Bone to be wild: Fleshing out a career devoted to skeletons and people

"Every skeleton has a story to tell," says anthropologist George Armelagos. His former students also have some stories, so many that it took a whole day to tell them. 

By Carol Clark

Dennis Van Gerven was flattered when George Armelagos handed him a human femur bone from a burnt-out crime scene and asked him to take it home for analysis. The two anthropologists were in Philadelphia for a conference and a criminal investigator had sought Armelagos’ expertise in piecing together details about dead people by studying their bones.

As Armelagos went through the airport security checkpoint, he turned to Van Gerven, who was next in line, and said loudly, “Be sure and tell them that your wife was alive when you saw her last.”

Then he kept walking, leaving Van Gerven to face the security agent alone.

“My bag goes through the X-ray and you can see this bone in my suitcase,” Van Gerven recalls. “The agent asked, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘It’s a bone.’ He said, ‘Oh,” and lets me go through.”

The story was one of many recounted during a day-long session devoted to the research, mentorship and mischief of Armelagos at the recent annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The session, entitled “Bone to Be Wild,” drew dozens of students and colleagues to Knoxville to celebrate Armelagos’ ongoing career of 50 years.

“I was overwhelmed,” says Armelagos, Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology at Emory. “It was surreal, sort of like an out-of-body experience, hearing everyone talk about me.”

Armelagos, left, with student Alan Goodman in 1982 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Former students presented 22 scientific posters describing how Armelagos involved them in pioneering work in wide-ranging topics that changed the field of anthropology, from our understanding of race and racism to the influence of agriculture, diet and stress on the health of individuals and across populations.

While still a graduate student in the 1960s, Armelagos was part of a team that excavated ancient skeletons from Sudanese Nubia, so the bones would not be lost forever when the Nile was dammed. The amount of scholarship done by Armelagos, his students and colleagues over the decades have made the Sudanese Nubians the most studied archeological population in the world.

“One of his main contributions is the marriage of biology with archeology,” says Debra Martin, a co-organizer of the session. “Previously, archeologists would retrieve human remains but then send them off to medical schools or other places interested in the biology. George kept the burials in the archeological context so that as you analyzed the bones, you were also studying a past way of life.”

He uses this approach to ask “some of these really big questions of our time,” Martin says. “He showed how the past sheds light not only on the origins of human conditions, but where we’re going. We see that racism, for example, is as deeply embedded in human behavior as it’s ever been, and yet it’s not in our biology or genes. It’s in the way that we organize ourselves culturally that we create some of these problems around race, nutrition, health and violence.”

Armelagos, in his lab during the 1980s, is still teaching and publishing at 77.

Martin, now a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, studied under Armelagos at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Armelagos has mentored over 30 PhD students, and many of them have gone on to become chairs of their departments or deans at their universities.

As a freshman at the University of Utah in 1965, Van Gerven was among Armelagos’ first group of students.

“George was a social force on that campus,” Van Gerven says. He recalls Armelagos holding court in a dining commons area, where he would often stay late into the evening, energized by caffeine and conversations with students.

“You’d see a crowd in the center of the room,” Van Gerven says. “And you’d work your way through to the middle of it, and there would be George. He’s truly interested in everybody and everything.”

When Armelagos moved to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Van Gerven followed for his PhD. Armelagos didn’t just give his graduate students food for thought. He cooked them gourmet meals and turned his home into an extension of the classroom. “He had a huge, long table where he would feed all of us,” Van Gerven says.

The larger the word, the more frequently it was mentioned by former students asked about Armelagos' influence on anthropology. (Survey conducted by Ventura Perez and Heidi Bauer-Clapp of University of Massachusetts, Amherst.)

Armelagos’ knack for demystifying research has set many undergraduates onto life-changing paths.

“The first article we published together came out in 1968, and we’re working on a book right now,” Van Gerven says. “I learned everything from him. He taught me how to think, he taught me how to work and to be passionate. He made me love this stuff.”

Armelagos joined Emory in 1994, and helped solidify the University’s reputation as a national leader in the bio-cultural approach to anthropology. So far, more than 80 of his Emory students have presented papers or published research as undergraduates.


Emory graduate Kristin Harper with Armelagos at "Bone to be Wild." Under his tutelage, Harper published the first phylogenetic approach to the centuries-old debate over the origins of syphilis.

Molly Zuckerman came to Emory for a PhD because she was inspired by Armelagos’ work on the evolution of syphilis. She soon found herself in England, tracking down human remains in the basements of out-of-the-way museums to research the origins of the disease.

“George ushered in a paleopathology movement that’s since become widespread, the idea that you need to orient your work to have a larger meaning than just documenting a particular disease,” Zuckerman says. “If you’re going to mess with the bones of someone’s ancestors, it should benefit contemporary populations. So you need to look at things in an evolutionary and ecological and sociological context.”

A co-organizer of the “Bone to be Wild” session, Zuckerman completed her dissertation “Sex, Society and Syphilis” in 2010 and is now an assistant professor at Mississippi State.


A sucker for kids: Armelagos with Henry, son of Emory anthropologist Craig Hadley.

Armelagos, meanwhile, continues to teach and publish prolifically at 77. “I enjoy what I’m doing,” he says. “It’s energizing. How could I get tired of it?” (Listen to a podcast of Armelagos reading an excerpt from his most recent book, "St. Catherine's Island: The Untold Story of People and Place.")

“In terms of energy and enthusiasm, George can kick my ass on his worst day, and I’m 10 years younger,” says Van Gerven, who recently retired from the University of Colorado. “I’m not sure George is from this planet. But he’s one of the most wonderful and brilliant beings I’ve ever known. And he’s completely crazy.”

Among the secrets to a long and happy career, Armelagos says, is to have fun and not take yourself too seriously. Even after decades in bio-archeology, he still laughs at skeleton jokes.

And, although he has extensively researched the relationship between diet and health, Armelagos is famous for over indulging, both himself and others.

Van Gerven recalls when Armelagos was visiting him and his family years ago and they stopped in a bank. “There was a jar of suckers on the counter, and George grabbed about 15 of them and handed them to my son, Jessie, who was three years old,” Van Gerven says.

Another customer in the bank scolded Armelagos, telling him shouldn't give his kid so much candy. Armelagos replied, ‘He's not my kid.’” The customer said, "Okay."

Related:
Skeletons point to Columbus voyage for syphilis origins
Dawn of agriculture took toll on health
Ancient brewers tapped antibiotic secrets
Telling the story of St. Catherine's Island

Credits: Top photo, iStockphoto.com. All others courtesy of George Armelagos.

Imagining Southern bodies: A review of 'Sex, Sickness and Slavery'

Some Southern physicians twisted medical science to aid the proslavery argument, writes historian Peter McCandless in the journal Southern Spaces, a digital initiative of Emory University Libraries.

McCandless' article is a review of "Sex, Sickness and Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South," by Marli F. Weiner with Mazie Hough. Below is an excerpt:

"A Gullah proverb warns, 'every sick ain't fa tell de doctor' (don't tell the doctor all your ailments). After reading 'Sex, Sickness, and Slavery,' the wisdom of that saying seems more obvious, especially as it applies to women and blacks in the antebellum South. The late Marli Weiner, a professor of history at the University of Maine, demonstrates convincingly how antebellum southern physicians—white males all—used information about their patients to advance their own professional and sectional political agendas. They actively used medical science to justify racial and sexual hierarchies, to define and characterize bodies by sex, race, and place, and to enhance their authority as physicians and white men. In the process, they wrestled with the problem of what Weiner calls 'ambiguous bodies' (mixed race, sexual hybrids, and 'monstrosities') and with the complex relationships between minds and bodies. ...

"They debated what aspects made blacks medically suitable for slavery, but southern physicians accepted the assumption that slavery benefited blacks, and some actively sought to provide medical evidence for it. Southern physicians had no difficulty justifying black subjugation.

"Justifying the domination of women should have been even easier. European and northern academics and physicians had already provided plenty of arguments and evidence. Nevertheless, as 'Sex, Sickness, and Slavery' shows, southern physicians faced a unique problem: How could they reconcile arguments for sexual and racial subordination in a way that did not undermine either? They had to categorize people by both race and gender, and in ways that supported male gender and white racial superiority. Few physicians doubted white or male supremacy, but a coherent racial ideology required that white women be shown to be superior to black men. Moreover, if women were indeed the weaker and sicklier sex, demanding protection and gentle care, how could one justify making black women perform hard physical work alongside black men, even when close to giving birth and shortly after delivering?"

Read the whole review in Southern Spaces.

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Human mobility data may help curb urban epidemics

By Carol Clark

Residents of cities like New York and London tend to move about in fairly predictable routines, following the same routes between their jobs and schools each day. When it comes to a city in the developing world, however, human movement is much more varied, a finding with important implications for controlling an infectious disease pandemic.

The Public Library of Science (PL0S One) published the first major analysis of daily human mobility in a resource-poor city, led by scientists at Emory University’s Department of Environmental Studies.

The researchers used GPS technology to quantify the movement and contact dynamics of nearly 600 residents of Iquitos, Peru. They applied the data to create a computer simulation for predicting the transmission rate of a flu virus.

“We found that the irregular movement of people in Iquitos increases the probability of flu transmission by 20 percent, compared to cities in developed nations,” says lead author Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, an Emory disease ecologist.

The study authors are making their data estimates and simulation methods publicly available, so that other researchers can conduct further experiments and build on their work.

“It is estimated that more than 90 percent of the mortality from a potential influenza pandemic would occur in developing countries, where vaccine and antiviral stockpiles are minimal,” the study authors write. “The lack of detailed models to estimate infectious disease transmission dynamics in such settings limits the ability to enforce containment measures or plan emergency preparedness strategies.”

Rather than commuting to a single workplace, poorer residents of Iquitos often work several jobs, such as driving a three-wheeled mototaxi, or selling produce at multiple markets. Photo via Wikipedia Commons.

Most previous data on human mobility, drawn from cities in North America and Europe, shows that urbanites visit an average of two to four locations daily.

In Iquitos, human movement is much more fluid.

Full-time jobs are scarce for the population of 400,000 living along the left bank of the Amazon River, on the edge of the Peruvian rainforest. “Most people are self-employed or have several jobs to try and make ends meet,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. Common occupations of poorer residents include driving makeshift taxis or selling produce at one of the multiple open markets in the city.

Some previous studies in other parts of the world have looked at cell phone data to track and model human movements. The data is limited, however, due to issues of antenna density, restricted information from cell-phone carriers and the fact that some people do not have cell phones.

For the Iquitos study the researchers outfitted 582 residents with an i-GotU GPS device, which is ordinarily used as a photo-tagging tool for hikers. The i-GotU was selected for the study because it is small (about the size of a thumb drive), waterproof, relatively affordable, has a large memory and long battery life, and is password protected.

Each study participant wore one of the devices like a necklace as they went about their daily routines during a two-week period. The devices were programmed to capture location data every 2.5 minutes, from 5 am until midnight.

About 70 percent of the world's 3.3 billion city dwellers live in resource-poor environments. Aerial view of Iquitos by Viault / Wikipedia Commons.

The study yielded more than 2 million raw GPS positions, with an error margin of just four meters, tagged with date and time. The researchers used a data-reduction algorithm to calculate the average number of locations visited each day for the study participants as a whole, and by age groups, ranging from 7 years old to 60.

The results show that the participants visited an average of six locations per day overall. People in the peak working age group of 36 to 45 visited an average of nine locations daily.

“The more random your movements are, the more chances you have to pass a pathogen like the flu,” Vazquez-Prokopec says, explaining the 20 percent higher transmission risk, compared to a developed city.

While the Iquitos study represents just one city in the developing world, the researchers hope that the fine-scale, spatial-temporal data they have gathered will help fill the knowledge gap on human mobility in similar cities.

About 70 percent of the world’s 3.3 billion city dwellers live in resource-poor urban environments. “Uncovering the basic mechanisms governing complex human behaviors in these environments is paramount for developing better infrastructure, fostering economic development and responding to infectious disease threats,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

The Emory research team also included Uriel Kitron, chair of the department of Environmental Studies, and post-doctoral fellow Donal Bisanzio. The study is part of a larger, ongoing disease ecology project centered in Iquitos that also includes scientists from the University of California, Davis, the U.S. Navy, the University of Iowa, Tulane University, San Diego State and researchers in Peru.

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Turning green slime into liquid gold

What if you could replace the petroleum molecules that we use in fuel and so many other products with a substitute made from algae?

Emory alum Harrison Dillon will explain how he’s doing just that, as the guest speaker for Emory’s Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium, on Thursday, April 25 at 4 pm in WHSCAB Auditorum.

In 2003, Dillon and fellow Emory alum Jonathan Wolfson founded Solazyme, named one of the “50 Hottest Companies in Bio-energy” for 2011 to 2012 by Biofuels Digest.

During a TEDxAtlanta talk (see above video) in 2010, Dillon explained how he and Wolfson became close friends as college freshmen and dreamed of starting a company together. They parted ways for graduate school. Dillon, who loved biotechnology and genetics, was working on a PhD in human genetics, but halfway through he became disenchanted with the idea of a career in the pharmaceutical industry.

“I started reading the scientific literature about micro-organisms that make stuff that’s flammable,” Dillon recalls. “And I thought, if you could use all this genetics and biotechnology to make organisms that make stuff that burns efficiently, maybe you could make renewable fuel. I called Jonathan and I said, ‘I know what our company’s going to be: We’re going to use micro-algae to make fuel.’ And he said, ‘That’s delusional. I love it.’”

Happy Earth Day!

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A primatologist on the origins of morality

Primatologist Frans de Waal, director of Emory's Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, spoke with CNN's Kelly Murray about his new book, "The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates."

Below is an excerpt from the interview, posted on CNN's Light Years blog:

CNN’s Kelly Murray: Tell us about the title of your book.

Frans de Waal: Well, the reason I chose that title is, when I bring up the origins of morality, it revolves around God, or comes from religion, and I want to address the issue that I think morality is actually older than religion. So I’m getting into the religion question, and how important is religion for morality. I think it plays a role, but it’s a secondary role. Instead of being the source of morality, religion came later, maybe to fortify morality.

CNN: How would you say that ethics or morality is separate from religion?

De Waal: Well, I think that morality is older. In the sense that I find it very hard to believe that 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, our ancestors did not believe in right and wrong, and did not punish bad behavior, did not care about fairness. Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist. So I think religion came after morality. Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it’s not the origin of it.

Read the whole interview here.

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