their invaders.

But the cultural changes do not stop there — ethnogenesis also changes the standard dialect itself from an earlier historical state. That is, the standardization of one language within an in-group is not just taking an existing dialect, left intact, and copying it throughout the rest of the group. Crucial changes are made to the chosen dialect which distinguish it from an earlier stage of its own history.

Therefore, its speakers are not only distinguishing themselves from their invaders, and from their neighbors among the in-group, but also from their own local ancestors of a more innocent age in their past, who were not undergoing intense ethnogenesis in the crucible of mounting invasions by starkly different foreigners.

This new cultural identity that they are creating for themselves tends to render earlier stages of their cultural evolution opaque — they may not be able to understand the earlier form of their own language. This is what causes boundaries within the history of a language. For centuries, a language has remained static enough for the living to understand the dead from hundreds of years ago. And then within a few centuries of linguistic change, the living can no longer understand their ancestors of only a couple hundred years ago.

These are not gradual changes with a constant rate of change that, cumulatively over long stretches of time, render older stages opaque to present-day speakers. They are one-off seismic events that happen quickly, and then remain in place for the indefinite future (until another such seismic event). This indelible mark in the linguistic history allows us to compare it to the history of ethnogenesis, to see whether they are happening at the same time. And sure enough, they are. Massive changes that render old forms opaque do not happen in a cultural or material vacuum, but as part of the overall ethnogenetic process.

I'll actually come back later to Roman ethnogenesis and the resulting primacy of Latin within the Italian peninsula. It's a much older language — indeed, a dead one — than the others I'll look at, and the languages / dialects of its neighbors are poorly attested, unlike those of more modern languages. The basic pattern holds up, but the evidence is not quite so fine-grained as it is for contemporary languages.

And anyway, this post is just an overview, not a case study. In future posts, I'll look at American English, British English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Latin, and Hindi. The main focus will be correlating the regions that gave birth to the standard dialect, and that were the meta-ethnic frontier. Also, the temporal correlation — the birth of the standard dialect and its distinctive historical changes, and the time when its speakers were undergoing ethnogenesis in the face of the invaders.

These are the "who," "where," and "when" that are sufficient to answer the theoretical question. I've already covered "why" and "how" in this post. The "what" is less relevant to the overall point, but I will cover some basics there too. That is, it's not important what the linguistic changes are — e.g., did they change one vowel to another, or maybe devoice their final consonants, or some other idiosyncratic thing.

Most speakers of a national language today would be hard-pressed to detail these differences between standard and non-standard dialects, but they would all agree that the dialect in a certain range of territory is more standard, and the dialects in some other range are non-standard. Every speaker of American English agrees that the versions along the West Coast are far more standard than those along the East Coast, whether New England, Mid-Atlantic, or Deep Southern.

And that is true for speakers of all other national languages: Brits agree on southern dialects being standard, Spaniards on Castilian, French on northern French, Germans on High German (with an Eastern twist), Russians on southern dialects, Romans on Latin, and Indians on the Hindi belt.

Speakers do not know when these distinctive changes arose, but historical linguists do, so I'll consult them for the temporal comparison. And I'll briefly sketch the substance of the changes, for the sake of completeness, though it'll bore most people and is not relevant to the main point anyway.

The ancient Indo-European roots of good luck charms in New Year's dessert, from Celtic Christmas pudding to samanu for Nowruz

I've been bitten by the Indo-European bug again, this time after looking into the cultural evolution of food. Years ago -- use google to search the blog for "Indo-European" -- I looked into iconography, dance, wedding rituals, etc., but didn't touch food.

In order to determine that some piece of culture has been inherited over the generations, it's best to study a piece that is not strongly shaped by material concerns -- and food certainly is. Not just the local environment containing different raw materials, but convergent evolution that could make two disparate lineages appear to share a common source.

For example, all pastoralist cultures will include dairy products in some way, even though some of them evolved separately and independently of each other way back when. At this level, you can't tell which ones share a common ancestor. But perhaps there are finer-grained aspects of their dairy culture that do in fact distinguish one from the other. That is true for Indo-Europeans as contrasted with Hamito-Semites, but that's a broad topic for another post.

To ease back into the subject matter, we'll start with a more specific case -- desserts for the New Year's celebration. As far as I can tell, this is an original discovery.

One crucial criterion I set for the earlier analysis was looking at pieces of culture that are highly ritualistic, as these are less susceptible to alteration -- which amounts to sacrilege -- and less influenced by foreign customs. That impedes the two major sources of change (from within and from without).

For mundane culture, you might adopt some other group's street food if it tastes good, but you're not going to adopt their culinary rituals for some holiday that you don't even celebrate yourself, and which might displace your own rituals for the holidays that you do actually celebrate.

And ritualistic pieces of culture are not so strongly influenced by material, utilitarian concerns. Making do with what you've got in order to not starve on a daily basis, could easily shape two distinct food cultures into similar ones, if their environmental pressures were similar. But what you eat, and how you prepare it, for some rare holiday -- that's not going to make or break your health on a quotidian level. You can keep doing it in the inscrutable, not-so-instrumental way without plunging your family into starvation.

That is the approach of genetics in reconstructing who came from where, and who is related to who else by what degree. You look at parts of the genome that are neutral in an adaptive sense. It's like an ID number generated at random, and whose digits do not influence anything about your ability to survive and reproduce. So if you and someone else have the same ID number, you must be closely related. Imagine flipping a million-sided die and getting the same number twice -- that's no coincidence, and both of your numbers must have descended from a single die roll in the past belonging to a shared ancestor.

For the current case, the epiphany came after looking into Armenian food culture. They are Indo-Europeans who have been holed up in the Caucasus highlands and mountains for millennia, and mountains are harder for foreigners to invade. If you can't invade physically, you can't invade culturally. All three branches of the Indo-European language family that have only one surviving member are located in hilly / mountainous terrain -- Albanian, Greek, and Armenian, who have resisted the spread of far more numerous sister branches (Slavic for the first two, Indo-Iranian for the last one).

A staple of Armenian food culture is a large sweet bread called gata. On a special occasion, they put something special in the dough -- a button or a coin (or perhaps some other trinket in some other local variation). Whoever gets the piece with the hidden prize is supposed to have good luck for the rest of the year. This special occasion is Candlemas, which marks the end of the Christmas / Epiphany season, and in that way is timed with the end of the old year and beginning of the new year.

This is a clear counterpart to various traditions throughout Europe, all of which are timed around the New Year, although perhaps Christianized in some way (Christmas, Mardi Gras, etc.). There's the king's cake from Spain and France, the vasilopita in Greece and similar non-Christianized versions in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the Christmas pudding in Britain, and the Christmas rice pudding in Scandinavia.

In fact, there's an even older pre-Christian version from the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, also timed around the end of December. As part of the carnivalesque inversion of the social hierarchy, a King of Saturnalia was chosen from the lower-ranking members, to preside over the merrymaking. He was chosen by lot -- a cake was baked with a bean somewhere inside the dough, and whoever got the piece with the bean had the good fortune of assuming the role. (This good luck is shorter in duration, although higher in intensity and more palpable, compared to the later interpretation that it was generic yearlong good luck.)

We could say that it all began with the Romans and was inherited by former political colonies of the Roman Empire, or by cultures that owed their Christianity to Roman influence. But perhaps the current variety of traditions do not stem from a Roman source, but are descendants of an even older ancestor, such as Indo-European. In that view, the British custom came from a Celtic source, the Scandinavian custom from a Germanic source, the Ukrainian custom from a Slavic source, etc. Only the Western Mediterranean customs would come from an Italic source, in this view.

This is how we analyze the languages spoken by these groups. If the word for "three" appears so similar across all of them, it's not necessarily because they all descend from Latin via the Roman Empire's influence and colonization. It's because each of them has its own older source, which is only Latin for the Romance branch, but those older sources themselves have an even older source in common -- Proto-Indo-European.

Still, if we only restrict our investigation to Europe, it can be hard to conclude decisively one way or another, because there are so few cases that can only be interpreted to support one view rather than the other view. That's why we have to look at the broader Indo-European spectrum.

And the example from Armenia argues strongly in favor of the Indo-European roots of the tradition, since most of Greater Armenia was not politically conquered by the Roman Empire, nor was its primary cultural influence from Rome. In antiquity, it was torn between the Romans and the Persians (who did not practice Saturnalia, and who would never become Christian). If Armenia did not receive these traditions through contact with the Romans, then they must have already been in place due to shared ancestry with an even older Indo-European origin.

The Roman Empire / Christian origin can also be ruled out from the other direction, by looking at cultures that were part of the Roman Empire, some of whom also became Christian, but who are Hamito-Semitic rather than Indo-European. That includes North Africa and the Levant. The obvious test is Lebanon (both a former Roman colony and early Christians). Although their Christmas dessert is a rice pudding, it does not involve the tradition of hiding an item that will bring good luck to whoever receives that portion.

That reflects the wider similarities in food culture between the Levant and non-Indo-European cultures of the region, but we'll get back to that topic when we explore the use of dairy among Indo-European vs. Hamito-Semitic cultures.

But by far the clearest evidence of the Indo-European origin of this tradition is the rituals involved in making and eating samanu in the eastern, Indo-Iranian range of the I-E territory. The special occasion is Nowruz, the New Year, celebrated in Iran, Afghanistan, and other areas nearby. Like Saturnalia being pre-Christian, Nowruz is pre-Islamic. Samanu is a sweet pudding made from wheatgrass, cooked in large pots.

From Wikipedia:

In Afghanistan and Uzbekistan the whole gathering, mostly women, gather near the huge pot: sit in a circle, sing songs, have fun, each of them waits for their turn to stir the sumalak [AKA samanu]. While stirring the samanak [AKA samanu], wishes can be made. Also, whole walnuts are thrown in near the end of the preparation while making a wish.

In her book Recipes from My Persian Kitchen, Nasreen Zereshki mentions that finding an unshelled nut in your serving of samanu is a "good omen". These are intended to be inedible trinkets or charms, since they are left unshelled, as opposed to shelling nuts when used as raw ingredients for an edible meal.

This exactly parallels the Christmas pudding rituals from the opposite side of the I-E territory, among the Celts (British). From Wikipedia's article on Stir-up Sunday:

Everyone takes a turn to stir the pudding mix for each person involved is able to make a special wish for the year ahead. Practically, stirring the mixture is hard work, therefore as many as possible are involved... In some households, silver coins are added to the pudding mix. It is believed that finding a coin brings good luck.

The special occasion is the New Year, a sweet pudding is being made in a pot, a group has gathered socially (not just one cook), they take turns stirring, each one makes a wish as they do so, some charms are thrown into the mix, and whoever gets one in their serving will enjoy good luck.

I tried looking for a counterpart in the Indian subcontinent, but could not easily find one -- it's too diverse, and with several potential holidays to sift through. I'm sure there's something there, just not an example I could identify right away. My targets are Pakistani and NW Indian customs for Diwali, Holi, and Lohri, although hopefully their Muslims are similar to European Christians in preserving local pagan traditions for nominally Abrahamic occasions.

I'd also like to find a counterpart in Turkey, which is more Indo-European than Hamito-Semitic (and is Turkic in language only, from known invaders). Ideally from their pre-Islamic celebrations, akin to Nowruz further to the east.

Still, this is mind-blowing stuff for archaeologists of culture. Why hasn't the connection been made before? Because academics are cerebrals and blind to most of material culture. They will notice that languages and mythologies are shared at a deep level among Indo-Europeans, but not their corporeal folkways. Sure, they know about the shared subsistence modes and basic ecosystems, like the I-E people having words for snow and cows. But not what we would call folk culture, customs, rituals, and the like -- especially by investigating those folkways directly, rather than through linguistic hints.

Those rituals are still being performed to this day, for similar purposes as before. So why not investigate their lineages? Not because they're fuzzy rather than sharply defined -- again, academics have no problem positing a shared pantheon, mythological narratives, and other things that are less clearly defined than "the pronunciation of the word for 'cow'". It's because they're too much a part of corporeal activities.

That's why I'm focusing on the topics I've chosen -- iconography, dance, wedding customs, and now food. It's mostly untapped, but no less important to appreciating the deep roots of all these seemingly disparate cultures today.