The Last Word On Nothing

It’s been over half century since researchers dreamt up the idea that grandmothers exist chiefly to enable their children to have their own children, thereby increasing the genetic fitness of the family lineage.  In the 1980s, Kristen Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, bolstered this so-called “grandmother hypothesis” with her studies of the Hadza tribe of Tanzania, hunter gatherers who rely heavily on the foraging of fruit, nuts and tubers.  Hawks found that the thriving of a first-born Hadza child correlated with the extent of its mother’s foraging efforts. But a second born child’s health—and that of its siblings–seemed to depend more on the foraging efforts of its grandmother.  The more grandmothers stepped in to feed and care for the family, scientists postulated, the better able were mothers to birth more children at shorter intervals.  So it seemed woman survived beyond their fertile years in order to maximize the fecundity of their daughters and daughters-in-law and therefore their line’s evolutionary fitness. (Curiously, further research suggested that the grandfather’s contributions to the children’s well-being did not contribute to said fitness.) 

Not surprisingly, not everyone bought this theory.  In fact, some scientists considered it just another Just-So Story built on post-hoc assumptions that, while compelling, lacked sufficient supporting evidence. 

It’s been 15 years since my one and only contribution to the Confluence Project, an achievement I savour to this day. The goal of the online repository is ambitious, but seemingly simple: to store photos—and perhaps a little travel story—from the intersection of every integer degree of longitude and latitude in the world. So far, 6,594 of these confluences have been recorded, but there are still almost 10,000 to go, even discounting the oceans they don’t expect people to reach.

Nunavut, Canada’s Inuit territory, holds hundreds of confluences, but only a handful have been visited. On the evening of March 10, 2007, the week of polar sunrise, I happened to pass near the confluence of the 80^th degree North latitude and the 86^th degree West longitude. I was visiting the Eureka High Arctic Weather Station on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, the northernmost civilian outpost in the world. Its military counterpart Alert is the northernmost continuously inhabited place, bar none, and that’s on the same island, just a few fjords further north.

My purpose at Eureka was to write a profile of the Polar Environmental Research Lab, which lay one mile North-West of this particular confluence. Polar sunrise is a particularly interesting time for atmospheric scientists, because they can get readings of the ozone layer after a whole winter of minimal interactions with sunlight, hence the timing of my visit. It also meant the temperature was -46 degrees Celsius.

This post first ran in July 2019.

In 2015, Sarah Grimes picked up this river otter’s carcass on a rugged beach covered in tumbled sea glass. She removed its skin and flesh and soaked its bones first in warm water, then Borax. She kept each section of the skeleton — legs, paws, spine – in a separate mesh bag so the bones wouldn’t get mixed up. Then she cleaned the bones and put the skeleton back together, a process called rearticulation.

Grimes is the Marine Mammal Stranding Coordinator for the Noyo Center for Marine Science in Fort Bragg, California. She is trained and permitted to pick up dead sea mammals and judge how they died. This river otter looked thin, and probably starved to death – its displaced hip joint would have made it difficult to swim. “Poor little nugget,” she said, showing me where the otter’s leg once attached to the rest of the skeleton.