Me and 1 Million BC (AKA Marvel, that's not how this works)

It might not be super clear in this blog but I’m an archaeologist. This means that at the most basic level I’m interested in what people did in the past and I try to access that by looking at the things that they left behind. (My specific research toes that line but that's another story). If you can stand some strange hours and a lot of learning, it’s a really cool gig. Special note: WE DO NOT INTENTIONALLY LOOK FOR DINOSAURS. If that’s your gig, look into paleontology. Archaeology digs people stuff.

So here’s my beef with Marvel’s 1,000,000 BC, it is on the very edge of making sense but is just one order of magnitude off. You say 100,000 and I’m there. But at 1 million you are in the territory of "do we call what we evolved from people” or "are they still not quite similar enough to us for that".

Yes. I. know. it. is. fiction.

The problem is that in many other ways comics do things that undercut what we know about the human past (Kree involvement to make the inhumans etc.) that this extremely close but not quite right event becomes the last straw and I can't suspend my disbelief. Besides the Inhuman influence, the implications of the 1 million BC arc are so far reaching that in some ways I seriously question if the “regular” humans in the Marvel Universe would even be recognizable to us as regular earth people. On top of that I hate that this timeline actually undercuts human achievement because we came up with the cool shit they are doing/wearing much more recently than 1 million years ago. AKA in less time we came up with the same complex stuff. For me errors like 1 million BC are closer to Ancient Aliens than something I would want people being inspired to do archaeology from because it takes all the cool shit away from people and makes them supernatural. If they had just removed a couple of zeros, let say 10,000 BC, I would have been fine but 1 million (so exactly 1,002,017 years ago), nope cool story Marvel, you're drunk please go home.

What is going with the Earth and our ancestors at 1 million years ago? Well we’re chilling as Homo Erectus, with some possible variation into maybe a few other species maybe just some cousins who are from a distant relative, and making some of the first stone tools, not the first but more advanced stuff. We probably make fire and it’s an ice age. There is nothing like Homo Sapiens for like another 800,000 years give or take. There is no such thing as symbolic culture at least that we have evidence for. Being white doesn’t exist yet and actually is a phenomenon that outside of Neanderthals may not have been common in Homo Sapien Sapien until the last 12,000-8,000 years. Related to this, there probably were not the ethnic separations that would produce the type of “avengers” Marvel is selling as of 1 million BC and also red hair didn't exist yet. So who were these "Avengers"?

Starbrand – The concept of a “Brand” doesn’t exist in the sense of signifying similarity or ownership

Agamotto – Fine basically except for there not being Ethnically Asian people yet

Iron Fist – We have not developed metallurgy enough to smelt iron

Black Panther – Possible except the human evolution hang up explained above

Ghost Rider – Not clear that we had the symbolic capacity to understand an afterlife and hence “ghosts” or if the concept of “riding” something had been invented

Phoenix – We just got around to fire and Phoenixes are associated with Ancient Greece which does not exist yet

Odin – Not human, so of all the Avengers he is actually the only that makes sense in this context because he did not evolve on Earth so doesn’t fall under my critique. The irony abounds.

My annoyance with settings like this are that we know a lot about what happened in the past. We spend a lot of time excavating sites and reconstructing climate and behavior by examining material culture. So to not take those as facts or even consider that as an avenue for consideration is really frustrating. While this is probably something that other scientists regularly get annoyed with, many of those technologies and sciences exist to some degree in the “future” of humanity. They are things that we are moving toward, in some cases, going from science fiction to science fact on the back of scientists interested in creating what was envisioned as part of our future. Unfortunately, that is not the case with historical sciences like archaeology. By remaking the history of the earth, and of human evolution, you are going from science fact to science fiction.

We can’t increase the pace of human evolution just because we wanted to have extra zeros to make our event look more existing. On top of the pace needed to sustain that, there’s also the problem that all of the characters come from what would essentially be complex civilizations that would need to have come about extremely quickly to support the symbolic behaviors, particularly with the mantle-like traditions of Iron Fist and Black Panther. We didn't even farm until 10,000 years ago during something called the Neolithic Revolution.

I also have to address the possible existence of people with the x-gene in 1 million BC. We would all have the x-gene by now, most likely, if people with it started popping up a million years ago. Especially if those were children of, or they were, the people who were smartest, most powerful, and had good reproductive power (all helpful for making sure your descendants continue to live). Most likely, in the absence of too many supervillains, such new “powers” would be highly adaptive and fitting for the unpredictability of the early Pleistocene so those with the X-gene would have definitely taken over the world by now. No Doubt. Also I’m very confused by the weird Starbrand/Hulk thing that is going on. Is It supposed to be Gigantopithecus (which is what Sasquatch might be based off of)?

So why do I even care so much as to write this? Well right now, as the March for Science demonstrated, science is being regularly attacked and under funded. Particularly, anthropological sciences, such as archaeology and paleoanthropology, that teach things like evolution are under attack and are presented as “one of many possible explanations”. And because of that it matters a fucking lot that comics espouse an evolutionary agenda more akin to creationism than evolution, especially when people like to think of comics as science fiction rather than just fiction or fantasy. From a storytelling point of view, it is a disservice to feed the public a thinner fictional world when we have a wealth of knowledge about the realities of prehistory. Particularly when prehistoric life rarely gets the sort of publicity that a Marvel event brings. This could have been a great chance to collaborate and use archaeological knowledge to color a fictional world using the comics art to illustrate a complex prehistory. A chance to do something fun but also use what we have learned about the past to give it a depth that goes beyond prehistoric “cavemen” stereotypes. In the same way I think that comics should be doing better with culture, they should be doing better with science. We know more about science and culture than we did in the 1960s, it's time we did something about it.

Attending without Attending: Twitter as replacement for attending a conference

I may have mentioned this before but I’m an archaeology PhD student and I’ve been using this blog to explore my interests in sci-fi and anthropology. In the last few days, or more by the time anyone reads this, my two interests collided on my twitter feed. Although I was probably the only person excited to be missing both Emerald City Comic Con and the Society for American Archaeology meetings, it was actually a great way to experience both events simultaneously.

While I considered attending both events, I went to neither but found that twitter provided much of the excitement of attending without shelling out the dough to do so. The only reason that was possible though was because there were a dedicated group of individuals at both convention and conference that were tweeting about the goings on at each. So, while I haven’t heard a single panel or attended a paper talk, I got to experience and comment on some cool new things happening in both areas.

I really enjoy comic conventions but they always a mix of awesome and horrible. Awesome to see comics creators, look at or wear cosplay, and buy exclusive art. Horrible to be in crowds, the price of food, and the lack of places to sit when you are tired. So I’ve “been” to a few comic cons now using twitter, following friends or creators through their attendance. And it’s been great, I get a cross section of the panels that were highlighted, see great cosplay of characters , and see the great commissions and prints that people pick up along the way. This of course doesn’t replace the feeling of actually being there and getting a duck-face selfie with a favorite writer but it’s a more relaxing and cheaper way to stay involved with the comics community.

I had become accustomed to this with comics conventions but this was the first time that I used twitter to "attend" a major archaeological conference. I went to and presented at three conferences within the last year so the idea of another seemed absurd. So I vicariously attended by following a great group of archaeologists who tweet and following the #saa2016.

Although it doesn’t replace being there and getting to share a beer and talk about the moon, it did give me a great way of interacting with new archaeological research and issues in archaeology. And in some ways, it was better than attending the actual conference. I got to see tweets about a lot of new research and examine how the archaeologists I followed absorbed those talks. It also highlighted some interesting things about archaeologists on twitter. Namely, the ones who use it to livetweet are also the ones who care about many of the same things I do: education, ethics, digital mediums, and preservation in archaeology.

It was awesome to see so many people interested in changing the culture of the field talking with each other and collaborating via Twitter. It also made me realize how rich the SAAs could be if more archaeologists collaborated via this social media platform. It is a very easy way to get research into the public sphere, which is part of the mission of archaeology, and allows direct discussion amongst peers in a relaxed environment. I have many classmates who have twitter accounts but few of them use it to share their research and conference experiences. Maybe it’s not important to them that their research gets this sort of press but it does tend to skew the social media, twitter-sphere, of archaeology to those already interested in digital mediums rather than representing a true cross section of the discipline.

That self-selection both in comics and in archaeology makes me wonder what I missed from the two cons but it gave me a great chance to experience both without leaving my home. While it would have been better to attend one or the other, seeing the other on twitter, their representation in social media is important to keep those who can't attend informed and use it as public outreach.