Loss After Loss

The Essence of the Thing

As most often now, Ken was sleeping when I entered his room.  He opened his eyes, said hello, and dozed off again.  This is how our visits most often go.  I watched him for a while, quiet.  I sometimes wonder if he will be surprised to see me there when he opens his eyes again.  Maybe he is, but doesn’t say so.  Or maybe he’s not.  

He woke again and said, alarmed, I thought even frightened, "Have I been asleep for a day and a  half?"  I said no.  "Weeks?" he asked, more alarmed.  I hadn't seen him frightened before.  Unhappy to be where he is, yes, but not frightened.  

He closed his eyes again, and when he opened them, he asked, again sounding frightened, "Why did you let me sleep through the war?" I asked him which war, and he said, "The war with Russia.  Weren't we bombing Russia?" 

This hadn't been a dream.  Or, if it had been, it wasn't that he was still caught up in it.  Ken has dementia and lives in a memory care facility now.  He had forgotten the question soon after he asked it -- another brief moment in his now fleeting reality.  

A pencil drawing of Ken's hands that I did before I moved him into care. 

Ken was a brilliant man whose sharp mind and insightfulness gave him enormous pleasure and  satisfaction, and made it rewarding and satisfying to talk with him on almost any subject.  Many of us who love him miss those conversations most.  I hasten to add that having been brilliant doesn't make his dementia any more tragic than anyone else's.  If he'd been a great chef, we'd miss the meals, and the pleasure he took in preparing them. If he'd been a good mechanic, it would be painfully difficult to now have to take our cars to the shop.  But perhaps because we all valued Ken's brain so much, the slow disappearance of the very thing that gave him so much pleasure, and that we held in such high esteem, feels especially sad and poignant.  

We think of dementia as memory loss, but the losses are much greater than that.  Dementia is being lost in time and space, it’s loss of the ability to reason, to evaluate, to put two and two together, it’s truly living in the moment, which brings the loss of the ability to read, or to appreciate baseball games, or to grasp a film, because you need to bring the past with you to understand what’s happening now, or what comes next, even when that past is only moments ago. Dementia is the loss of the ability to calm yourself, to entertain yourself, to even care about entertaining yourself. It's the loss of the ability to learn, to make new memories. It’s personality loss, it’s the loss of self. For those of us who love someone with dementia, it’s the loss of the person we love.  

When Ken woke again, he said, “I wish I wanted to go home.”  He had never put it this way before.  I took it as a version of, “If I were home I wouldn’t feel as safe as I do here,” which he has said from time to time, and which I'm always comforted to hear, even though it's a thought that leaves him as quickly as it arrives. And, I haven't heard it in a while now. He sometimes knows he's in a retirement facility of some sort, but he has no insight into his dementia, so he doesn't know why he's there and not at home with me.  This lack of insight in people with dementia is much more common than understanding, and I feel fortunate that at least he doesn't have to cope with the loss himself, because that can be very painful.  He'll often say, "I don't even know why I'm here."  He once asked if it was because of the sore toe he had at the time.

Then, a moment later, “When can I go home?”  Had he changed his mind and now wanted to come home?  No, I don’t think that changing his mind is something he has any control over any longer.  Dementia runs things now.  He lives almost entirely in the moment, and what he’s thinking requires no work on his part.  I envision each moment passing, unremembered, and unconnected to the next. I answered, as I usually do, that we don’t know. 

And then he asked, as he always does repeatedly, and I never am, “Are you here for lunch?”  He has lost his sense of time of day.  He no longer remembers whether he’s had breakfast, or which meal is coming up.  He often seems disturbed about any meal, though, unsure of whether he wants it or not.  If I’m there before lunch, as I usually am, he’ll say he doesn’t want to go.  But then he’ll worry about what happens if he gets hungry later.  Maybe he can go get some chocolate milk. So, no, he won't go.  But then, when an aide comes to tell him it’s lunchtime, he goes.   

Still, after almost two years, he will ask me whether they bring meals to him in his room, or if he goes to the dining room. Then he'll ask if it's cafeteria-style, or the meals are served.  He once described getting to the cafeteria by walking down a long hall with pots and pans hanging on the walls. I don't know where that image came from.  It could be someplace from the past or it could be an invention.  But here it's a dining room where people are served at their tables.  No standing, no making decisions about what to eat.  

His confusion about this happens so often, probably before every meal, that I have come to imagine that all that's left of all the meals he’s ever eaten — at home, at restaurants, in hospitals or cafeterias — in whatever part of his brain they are still stored in, is a kind of Platonic ideal, the true, philosophical, non-physical essence of the thing that is Meal.  Or Meals. Now, multiple equally plausible images of mealdom -- whether self-selected in a cafeteria, a hospital tray brought to him in bed, or a dinner plate served at the table -- are still accessible to him.  But, he can’t settle on just one because he has essentially not been making new memories since long before memory care, so he doesn’t know where he is, or how he gets his meal, but he does still have, somewhere deep in the part of his brain that generalizes about life, that apparently can still generalize about life, images of the possible ways that a meal might appear before him. At some point, of course, this, too, will disappear. 

He still carries his wallet in his pants pocket, and wears his cell phone on his belt.  He won’t leave his room without either of them.  For a long time, there was only an expired driver’s license in his wallet, but then he lost that wallet, so I bought a new one, printed out a scan of the first page of his expired passport because I didn't have an image of his license, and images of his insurance cards and loaded those into the new wallet. I wasn't sure I even needed to do that, but when I gave it to him, he did check to make sure there was something in it. Happily, he was satisfied with what he saw.  

I cancelled his phone line a few months after he had forgotten how to turn the phone on, which was not long after he no longer knew how to answer it.  So, neither his wallet nor his phone any longer perform their primary functions — he has no credit cards, no money, no valid id, and he can’t make a phone call.  But to Ken, they have quite literally become their Platonic ideal, and that’s what counts now. They bring him security and comfort.  When he gets ready to leave his room, he goes through the same motions he's gone through for much of his life -- wallet, phone, pen, paper, (he no longer checks for his keys), ok to go down to the dining room, or cafeteria, to either choose my meal or be served. I have come to admire his courage for venturing into the unknown at least three times a day.  

Old Age is Loss After Loss

As an academic, and even after he retired, Ken lived on his email account, and took care of most of his business this way.  He was known for replying instantly to any message.  People worried when he didn’t.  He was a researcher, he was on a number of editorial boards, he was a department head, a professor, a collaborator, a parent, a friend, and he had extensive correspondences in all of those roles.  He organized his email by maybe 50 different labels and sublabels; Editorships, then Reviewing, or Personal, then Letters, for example, and he had tens of thousands of messages going back many years.  

A few years before I moved Ken to memory care, when he was still active on email but already having a bit of trouble figuring out how to use it, I was helping him with something, and I had to get into his account. I clicked on one of his labels, maybe Editorships, and then Reviewing, and discovered that there was nothing there, not a single message.  I clicked on other labels and found nothing under any of them, either.  All I could find were some messages in his inbox.  He had, surely inadvertently, deleted years and years of correspondence, all of which he’d carefully curated and saved — for what?  For later?  

I found this to be both deeply disturbing, and deeply profound.  On the one hand, years of back and forth collaborations, chatty messages from his children, his thoughts on academic papers he’d been asked to review, or reviews of papers of his own, correspondence with students and ex-students — so much of his life — gone in an instant, by the mistaken touch of a key on a keyboard. 

On the other hand, what had he been saving it all for?  He had never expressed any interest in writing his memoirs — if pressed to say what had been the most interesting parts of his life, I think he’d have said the world of ideas, and his own could already be found in his books and papers.  And, no one was going to write his biography, so what did it matter that it was all gone now?  He, to whom it should have mattered the most, wasn’t even aware that it had happened, so why should it matter to me?  

The digital evidence of our lives has become as real as the physical.  To me, this was a small death, one of the first in what’s turning into a long string of small deaths.  Indeed, dementia is sometimes known as "the long goodbye."  Loss after loss.  

That Question

I think Ken still has a Platonic ideal of Day in his head, too. Wake up, have breakfast, do stuff, have lunch, do stuff, have dinner, shower, go to bed.  Now, for "stuff" read "take nap." He no longer does anything but nap without prompting, and sometimes not even then. I think this might be because, in the map of Day in his head, he's already done whatever it is he's being asked to do. Or he will do it later, he really will. So, it's hard to convince him to take a shower because he is certain that he either already has taken one, or that he will.  Just like in his old reality.  

But, the other day I managed to talk him into showering, and I was helping him get ready.  He took off his shirt and I noticed he had a bandaid on his wrist.  I thought perhaps he’d had blood drawn, though they usually inform me when that happens and I’d heard nothing about it.  But, if so, I assumed he would no longer need the bandage so I suggested he take it off. It turned out that he had a jagged cut, now healing, on his fragile skin, definitely not a blood draw.  It looked superficial but had clearly bled a lot.  He, of course, had no idea what had happened and unless I happen to run into the aide who helped him clean it, I’ll never know. 

But, it doesn’t matter.  I put on another bandaid, the wound will heal and he’ll be fine. But, I wonder every day whether there will come a time when the intensity of the guilt and grief that has weighed me down since I moved him into care will abate.  This incident told me something about that.  

People often ask, “Does he still know you?”  This is a real question, yes, and it’s definitely a big deal line to cross.  But, it is also superficial in a way, since so much must already be lost before that point is reached.  Indeed, years usually go by between the onset of dementia and this, but everything that happens before that will have been just as hard as the loss of the person’s memory of those they love.  Or at least I think that’s true. The first time he forgot what to say when he answered the phone, and then how to answer the phone; the first time he forgot whether it was breakfast time or lunch time; when he couldn't remember whether I was with him in England in the Air Force or not (I wasn't), these were all difficult, and there's a new difficult thing almost every day.  So, I don’t know what it will feel like the first time he forgets me because we aren't there yet, but maybe it's a feeling I already know.   

I have always assumed that the complexity of the connection I feel to Ken will lessen when he no longer knows me. I suspect that I'll gain a bit of anonymity that will mean he will no longer be expecting Anne things from me.  It turns out that, for me, the discovery of a wound that I hadn’t known about, hadn’t discovered, hadn’t washed, and hadn’t bandaged, may have given me the sense of how this is going to feel.  I know that when he was looking for someone to help take care of the wound, if he was, it wasn’t me he was looking for.  And I know that he had no idea the he had a bandage on his arm 2 minutes after it was placed there, so even if I had been the one who had placed it there, he wouldn’t have remembered, and the fact that I had helped him would no longer mean anything to him.  

Ken won’t go to bed one night fully aware of who I am, and wake up the following morning having forgotten.  It’s a gradual process which I can already see happening. It’s been happening for years.  He still tells me he loves me, and he is still pleased to see me when I visit.  Though, the other day he said, “We’re married, aren’t we?”  It was impossible to know what prompted this — his head had taken him back to when we were together but not yet married?  He wasn't remembering that I was his wife?  I will never know, and whatever the reason, it was fleeting.  

I may feel differently when he no longer knows me, but I now think that forgetting what happened two minutes ago, or no longer sharing my reality, are as deeply significant in their way as his no longer knowing who I am will be. In significant ways, I am already as temporary, as easily wiped from his mind as the wound that required a bandage — already out of sight, out of mind.  Just not yet completely.  

Reality, Now and Then

A few weeks ago, the wife of a resident who Ken has sat with at meals every day since he’s been in memory care texted me while she was sitting with them at lunch.  I had been visiting, and then, as always, I walked Ken to the dining room, said goodbye and left. This woman, who has become a good friend as we both deal with husbands with dementia, texted five minutes later to tell me that Ken had just told her that I was in North Carolina with our daughter.  Later, he told her that I was in Europe.  And recently, he asked me if I’ve moved yet.  I asked where I was moving to.  He said he thought I was moving to North Carolina. 

Does he feel I’ve abandoned him? Or would? I have certainly learned that just because something makes sense to me, in my brain not being destroyed by dementia, that tells me nothing about what now makes sense to him. I don’t see him when I’m not there, so I can’t know, but he doesn’t seem to feel abandoned.  For him, when I'm there, I'm there.  When I'm not, I'm not; I'm who knows where. He seems to live in both realities as though both are always true.  That is, he truly lives in the moment, each moment his current reality. 

A few years ago, I decided to draw my completely invented idea of what happens to a brain with dementia.  I envision a very slow melting of the lobes.  I did this with Procreate. 

I’ve heard Ken say, when asked about the genetics research he used to do — which he no longer reliably remembers — that he ran a grasshopper lab, a fruit fly lab, studied intestinal diseases, or memory in WWII veterans at Walter Reed Hospital who’d lost half their brain.  None of this happened. He’s not just forgetting his career, he’s inventing alternatives.  He doesn't talk about Penn State or his career anymore. He was there for 35 years, but a year ago or so when we did talk about it, he remembered it as maybe 7.  His 5 years in the Air Force as a meteorologist when he was in his 20s are more real to him now than his long and successful career.  This isn't a surprise because, for people with dementia, earlier memories last longer. Even his Air Force memories are fading now, though.  

He has told stories of having worked in a bookmobile above the Arctic Circle in Finland during winter, he’s had sabbaticals in places he’s never been, he’s made his children’s travels his own, and even been down to see the Titanic.  All of this is confabulation, and it’s common with dementia.   

There has been disagreement in dementia care over the years as to whether it's better to go along with these kinds of stories or, instead, try to pull the person back into our own reality.  Their old reality.  There is now general consensus that no reminders, no amount of impatience, or scolding, or yelling, or arguing, can change the reality of someone with dementia.  It's better for everyone if we meet them where they are. I find that trying on the idea that their reality feels the same to them as it ever did makes this easier.  Plus, emotions seem to linger when words don't, so the attempt to remind someone of what we know to be true, but they no longer do, can cause more harm than good.  Of course it's painful to see someone lose what we had with them.  But, that is the nature of the disease.  

Ken sometimes asks why he's where he is now, and I always find this difficult to answer.  Dementia care workers often recommend the use of "therapeutic fibs" for situations like this.  I am completely fine with this, but I can't always think fast enough to come up with one and so occasionally I have told him that he's got memory issues.  He is always surprised.  I have asked if that seems true to him and he says no, even as his reality diverges further and further from mine, and from what it used to be, an ever-growing schism in what was once our shared world. 

Much of what happens in the mind of someone with dementia seems hard to understand. What is it like not to be able to follow the plot line of a book or a movie, or to not remember something for 2 minutes, or to be so distant from a reality we once shared with people we love that we can invent stories with abandon but not know it, or to forget people we once knew intimately and loved, and then to have no idea that our memory now works this way? 

Confabulation might be easier to understand. I think we've all had the experience of absolutely knowing that something happened, being certain of a memory, but then being told convincingly that we are wrong. It could be a memory that we've held on to for decades.  We might even have clear images in our heads. Indeed, we are all susceptible to the creation of false memories, through suggestion or misinformation, or these memories might simply be the product of our own imagination.  We've all unintentionally confabulated.  Our memories, even at their best, are not infallible.  

And, given that we can recognize that we might have this in common with people with dementia, it might require us taking just a few more conceptual steps to recognize that, for people with memory loss who don't have insight into their disease, what looks to us like a very foreign new reality doesn't feel new or strange to them at all. They don't know that their brains aren't working as they used to. So, while forgetting people they once loved is painful for those who've been forgotten, it's simply reality for the person who's forgetting.  Indeed, every time they see the people they once loved it can be like meeting someone for the first time, something we all recognize.  Reality itself has become a Platonic ideal.

Is it Ok to Publish This?

I write this post for people who've known Ken for a long time or who knew him only through this blog, or through his published work, or maybe who had him as a professor, but I also hope that what I have written here will mean something to people who've never heard of Ken Weiss before now, who haven't read any of his work, including the thousands of posts he published here on the Mermaid's Tale. Yes, it is said that if you've known one person with Alzheimer's disease, you've known one person with Alzheimer's disease, but I think there are aspects of the experience that can be generalized. 

 

I've been writing for years about Ken's Alzheimer's disease for myself and a few family members and close friends.  I have felt strongly about protecting his privacy, and because he can't give true informed consent, I've not wanted to write about his illness publicly.  But, not long ago, Ken asked what I do all day. I told him simply that I draw, I paint, and I write about what's happening to him.  He found that interesting. I asked if he thought I should blog about it, and he said yes.  This is certainly far from recognizable informed consent, given that he doesn't understand what's happening to him, but it's the closest thing I'm going to get from him. So, when Holly mentioned in her post last month that she'd gotten a book from me, I thought maybe it was time to explain. 

I now live alone, but I remain surrounded by Ken -- his clothes, his library, his CD's, his computer, his bike, his bike repair tools. I have been living as though he's going to recover and come home and pick up his life where he left off, but he isn't. The long goodbye.  

The old Ken is gone, and won't return, but there is still a Ken. There's no rush for me to empty my house of him, but could it help me accept the permanence of this disease if I started to work on it? A dear friend who was going through the very painful task of sorting through her wife's things after she died, very kindly offered to come help me sort through the clothes that Ken would no longer wear, whenever I was ready.  We did this, but I left the space we'd emptied empty.  I couldn't bring myself to use his side of the closet.  It wasn't until months later, when I had to clear out the entire closet because of work being done in the attic that was accessed from a hatch in the closet ceiling, that I could actually hang up my own clothes on "his" side when the work was finished.  

In the same spirit, Holly offered to come help me sort through his books.  I was so grateful for this, and it especially meant a lot to me to have so many of them going to her.  I know Ken would have approved. And, one of the books she chose to take was Fossil Men.  If you haven't read her post about this book, do!  Ken would have loved it!  

And, my daughter, who grieves those missing conversations with her father every day, has convinced me that he would have wanted his story written if there was any hope at all of someone else resonating with something we have learned along the way, perhaps learning from it, too. Dementia is a tragic disease, indeed a long goodbye. It's because it's so common that there are tremendous resources available to those of us living with it -- an amazing Alzheimer's Association social worker has called me at least every month for 5 years offering invaluable advice and support and care, a palliative care team was very helpful for a few years until I moved Ken into care, my sister has been invaluable, many of the staff where he now lives have been kind and understanding, the wives of other residents in the memory care unit, women who understand what it means to lose a spouse this way, have been welcome fellow-travelers, dear friends have kept me standing upright, as has my daughter.

Dementia is a long hard haul.  It can break families, it can cause caregiver burn-out, it can deplete finances, and it always leaves much grief in its wake.  If there is anything I have said here that might lessen the burden for someone else dealing with this disease, even if it's just knowing that you are not alone, I am grateful. I choose to believe that my Platonic ideal of Ken would be grateful, too.  

Fossil Men, Indeed (A Book Review?)

Chapter 1. The Outsider-Insider

Look. I never met Tim White. I never worked in Ethiopia; I never visited Berkeley; we never crossed paths in Nairobi; he never visited Penn State while I was there; as far as I know, we only attended the same conference once, back when I was a graduate student. Though I saw him give a talk, I never spoke to him. The opportunity never arose. I was not the kind of student who asked my advisor to introduce me around at conferences. And, at least with me, Alan Walker was not the kind of advisor to introduce his student around at conferences. Much later, I was set to be in the same episode of the PBS/HHMI documentary Your Inner Fish as White et al. But, for mysterious, disappointing reasons, my big part was cut out of it along with that of the other young woman paleoanthropologist, Tracy Kivell.

Anyway, what I wanted to get across from the get-go is that while I’m more of an insider than many other readers, I’m also not really an insider.

The book, Fossil Men, is masterfully written. Kermit Pattison: Wow, just wow. That I listened to Moby-Dick over the same days that I read Fossil Men is testament to just how good Pattison’s writing is. Melville is a magnificent writer, just extraordinary, and other writers hope their books are read as far away from his as possible. Pattison held his own.

Of course, my interest in hominin fossils, my career in the field (fieldwork and beyond), and my experience with Moby-Dick elevated my experience of Fossil Men, so I have no way of seeing the book, plainly for what it is. Fossil Men became something of myself. 

Chapter 2. Thar, It Blows

Fossil Men was published in 2021. I first encountered the sizable tome in person, never even having heard about it.  My family and I were on our masked way to Zion National Park in the summer of ’21, stretching our legs between flights at O’Hare. I picked it up off the bookstore pile, flipped to the index, and looked for Alan Walker’s name. He was the fossil man I knew best.

Walker, Alan, 355

For perspective, “Romans, ancient” has four pages. “Nazism” has three.

I flipped to the jacket and surmised that this book is only about certain fossil men, some American, some Ethiopian, and a few Europeans, but most of all Tim White. I couldn’t help but wonder, then, what kind of book about Tim White this would be. So, I flipped back to the index to find Leslea Hlusko.

               Hlusko, Leslea, 5, 356

Alright, so, this was going to be a book about a man, framed in such a way as to effectively omit his marriage partner who is a significant member of his same scientific field. Okay. And wow… okay, wow… I went back to flipping through the index to find that Carol Ward, Kay Behrensmeyer, and Kaye Reed are on as many pages as there are fossil primate caudal vertebrae on Rusinga Island (0). Telling.

This was mid 2021. I was still getting over my first read of the icky parts of Descent of Man and having to write publicly about some of those icky parts. In this moment, the public is full of defensive Darwin fans, including some who quite like those icky parts. That experience was, and continues to be, …. something. And then, I was still getting over an academic year of “teaching” to a screen of black squares. And I was recovering from Trump’s first term and all the hate and violence in it, fueled by beliefs that may as well have been ripped from the pages of Descent of Man. And then there was this whole pandemic going on as well. I wasn’t the only person who was running on stress and rage. And I definitely wasn’t interested in whatever Fossil Men seemed to be.

It didn’t help that I had just watched Werner Herzog’s Into the Inferno and was shocked by how White behaved in the field with his crew. Entertaining and talented as he may be, to someone with many seasons of paleoanthropological fieldwork under her belt this was not the personality of someone I’d want to spend weeks in the wild with. This was too much.

Oh, maybe I shouldn’t throw stones. I’m energetic, too. I’m not exactly everyone’s cup of tea. But this was too much! Maybe he was merely charming the documentary crew that day. But it was so natural that it just couldn’t be what comes out for show. That’s got to cause some problems. So, then what’s the secret to his success? For whatever reason, I didn’t begin reading this book in the airport to find out. I simply put it down and walked away. Then, I totally forgot about its existence.

It’s hard to convey how strange it is for someone, especially someone like me, to not read a book about their own field. But there's something that may help it make sense. Back when I struggled to get a tenure-track job after defending my dissertation, I thought that being dead would be better than not being a paleoanthropologist. Back then, the thought of death was comforting. I did get a job, but I didn’t last very long as a paleoanthropologist. It’s been 20 years and I absolutely love my life, what I do with my hands and the rest of me, and what I think about with my mind.  I do not want to be a paleoanthropologist anymore, and have not for a while. But that me who wanted so badly to be a paleoanthropologist will always be part of who I am. And, I guess, that me is an asshole who doesn’t want to read about the people who are living the dream.

Combine that with the present me, a wise middle-aged woman, and, well, there’s at least two kinds of asshole in me right now.

Chapter 3. Aloha

If you want to know about the different kinds of assholes in Fossil Men, going to the index won’t help. At least, not if you’re searching for “asshole”.  For “a brief primer on the taxonomy of assholes,” I marked the page (107).

In the Tim White classification, the word carried many shades of meaning. A snarl of Asshole! Might condemn an enemy as morally or scientifically bankrupt. Down a notch, he sometimes used it to vent irritation that evaporated as quick as sweat in the desert. But You asshole could express sardonic affection, even grudging admiration. In moments like this, White adored that asshole.

Chapter 4. The Title

If you want to know how, after my initial meeting with Fossil Men, I found myself reading it, well Anne (of this very blog!) passed it along to me (with a truckload of books!) about a month ago.

I started with the three chapters, between the middle and end, that included one brief quote from Alan about Ardi: “This find is far more important than Lucy.” And then, having enjoyed those chapters, I decided to go for it and started the whole thing from the beginning. This is when I hoped I’d find out, from the author, what he meant by Fossil Men. 

What can I say. I’m a sensitive asshole. So when I saw him describe Ardi as,

an inconvenient woman who disturbed scholars of human origins more than many care to admit

my eyes rolled right out of my head. That was page 1. A woman. Who disturbs men. But they can’t admit it too much. Lest they express feelings like a girl. Fossil Men, indeed! But will he actually go there? 

Whoomp. There it is. A paragraph on page 9.

The title Fossil Men—which may seem an odd choice for a saga about a female skeleton—…

My eyes are rolling again, because that’s not why it seems like an odd choice to me! (Fun fact: Ardi could be male, we do not actually know the truth about that.)

…refers to these central characters, the lead investigators of a team that collected truckloads of old bones and occupied a lonely branch of the science that some peers disdained as outdated.

Hm. Peers disdained the Ardi teams science as “outdated”? That’s not what I expected to lead this story. Outdated science? Hm. Yeah, not the lead I was expecting.

The great irony is that this team proved more forward-thinking than many contemporaries,

Oh. I guess there’s a nice literary ring to putting things that way. Besides, this is America. Someone’s got to be the underdog who ends up the hero.

and fossils never go obsolete—and sometimes force us to write history anew.

Fossils don’t force us to do anything. Our imaginations create the conditions in which we’ve written so many guesses and so much unknowable bullshit as natural history, going beyond the stone cold chronological facts, that when new fossils don’t fit the story we made up, then we have to revise the guesses and unknowable bullshit to make the new fossils fit in.

And, now, the end of the paragraph:

Once upon a time, “fossil men” was also a term for human ancestors, but the title should not be read as endorsement of bygone sexist language…

Hm. Like “an inconvenient woman” who caused all these dudes to fight? There I go again. Just being an asshole. It’s a trope as old as time. Why wouldn’t a writer use it?

… nor a dismissal of the contributions of female scientists on the Ardi team or any other. If anything, this field needs more women.

Does it? Is there a place for women out in the badlands where men roam with loaded machine guns? Is there a place for women where men think of themselves as bullshit detectors while they spew bullshit stories about hominins exchanging food for sex with bipedally incompetent females? Such a story has achieved such mythological status that it is perpetuated unquestioned in at least one best-selling 2025 biological anthropology textbook. We’re about 45 years into this story! It stuck, impervious to critiques. And that’s just one example of the bullshit. Is there a place for women in a violent and bullshit-ridden field? Maybe women are no longer excluded as much as they simply don’t want to find a place in whatever we’re calling “science”.  

We don’t know why the author of Fossil Men believes there aren’t enough women in the field and that the field needs more of them, because the issue never comes up again. Maybe it’s as simple as statistical parity. But maybe he’s alluding to the value of diverse viewpoints and how they calibrate the field’s shared bullshit detector.

When I read this paragraph about the title (before reading the rest of the book to come), I thought: maybe he will walk the talk. If he thinks there should be more women in the field, then maybe women’s ideas are featured in the book, you know, because of equity or because they’re valuable, like he suggests. I found myself daring this book not to dismiss the contributions of female scientists. Don’t do it. Don’t dismiss the contributions of women in paleoanthropology! Given the absence of just those three big contributors I had already searched for in the index (out of a small number of successful women in the field to begin with) I lowered my expectations and started a log, recording each instance a woman appeared. Can Fossil Men come through? Of course it can. But will it?

Chapter 5. “If you want to find something that walked like [Ardi] did, you might try the bar in Star Wars.”

First of all, it’s a cantina.

Second of all, the Star Wars stuff is what we had to listen to while we waited. This isn’t normal. When we have fossils, we might talk about them with colleagues, even those we’re not collaborating with, but we generally don’t talk much about them publicly until we are close to publication (or ready to share them) and when we do we don’t flaunt and taunt. We were hearing about Ardi’s sci-fi locomotion several years before we could read anything about the bones in a scientific paper.

Tim White had to know he was dangling a fat lamb over a den of hungry wolves. Maybe the long lag was a surprise even to him. As you’ll learn in the book, there was more than science delaying the publication. Ethiopian politics played a major role, too. But, between discovery and publication, those 15 years, people on the Ardi team were applying their transformational knowledge and strong opinions about Ardi to their assessment of colleagues’ work, despite their colleagues’ not having any knowledge of Ardi during all that time. It was all pretty fucked up, and anyone should be able to see how that would cause tension between paleoanthropologists. More than tension. Ill will. It’s in the book. Also, it was palpable even for people not directly involved, at the time, like me. And I know how that (dare I say) animosity spilled out beyond the science around Ardi and over into the genus Homo.

It's nothing but trouble when you are the only subset of people to know something profoundly important about what it is that an entire group of people studies. Everyone else is going on with the science, not knowing what you know. It’s not like they can freeze all their research until you publish your new fossils. That is why the information needs to be shared in a timely way. And this is why it looks like you don’t respect or empathize with others in your own field, regardless of whether that’s the case. (Note: From what I gather in the book, that may be the case.) How a thing functions is what a thing is.

In science, it’s too hard—especially for assholes who like to lord over so-called enemies whom they call (complete with scare quotes) “the profession”—to pretend like you don’t know what you know. It should feel unethical to pretend like that for too long. In that situation, the ethical move isn’t to stop pretending like you can unsee what you’ve seen and, then, to be a giant asshole to everyone who hasn’t yet seen what you’ve seen. No, the ethical move for someone who wants to live the truth among others is to share that truth with others. If you don’t want to share until you’re good and ready, or if you can’t share because of government policy and politics, or whatever it is, then shut the fuck up until you can. Not saying it’s easy. Not at all. But jeeeeeeezus, just reading about these people is exhausting. I’m sure it’s more exhausting to be these people. Glad I’m not. Is that the point of the book? Glad I’m not a whaler, either. Whew.

Chapter 6. Tim White (sensu Werner Herzog) Is a Volcano (sensu Werner Herzog)

I watched Into the Inferno again, just after reading Fossil Men. White clearly loves this shit and I love him for it. I love this shit too. What’s not to like about Herzog’s Tim White?  What an asshole I am when I’m unhappy. Four years between the first viewing and now, and I have an entirely different reaction to White’s personality. How fascinating. Anyway. Phew! I’m sure the book helped. My book is marked to high hell with reactions to quotes and ideas, many of them positive remarks about White’s. Now all the adoration (even through his prickly eruptions) makes sense. And it makes more sense that he could be so successful in spite of all the opposite of what’s in this film (which is peppered through the book).

Chapter 7. The White Paper

The words “bite me” come to mind. It’s something a friend in a lab down the hall at Penn State liked to say. Perhaps that’s what she said way back then when we read “A view on the science: Physical anthropology at the millennium” (White, 2000). “Bite me” is one of many correct reactions to this paper which you can read all about on page 257. Who writes a paper saying that there are no more fossil sites only to be out there, in that moment, finding them?  I read it again, a few  years ago, can’t remember why but it was with some students. Here’s another appropriate response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7iQtP4cO1o 

Fossils are rare but deep-time-dirt remains plentiful and productive. The only explanation for that paper, thanks to insights from this book, is that White believes everyone else is incompetent and so he hoped he could keep us from doing what we love.  

Chapter 8. The Profanity

Over the days I read Fossil Men, I found myself swearing more than usual. It’s got so much on the pages. And the energy evokes it, too. I said “fuck you dog” to my dog! She can be a horrible person, but I’ve never said that to her before. I felt awful. And then I said “fuck you [person’s name]” as I read an email from [person’s name] that irritated me. I felt less awful, but still… somewhat bad. I love swearing but this new level of it was toxic. After getting to about the halfway point, I got better. So did the book. 

Chapter 9. Hyperhidrosis

Why didn’t I ask Alan Walker to introduce me around at conferences? After growing up and into having chronically sweaty hands throughout my teenage years, I was a squirrel wherever there was hand-shaking to be done. It’s not as big a problem anymore, and it helps to be out of Florida, but it’s not gone away entirely either. Just writing about it now made my hands sweat. Just imagining an upcoming handshake makes my palms tingle and moisten, if they’re not moist already. Watching rock climbing is the sure-est fastest trigger. Alcohol helps keep hyperhidrosis at bay. I offered a fist bump at a conference long long ago. Surely No one wants me to shove this into theirs. But I got shamed for it. It’s a motherfucker! I thought covid would end hand-shaking forever. I was just as excited for that as for the guaranteed, forever four-day workweek and the inevitable, anti-racist, patriarchy-smashing makeover of the police.

Chapter 10. How To Kill a Human Evolutionary Fairytale

How surreal to see Lovejoy’s fairytales about Ardi presented almost entirely without critique in Fossil Men, but not surprising!  I think the only objection that the author includes is the fact that some women call it a “male fantasy”. Why more men don’t call it the same beats me. Maybe they don’t know how pervasive it is. Maybe they’re not teaching the big survey courses with the textbooks that still include it. Or maybe they <sucks in teeth> think it’s good science. It’s been 45 years of this, on top of Man the Hunter, etc. that we’re still dealing with today too.  

At this point in my life, this asshole has accumulated enough wisdom to be unabashedly sure of what’s untrue in human evolutionary biology, and righteously so. That’s how, despite not yet having any kills of my own, I can present this set of guidelines for killing human evolutionary stories:

1. The first rule of killing a human evolutionary fantasy/fairytale//myth/fiction/story is to never tell another human evolutionary story to take its place.

2. The second rule of killing a human evolutionary fantasy/fairytale//myth/fiction/story is to never tell another human evolutionary story to take its place.

You cannot play the game. Once you play the game then a story wins. It’s because there’s now a foil, which can only make one of the stories look better, in comparison. And because people believe that there must be a story, then one is chosen as the winner. Having any story is bad, first of all, but what’s worse is by playing the storytelling game, you’ve given legitimacy to stories. And, often, the first story wins because they got there first, it’s probably better than yours, and, because it can’t be falsified, it’s there forever. Or, if you win, yours is. Ew.

3. Fuck people’s fear of feeding the creationists! Evolution is true. There are the facts of evolution and then there are the unverifiable, unfalsifiable stories we tell with them. Doing creationism to own the creationists is not the move.

4. Look through the story you’re killing and point out any actual evidence, any actual facts. Separate these from the guesses/theories one could eventually verify and the guesses/theories that one can never verify (a.k.a. the bullshit).

5.  Offer alternative counter guesses/theories about the same facts in play ONLY to point out that these alternate narratives or scenarios are just as unfalsifiable and unverifiable! This is a tool for showing just how bullshitty the original fairytale is.

6.  If you haven’t done so already, point out that floating truth or even hypothetical/ plausible truth with no regard for its unknowability is floating bullshit in the academic, philosophical sense.

7. Acknowledge that just because storytelling has been legitimate in human evolutionary biology doesn’t mean that it should continue to be. We don’t have to put any of it in the textbooks as if it’s science.

8. Argue that what we can know about the past is enough and is important because it demonstrates, in relief, what bullshit we make of it. Fossils are liberating!

Chapter 11. Hypothesis/ Hypotheses

Hey paleoanthropologists and writers-about-paleoanthropology, you keep using that word.

Chapter 12. Women Talking

A comprehensive list of quotes by women in Fossil Men:

·       p. 5 – Meave Leakey, re: White’s science

·       p. 5 – Leslea Hlusko, re: White

·       P. 51 – Mary Leakey, re: White

·       p. 52 – Mary Leakey, re: White

·       p. 53 – Mary Leakey, re: White

·       p. 54 – Mary Leakey’s telegram with rules for White to follow in the field

·       p. 66 – Susan Antón, described only as “former student”, re: White, how she heard he was “God” (quite something to see her included like this when she was a god to us anthropology majors at U.F. and has been such an important member of the field, kind of like if the author of Van Halen’s biography Rock Men described Henry Rollins only as a “fan”)

·       p. 76 – Frehiwot, re: husband Berhane Asfaw

·       p. 83 - Frehiwot, talking to Asfaw

·       p. 142 – Ann Getty, “need a bandage”

·       p. 180 – Meave Leakey, re: science

·       p. 217 – Elisabeth Vrba, re: science

·       p. 219 – Raymonde Bonnefille, re: science and White

·       p. 221 – Sarah Feakins, re: science

·       p. 244 – Dean Falk, re: getting tent burgled at nearby site with another (positioned as rival) team

·       p. 290 – Bruce Latimer’s date, “I think you better take me home.”

The book goes until page 421. But, apparently, I didn’t see any more women talking after page 290. Maybe I missed someone. I cannot muster the fucks required to double-check.

Chapter 13. Castration

The violent removal of male genitalia comes up four times in Fossil Men (pages 14, 37, 110, and 124). However, no actual castrations occurred in this book.

Chapter 14. The Real Assholes of the Middle Awash

…are the gun and bullet manufacturers and the people who buy them and the people who give them out to other people. What a world. Men (and “zero fucking zero” women as far as I can tell) just roaming around the Ethiopian wilderness with machine guns as tools for dominance. Occasionally they shoot other men. The stupidest circumstances caused by the stupidest empires. How is this a chapter in Earth’s history? And why couldn’t we have been born after it was all over? So stupid.

It's hard not to wonder how much of this stuff seeps into the dogmatic perpetuation of the Killer Ape/ Man the Hunter/ “Tribal” (fictional) narrative of human nature.

Chapter 15. Tiny Circles

When I was young and stupid I once said, “Well, I guess I’m lucky. My advisor doesn’t have any enemies.”

“HA!” is how a senior member of the field responded to that.

I asked no follow-up questions because this was a past me who verbalized few questions, period, but mostly because I was shocked to hear Alan had enemies and, also, reddened for being so naive.

Until I read Fossil Men, I had little idea of how close I was to being directly involved in the turmoil it describes. It was spring semester in Gainesville, 1999. All afternoon I read Bill Kimbel’s papers (that I had photocopied from the journals in the library stacks) before he was scheduled to call me. Just days before I had been awarded an Institute of Human Origins fellowship, which would mean attending the Ph.D. program at ASU with Kimbel. I wanted to go there far more than to Penn State, but Penn State flew me in for a visit. ASU did not. I couldn’t say no after that, and I loved Alan. My letter of support from Jack Harris (then director of the Koobi Fora field school) basically said I was born for fieldwork, so no wonder I got these offers. Little did I know that Alan Walker had sworn off fieldwork. This was Alan Walker. I didn’t even think to ask him. I just assumed he was still doing fieldwork because that’s what he did. I moved to Penn State and then I found out, after. My brain, my heart, I should have spontaneously combusted right then. Somehow, instead, I continued to live as if unscathed. I was in it. No turning back now so there’s no point in getting upset. But just think. If I’d gone to ASU instead, its’ not like I’d automatically have been in the field, either! If you read the book, you’ll see how the late nineties were a motherfucker for Johanson and Kimbel. I’d have been gummed up in all that, and without Alan Walker and all the rest of my lovely professors and friends and dear friends at Penn State. No regrets at all. I’m not even mad at Alan for taking on a kid built for fieldwork knowing he wasn’t going to take me anywhere. He loved this shit too. He probably wasn’t ready to admit it to himself that those days were behind him. After getting to know him, I don’t think he ever did. I can’t be mad.  I’m not even trying not to. I’m not taking any of it personally. The eye-opening stories in the book helped me to not take it personally in all new ways.

I love fossils, especially of our closest relatives. But the passionate arguments over the unknowable? No thanks. The maneuvering for permits and access? No thanks. The guns? Absolutely no thanks. And I’m not talking entirely from some  high horse. I’m just not built for all that politicking and sphincter-squeezing, though, if I had male parts instead of female parts…maybe I’d be a contender.

Anyway, where I am fully up on this high horse is about the unknowable. Why can’t people find a way to study fossils without telling stories about where exactly they fit in the tree of relatedness to others and us? Why can’t people find a way to study fossils without telling stories about how the males and females treated one another 4 million years ago? What’s so awful about simply describing the conditions at a site at a time in the past?  Why isn’t what we can know enough?

Chapter 16. Mentions

A comprehensive list of women scientists who appear in Fossil Men along with some acknowledgment that they have indeed made scientific contributions (but not necessarily what those contributions might be):

·       Mary Leakey

·       Meave Leakey

·       Louise Leakey

·       Mary Claire King

·       Alison Brooks (only mentioned in parentheses as wife of …)

·       Susan Larson (only mentioned in parentheses as co- of…)

·       Ruth “Dee” Simpson

·       Elisabeth Vrba

·       Raymonde Bonnefille and Doris Barboni

·       Sarah Feakins

·       Brigitte Senut

·       Linda Spurlock (and the brief mention includes “sexy lingerie”)

·       Cheryll Tickle (on the heels of her mention, a man down the hall’s science is lauded)

·       Melanie McCollum

Chapter 17. Obsession

Is it science or is it vengeance? Fossils are like Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick is like whatever the fossils stand for. Are they to have as one’s own? To dominate? Do we ever know why these fossil men are like, well, how they are? White is like a martyr, almost—doing it because everyone else, as the sentiment seems, cannot. They’re incompetent. It’s like if he didn’t do this, then no one would be doing it right. No one could. I can’t help but think that’s true for the field work he does. You need someone like him, whom you don’t exactly find on every street corner, to volunteer to go out into automatic-weapons-land over and over and over again. But he does love fossils, those “fucking jewels.” Maybe he loves them for the same reasons I do—because they are the tangible proof of deep, fantastic space-time and my, yours, and everyone’s infinite connectedness to everyone and everything in the universe. But that kind of gooey stuff doesn’t make it into Fossil Men. I’m a girl, so I’m allowed to share my gooey feelings in public. Not very volcanic of me, I suppose.

Chapter 18. Snakes and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails and Bullshit Stories Masquerading as Science

Oh, and if I were a boy, I could get away with the sex for food bullshit. You know how I know? Woman the Gatherer never took hold. Man the Hunter may not be our field’s explicit framework, but it is cultural common sense, along with this belief that we evolved to be “tribal”. That view of human nature—with masculine traits being the driver of our species’ evolution and our triumph over nature—stuck because it was already there before science, before theorizing about the unverifiable and unknowable past was deemed science. It stuck because it naturalizes patriarchy. Boys can tell stories and girls cannot.

Peoples’ reaction to that fun little quirk about human evolutionary biology has been to try to raise women’s voices, to empower them to tell stories too, to do exactly what the men have been doing. No thanks.

No scholars or scientists or journalists or science writers or teachers or professors should be telling stories with the storyless facts of human evolution. Sure, free speech, but believing that completely unverifiable stories are fact is only for the faithful.

Chapter 19. Anatomy

I don’t have a first author paper in Journal of Human evolution or American Journal of Physical Anthropology. I tried, a little. I submitted the hundred or so pages of fossil description that I thought needed to go somewhere, anywhere, other than my dissertation (Proconsul heseloni feet from Rusinga Island, Kenya) because I was made to believe that dissertations didn’t count and that I couldn’t publish my quantitative (metric and CT) analyses of those fossils without describing them first. To combine the two would take over a hundred journal pages! So, I sent that huge stack of pages of description (virtually, of course) to JHE.

Why Bill Kimbel would bother to read the whole thing and provide some comments when it was just going to be rejected for being too damn long and including no quantitative analysis is beyond me. His only comment that I put to memory was his exasperated reaction to my use of “gunwale” as an analogy for some aspect of some deformed bone. I think he wrote “really?” (Yes, really. I had assumed my analogies were kosher because they passed Alan’s careful readings.) A second (anonymous) reviewer shamed me for “aping” my advisor about taxonomy. (Who cares about made-up labels so much that they get nasty to people about it? Too many people and not enough me, I suppose. Otherwise, maybe I’d still be a paleoanthropologist?) He (I assume, because I’m an asshole) accused me of not reading one of my sources because I had misgendered its author. I read all my sources. But I never got to say so in a rebuttal that never was. How do you publish your analysis of fossils that have not yet been described in a non-dissertation publication? You don’t if you’re me. My dissertation research remains in my dissertation. You can read the abstract and all the rest of it here: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/7393 .

Fast forward a year or two and I am newly on the tenure track and submit a study I cooked up with Alan before I did my dissertation work. It was the topic of my first conference presentation back when I was a rookie grad student, some 7 years prior. They put me at the podium between Ralph Holloway and Dean Falk, so the room was packed (iykyk). Needless to say that imagining everyone in the audience was sitting and straining on a toilet did not calm my nerves enough. It was the public speaking, not the ideas. Not at all. Those, I thought, were safe. I suggested that the Chemeron temporal (KNM-BC 1) could belong to A. garhi.

It took me several years to realize it was worth publishing, or at least worth trying to. Why no one had suggested I do so during grad school is a mystery. It was a fun little study where I was able to predict temporomandibular joint measures from molar measures, which seemed like a reasonable functional relationship (the bigger the chewing surfaces, the bigger the joint handling what those chewing surfaces were doing), and use that to show that isolated hominin molars could be matched to isolated TMJ fossils. I emailed Alan from my new desk in my office at NEIU, but Alan would not be a co-author. (This was right around the time he was having me ghost edit for him, which I did for no benefit other than the satisfaction of helping him carry out his commitments past the point of his ability/willingness to, but wasn’t my work a commitment too? That question I never allowed myself to ask, not even rhetorically, until this very moment.) So, garhi’s teeth seemed to match with KNM-BC 1. I’d published on fossil hominins before, but this was the first time I’d done some measures and suggested that separate fossils may belong to the same species. I couldn’t believe how angry my paper made an anonymous editor at the journal. It was so utterly offensive to him. It’s probably no coincidence that it was right around that time that I started to write on The Mermaid’s Tale. Constantly. At the time, I was just starting up several summers of wonderful paleoanthropological expeditions to Rusinga Island, Kenya. But, all that time, I was writing my way out of paleoanthropology, here on this blog with Ken and Anne.

Chapter 20. “The Profession”

A couple times in Fossil Men, readers are reminded that White (and maybe Lovejoy too) refer to colleagues in paleoanthropology (and maybe biological/physical anthropology in general) with a sarcastic “the profession”. Now’s as good a time as any to describe the difference between dicks, pussies, and assholes.

Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes— assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate — and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are only an inch and a half away from assholes. (Team America: World Police, 2004-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32iCWzpDpKs )

Chapter 21. The Whiteness of the Field

Paleoanthropology is white. It’s less white than it used to be. As described in the book, Tim White’s efforts to include Ethiopian scientists are a reason why. It’s an important story, the whiteness of paleoanthropology, because it helps make sense of the narratives we still use for human evolution and human origins. The “exodus” from Africa. The frame that only the more evolved sapiens could “finally” escape the confines of that (insinuated) awful place and continue evolving (towards superiority) elsewhere. Science is a baby and it was born into a world with race/ism. We may be only a few generations on from there, science-wise and race-wise, and we may talk differently but our narratives have been slow to transform away from white supremacist and colonial (and capitalist, patriarchal, sexist, biological determinist, essentialist, adaptationist, teleological, storified, etc.) assumptions. I wish the narratives of human evolution and, by extension, human nature would change faster.

Chapter 22. Mankind’s Dominion

Contrary to what many people think about paleoanthropology and human evolutionary biology writ-large, the stakes are fucking high. Stories matter. We like to pass the buck and believe that medical science is where the stakes are actually high, but guess what narratives control how medical science is carried out? OURS. And right now, so many of ours (or that come out of ours) are mad-libbed versions of (how white, patriarchal people read) Genesis, and whatever you want to call the genre that includes the food-for-sex, helpless female, monogamy core and the male-male combat core.

Fossil Men, indeed.

The fossils inspire tall tales. But fossils are the cold hard facts that demonstrate just how tall those tales are.

How could holding fossils in your hands do anything but reveal the unknowable truths about our natural history? Are they direct ancestors or descendants to X or Y fossil species? We cannot know. Did they share food in pair-bonds because it was too hard for females to feed themselves? We cannot know. Etc. Etc. The fossils themselves are the only truth there is.

Evolution is true but, also, live in the mystery, motherfuckers. It’s magnificent! Besides, to do otherwise is to breach the bounds of science.

Chapter 135. The Lone, Mysterious Figure

Thar she sits! Page 208. The one woman in a photograph in Fossil Men. Cross-legged on the dirt, leaning against a cooler, in the background, blurry beyond recognition, and looking intentionally so, as if blurred in Photoshop so that Tim White pops.

Epilogue. Death or Life

Do you want to not-die or do you want to live?

This isn’t one of those “there’s two kinds of people” observations. But it’s close. When people have extreme personalities on the not-die side, a disturbing imbalance surfaces. It seems like there are more people who want to not-die than who want to live. Society seems to be far more affected, and controlled by, the not-diers.

When we want to not-die, we cower or we confront our mortality. Life becomes trying to not-die. And that means facing death, imagined or real, as life. And trying to not-die again and again. To win this time, to triumph over mortality until we cannot any longer, to the point that not trying to not-die is the same as dying. Not challenging death amounts to death. So really, these repeating attempts to face mortality are about denying our mortality. That’s living in fear. And that breeds anger. The Pequod is full of men who have to hunt and kill whales to not kill themselves. The captain and his mates have secure benefactors, pack enough rations, and hire sufficient brains and brawn to arrange a showdown with mortality in order to not-die, as a way of life.

What if, instead, we accept our mortality. Not facing death but embracing death. A book about such a life would never be titled Fossil Men. Whether it’s because of male dominance and violence or because (people deemed) not-man-enough are excluded from participating in arranged face-offs with death or because the not-man-enough opt out of the not-die life, then the not-man-enough can live differently. And they do. They show us that we don’t need to challenge death so intentionally, so angrily. Instead, we live with death every day. Death is just life. And when mortality is something we live with, not against, then we can’t help but live for love. When you live in the reality of death, what else is life for but love? The only rational response to our precious, mysterious reality is to love.

That includes loving what cannot be fully understood or known. Maybe even because it cannot be fully understood or known. Like other people. And, like paleoanthropologists, who provide constant proof, in front of our very eyes, that what terrible things we do to each other and to the planet is not the natural order or our evolved destiny. That’s entirely made up, imaginary, bullshit that we tell ourselves. We could live other stories, instead. To invoke novelist Ruth Ozeki, I’d rather know the truth about our past, the whole truth about human evolution, but not knowing (because we cannot!) keeps all the possibilities, all the worlds, alive.

And that’s why, despite the humanity of the Pequod’s crew, we root for the whale. And that’s why, despite the assholes who find them and the dicks who spew bullshit about them and the pussies (like me) who complain about it all, we root for the fossils.