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Part 1
Read the text and answer questions 1–13.
There is no doubt that dogs are the oldest of all species tamed by humans and their domestication was based on a mutually beneficial relationship with man. The conventional view is that the domestication of wolves began between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. However, a recent ground-breaking paper by a group of international geneticists has pushed this date back by a factor of 10. Led by Dr. Robert Wayne, at the University of California, Los Angeles, the team showed that all dog breeds had only one ancestor, the wolf. They did this by analysing the genetic history through the DNA of 162 wolves from around the world and 140 domestic dogs representing 67 breeds. The research also confirms, for the first time, that dogs are descended only from wolves and do not share DNA with coyotes or jackals. The fact that our companionship with dogs now appears to go back at least 100,000 years means that this partnership may have played an important part in the development of human hunting techniques that developed 70,000 to 90,000 years ago. It also may even have affected the brain development in both species.
The Australian veterinarian David Paxton suggests that in that period of first contact, people did not so much domesticate wolves as wolves domesticated people. Wolves may have started living at the edge of human settlements as scavengers, eating scraps of food and waste. Some learned to live with human beings in a mutually helpful way and gradually evolved into dogs. At the very least, they would have protected human settlements, and given warnings by barking at anything approaching. The wolves that evolved into dogs have been enormously successful in evolutionary terms. They are found everywhere in the inhabited world, hundreds of millions of them. The descendants of the wolves that remained wolves are now sparsely distributed, often in endangered populations.
In return for companionship and food, the early ancestor of the dog assisted humans in tracking, hunting, guarding and a variety of other activities. Eventually humans began to selectively breed these animals for specific traits. Physical characteristics changed and individual breeds began to take shape. As humans wandered across Asia and Europe, they, took their dogs along, using them for additional tasks and further breeding them for selected qualities that would better enable them to perform specific duties.
According to Dr. Cohn Groves, of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, early humans came to rely on dogs’ keen ability to hear, smell and see — allowing certain areas of the human brain to shrink in size relative to other areas. ‘Dogs acted as humans’ alarm systems, trackers and hunting aids, garbage disposal facilities, hot-water bottles and children’s guardians and playmates. Humans provided dogs with food and security. This symbiotic relationship was stable for over 100,000 years and intensified into mutual domestication; said Dr. Groves. In his opinion, humans domesticated dogs and dogs domesticated humans.
Dr. Groves repeated an assertion made as early as 1914 — that humans have some of the same physical characteristics as domesticated animals, the most notable being decreased brain size. The horse experienced a 16 per cent reduction in brain size after domestication while pigs’ brains shrank by as much as 34 per cent. The estimated brain-size reduction in domesticated dogs varies from 30 per cent to 10 per cent. Only in the last decade have archaeologists uncovered enough fossil evidence to establish that brain capacity in humans declined in Europe and Africa by at least 10 per cent beginning about 10,000 years ago. Dr. Groves believes this reduction may have taken place as the relationship between humans and dogs intensified. The close interaction between the two species allowed for the diminishing of certain human brain functions like smell and hearing.
Part 2
Read the text and answer questions 14–26.
Position in the family can play a huge role in shaping character, finds Clover Stroud.
A Last week I was given a potent reminder of how powerful birth order might be in determining a child’s character. My son, Jimmy Joe, nine, and my daughter, Dolly, six, were re-enacting a TV talent show. Jimmy Joe elected himself judge and Dolly was a contestant. Authoritative and unyielding, he wielded a clipboard, delivering harsh criticisms that would make a real talent show judge flinch. Initially Dolly loved the attention, but she soon grew tired of his dominance, instigating a pillow fight, then a fist fight. It ended, inevitably, in tears. A visiting friend, with an older, more successful sister, declared it ‘classic first child behaviour of dominance and supposed authority’. Dolly’s objection to her brother’s self-appointed role as leader was justified, he announced, while Jimmy Joe’s superiority was characteristic of the forceful personality of firstborns. Birth order, he said, wasn’t something they could just shrug off.
B Debate about the significance of birth order goes right to the heart of the nature versus nurture argument and is, consequently, surrounded by huge controversy. This controversy has raged since the 19th century, when Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler argued that birth order can define the way someone deals with life. He identified firstborns as driven and often suffering from a sense of having been ‘dethroned’ by a second child. Younger children, he stated, were hampered by having been more pampered than older siblings. It’s a view reiterated by Professor Frank Sulloway’s influential work, Born to Rebel. Sulloway, a leading proponent of the birth order idea, argued it has a definitive effect on the ‘Big Five’ personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
C According to the birth-order theory, first children are usually well-organised high achievers. However, they can have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and be unyielding. Second children are sometimes very competitive through rivalry with the older sibling. They’re also good mediators and negotiators, keen to keep everyone happy. Middle children, tagged the ‘easy’ ones, have good diplomacy skills. They suffer from a tendency to feel insignificant beside other siblings and often complain of feeling invisible to their parents. Youngest children are often the most likely to rebel, feeling the need to ‘prove’ themselves. They’re often extroverts and are sometimes accused of being selfish. Twins inevitably find it harder to see themselves as individuals, unless their parents have worked hard to identify them as such. It’s not unusual for one twin to have a slightly dominant role over the other and take the lead role.
D But slapping generalised labels on a child is dangerous; they change all the time, often taking turns at being the ‘naughty one’ or the ‘diligent one’. However, as one of five children, I know how hard it is to transcend the tags you earn according to when you were born. It is unsurprising then that my eldest sister is the successful entrepreneur, and that, despite covering all the big bases of adult life like marriage, kids and property, my siblings will probably always regard me as their spoilt younger sister.
E ‘As the oldest of three, I’ve found it hard not to think of my own three children as having the same personality types that the three of us had when I was growing up,’ says Lisa Cannan, a teacher. ‘I identify with my eldest son, who constantly takes the lead in terms of organisation and responsibility. My daughter, the middle child, is more cerebral than her brothers. She’s been easier than them. She avoids confrontation, so has an easy relationship with both boys. My youngest is gorgeous but naughty. I know I’m partly to blame for this, as I forgive him things the elder two wouldn’t get away with.’
F As a parent, it’s easy to feel guilty about saddling a child with labels according to birth order, but as child psychologist Stephen Bayliss points out, these characteristics might be better attributed to parenting styles, rather than a child’s character. He says that if a parent is worried about having encouraged, for example, an overdeveloped sense of dominance in an older sibling or spoiled a younger child, then it’s more useful to look at ways this can be addressed than over-analysing why it happened. Bayliss is optimistic that as adults we can overcome any negative connotations around birth order. ‘Look at the way you react to certain situations with your siblings. If you’re unhappy about being treated as a certain type of personality, try to work out if it’s a role that you’ve willingly accepted. If you’re unhappy with the role, being dynamic about focusing on your own reactions, rather than blaming theirs, will help you overcome it. Change isn’t easy but nobody need be the victim of their biography.’
Part 3
Read the text and answer questions 27–40.
A In the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, a man remains forever young while his painted portrait acquires the blemishes of his increasingly sinful life. The story exactly reverses our expectations – that while life is a process of constant change and decay, the masterpieces of art will endure. Any conservator will tell you, however, that things are not so simple. All material objects age; paper and silk discolor and turn brittle; painted surfaces crack and pigments darken or fade; even materials as durable as marble and bronze will change color and texture after prolonged contact with the elements.
B When it comes to works of modern art, the experimental embrace of new materials that gave the period much of its dynamism in the late 1800s and early 1900s poses a whole new set of challenges. These are not only technical but conceptual, since the use of the new materials – many of them never meant to last – often went hand in hand with a disdain for the traditional notion of the artwork as a precious artifact and embodiment of eternal values. A case in point was when the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard recently acquired a sculpture made of dirt by the German artist Dieter Roth (1930–98). Conservators had to face the fact that their mission to preserve for future generations the culture of the moment would have to yield to accommodate materials chosen precisely because of their propensity to decay. ‘Our natural inclination is to preserve objects,’ explains Henry Lie, head of the Straus Center for Conservation at Harvard, ‘but also to honor the artist’s feelings of how they should change over time.’
C The recently established Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at Harvard has been set up partly to meet the distinctive challenges posed by the art of the last century. Under the directorship of Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, the center will provide a road map to future conservators and a resource for scholars seeking to understand how works of modern art were made.
The center has opened at a critical juncture in the afterlife of modernism. ‘Establishing the center became urgent because these artists are disappearing,’ said James Cuno, director of the Harvard University Art Museums. ‘We need to know all we can about the materials they used, the way they used them, so that we can understand their achievement and how to treat these objects.’ In establishing guidelines for the conservation of modern art, Ms Mancusi-Ungaro said that there is no substitute for the artist’s voice. Hence a goal of the center is to create an archive of videotaped interviews with artists. ‘With modern art there are no boundaries,’ Ms. Mancusi-Ungaro said. ‘Anything could be used, from industrial materials to edible materials. It’s time to come to terms not only with what these materials are, but why the artist used them.’
D The problems for the conservator of modern art differ fundamentally from those that concern conservators of old master works, where the goal is to preserve as faithfully as possible the integrity of the original. A hands-off approach is dictated, where change is antithetical to the artist’s meaning. Joseph Beuys, for instance, used organic materials like fat or honey precisely because of their tendency to change over time; to halt that process would be to falsify the work in critical ways. ‘If the artist says: “My art is just for my lifetime, I don’t care if it changes,” then that is the attitude that the conservator has to adopt and to work with. If we make the object so precious that it’s alien to the artist, that would be the worst thing we could do,’ says Ms. Mancusi-Ungaro.
E Ms. Mancusi-Ungaro believes that artworks, like people, have a natural life cycle. ‘It’s impossible, if not misdirected, to try and make a work of art look the way it did when it was new,’ she insisted. ‘We have to accept aging, and in accepting, we have to understand what the artist was intending.’ She recalled seeing a work by Robert Rauschenberg that had been damaged and then meticulously restored. ‘This was an example where a conservator came in and, with the best of intentions and the best of skills, restored something in a way that made it stand out as being not by Rauschenberg.’
F The establishment of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art signals the transformation of modernism from the art of the now to an art for the ages. That x-rays, ultraviolet and infrared photography, and chemical analysis – tools used to probe works centuries old – are now being employed on more recent art confirms that modernism has entered history. High-tech tools can not only help conservators understand how a work was made, but when sensitively deployed, can help them recover the living artist from the evidence of the mute painting.
G Such an approach is much in evidence in the exhibition Mondrian: The Trans-Atlantic Paintings, on view at the Busch-Reisinger Museum until July 22. The paintings there, begun by Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) in Europe and completed in New York, were scrutinized using the latest scientific techniques. In this case, technical analysis revealed something unexpected in the character of the notably reserved Mondrian. ‘What really surprised me,’ curator Ron Spronk recalled, ‘was the vigor and the incredible energy, how laborious these re-workings were and to what length Mondrian went to attain these paintings’ serenely abstract works. It seems certain that these tools will play a greater role in the preservation of modernism and in how future generations interpret its legacy.’