Making sense of meteorites

Sep 28, 2007 Alun Science 3 Comments Andes, Anthropology, Folklore, Geology, Health, Illness, Meteorite, Peru, Society, Sociology

A were-llama?

There’s been a couple of inter­est­ing posts on the Peru Ill­ness Flap recently. If you haven’t been read­ing about this, some­where in the Andes near Lake Tit­ic­aca vil­la­gers saw a flash of light and heard a bang. They went to invest­ig­ate and found a crater. They say there was a strange smell and that people are get­ting ill.

I’d been plan­ning to blog about this when there was more inform­a­tion, so I was pleased to read Hys­ter­ical about hys­teria on the SciAm blog. A lot of sites have been rub­bish­ing the idea that this was an extra-terrestrial ill­ness, which is fine, but George Musser at SciAm gets it exactly right when he argues that if you want to talk about the incident’s effect on the local people simple Geo­logy isn’t enough. Geo­logy is great when it comes to rocks, but it’s a remark­ably poor method to invest­ig­ate people.

The Geo­lo­gical explan­a­tion of what phys­ic­ally happened is dif­fi­cult because of the lack of trained observ­ers at the site, a point brought out by Chris Rowan in his post on the sub­ject at Highly Alloch­thon­ous. What appears to have happened is that a met­eor­ite prob­ably struck the ground and caused a chem­ical reac­tion in the soil releas­ing sul­phur and arsenic from a freshly formed crater. This could have made those who invest­ig­ated the impact ill. How­ever because the tox­ins are not bio­lo­gical it can­not be an infection.

The reason I can be sat­is­fied with this explan­a­tion is that it seems to cor­rel­ate with the opin­ions of other geo­lo­gists and also with what other reli­able news sites I’ve been able to access else­where on the inter­net. What this doesn’t mean how­ever is that the com­plaints of ill­ness are hys­teria. This impact didn’t hap­pen in a well-connected city, it happened in the Puna, the high­lands of the Andes. How would you make sense of the impact if you lived there? The people in the high­lands view their land very dif­fer­ently to west­ern­ers. An example would be seen in the rich super­nat­ural fauna you find in the Andes.

I was intro­duced to some of this by Kevin Lane, who was explain­ing some of the per­ils of work­ing in the high­lands. His favour­ite is the were-llama. The were-llama also gets a ref­er­ence in Wil­liam Isbell’s Mum­mies and Mor­tu­ary Monu­ments where Isbell tells of how vil­la­gers would quake at the sound of strange hooves in the night. The real prob­lem for me though was the Pish­taku. You really don’t want to be mis­taken for the Pishtaku.

Def­in­itely not the Pish­taku. Photo (cc) Quinet.

The Pish­taku is a man with pale skin who stalks the Andes. You can recog­nise him because he is dressed in black. I wear a lot of black because I’m colour-blind and it makes life easier. It wasn’t an insur­mount­able prob­lem though. I have some white clothes. White is a bad idea too though Kevin said. White was also a Pish­taku col­our. I had some muddy green/brown clothes, but this too could pos­sibly be a Pish­taku col­our (If you’re won­der­ing what col­ours you can wear, some of the most col­our­ful clothes I’ve seen were in Peru.).

The Pish­taku is feared because of what he does. If he sees you then he cap­tures you and steals your body fat. If you see him, but he doesn’t see you, you’ll prob­ably waste away any­way. He sells the fat to the Swiss, who use it to make the best watches in the world, which as every­one in the Andes knows, are greased with human fat. In the 1960s the Pish­taku sold human fat to the Amer­ic­ans because an unspe­cified but spe­cific part of atomic bombs required human fat to work. I’m temp­ted to say that if LOLcats ever make it big in the high­lands the Pish­taku will sell human fat to people adding the cap­tions to the pho­tos. How­ever, in the Andes the per­cep­tion is that the Pish­taku is a lethal creature. If you’re sus­pec­ted of being the Pish­taku you’ll be run out of town by an angry mob — if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky you won’t leave town.

It sounds irra­tional but it might not be entirely so. Back at the time of Span­ish con­quest and after the Span­ish were eager to find labout for their sil­ver mines. People taken into the mines would waste away — los­ing their body fat. One explan­a­tion for the Pish­taku is that he’s a folk memory of a Span­ish priest come for slaves. There are vari­ants where he speaks no Quechua and has an assist­ant who trans­lates for him.

The Pish­taku might not be an accur­ate rep­res­ent­a­tion of real­ity, but in a region where com­mu­nic­a­tions are poor, he does the job of rep­res­ent­ing a danger. It’s a ser­i­ous enough threat that the task of exper­i­ment­ing to see if it is accur­ate is likely to be fatal, so it doesn’t have to be cor­rect, just safe concept to use.

Flip­ping back to the met­eor­ite, people visit the site and they get ill. Now there’s always a back­ground noise of people becom­ing sick, but if you have more people becom­ing ill it is safe to say Domingo is merely suf­fer­ing from ‘flu which he would have got any­way? How do you go about test­ing this? The go-to answer, exper­i­ment, isn’t an option here, because when a poten­tial killer is in town you don’t want to play with lives to see how dan­ger­ous it is.

This is where both the people who dis­miss the ill­nesses as purely psy­cho­lo­gical and those who assume that the loc­als are accur­ate object­ive observ­ers do the nat­ives a dis­ser­vice. Per­haps people in the indus­tri­al­ised world are so accli­mat­ised to the use of sci­ence, they for­get it is an extremely odd way of look­ing at the world. The people of Caran­cas are not stu­pid or fool­ish. They simply do not have the com­mu­nic­a­tion links send vast quant­it­ies of data to experts for rapid ana­lysis nor do they have the train­ing to do the work them­selves. Des­pite this, they’re using the tools they do have avail­able to tackle what may have been a poten­tially lethal problem.

For­tu­nately it appears that the crater is not the threat it may have seemed, but it does show the import­ance of basic sci­entific lit­er­acy. Just as these people iden­ti­fied a major threat where there wasn’t one, it would be equally easy to over­look a threat which was very real if you lack the edu­ca­tion to recog­nise the problem.