Reading List by Jayne

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Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney

Daughter. Duhitár-. Dustr. Dukte. Listen to these English, Sanskrit, Armenian and Lithuanian words, all meaning the same thing, and you hear echoes of one of history’s most unlikely journeys. All four languages-along with hundreds of others, from French and Gaelic, to Persian and Polish-trace their origins to an ancient tongue spoken as the last ice age receded. This language, which we call Proto-Indo-European, was born between Europe and Asia and exploded out of its cradle, fragmenting as it spread east and west. Its last speaker died thousands of years ago, yet Proto-Indo-European lives on in its myriad linguistic offspring and in some of our best loved works of literature, including Dante’s Inferno and the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings and the love poetry of Rumi. How did this happen?

Acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We retrace the epic journeys of nomads and monks, warriors and kings – the ancient peoples who carried these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve the lost languages and their speakers: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed that ancient diaspora. What they have learned has profound implications for our modern world, because people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.

Review

I’m still working my way through this one but it’s been fascinating so far. Yet I also have to say that at times information is repeated. And due to the fact that we have no written records as far back as we would need in order to truly understand the origins of what is thought to be the language from which half of our planets’ languages evolved, there’s necessarily a lot of guesswork.

Working our way back to bits and pieces of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is being approached with some innovative ideas which go beyond just painstakingly comparing extant languages or written records of extinct ones to see which words are similar in all of them. Now computers can do some of that grunt work but archaeology and genetics now join philology to deliver new insights to this mother of so many languages. Studies of ancient DNA can now help reveal who was where when, while archaeology helps us guess what they were doing. Together this helps show when words were first developed by whom – e.g. farmers vs herdsmen who would have needed specific words for their worlds. Lots of ancient PIE words have been sort of reconstructed based on studies of how current languages spread from where scientists now guess PIE originated along with possible vocal shifts that occurred along the way. 

Yet as interesting as all this is, it might be more than most armchair readers want. Spinney is also not a scientist but a journalist so while the book is readable, she’s not working first hand at uncovering any of the information. I set the book aside to read and review a few other books when I found myself not seeing the forest for the trees but I do plan on picking it back up and continuing on. B- so far

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Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth by Karen G. Lloyd

A biologist’s firsthand account of the hunt for life beneath earth’s surface—and how new discoveries are challenging our most basic assumptions about the nature of life on Earth

Life thrives in the deepest, darkest recesses of Earth’s crust—from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost—and it is unlike anything seen on the surface. Intraterrestrials shares what scientists are learning about these strange types of microbial life—and how research expeditions to some of the most extreme locales on the planet are broadening our understanding of what life is and how its earliest forms may have evolved.

Drawing on her experiences and those of her fellow scientists working in challenging and often dangerous conditions, Karen Lloyd takes readers on an adventure from the bottom of the ocean through the jungles of Central America to the high-altitude volcanoes of the Andes. Only discovered in recent decades, “intraterrestrials”—subsurface beings that are truly alien—are demonstrating how life can exist in boiling water, pure acid, and bleach. They enable us to peer back to the very dawn of life on Earth, disclosing deep branches on the tree of life that push the limits of what we thought possible. Some can “breathe” rocks or even electrons. Others may live for hundreds of thousands of years or longer. All of them are living in ways that are totally foreign to us surface dwellers.

Blending captivating storytelling with the latest science, Intraterrestrials reveals what microbes in Earth’s deep subsurface biosphere can tell us about the prospects for finding life on other planets—and the future of life on our own.

Review

Scientist Karen Lloyd takes readers into a world that is wild, weird, and in many ways unlike anything we can imagine. Beneath surfaces, underground – wherever that ground might actually be – exist microbes that might answer the question of how life began on this planet and might help us clean up the mess we’re making of the world. Some of them live under conditions that would slay most plants and animals in an instant but which the microbes seem to like just fine. Their lifespans might be almost unimaginably long to us (think possibly multi-millennia if not much longer) and they use (breathe) rock and metals to fuel their (very, very, very slow) metabolic processes.

Intraterrestrials give us a new perspective on the origin of life because they give us a new perspective on the nature of life itself. They’ve shown us that you can toss hundred- year life spans to the curb if it suits your evolutionary lineage, that shimmying to the edge of thermodynamic limits is just fine if you have the right enzymes, and that nearly every rock on Earth can provide chemistry to support life. These facts bring our conception of life much closer to our conception of geology, which is what needs to happen if we’re ever going to figure out how life arose from what was previously only rocks, minerals, gases, and fluids.

Scientists are gathering new tools and techniques to study these life forms that until recently we didn’t know existed but which billions of years ago diverted on the tree of life from what led to multi celled organisms. Lloyd tells readers about many of her (potentially harrowing) scientific expeditions around the world or deep underwater and enthuses about the international collaborations behind new insights and discoveries which in turn spur further research and studies. It takes a scientific village.

Karen Lloyd has a great and entertaining writing style that pulls you in and grounds you with examples to help the layperson make sense of all of this. But fair warning – Here Be Chemistry, Here Be Physics, and Here Be Equations. I grasped a bit about a lot of it but readers without a scientific background might find themselves lost in the central portions of the book. For brief but well delivered precis, check out her TED talk or her episode on the Talk Nerdy podcast both of which I have listened to. B

~Jayne

Ted Talk

Talk Nerdy Podcast

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