It's widely believed that all humans originated from Africa, which makes the modern physical variations between different races of humans pretty fascinating. How did we evolve to all be so different?

BabyMetal. Not only are they fun music performers, but also own traditionally 'Asian' eyes.

..............................................................................................................................

Now, of course, curiosity about why some humans evolved differently than others has taken science down some damned dark places in the past. For example, when it intermingles with racist social prejudices and concepts of 'evolutionary superiority' you get eugenics and naziism. It would be wrong to approach this kind of subject and not acknowledge this past.

But if you accept that really none of these traits are superior to one another, you can learn something really interesting about how different populations of humans adapted to their different environments, which makes it a pretty fascinating branch of science.

Take, for example, the presence of epicanthic folds. Or, rather 'Asian' eyes vs 'Caucasian' eyes. Why did they appear? What function do they serve?

Biffy Clyro. Also fun music performers, but this time with traditionally 'Caucasian' eyes.

John David Ward of Quora explains why.

"I know this is going to sound really strange and clinical, but please bear with me. 

That distinctive Asiatic eye look is caused by a variety of things, including strong, forward projecting zygomatic arches (the cheek bones just under the eyes), relatively large epicanthic folds, smoothness caused by fat around the eye socket, and a flatter nose bridge. Not everyone has all of these traits, or has them to the same degree, but these traits all tend to reinforce each other visually, leading to a distinctive effect. 

In theory, these effects are presumably caused by a combination of continentality and sexual selection for neoteny (that is, for cuteness). The exact way this happened is still the subject of some controversy, but the correlation is well established.

The story goes that ancestors of the Asiatic peoples (that is, the people who live in modern day East Asia) migrated, in prehistoric times, from somewhere around Central Asia or Siberia to their current locations. That area is the place on Earth which is the farthest inland, and as a result experiences large seasonal swings in temperature. They would have adapted to deal with dry, cold winters, hot, bright summers, and dust. They would have had to deal with dust in the summer and glare from sunlight reflecting off snow in the winter, under conditions where survival was fairly difficult.

If environmental effects were all that mattered, moving south-east like this would have resulted in these Asiatic people losing their distinctive features as an adaptation to their now more temperate environment. But that wouldn't be instantaneous and environment is not the only factor in play. When these prehistoric Asiatic people reached more temperate and coastal areas, which were capable of supporting a larger population, they underwent a population explosion, which allowed sexual selection to take over. The Yellow River Civilization, for instance, which is the ancestor to the modern nation of China, had a relatively high population for many thousands of years.

Sexual selection is mating preference. That is, cuter people (as judged subjectively by the pool of potential mates) are more desired as reproductive partners and therefore are more likely to pass on their genes. Social selection in connection with infanticide in times of famine might also have played a role.

So we can say that features which originally arose as adaptations to an extreme, dusty climate were probably exapted through sexual selection.

Edit: I want to add that epicanthic folds are pretty common around the world, especially in children (they protect one's eyes while they're still developing), and the majority of people have low or flat nose bridges. So it's important to consider who you're comparing these Asiatic eyes to. 

If you're comparing them to Caucasians—which is not synonymous with "white" or "European" but is a collective term for the people who form the majority of the population in countries of the Middle East, Anatolia, Northern Africa, India, Europe, Russia, and former European colonies, who have commonalities, including facial features, regardless of their skin color—keep in mind that Caucasian eyes are not neutral. That is, they do not represent an unchanged original state; they have a distinctive look, too, and there's nothing obvious or inevitable about comparing East Asian eyes to Caucasian eyes rather than anyone else. The eyes of East Asian people look particularly different when you compare them to Caucasians, because the Caucasian peoples went through just about the opposite sort of evolution: their ancestors came from, and for the most part continue to live in, areas where the climate was stabilized by the presence of a nearby body of water (which, due to its tremendous specific heat capacity, tends to mediate year-old temperatures by emitting heat in the winter and absorbing it in the summer).

If you look at an atlas, you'll see for yourself that the north-western quadrant of the Old World is much craggier than the north-eastern quadrant, with a lot of coastline, full of islands (like the British isles and the islands belonging to Italy and Greece), peninsulas (like Denmark, Italy, Little Britain, Iberia, and Scandinavia), bays (like the Bay of Biscay), seas (like the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea, and the Mediterranean, most of which are remnants of the ancient inland Tethys Sea before it closed up), and gulfs (like the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden).

Image from Wikipedia, if you didn't recognize the style

So when someone is described as having Asian looking eyes or Caucasian looking eyes, often all we're really saying is that they look like their prehistoric ancestors came from a highly continental area (like the middle of the continent of Asia) or a highly coastal area (like the area around the remains of the Tethys sea), just as when we describe someone as white or black, we're really talking about, via skin color, whether they look like their ancestors came from high latitudes (closer to the poles) or low latitudes (closer to the equator). It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with where their relatives are actually from.

For instance, South Africa is relatively continental (Africa is a much bigger continent than people think). The indigenous people of South Africa, because they live in and have adapted to a location far enough from the equator to have pronounced seasons, and where the coastline is relatively smooth, have eyes that are frequently described as looking "Asian." You can see this in this image of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, who is Xhosa, a ethnic group from South Africa:

Meanwhile, Melanesians and Australian aborigines, who migrated into their current locations by island-hopping through Southeast Asia, have eyes that look more "Caucasian," as you can see in this picture of Australian pop singer Christine Anu, who is a Torres Strait islander, and who had a brief role in The Matrix Reloaded:

Likewise, since Japan is an island country, is perhaps not surprising that the Ainu, who are the indigenous minority people of Japan, have facial features that have been described as "Caucasian," despite not being particularly closely related to any of the people of Europe, the Middle East, India, or North Africa.

See this picture of a random Ainu man:

Meanwhile, there are people in Europe who are (presumably) descended from the native people of the more continental region of Europe, called the Russian plain or the East European Plain, who have Asian-looking eyes, including quite pronounced epicanthic folds. Most of these people were, at some point, driven up into Finnland (or restricted to Finnland, since Finnland is sometimes considered part of the East European Plain itself) by the territorial expansion of the Eastern Slavs, so these sorts of features most commonly pop up in Scandinvia, but it can also be found occasionally in Poland (going by Wikipedia). For some reason I've never bothered to research, before routine contact with the Orient was established, European writers tended to describe these as "Tataric" features, despite the fact that they're not really present in Crimean Tatars, at least not today.

The most commonly cited example of Asian-looking eyes among Europeans is Björk Guðmundsdóttir, who, despite being of Icelandic nationality, has, through the genetic lottery, inherited via her Scandinavian ancestors a fairly impressive case:

Keep all this in mind when you think about the case of the anthropologists who examined the remains of Kinnewick Man found in Washington state. They were widely misreported as having stated that he was Caucasian. What they discovered, rather, was that measurement of Kinnewick Man's skull showed evidence of morphological adaptations to a coastal, rather than continental, climate which made him resemble that picture of an Ainu man more than that picture of Björk. That doesn't mean that he wasn't actually Native America. Osteology isn't everything. There's a lot more to a person than their facial features."

Source

- Quora : Why do asians and caucasians have different eye shapes?

- Your local blogger's taste in music :p

Keep in touch....

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Stay curious!

If you're interested in evolution you might like...

↠ 5 funky little elements of evolution that you can spot on your own body

↠ An excellent takedown of the critics of evolution, courtesy of the science side of Tumblr

↠ Why water bears are the most badass creatures on the planet

.When you live in the arctic, you know not to let anything go to waste.

The curious gut skin parka is a perfect example of this philosophy being made, as the name suggests, out of the cleaned guts of seals, walruses or whales. Surprisingly delicate in appearance despite their practical purpose; they are partially see-through and designed to be worn on top of other clothing. They could also be attached to the hatch of a kyack, which serves as a great waterproof protection for travelling arctic waters.

When european sailors travelled up and met the inuit people, they were amazed by the coats as they found that they were superior to the western oilskins in that they were more water resistant, trapped in more heat and were far lighter. The coats were highly prized and often bought for use by the western visitors.

Despite their rudimentary material, the preparation of a gutskin coat is labour intensive and complex, with the full process of creating a coat taking up to a month. The intestines are retrieved,washed and peeled inside out to be scraped. Once cleaned, they are inflated and tied at each end until completely dry, with any holes being patched. After around two days the intestines are cut and rolled into tight bundles ready for use, and the parka itself can be put together.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm a big Night at the Museum fan, so when the third film actually took place in the British Museum I knew it was a travesty that I hadn't been there yet.

Yes, all the exhibits were alive,I grant you, but they were so cool. The sheer variety on display was more than I'd ever thought about. It reminded me that the place existed, basically, and I had a hunger to get my backside down south and experience the real deal: arguably the biggest and best museum in the country.

And I was not disappointed.

The British museum itself is free, situated on Russel street, which is easily reached from the major stations via the tube or bus. For me, it was a 20 min ride on the Piccadilly line (westbound) from St Pancras station and a short walk. The museum itself is a large traditional building with Edwardian classical styling, but as soon as you walk through into the main hall you can see that this is no ordinary structure. The entrance hall is sweeping and beautiful in a loose circle, with the temporary exhibits occupying the upper floor of the central circle, and with all the other steady exhibits spread around it across five levels.

Luckily there are plenty of facilities and cafes (and gift shops!), so while nothing's cheap you can easily spend all day having a good explore. Personally we spent well over 6 hours there, until our howling feet and fatigue claimed us and we had to call it a day. Even then, there is plenty to come back for.

"Six Hours?! How Much is There to See, Really?"

A whole world. Despite the name, The British Museum really isn't just about the history of Britain, or even the British Empire, but exists as a capsule of the whole world's cultures. You can find treasures from the Ancient Near East, the Islamic World, Africa, Egypt, China, South & South East Asia, Japan, Korea, The Pacific and Australia, Mesoamerica, Central and South America, North America, Prehistoric Europe, The Greek World, The Roman Empire, Roman Britain, Medieval Europe, Renaissance and Later Europe, Modern Europe and America, as well as modern examples of art mixed in with each culture. Having almost all of the world's cultures in one place to seamlessly journey through is -to put it bluntly- a goddamned revelation.

This stunning mural of an Assyrian lion hunt went on for several ROOMS at full scale.

"But Colonialism!"

Yes, I know that the British Museum is at the centre of debates on colonialism in museums, and I have mixed feelings on the subject that I have already written about at length here:

http://preludesblogofwords.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/what-can-digital-heist-of-bust-of.html?m=1

But you can't argue against the sheer awe at walking around this whole world of art and history in a day and what this can teach you. Everything is beautifully curated and treated with great respect and value and by holding everything side by side, no one item is treated as being more important than another, or one culture as being 'superior' to another. The end effect is all so amazing that it makes you proud to be human.

"Ok, So What Are The Highlights?"

As well as the general feeling of awe and discovery that comes with experiencing so many cultural treasures side by side, the thing that stuck out most to me were the sheer sense of scale that the museum was able to accommodate. 

For example, there were plaques of the beautifully intricate Assyrian lion hunt, snaking through rooms in a  dramatic tableaux. There were panels from the flipping Patheon (!), in full scale, wrapping around the whole building. Huge Egyptian pharaohs stared down at you, and Assyrian gatekeepers smiled next to the storeys-high gates themselves. Noble totem poles stood as markers and full-floor mosaics decorated the stairwells. Reams upon reams of orange and black pottery, and intricate gold-work, fabulously detailed islamic tiles, ticking timepieces and curios nestled against one another in displays. I have never seen anything like it.

One of the many Pharaohs keeping an eye on us.

In addition to the scale, what really excited me was finally seeing in person so many of the treasures that I has viewed in countless picture books about history while I was growing up. It was like encountering a celebrity!

"Look! A real easter island figure!"

"oh my god it's the jade-mosaic aztec snake. I've never seen it in real life!"

"Oh Jesus that's THE Lindlow bog man!"

"HOLY BALLS THAT'S THE GODDAMNED ROSETTA STONE!!!"

In the end, It's just very hard to describe how the sheer wonder of the place hits you right in the gut. All you can do is to go see it for yourself.

A beautiful part of the African exhibit

Bonus feature: One very happy blogger.

It's amazing where a research grant can take you. Often it's not just about Gravitational Waves or stuffy labs, but actually getting out there to improve the lives of global communities.

One such project was headed by the University of Oxford in order to combat one of the alarming side affects of the successful elephant conservation effort. 

So what's the problem?

Fences don't always work...

In many places of Africa, elephant populations are improving after decades of hard-fought conservation efforts and actions against poaching. While this is fantastic news for the growing elephant populations, it has left the local farmers increasingly vulnerable to elephant attacks. Some herds return to old migratory routes only to find small farms in their way which they then plough through, while others find themselves coming up against humans when hunger sets in and the crop-laden fields are too hard to resist. In both cases both animal and human are at serious risk: with their livelihood and safety on the line farmers can do little else but face down the huge creatures themselves, armed with whatever they can find. In some cases this means shooting the elephants, and in others it means making a enough noise in an effort not to shoot them that it simply scares the elephants and gets the farmers killed. Non violent deterrents like cow-bell fences can do little but simply warn farmers that elephants are coming, and more effective methods like tall electric fences are simply far too expensive for the majority of communities. A hungry elephant is a determined one, and a frightened or angry elephant is a horror.

The answer to the problem was surprisingly simple.

Anyone who loves elephants will tell you that we have a lot in common: elephants are intelligent and some people even think that they can mourn. However, their most famous feature is their decades long memory and they, like us, often remember experiences that are unpleasant and will learn from them.

Enter the humble honeybee.

When a person is stung by a bee they learn quickly to spot the signs of the insects nearby and will actively avoid hives - after all, once you've encountered an angry bee it's not a situation that you'd like a repeat of. Elephants, despite their size and tough skin, also hate bees as the tiny creatures can swarm and sting their sensitive eyes, trunks and ears. Like us, they'll give hives a very wide berth indeed, and encourage their friends to do the same. The university looked into this phenomenon, working with local farming communities to experiment with the idea of using bees as a deterrent but in a way that farmers could afford, maintain and actually use to improve their lives in addition to keeping the dangerous animals away in a peaceful faction. The solution was to make a fence of living buzzing beehives.

A fence of langstroth hives

Researchers found that just the sound of bees was enough to keep 94% of animals studied away from the area. Moving on to the real thing, a study of 34 communally-run Kenyan farms found that when they adopted the bee-fence method, only one elephant actually crossed the beehive fence out of a total of 45 attempted raids. It seemed to work.

The main challenge was to figure out a way of creating a beehive fence that fit the needs of the farming communities who owned them. The researchers worked with them and created a pamplet that outlines how to construct and maintain these fences, giving them three design options of increasing effectiveness and price. In each option, the hives are linked together and separated 6m apart. Because elephants would learn to recognise the hives on sight, not every 'fence post' needs to be an active hive, and dummy hives can be created. Each construction needsa thatched roof to keep it shaded and dry, and allows for honey collection so that the farmers can supplement their income. 
The cheapest option is the traditional log hive: effectively a log suspended with a roof. This design makes honey collection difficult and inefficient, but was ideal for poorer farmers who can scavenge the main materials from the landscape. The medium-priced option is the top-bar hive which requires more construction effort and costs around $35 per hive, but allows for easier honey collection and protects the larvae within. Finally the most expensive option was the purpose-designed  langstroth beehives (pictured above) which come in at about $60 per hive, but are the most sophisticated examples for honey collection and provide the greatest quality honey. The farmers have the ability to pick the option that suits them best while also investing in a new form of income in the form of Elephant Friendly Honey.

Construction of a top bar hive

In short, this simple solution saves lives; human, elephant and even bee. What's not to love?

It may have taken a whole research project to bring it to light, but this simple solution is just about as natural and wholesome as you can get.

So now you know. If life gives you trouble....

Sources
 - REF Impact case study: UOA05-20 Using Honey bees as an effective deterrent for crop raising elephants.
-Beehive Fence Construction Manual
- Using honeybees to keep elephants out of farmer's fields
-BBC Earth news: beehive fence deters elephants

To understand our own mortality is one of the biggest markers of being human. To seek to control it, even more so.

True, we're not sure whether the anticipation and understanding of death is uniquely human, and there are certainly plenty of arguments to suggest that some animals understand death too, but it might be that the concept of a soul that couples with the idea of death is entirely a human construct. In this way, humans would truly be unique.

In his book 'The Buried Soul', the archaeologist Timothy Taylor takes a close look into when it was that humans first started to create the concept of a soul and started to try to define and control their own mortality -and by extension - immortality.

One of the greatest problems with pre-history and early history is the difficulty in source materials and, by extension, the difficulty in stepping into the minds of those in the past. "The past is a foreign country" a wise man once said, and we are often scant-informed tourists. As an archaeologist Taylor is well aware of these problems and how these have led to what he believes are misinterpretations of the cultural data of mortality in the past, often due to anachronisms created when historians put their own modern cultural perspective onto the remnants of history. Too often we either assume that our ancestors thought and acted exactly like us (and therefore we reject the more distasteful parts of their cultures as false), or we view them as barbarians and so don't bother to properly unpick the layers of why their actions were important and unique to them. While Taylor runs through a whole host of different death cultures, it was his treatment of the above issue that I found the most valuable and interesting in the book.

For example, Taylor centres the majority of his book around unpicking an understanding the funeral of a Rus (Viking) chieftain, returning to the vividly described scene as each of his arguments shed more light on it and the mindsets of those involved. In this funeral we have a rare written account provided by an arab ambassador about how the chieftain was interred in the ground while a huge ship and scaffold were created, ready for his cremation. When complete he was disinterred and laid on a great bed on the ship. Of his slave girls, his favourite apparently volunteered and took part in a seemingly strange and brutal ceremony. She was given the rings of engagement, as if she was betrothed to the chieftain, and, heady on ritualistic wine, went to each tent of his closest men and slept with them. Afterwards she was lifted up above three houses, announcing that she could see her parents and others waiting for her in the afterlife. When she went to the great building of the ship she reportedly found herself hesitating and was encouraged inside. The rings were removed, she lay on the bed next to their chieftain and, with a noose tightening around her neck by the old women dubbed the 'Angel of Death', she was brutally raped by seven men as the crown outside drummed their shields to drown out her screams. 

Timothy Taylor

Why did this sequence of events occur?

How reliable is the account?

What purpose did the brutality serve and what was the slave girl's investment in it?

Why on earth do some historians reject the brutal realities and simply sign off with dismissive statements like: "The happy girl thus went to Valhallah?"

What does this ritual tell us about the purpose of death culture, and the potential danger that the chieftain's soul posed to the mortal living?

Taylor answers all of these questions and more with care and convincing evidence. In doing so he also looks into another brutal and controversial element of history: cannibalism. Since the 1970s it has been fashionable for historians to reject cannibalism altogether, finding it more comforting to assert that it never actually happened and was instead a racist accusation or a misinterpretation of evidence, to the point where I assumed this was likely. But Taylor challenges this in a very convincing manner, taking the stance that cannibalism was - and is - commonplace, but served very different purposes for different cultures, all of which features importantly in how these culture interacted with death and funerary rites. Cannibalism isn't something that belongs in a horror movie, but instead can be a legitimate, useful expression of grief that should not be ignored simply because it is distasteful to western historians. I must admit, after the reading the book, I'm pretty darn convinced he's on the right lines.

In the end, I know that in this blog I tend to trot our reviews of books that I like, leaving those less interesting neighbours by the wayside. But out of my pick of excellent books, this really is one worth paying attention to and picking up for yourself. Taylor's combination of engaging narrative writing as well as the exciting (and potentially controversial) views he has of the pre-history and history he knows so well, makes this a book that is both entertaining as well as being genuinely academically important for any interested in the subject. It certainly convinced me to re-evaluate how I looked at various elements of cultural history, which I think is worth it's weight in gold.

What's more, I couldn't put it down. For a non-fiction book is very high praise indeed. 



More Great Books and Media on Mortality and the Human Imagination:
- Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind - By Yuval Noah Harrari
- The Self Illusion - by Bruce Hood
- Paranormality - By Richard Wiseman
- Gunther Von Hagen's Autopsy Series

Do you want to get out there and make a little history?

On the 12th of May, through either the University of Sheffield or directly with the Mass Observation Archive itself you can take part in creating a little time capsule of your day that will be recorded for future generations as a sort of time capsule of words.

Wait, why?

On May 12th 1937, on the day of George VI's coronation, the Mass observation called for people from all over the United kingdom to record what they did on that day from their first groaning moments in the morning to their last notes before settling to sleep. In doing so, they hoped to capture a very real snapshot of people's every day lives across the country, whether rich, poor and middling. The tradition has been carried on annually, (with some additional dates in their repertoire), and has provided a remarkable resource for historians, journalists and more who wish to get a real feel for the living breathing past. The hope is, by offering the modern day public to include their own diaries for the day, they can keep building their archive for the future.


Awesome! How Do I Get Involved?

To take part you need to mark the 12th in your diaries as the day you try to make a Samuel Pepys of yourself. Record as much as you can about what you do, who you meet, what you talk about, what you eat, drink, buy, sell, what you;re working on, what you visit, what you read, see and hear around you, how you feel and what you're thinking. If it's a typical day say so, and if it's unusual then say so too. 

To give a little context make sure to note briefly your age, where you live, your relationship status, your present job and any other important info.

Type it all up on a word document AND INCLUDE THE STATEMENT BELOW, or else they won't be able to use your entry in their archive.

“I donate my 12th May diary to the Mass Observation Archive. I consent to it being made publicly available as part of the Archive and assign my copyright in the diary to the Mass Observation Archive Trustees so that it can be reproduced in full or in part on websites, in publications and in broadcasts as approved by the Mass Observation Trustees. I agree to the Mass Observation Archive assuming the role of Data Controller and the Archive will be responsible for the collection and processing of personal data and ensuring that such data complies with the DPA.”

Finally, email it to moa@sussex.ac.uk

Et voila! you have just achieved a little slice of immortality.


Where Can I Learn More?

Sussex university manages the Mass Observation project, so their website or the Mass Observation twitter account is the best place to have a poke around.
Personally I found the 'occasional papers' section of their website fascinating: here you can find various articles and papers that draw interesting results from having worked with the archives themselves. For example, this student paper on 'Birth and Power'.

The Bust of Nefertiti

In the Neues Museum in Berlin there is a very special artefact that is so prized that the public are not even allowed to take pictures of it. 

This the bust of Nefertiti, a 3,300 year old piece of royal art that was removed form Egypt by German archaeologists in Amarna, shortly after its discovery. Germany has always asserted its legal right to the fragile artefact but Egypt contends that it was removed with fraudulent documents. This exquisite bust, like many objects in modern museums, had become the centre of a political struggle over the true 'rights' of historic objects and their 'owners', and two German artists decided to do something about it.

As part of their project "The Other Nefertiti", Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles aimed to encourage museums to look again at the concepts of ownership of the past and how they interact with their own colonial pasts. To achieve this, they arrived as visitors to the museum and, using 3D scanners hidden under their coats and scarves, managed to created a fantastically detailed digital scan of the bust. They then released a torrent of the 3D data to a collection of hackers who further seeded the data, spreading it to allow potentially any member of the public to get a copy of the data and create their own 3D printed version of the controversial work of art. To crown their defiance the resulting 3D printed piece of polymer resin was placed on display at the American University of Cairo as a stand in for the artefact until it can be 'rightfully' returned to its homeland.

At play here are two real issues: The first, who truly 'owns' these priceless historic artifacts and the second, why should their be any restriction in how the public can interact with their shared past? It is clear that in respects the public are getting better and better access to the treasures of museums, with museums such as the British Museum even hosting 'scanathons', but many museums like the Neus museum still restrict much access and, frankly, we are a long way off the public being able to benefit from many of these archives or academic reading materials without paying a hefty subscription. But, in the end, things are getting better.
This then leaves us with the first question - who 'owns' the originals? And do museums have the obligation to make up for shady colonial pasts?


The issue of colonialism in museums

"The Other Nefertiti"

I'm English. So far as I know my family have never strayed far from these shores (though there are echoes of a 'gypsy' or yiddish past somewhere that could either be truth or the product of the kind of romantic fancy one finds themselves in when the censuses start to crumble apart.) As such, I accept that I have privileged hugely from colonialism, being a member of the country that has had the most recent and largest empire. 
History is written by the victors, they say, and so the narrative of my own nationality - and western history as a whole - has been written from the perspective of colonial victories. Just as the Romans idealised and absorbed Greek history, ideas and mythologies into their own identity while simultaneously sniffing at the contemporary Greeks themselves, the British identity is one that sends its ties out into other cultures to bolster itself. The Victorian idea of eugenic progress never really died and my culture attached itself to the Romans and Egyptians as proof of its own civilisation, and relegates other peoples as being somehow 'other' and more fragile, violent or uncivilised. It become a self fulfilling prophecy, of course, with the wealth and control stripped away from 'lesser' nations and the British ideals pushed into the new void until those cultures started to imitate our own in order to get by. "Ah." The old Victorians would say "Look how much more civilised and successful they are now that they're acting like us. Didn't we do a good job of sorting those blighters out?"  Sure, these other cultures could be exotic and admirably so, but they weren't seen as responsible enough to look after themselves in any sort of autonomy that we could respect. 

A lot of work has gone into eroding those rather poisonous but perhaps inevitable cultural narratives since then. But the spirit of them is still within the museums due to the nature of how many of their most precious artefacts were discovered. The Empire had the interest and resources to go mad for archaeology and made great progresses, but also claimed that the items they found as their own. Instead of working with the cultures they found these items from, many took them for their own, feeling entitled to them either out of greed or out of wonder. After all they could 'care' for them better, couldn't they? The items would be safest where the country was most stable and well funded. And anyway, wasn't the history of, say, the Egyptians really the history of everyone? It was civic duty....and also surprisingly profitable.


So should we start to give back items to their 'rightful owners'?

Dr Jones: Surprisingly problematic

There are many reasons why one could argue that museums that holds such culturally valuable collections shouldn't be bound to return them. For one, they were acquired under a different system than today. Michel Guiraud - head of collections at the Natural History Museum in Paris -  explains that:

“In the old days there were far fewer rules for collecting specimens in the field....people would go exploring and bring back whatever they found of interest. It was all part of collective appropriation by the scientific community. Now, adding an item to a collection is subject to a strict procedure.”

In other words we have since improved ourselves. It would be a pointless and anachronistic endeavor to try to put the genie back in the bottle and retroactively correct all the more challenging elements of history. We can't, for example, give America fully back to native peoples. We can't settle personal injury claims for every single person affected by slavery - black or white. We can't trudge across to the Nordic countries and demand reparations for viking rape and pillage in the dark ages. If I am to play devil's advocate then the brutal heart of the matter is this: to the (historic) victor the spoils. If it was legal at the time, then it is acceptable. If the colonial country invested money and resources to dig up and find these items then even more so as the host countries clearly didn't have the resources or inclination to do so.

Monuments men: protecting priceless art from Nazis

Another argument for the retention of these items is one that can loosely be called a sort of 'Monuments Men' mentality. That is that all art and history belong to all peoples - they all makes us who we are as humans - and so we have a duty to protect them. Many countries just simply aren't able to protect their precious artefacts 'properly'. Recent threats from ISIS of cultural terrorism will for many emphasise the argument that items of global cultural value should go nowhere near the involved countries, even if it is their own heritage. Many a tourist have found themselves anxiously deciding whether their desire to see the great pyramids trumps their fear of getting caught up in a war that has been raging for decades. Every historian and librarian worth their salt imagines with horror the legends of what treasures resided in the great library of Alexandria before it burnt to the ground, and how further advanced civilisation might have been if it had survived.  The privilege of the empire created a certain amount of wealth and stability that still safeguards these items to this day so surely it would be right to retain ownership of these items...'for their own good.'

It doesn't always "belong in a museum"

But, on the other hand, it's hard to argue against the return of these items as being the ethical thing to do. And, frankly, all of the above issues can be cured with proper collaboration between countries and the erosion of what 'ownership' even means when applied to this global cultural heritage.
Jonathan Jones, while writing for the Guardian, makes a fine point when he examines why some items that still have this colonial past, are regarded as far more palatable:

"I realised this recently on the Greek island of Aegina. It has a superb classical temple whose sculptures were removed and taken to Bavaria at about the same time Britain took the frieze and pediment sculptures of the Parthenon. Today they are in Munich, but there is no global outcry for their return. Why not? Well, if you visit the temple you can’t help noticing the prominent German involvement in archaeology and conservation work there. German scholarship has kept up a constant, reciprocal relationship with Aegina. There is no equivalent British involvement in the preservation of the Parthenon."

The real life monuments men

The key here is the collaboration and relationship of mutual respect. Both countries work together to care for what they believe is an item that they culturally share, despite the dark past. It's this respect that gets to the heart of many of the above disputes. Often, when peoples who have been hurt by colonialism look for reparation the thing that is perhaps most important to many is the apology, the admission of guilt, the taking of responsibility and the giving of respect. The acknowledgement that these people and their ancestors are human: not 'others' and not inferior and entitled to own what they themselves created. The reason why Indiana Jones and the Monument Men are the heroes of their stories is because, while they do take historical valuable items of art and archaeology, it is because they are protecting them from a greater force of destructive evil, like the Nazis, and are working with other cultures to do so. Indiana gives the stones of power back to the Indian village when it's safe and he trusts that they can best take care of their power. The Monument Mens' works of art are returned to their rightful homes once the war is over.
Nowadays many funding bodies demand the collaboration of multiple universities across the globe as a matter of course, so there is little excuse not to take this approach in modern times. Clearly it also works for those items that historically did not have this applied to them.

But what if the origin countries still demand their precious items to be returned home? Well, is this so bad? It's patronising to assume that items are 'safest; on foreign shores and the old colonial xenophobia of assuming that other cultures aren't intelligent enough or able to rally resources to do so enough rears its ugly head. More 'stable' countries should not act as parental figures, and even if they did after a point parents have to let their children have responsibility to look after their own property in an autonomous way. It is their right to be given the opportunity to care for their own heritage. Add to the collaboration above and really, you're mitigating the risks involved anyway. If everyone is working together to care for these artefacts then what risk is there in doing the good thing and passing across the items? Aside from risk to the colonial nation's pride. Or risk to the thickness of their wallets.
Heck, even monetary risk can be mitigated - what is more likely to get crowds flocking in anew to museums then the 'tour' of a famous artefact? It's been working in this way with the Magna Carta for years.


Conclusion

My opinion is a difficult one: I have a colonial entitlement in my blood that is hard to escape due to sheer social osmosis. I selfishly want the easy road - to have all the world's heritage at my fingertips to experience so I, like others in my country, naturally slip into a certain greedy appreciation of the status quo out of instinct. But I know this is wrong and in modern times this selfishness is frankly inexcusable.
I understand that museums are fragile creatures that already face funding cuts and jockey desperately for income, and income is created by interest. The financial risks involved in doing the right thing are frightening. But it doesn't make doing the right thing any less important.

Nefertiti, hidden in a German salt mine in the war

The handing of obviously stolen items back to their country of origin clearly works and symbolically is very important in showing what we want history to be. When Rome returned the 2,000 year old obelisk that was looted by Mussolini in 1937 back to its owners they not only did this as a sign of respect, and because it was the right thing to do, but as a political statement against dictators and the thieves of heritage. In returning it they said in not so many words "this will never happen again."

If we can create a global culture of collaboration, with items on loan across the globe and accessible to all then we really have very little to lose. If, furthermore, we can use technology to scan and preserve these treasures in a  digital and well as physical format the dangers of such collaborations are even further lessened. If every man woman and child can potentially hold and touch and marvel at their own Nefertiti, then how can it be truly lost?

Finally, the sharing and digitisation of our heritage gets to the deepest core of what a museum is.  The museum belongs to the people. It is created to share knowledge, to educate, and to put us in touch with our clever, beautiful, frightening ancestors. Collaboration, respect and openness for all peoples is the name of the game. If we keep this goal at heart then we should never go far wrong.

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Stay curious!

Sources

- Artists Covertly Scan Bust of Nefertiti and Release Data for Free Online by Claire Voon of Hyperallergic (originally found via Szembogar on Tumblr)
-The Art World's Shame: Why Britain Must give its Colonial Booty Back by Jonathan Jones
-French Museums Face a Cultural Change Over Restitution of Colonial Objects by Laurent Carpentier
-To Be or Not to Be Colonial: Museums Facing Their Exhibitions by Alexandra Sauvage
-Egypt asks Berlin to Return Nefertiti Bust
-Rome obelisk set for African return