The Origin of Laughter

While joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not.
Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, laugh. The fact that
they laugh suggests that laughter has been around for a lot longer than we have.

There is no doubt that laughing typically involves groups of people. "Laughter

evolved as a signal to others - it almost disappears when we are alone," says Robert
Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most
laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as "see you later",
rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the
company we're keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with
other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher
pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.

To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He

points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more
obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known
primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that
chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It
seems obvious when you watch their behavior - they even have the same ticklish
spots as we do. But after removing the context, the parallel between human laughter
and a chimp's characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of
the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what
it was.

These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we
laugh the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series
of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question
is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter? New research
lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head
of the Institute for Zoology in Germany who compared the sounds made by babies
and chimpanzees in response to tickling dunng the first year of their life. Using sound
spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalizations, she discovered that
chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman
believes the closeness of baby laughter to chimp laughter supports the idea that
laughter was around long before humans arnved on the scene. What started simply as
a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has
acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.

Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and

chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps 8 million years ago, but animals
might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including
gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals can do
too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just
how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling
evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by Jaak Panksepp
from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats
during play and in response to tickling.
All this still doesn't answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that
laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother
and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to
the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the
parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea
that has gained the most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to
tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This
hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if
it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put
ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is what makes it a reliable
signal of trust, according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of
California, Los Angels. "Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats
chirp a lot when they play," says Flamson. "These chirps can be aroused by tickling.
And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust."
We'll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can
be sure it wasn't in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the
origins of laughter are probably quite serious, we owe human laughter and our
language-based humor to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone
can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that
control there would also be no speech.- and no jokes to endure.

THE LOST ClTY

 Thanks to modern remote-sensing techniques, a ruined city in Turkey is
slowly revealing itself as one of the greatest and most mysterious cities of the ancient
world. Sally Palmer uncovers more.

A The low granite mountain, known as Kerkenes Dag, juts from the northern
edge of the Cappadocian plain in Turkey. Sprawled over the mountainside are the
ruins of an enormous city, contained by crumbling defensive walls seven kilometers
long. Many respected archaeologists believe these are the remains of the fabled city
of Pteria, the sixth-century BC stronghold of the Medes that the Greek historian
Herodotus described in his famous work The Histories. The short-lived city came under
Median control and only fifty years later was sacked, burned and its strong stone walls
destroyed.

B British archaeologist Dr Geoffrey Summers has spent ten years studying

the site. Excavating the ruins is a challenge because of the vast area they cover. The
7 km perimeter walls run around a site covering 271 hectares. Dr Summers quickly
realised it would take far too long to excavate the site using traditional techniques
alone. So he decided to use modern technology as well to map the entire site, both
above and beneath the surface, to locate the most interesting areas and priorities to
start digging.

C In 1993, Dr Summers hired a special hand-held balloon with a remote-

controlled camera attached. He walked over the entire site holding the balloon and
taking photos. Then one afternoon, he rented a hot-air balloon and floated over the
site, taking yet more pictures. By the end of the 1994 season, Dr Summers and his
team had a jigsaw of aerial photographs of the whole site. The next stage was to use
remote sensing, which would let them work out what lay below the intriguing outlines
and ruined walls. "Archaeology is a discipline that lends itself very well to remote
sensing because it revolves around space," says Scott Branting, an associated director
of the project. He started working with Dr Summers in 1995.

D The project used two main remote-sensing techniques. The first is

magnetometry, which works on the principle that magnetic fields at the surface of the
Earth are influenced by what is buried beneath. It measures localised variations in the
direction and intensity of this magnetic field "The Earth's magnetic field can vary from
place to place, depending on what happened there in the past," says Branting. "If
something containing iron oxide was heavily burnt, by natural or human actions, the
iron particles in it can be permanently reonented, like a compass neede, to align with
the Earth's magnetic field present at that pomt m time and space." The
magnetometer detects differences in the onentations and intensities of these iron
particles from the present-day magnetic field and uses them to produce an image of
what lies below ground.

E Kerkenes Dag lends itself particularly well to magnetometry because it

was all burnt once in a savage fire. In places the heat was sufficient to turn sandstone
to glass and to melt granite. The fire was so hot that there were strong magnetic
signatures set to the Earth's magnetic field from the time - around 547 BC - resulting
in extremely clear pictures. Furthermore, the city was never rebuilt. "If you have
multiple layers, it can confuse pictures, because you have different walls from
different periods giving signatures that all go in different directions," says Branting.
"We only have one going down about 1.5 meters, so we can get a good picture of this
fairly short-lived city."

F The other main sub-surface mapping technique, which is still being used
at the site, is resistivity. This technique measures the way electrical pulses are
conducted through sub-surface soil. It's done by shooting pulses into the ground
through a thin metal probe. Different materials have different electrical conductivity.
For example, stone and mudbrick are poor conductors, but looser, damp soil conducts
very well. By walking around the site and taking about four readings per metre, it is
possible to get a detailed idea of what is where beneath the surface. The teams then
build up pictures of walls, hearths and other remains. "It helps a lot if it has rained,
because the electrical pulse can get through more easily," says Branting. "Then if
something is more resistant, it really shows up." This is one of the reasons that the
project has a spring season, when most of the resistivity work is done. Unfortunately,
testing resistivity is a lot slower than magnetometry. "If we did resistivity over the
whole site it would take about 100 years," says Branting. Consequently, the team is
concentrating on areas where they want to clarify pictures from the magnetometry.

G Remote sensing does not reveal everything about Kerkenes Dag, but
it shows the most interesting sub-surface areas of the site. The archaeologists can
then excavate these using traditional techniques. One surprise came when they dug
out one of the fates in the defensive walls. "Our observations in early seasons led us
to assume that we were looking at a stone base from a mudbrick city wall, such as
would be found at most other cities in the Ancient Near East" says Dr Summers.
"When we started to excavate we were staggered to discove; that the walls were
made entirely from stone and that the gate would have stood at least ten metres
high. After ten years of study, Pteria is gradually giving up its secrets."

Designed to Last: Could Better

Design Cure Our Throwaway Culture?

Jonathan Chapman, a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK, is one

of a new breed of 'sustainable designers'. Like many of us, they are concerned about
the huge waste associated with Western consumer culture and the damage this does
to the environment. Some, like Chapman, aim to create objects we will want to keep
rather than discard. Others are working to create more efficient or durable consumer
goods, or goods designed with recycling in mind. The waste entailed in our fleeting
relationships with consumer durables is colossal.

Domestic power tools, such as electric drills, are a typical example of such
waste. However much DIY the purchaser plans to do, the truth is that these things are
thrown away having been used, on average, for just ten minutes. Most will serve
'conscience time', gathering dust on a shelf in the garage: people are reluctant to
admit that they have wasted their money. However, the end is inevitable: thousands
of years in landfill waste sites. In its design, manufacture, packaging, transportation
and disposal, a power tool consumes many times its own weight of resources, all for a
shorter active lifespan than that of the average small insect.

To understand why we have become so wasteful, we should look to the

underlying motivation of consumers. "People own things to give expression to who
they are, and to show what group of people they feel they belong to," Chapman says.
In a world of mass production, however, that symbolism has lost much of its potency.
For most of human history, people had an intimate relationship with objects they used
or treasured. Often they made the objects themselves, or family members passed
them on. For more specialised objects, people relied on expert manufacturers living
close by, whom they probably knew personally. Chapman points out that all these
factors gave objects a history - a narrative - and an emotional connection that today's
massproduced goods cannot possibly match. Without these personal connections,
consumerist culture idolizes novelty instead. People know that they cannot buy
happiness, but the chance to remake themselves with glossy, box-fresh products
seems irresistible. When the novelty fades, they simply renew the excitement by
buying more.

Chapman's solution is what he calls 'emotionally durable design'. He says

the challenge for designers is to create things we want to keep. This may sound like a
tall order, but it can be surprisingly straightforward. A favorite pair of old jeans, for
example, just do not have the right feel until they have been worn and washed a
hundred times. It is as if they are sharing the wearer's life story. The look can be
faked, but it is simply not the same. Waiter Stahel. Visiting professor at the University
of Surrey, UK, calls this 'the teddy bear factor'. No matter how ragged and worn a
favorite teddy becomes, we don't rush out and buy another one. As adults, our teddy
bear connects us to our childhood and this protects it from obsolescence. Stahel
argues that this is what sustainable design needs to do with more products.

The information age was supposed to lighten our economies and reduce our
impact on the environment, but, in fact, the reverse seems to be happening. We have
simply added information technology to the industrial era and speeded up the
developed world's metabolism. The cure is hardly rocket science: minimise waste,
stop moving things around so much and use people more. So what will post-
throwaway consumerism look like? It might be as simple as installing energy-saving
light bulbs, more efficient washing machines or choosing locally produced groceries
with less packaging. In general, we will spend less on goods and more on services.
Instead of buying a second car, for example, we might buy into a car-sharing network.
Rather than following our current wasteful practices, we will buy less and rent a lot
more; why own things such as tools that you use infrequently, especially things are
likely to be updated all the time?
Consumer durables will increasingly be sold with plans for their disposal.
Electronic goods such as mobile phones will be designed to be recyclable, with the
extra cost added into the retail price. Following Chapman's notion of emotionally
durable design, there will be a move away from mass production and towards tailor-
made articles and products designed and manufactured with greater craftsmanship,
products which will be repaired rather than replaced, in the same way as was done in
our grandparents' time. Companies will replace profit from bulk sales by servicing and
repairing products chosen because we want them to last.
 Chapman acknowledges that it will be a challenge to persuade people to
buy fewer goods, and ones that they intend to keep. At the moment, price
competition between retailers makes it cheaper for consumers to replace rather than
repair.

Products designed to be durable and emotionally satisfying are likely to be

more expensive, so how will we be persuaded to choose sustainability? Tim Cooper,
from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, points out that many people are already
happy to pay a premium for quality, and that they also tend to value and care more
for expensive goods. Chapman is also positive: "People are ready to keep things for
longer," he says, "The problem is that a lot of industries don't know how to do that."
Chapman believes that sustainable design is here to stay. "The days when large
corporations were in a position to choose whether to jump on the sustainability
bandwagon or not are coming to an end," he says. Whether this is also the beginning
of the end of the throwaway society remains to be seen.