A hurricane is a whopping big thing. A hurricane can be bigger than some states. The physical region across which a hurricane is potentially deadly and damaging is very large, many tens of miles across, sometimes a couple of hundred miles across. The danger zones are often organized like this:

The central storm surge. A central region may have a strong storm surge caused by the low pressure of the storm. This may be dozens of miles wide, but the area of effect is determined as much by the shape of the coastline the hurricane is landing on as by the hurricane itself.

The Right Punch. To the right of the central storm surge area is a region where the counter-clockwise rotating storm bearing down on the coast and hinterland will have very strong winds combined with very low pressure to increase the storm surge even more.

The storm surge caused by the low pressure system and the right punch can be a very wide area, and it can affect a coastal region for a long period of time, as the “surge” itself maybe several miles “deep.” If a hurricane is moving slowly, if the winds are strong and the pressure low, and if tides are already high and coastal flooding is already underway because of hurricane caused rain that came through for several hours before the surge arrives, this flooding can be extensive.

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In some cases, the initial flooding may be very bad but the secondary flow of flood waters can be worse. If a hurricane storm surge and rain-related floods fill up the lagoons behind barrier islands, and at the same time the outlets get clogged by debris pushed up by high waves, that flooding can break open the barrier beaches in new locations, which may or my not be underneath settlements, major roads, etc. (This was, by the way, the theme of the famous book “Condominium” by John D. MacDonald which had a lot of inaccurate or outdated science but still stands as a classic “Disaster” book.)

So to review so far, around the middle of the hurricane is very low pressure, and to the right of this middle are very strong winds (and low pressure) that can cause a big flood that can first run over the land and flood stuff, then run back to the ocean and do even worse damage. Well within this area is the “eye” of the storm. The area of storm surge is much, much larger than the eye.

Spin-off Tornadoes. The big giant hurricane may cause the formation of many small tornadoes which will essentially act as very intense ambassadors of the passing cyclone. The tornadoes actually form as a function off the weakening, or generally messing up, of the organized cyclonic hurricane. They tend to form in advance of “Landfall” by as much as two days, but are most common as the hurricane’s right front quadrant is over land, and occur over a very large area. (They can also occur long after the Hurricane is downgraded to a tropical storm and is mostly on land, days after “landfall.”)

Hurricane Winds. Around this area of storm surge is a region of hurricane- or near hurricane-force winds which, especially if the hurricane is moving slowly, can buffet an area for hours and hours of time. This is like one of those nasty thunderstorms with the ‘straight line winds” coming through and knocking down a couple of trees, but for several hours. The area of these winds is typically measurable in the hundreds of miles in all directions.

Flooding Rains. Usually, over a larger area than this wind zone there will be bands of rain falling. The region over which sufficient rain to cause flooding may fall is hundreds of miles in any one direction. Flooding may start long before the hurricane force winds reach the coast. After the hurricane is way inland and is no longer called a hurricane, it can still cause major flooding. If you live, say, in Virginia or Connecticut, don’t think the hurricane has missed you just because it hits the Gulf Coast. You may be in for some major flooding in a week or so.

The Landfall Fallacy. Now, there is this thing about scientists, even meteorologists. When dealing with time-based phenomena, they need to know when something starts and when it ends, so they can do things like measure when on average certain things start, how long on average they last, etc. Therefore, there has to be an agreed upon point in time when a hurricane starts to exist (this is when the winds reach a certain strength and the cyclonic storm reaches a certain degree of organization, all of which is actually kinda hard to measure but they do it anyway). There is also an agreed upon point at which the hurricane “hits land” … known as landfall. This is when the eye of the hurricane, which is usually still visible on satellite views, on radar, as well as on the ground, crosses the shoreline. That is the arbitrarily decided on moment when scientists say the hurricane is at a certain point in its life cycle.

This does not. Repeat, not. NOT. mean that a hurricane “hits land” or “arrives” or “becomes a problem” or “starts to do damage” on “landfall.” No. The hurricane arrived hours before landfall! The outer bands that brought the beginnings of flooding rain came way before. The occasional tornado spun off by a hurricane may have already done in a neighborhood hours before. The highly damaging winds arrived long ago. The storm surge may have even started to chew up cities, towns, and industrial areas along the coast before the eye wall crosses landward, depending on all sorts of different factors. Hell, it is actually possible for a hurricane to totally mess up a coastal region then move back out to sea with the eye never crossing the coast. No landfall, but big problems. Landfall is not arrival.

The reason I mention this is that the “landfall fallacy” was one of the two Great Stupidosities that happened in relation to Hurricane Katrina, the anniversary of which is coming soon, and I fear that this fallacy remains in place (or has made a comeback) as we approach the visitation of Hurricane Isaac, now entering the Gulf of Mexico. (The other fallacy is that Katrina did not breach the dikes in NOLA, that they were breached by a flood. Which must have happened at the same time as the hurricane. But really was the hurricane… yes, you can imagine that these two Stupidosities, both perpetuated by a combination of ill intentioned politicians and not very well trained weather reporters and other journalists, are related.)

In a way, Hurricane Isaac is already affecting the Gulf coast because people are reacting to it! But really, it may be hours before “landfall” when we see our first serious flooding, wind damage, tornadoes, and all that, wherever Isaac ends up going. The area across which it will affect things will be much, much broader than the spot it makes landfall. When Katrina hit, Mississippi really took it in the neck. Huge areas of coastal Mississippi were wiped out. But, since “landfall” was in New Orleans, it didn’t make a lot of sense to report much of that in the early days of that disaster.

The hurricane hits where it hits, and it is a Big Giant Thing. Isaac may very well hit BOTH Mississippi and New Orleans, and a bit of Florida, just like Katrina did.

Do not fetishize the landfall, grasshopper.

Here I want to do two separate but related things. I want to discuss certain aspects of the nature of fieldwork in my area in the 20th century that have had a strong effect on the way women have pursued their careers (or not). Although I characterize this as the situation of the 20th century, this does not mean that the situation has or has not changed substantially since then. Simply put, I’m not discussing the current career related situaton for women in field paleoanthropology here in this post.

The second thing I want to do is to talk about a successful female social scientist with a strong connection to fieldwork in palaeoanthropology, as well as theoretical and administrative contributions. This person is also someone who straddles the boundary between classic mid- to late-Twentieth Century patterns of professional activity (in these field sciences) and more recent patterns. I’m speaking here of Barbara Isaac.

The link between these two topics is a bit tenuous but it is also meaningful. There is nothing stereotypical about Barbara Isaac’s career, and there is nothing short of admirable about her as a person and a scholar. My intention here is to not make strong links between these two parallel topics.

Maybe most scientists are labrats, but just as majority rule in defining normalcy and typicality is damaging in matters of gender fairness and diversity, majority rule in matters of sub field should be viewed with a critical eye. In particular, it may be the case that field sciences are fundamentally different from lab sciences in important ways. Consider the fields of Palaeoanthropology and Primatology. Well known women in these fields include Jane Goodall, Alison Brooks, Sara Hrdy , and Mary Leakey, to name just a few. The significance of these women is not simply that they have been successful. It is much larger than that. People get the “Leakeys” confused, but in my experience with 20 years of teaching introductory classes in human evolution, if you mention Mary Leakey, the average person (students, members of the press, people I’ve just run into) knows that you are speaking of one of the main Africanists who have studied human origins. Many Americans are aware of Sara Hrdy because her books Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species and The Woman That Never Evolved: With a New Preface and Bibliographical Updates, Revised Edition have been read so widely, and assigned in so many intro or mid level classes covering the biology of women, or intro bioanthropology. Indeed, people often ask me about her, having read the book at some point in time. The average American may not know who Alison Brooks is, but Africanists acknowledge her as one of the leaders, if not the leader in African Paleolithic archaeology.

For many years I have had the impression that Jane Goodall is one name that is often recalled when students are asked to name a living famous scientist. In an earlier “edition” of this blog post I made the claim that this was well known, and many individuals objected to this. Since I don’t have the time to investigate further I’ll assume that it might not be the case that Jane Goodall comes to mind when people are asked to name a scientist. (But in my heart of hearts I think her name DOES often pop up.) Surely, dear reader, YOU have heard of Jane Goodall.

My point is that there may be something about the field studies of which I speak that is different from other areas of science. The list of physisists who have contributed to our modern understanding of cosmology includes many women, but the list of people who come to mind when the average American (for instance) is asked to a name famous physicist is (it is my impression) mainly male. I’m arguing here based mainly on my own impressions that the opposite is true with palaeoanthropology and primatology. I could be wrong. But I don’t think so.

Does this mean that these fields are contributing in an important way to perceptions of diversity in the sciences generally? Well yes.

I would now like to make a carefully worded statement about the difference between men and women in traditional 20th century academia in the roles they played in both the professional and personal setting. Listen carefully.

All else being equal, most men in 20th century field sciences had the assistance of highly capable spouses … the proverbial woman behind the man, while most women did not. Women did not typically have this resource available to them. Numerous other barriers to women’s success existed, of course, but this differential is especially interesting in the context of field bioanthropology because of the nature of the pursuit itself. It is quite possible that some areas of science (or other endeavors) had more opportunities for a spouse (usually a woman) to assist the career professional (usually a man) than other fields. For various reasons, field Palaeoanthropology is probably one of these areas.

It is interesting to survey the primary African Palaeoanthropologists of the latter part of the 20th century. I can do part of this informally in my own mind as I recall various conferences, biographies, and obituaries of the day, and collate (again, this is all in my head….) these with acknowledgment sections of major monographs. Bill Howells acknowledged his faithful wife, Muriel, who traveled around the world with him measuring skulls and keeping him in line. C. Loring Brace never forgets, in a public talk to note the contributions Mrs. Brace made to his research efforts. Betty Clark was always there for her husband Desmond, in the field or in the lab. And so on and so forth. You get the picture.

Now, here comes a statement about this observation that is meant to be dripping in sarcasm and over the top in cynicism. But, some people (owing perhaps to their own biases) will not understand that this is a cynical statement about the patriarchy and how it operates. So, remember, the following statement is not what I or anyone with even a modicum of political enlightenment would ever think. If you do not understand what I am saying in the paragraph you are reading now, then GO BACK AND READ IT AGAIN! And if you still don’t get it, then PLEASE LEAVE NOW. OK, ready? Here goes:

That is, indeed, what every scholar needs: A wife (or two) who knows how to type, edit, wield a caliper, and still have time to do the grocery shopping, have lunch ready at noon, and give birth to and raise the kids.

But the women who are well known in this field come from a slightly different background. Either they powered ahead into the field of study along side their husband (about whom … the husband … I make no claims in this post) in a similar area, as with the archaeologist Mary Leakey, who’s husband was a palaeontologist or primatologist and naturalist Jane Goodall, who’s husband was director of the Gombe chimp field site and a film maker/naturalist, and/or they worked in a field setting for much of their career whereby they actually lived in-country, or both.

Living in-country provides a significant career advantage for anyone. The basic cost of transport and scheduling of research is different, and easier. When Ofer Bar Yosef was visiting Harvard from Israel, prior to being hired at the Ivy League college, he told me “I’ll never take a job here. In Israel, the sites I work on are in my back yard. Nothing is more than an hour drive away!” (Apparently Harvard made him an offer he could not refuse a year or so later.)

Another advantage of in-country work (meaning you LIVE IN THE COUNTRY IN WHICH YOU WORK), when the country is a developing (or in some cases, unraveling) nation, is the basic cost of doing business. Dianne Fossey , Jane Goodall, Shirley Strum (to name a few highly successful women) and a number of men as well have probably benefited significantly from having inexpensive household and professional staff while working in the Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, and so on. An academic ex patriot’s (an ex patriot is someone who has moved to and works in a country other than their native land) household can be a very easy place to get things done. Excellent libraries may be far away, but you may have a driver and a cook and a cleaner and, as was the case with the Leakeys and many others, a number of technical staff who do not cost much but who can work with the fossils or carry out data collection better than any passing graduate student. Everyone knows, and the people involved readily acknowledge (to their credit) that the big names … Leakey, Walker, and so on, hardly ever actually found a hominid fossil. A hominid fossil found in Kenya is more likely to have been found by Kenyan Kimeu Kimoya than by anyone else.

For the present, I’ll just skip over the part about the subaltern contribution to the career of the privileged. Not because that is not important, but rather, because it is too important to address as an aside. I will save that for another time.

I have two reasons for mentioning all of this. One is simply to point out the nature of these field studies, and to note the fact that some of the successful women in these fields were successful in part because they had the equivalent (more or less) of a spouse, just like all the men in these fields did. (Keep in mind, this all primarily applies to a 20th century context.) The second reason is to mention that Barbara Isaac’s career involved being the spouse (for several years) and being independently successful without the aid of a spouse or minions as highly skilled low-salaried field workers.

Barbara’s career has been fairly low key. She contributed in all the usual ways, as part of a team, working with her husband, Glynn Isaac. Following Glynn’s untimely and tragic death, Barbara edited a volume of his major papers, and shepherded (a mild word compared to the reality) the production of the Koobi Fora monograph. At the same time, she continued work on an important research project that I’ll shift the focus to momentarily, on the role of throwing in human evolution.

Very few people know this, and I’m not going to go into any details here because they would necessarily be too vague, but Barbara Isaac was instrumental in the process of opening up international research in the Republic of Georgia, where the Dmanisi site has yielded important hominid fossils. Barbara stepped aside from that work early on, but it continues today. Barbara also oversaw the repatriation of Native American materials at the Peabody Museum, and served for ten years as assistant director of the Peabody.

I’ve always thought, but some may argue that I’m wrong, that Barbara was also responsible for the branding of African Stone Age archaeology, in a visual sense. Barbara did many of the illustrations for the work at Koobi Fora and for Glynn’s theoretical contributions. The fanciful rock art-inspired figures that play out the various theories of bipedalism, or central place foraging, or acheulean activities of one sort or another seem to have come from her imagination, although they’ve been imitated subsequently many times.

Barbara’s work with throwing is especially important and underscored a number of her excellent intellectual and personal skills. Here is the basic question: Did throwing things, as weapons, play any role in hominid evolution? It turns out that many of the earliest considerations of this idea, and some of the investigations carried out contemporaneously with Barbara’s interest in this, were kinda nutty. One ‘researcher’ took the opportunity of being a tourist at Olorgesailie — a site excavated by the Isaacs in Kenya at which thousands of hand axes are seen still on the ground, with the tourists walking over them on a wooden catwalk — to pick up an actual hand axe from its place in situ and wing it across the landscape to see what would happen. Crazy people with crazy ideas totally ruined the whole throwing thing, simply because taking a look at throwing would be received like launching an expedition to find Bigfoot. Crazy.

But, the idea is not really so crazy, and Barbara Isaac recognized this because of some work she had done on the question. So, despite the Bigfoot like nature of the throwing hypothesis, she went ahead and assembled a large amount of information in an effort to have a run at the idea. This is how many ideas in palaeoanthropology are addressed scientifically. You can’t run lab experiments for most of these things. So instead you work out a model that described the putative phenomenon, and then apply several lines of evidence to the model to see how stupid the model turns out to be. This evidence can include some experimental work, but it also includes seeking patterns in the archaeological records (objects that can be thrown) looking at medical, physical, or anecdotal evidence (cases of successful homicide by throwing, sports related research), and ethnographic evidence where available. After numerous attempts to make the idea look stupid, if it ends up not looking too stupid, then you may be on to something!

The point here is that Barbara had the cachet in the field, among her peers, to look for Bigfoot and be taken seriously. And when she looked, fully prepared to reject the idea, she ended up making a reasonable argument that throwing was a plausible technique for interpersonal conflict, defense, and hunting. She would not and did not go beyond plausibility, but that is all she attempted. The idea of her work was to demonstrate the implausibility of the throwing hypothesis, and she ended up essentially unable to do so, leaving the idea standing at the end. As plausible. That is good paleoscience.

“Ability to throw was probably achieved at an early stage in human evolution but has received little scholarly attention. Although this ability is poorly developed in apes, anatomical studies suggest that the hand of Australopithecus afarensis was adapted to throw with precision and force. Archaeological evidence and early ethnographic observations are cited in order to demonstrate the importance of the throwing skill in human evolution.”

This of course applies to the use of thrown spears but Isaac looked beyond this to the idea of any deadly projectiles, including basic rocks or the famous Middle Stone Age “spheroids” (rocks shaped by hominids to be round) and such contrivances as bolas. Even to this day, the validity of any claim that a particular artifact is a throwing spear or something similar is very questionable prior to the Upper Paleolithic.

Isaac reviews the ethnographic record and there are a number of examples of cultures in which throwing relatively simple objects for hunting is documented. Most of these are cases of people throwing rocks (as a regular practice) at small things like hyraxes . But there are more extreme cases. The Portuguese encountered natives in the Canary Islands who were able to keep the Portuguese at bay using thrown stones and horn tipped wooden lances.

“In hardly any time at all they had so badly beaten us that they had driven us back into shelter with heads bloodied, arms and legs broken by blows from stones: because they know of no other weaponry, and believe me that they throw and wield a stone considerably more skilfully than a Christian; it seems like the bolt of a crossbow when they throw it…”

(Notice the passive-aggressive “that’s all they know” along with the “They kicked our arses.”)

In addition to the ethnographic record, Isaac reviews the archaeological, human and more broadly hominid anatomical evidence, and looks at chimps. Again, there is general support for the idea.

She concludes, among other things: Stone throwing can be highly lethal, and is widespread in areas where there are no firearms, in the ethnographic record; The anatomy allows for this practice, and there is evidence of this ability in early hominids as distinct from ape models.; The archaeological evidence is suggestive but equivocal to date, owing mainly to a lack of consideration of the nature of the evidence. She also briefly discusses observed sex differences in throwing behavior.

Isaac, Barbara (1987). Throwing and Human Evolution The African Archaeological Review, 5, 3-17