Environmentally Manipulative Skills Predating Homo Sapiens

"Waterlogged deposits ... preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch."

"This construction has no known parallels in the African or European Palaeolithic."

"We also recovered four wood tools ... including a wedge, digging stick, cut log and notched branch. The finds show an unexpected early diversity of forms and the capacity to shape tree trunks into large combined structures."

"These new data not only extend the age range of woodworking in Africa but expand our understanding of the technical cognition of early hominins, forcing re-examination of the use of trees in the history of technology."

Professor Larry Barham, Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool

 

"That the wood has remained in place and intact for half a million years is extraordinary. And it gives us this real insight, this window into this time period."

"It’s completely changed my view of what people were capable of at that time."

Geoff Duller, professor of geography and Earth sciences, University of Aberystwyth, United Kingdom

The excavation team uncovers the wooden structure along the bank of Zambia's Kalambo River.  Professor Larry Barham/University of Liverpool

Archaeologists at work in Zambia discovered the remains of a wood structure, believed to represent the oldest wooden structure in the world dated to about 476,000 years ago. Which places these newly-discovered, human-worked and shaped logs to a position close to a hundred times more ancient than the construction of Egypt's pyramids. The remains were discovered, surprisingly intact, despite their venerable lineage, at Kalambo Falls in the central African nation of Zambia.

It is a region considered to be an archaeological treasure geology by scientists, where evidence of human habitation can be detected back in the early Stone Age period, forward to the modern era. Professor Barham describesd how his team discovered preserved wooden remains they were able to date to almost half a million years ago, published in a paper in the journal Nature.

The area's  high water table aided in the preservation of organic matter that would otherwise rot in a short period of time through exposure to the elements, and decompose, buried deep underground. The team meticulously worked to recover a 1.4-metre piece of wood notched in a manner that would do justice to present-day log cabin construction methodology. 

Modern humans are thought by archaeological science to have appeared some 350,000 years ago in the evolutionary timeline. Yet these newly-discovered structures serve to predate even the appearance of Homo sapiens, by thousands of years. At least one piece of wood indicated evidence of having been shaped with a broad, cleaver-like edge. "We interpret this object as a portion of tree trunk cut to size, indicating capacity to work wood at a large scale", the scientific team noted in their published paper.

The paper observed that Kalambo's dense forest cover teamed with a high water table would have resulted in frequent flooding, both of which provided the necessity and the means -- given the raw resources right at hand -- for the construction of "a raised platform, walkway or foundation for dwellings". Human ingenuity is never to be under-rated, even during its most primal appearance; an intelligence designed by nature to think ahead and seek out solutions to problems associated with ensuring survival in a raw world.

The wooden structure was found at an archaeological site upstream of Kalambo Falls in Zambia. Professor Geoff Duller/Aberystwyth University

Photo: Larry Barham/University of Liverpool

"You could see the individual chop marks really clearly. It's extraordinary. Everything just looks so fresh you think 'it can not be this old'."

"And when Geoff's dates came through, 477,000 [years old], I thought wow! It's just amazing. We were lucky."

"They are locking something in. So it restricts the movement and that's intentional. And nothing has been seen like that the archaeological record at this time and really they won't be seen again until maybe 9,000 years later, so a huge gap in time between what these people could do 477,000 years ago and then when we see that again in the archaeological record, in this case in the European record."

"So that's how I understand it, so this a framework on which things could then be added, like a platform."

 "It's what I call a disruptive discovery. I never expected it. And it took me a while before I appreciated what we were looking at. It didn't look very nice, to be honest. But it is much more complex than I thought and it suggests to me that early humans, early hominins before us, were actually capable of doing things which we would marvel at if we were doing it ourselves. So it's not just the stone tools, it's the wood as well. They've got this repertoire of materials now. They can transform their environment. They can build things that are lasting. That's new."

Professor Larry Barham

 

"What I've been involved in is a method called luminescence dating and this enables us to fill in this gap that other dating techniques really can't touch."

"And in particular what's useful about it is that we can apply it to the sands that the river deposits themselves, so we don't have to find special materials, we don't have to find tephra [volcanic ash] or anything particularly, it's just common minerals that occur in these sediments."

"And we can date those to give an age range."

Geoff Duller, Professor of Quaternary Science, Aberystwyth University

Research, Innovation, Discovery, Production, Distribution

"Enhanced Big Pharma reputations may well be the result. In its search for COVID profits, Pfizer last March issued $1.25 billion in 'sustainability bonds' under the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. The money raised, said Pfizer, will be used to fund capital investments in the manufacturing and development of medicines and vaccines, including the COVID vaccines."

"By issuing the bonds and taking a lead role on the vaccine search, Pfizer may in fact be seizing an opportunity to improve its image. Sustainalytics, which ranks corporations according to their perceived ability to live up to dubious environmental, social and governance objectives, currently ranks Pfizer as a 'high-risk' operation."

"At the end of the day, however, the arrival of effective vaccines will in fact mark another triumph in the role of profit-maximizing corporations in bringing good to society. The story will be how Big Pharma rescued global governments from the COVID-19 pandemic -- and at a fraction of the cost of what governments have expended on the project."

Terence Corcoran, journalist, Financial Post 

The laboratory at the University of Toronto where insulin was discovered.  University of Toronto

When insulin was discovered in a University of Toronto laboratory headed by J.J.R. Mcleod in 1921, its discoverers, Frederick Banting and Charles Best with the help of lab assistant James Collip, aspired to save lives lost to a dread disease, where children diagnosed with [juvenile-onset insulin-dependent] diabetes -- now known as Type 1 -- were as good as given an imminent death sentence, when their pancreas was no longer able to produce insulin to convey glucose to cells to be converted into energy. 

It was Frederick Banting whose idea formulated the production of insulin to save millions of lives around the world. And he had no interest whatever in profiting from his invention. He 'sold' the patent to the University of Toronto for the princely sum of one dollar. He felt the discovery should have no price tag connected with it, that it was the property of science and the world community, not his own. Thereafter insulin was mass-produced and widely available for the treatment of diabetes everywhere in the world. That was then, this is now.

 

Pfizer identifies lead coronavirus candidate ... WSJ

 

Laboratories of today bear no physical resemblance in their state-of-the-art equipment and scientific upgrades in fast-evolving techniques. And though there will always be laboratories and discoveries in university settings, the manufacture of pharmaceuticals is the work of large production facilities, the private property of big business popularly named as Big Pharma, and not with affection. They are driven, like any other business, to expand their profit margin.

And claim that much of their profit is plowed right back into new discoveries -- apart from what shareholders are guaranteed. That without charging hefty prices for their biological/chemical formulations -- developed in their laboratories by their own scientists and subsequently patented to ensure their research would profit their own business until patents ran out -- the wherewithal to continue important research into the many chronic illnesses and diseases that bedevil humanity. Research is costly, trials are time-consuming and also costly.

Government safety and efficacy regulations are a concern and products must be approved and only then will the production line proceed and distribution begin, to service the needs of the public requiring medication for a wide range of conditions. But because pharmaceutical companies make huge profits and their earnings burden health systems, the public, led by health services and government agencies view the producers as scalpers, unjustified in the prices they set in a capitalist free enterprise system.

Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

So we mentally sneer and refer to them contemptuously as conscienceless "Big Pharma" out to get the biggest bang for their research prowess. They're sinister in the sense that they're driven by Filthy Lucre, but their research, development and production are critical to our general well-being, battling the scourge of human illness and disease, goes the grudging admission. We don't regard manufacturers of far less vital products charging hefty fees in the same way, however.

There are governments, such as Canada's that castigate Big Pharma for their operations and pricing, placing pressure on the pharmaceutical companies for pricing concessions tied to bulk purchasing in the case of national health care schemes. Which leaves the pharmaceutical companies that sell to Canada no incentive to also produce in Canada. Canada's forced low prices present a conundrum whereby Americans try to purchase their drugs from Canada though the drugs are produced in the U.S. where they sell at competitive prices.

So Canada has no production capacity. And at a time of critical access to developing vaccines to combat a sometimes-deadly and frequently-devastating coronavirus Canada has left itself in the lurch. Those countries which enable the production of drugs without pressing the producers for lower pricing will have expedited access to vital vaccines. Canada will have to wait before its population is able to be inoculated, a considerable length of time after other nations' populations have been serviced. 

Since those in the health and pharmaceutical fields have been sounding the alarm to Canadian governments over its pricing and regulatory regimes undermining pharmaceutical capacity in the country for years, and government has taken little heed, this is one of the dire consequences. "Innovative new medicines" entry to Canada will lag and sometimes not be available at all should producers fail to launch their products in a country that haggles firmly over pricing.

 

Banting and Best were satisfied with a Nobel prize.

F. G. Banting and C. H. Best with a Marjorie on the roof of the U.of T. Medical Building

Another Time, Another Place

"If you had to point to the seminal discovery transforming biology and science in the previous century, the discovery of the double helix, in my mind, is No.1 as the most transformative discovery."
"And the fact that this woman's work was seminal to it, it is a remarkable achievement."
"[June Lindsey] blazed a trail for women long before gender equity in science became our era's clarion call."
Alex MacKenzie, molecular biologist, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute

"He [scientist Bill Cochran] was a quiet kind of person and they [double-helix Nobel prize winners James Watson and Francis Crick] ignored him. If anybody should have got the Nobel with them, it should have been him."
"I still feel that when women have children they should look after them. I am a bit old-fashioned like that."
"He [late husband George Lindsey] was streets ahead of me in ability. He could do anything. He could work in wood and marble and soapstone, he could write poems -- he could do anything."
June Lindsey, 96, 1940s Cambridge University alumni, Ottawa, Ontario

June Lindsey, still from video

June Lindsey -- at the time before her marriage, June Broomhead -- worked at the Cavendish Laboratory while she studied at Cambridge University in England. She was a gifted student for whom physics and math were an intellectual draw when she arrived from Yorkshire, England, to Cambridge University after winning the top science scholarship. When she completed her studies, sitting for the very same exams, competing in the same work as her male colleagues and earning high marks, she was nonetheless not awarded an undergraduate degree in 1944.

Women, at that time, though admitted to Cambridge to study were not granted degrees. They were permitted at that time for the last half-century to study at the university but degrees were withheld until 1948 when Queen Elizabeth was granted the first such degree, albeit an honourary degree in view of her station in life, not as a result of academic studies. One of a few women studying science and working at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, she was also working toward her PhD, and was but one of four women among a hundred men.

But she was in distinguished company, for among those doctoral students were many future Nobel Prize laureates. Around the same time as June Broomhead studied at Cambridge, Roselind Franklin contributed to the double helix discovery through her work on X-ray crystallography, credited with taking the X-ray that originally mapped out the double helix structure. Franklin died of cancer at an early age but awards and buildings were named after her, recognizing her contribution to science. Of her, June Lindsey has this to say: "I think she was overrated completely".

According to Lindsey, it was a student who had taken the X-ray that Franklin placed in a drawer, later to be retrieved by Crick and Watson and used in their work. After leaving Cambridge, Lindsey worked at Oxford University with another woman who would later win the Nobel Prize on determining the complex structure of B12, Dorothy Hodgkin. She moved among and worked around distinguished scientists and scholars and was herself in their league though recognition has eluded her, and it is this fact that has moved Alex MacKenzie to launch a campaign to correct that oversight.

June Lindsey, bottom left, in her days at the Cavendish Laboratory. She is at bottom left. Postmedia

In her research, she had delineated the precise shape and dimensions of adenine and guanine, two components critical to DNA, with the use of X-ray crystallography and precise calculations while a graduate student, mapping out their crystal structure. As well, she proposed the molecules were linked to one another with a series of repeated hydrogen bonds, representing an "overlooked prequel" to the discovery of the double helix. Her work, in other words, was what the scientists who discovered the double helix built their discovery upon.

When she made the observation relating hydrogen bonds binding the molecules she studied, a "critical epiphany" arose for American biologist James Watson and British physicist Francis Crick, later awarded the Nobel Prize, but who failed to make any mention of her work propping up their own. Both men were working at Cambridge's Cavendish Labs. Francis Crick worked right across the hall from where Lindsey did. "I didn't like him particularly. He ignored people like me", she recalled of those early years.

Historical writer Robert Olby wrote in his book The Path to the Double Helix, The Discovery of DNA, that Watson had consulted Lindsey's thesis shortly before the eureka moment leading to the double helix discovery. It was when he studied her work that Watson understood the hydrogen bonds could serve as the 'zipper' for the two nucleic acid strands that make up the double helix. "It is sad that the famous duo omitted to acknowledge their debt to Broomhead (Lindsey) and her colleagues", wrote X-ray crystallographer Durward Cruickshank in 2004.

 Yet Lindsey herself nominates someone else for the honour of having led the two researchers to their discovery, unacknowledged and unsung, and that person was a Scottish scientist also involved in research at the Cavendish Laboratory. Bill Cochran built on the structure of hydrogen bonds and he worked out the complex mathematics needed to "extrapolate from the 'dots on paper' diffraction pattern to the elegant double helix structure", wrote Mr. MacKenzie. Cochran decided not to publish his results, handing them over instead to Crick and Watson.

Lindsey met her husband, Canadian nuclear physicist George Lindsey, while she was working at Cavendish Labs, and with him moved to Canada where soon after bearing children she left her scientific career behind to become a full-time wife and mother. George Lindsey did military defence work during the cold war, and as a polymath he helped to create sabermetrics. Their children have themselves gone on to academic careers.

As for her belated recognition and how she feels now about the past, she responded philosophically: "Well, I am being recognized. I didn't expect any of that. I think in those days you expected women not to be taken much notice of."

June Lindsey’s (then June Broomhead) PhD thesis. Postmedia