Guide to Paranthropus species

Long known as a group of human relatives with big teeth and jaws, these ancient species lived for at least two million years alongside our ancestors.

21 JAN 2024 — JOHN HAWKS

Eye orbits of SK 48, Paranthropus robustus. Image: John Hawks

LONG READ 

A time traveler who looked at the species of our ancient relatives around 1.5 million years ago would find that they belonged to two groups. One group included a handful of species that we call Homo. The other included two species with quite large molar and premolar teeth, and jawbones, faces, and jaw musculature to match. Most anthropologists today use the name Paranthropus for these big-jawed species of hominins.

Fossils of Paranthropus are easy to recognize because of their distinctive skulls and teeth. They have large molars, premolars nearly as large as the molars, and small canines and incisors. Their mandibles are thick and tall. They have wide, massive cheekbones, wide zygomatic arches, and their cranial vaults often have raised sagittal and nuchal crests.

Such features give the appearance of strength, which led Robert Broom to give the name robustus to the species he first recognized at the South African site of Kromdraai in 1938. More than twenty years later, even larger jaws and teeth were found at Olduvai Gorge and other sites in eastern Africa. Anthropologists of the 1960s were in a phase of simplifying the number of names for genera and species, reducing all early hominins into Australopithecus. Even so, these fossils with big molars and jaws stood apart. Many scientists, following Phillip Tobias, began to call these forms “robust australopithecines”, a name that would be widely used for more than 40 years.

Today most scientists recognize three species of these large-jawed human relatives: Paranthropus robustus, Paranthropus boisei, and Paranthropus aethiopicus. Southern Africa was the home of P. robustus, while eastern Africa over time saw a succession of P. aethiopicus to P. boisei. Evidence shows that the lineage existed for around two million years, from around 3 million years ago until just under one million years ago. Hundreds of fossils of the three species are known to scientists today.

Map of sites with fossil evidence from Paranthropus, as well as some additional well-known fossil sites for context.

Paranthropus lived almost everywhere that earlier hominin species have been found. But there are exceptions. No fossils of Paranthropus have yet been found in the Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia. From 2.5 million to 1.2 million years ago when P. aethiopicus and P. boisei were the most abundant hominins in the Turkana Basin, only fossils of Homo and of Australopithecus garhi have been identified in the Afar region. This limitation to Paranthropus geographic range may help explain why this successful and numerous lineage has not yet been found in Eurasia.

Scientists long viewed these species as specialists with a different diet and lifestyle than other hominins. But evidence today suggests that Paranthropus behavior overlapped with early Homo in many ways, from tool use to food choices. Researchers are starting to ask new questions about how they interacted and how their evolution may have been connected with our own.
Paranthropus robustusFirst appearance: 2.3 million years, Kromdraai, South Africa
Last appearance: 1 million to 800,000 years ago, Swartkrans, South Africa
Holotype: TM 1517 partial skeleton, Kromdraai, South Africa
Named by: Robert Broom in a 1938 article.
Etymology: Paranthropus comes from Greek, meaning “near human”, and robustus is Latin for “firm” or “hard”.

Robert Broom related the story of how a young boy named Gert Terblanche discovered the first fossil of P. robustus from an outcrop of breccia near his family's farm. The place where this partial skeleton was found became known as the Kromdraai fossil site, and renewed scientific investigation of the site during the last twenty years has expanded the record of fossils and their context. This ancient cave is today only preserved as a remnant deposit of fossil breccia upon a hilltop, and is the site of some of the oldest-known fossils of P. robustus, up to 2.3 million years old.

Most fossils of P. robustus come from just four ancient cave sites: Kromdraai, Swartkrans, Drimolen, and Cooper's. A handful of fossils from other sites are also part of the sample, all found within the area of caves northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. The largest number of fossils come from Swartkrans, which has deposits with P. robustus extending across a million years or more. Paranthropus robustus is the most common species of fossil hominin represented in these sites, although researchers have found some Homo fossils at some of the same sites.

The postcranial record of P. robustus shows that this species had a body size similar to Australopithecus africanus, with an average body mass between 30 and 40 kilograms. The pelvis and femur of P. robustus also look like Australopithecus, with a wide pelvis relative to stature, long femoral neck, and strong bicondylar angle at the knee. The form of the humerus shows strength for rotating and flexing the forearm, which may suggest that the species relied on climbing as earlier hominins had done. The Swartkrans sample of P. robustus includes many fossil hand bones, which show that this species could use its hands to make and use tools. Many stone and bone tools have been found at the sites that preserve P. robustus fossils.
Paranthropus boiseiFirst appearance: 2.5 to 2.3 million years, Malema, Malawi
Last appearance: 1.34 million years ago, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania
Holotype: OH 5 cranium, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania
Named by: Louis Leakey in a 1959 article named the OH 5 fossil Zinjanthropus boisei. John Robinson was the first to suggest attributing the species to Paranthropus.
Etymology: Zinj, more usually spelled Zanj, is a word from Arabic referring to eastern Africa, anthropos is the Greek word for “human”, and boisei was named for Charles Boise, who provided funding for some of the fieldwork by Louis and Mary Leakey.

Paranthropus boisei is one of the best known fossil hominin species. Compared to all other hominin species, P. boisei has the largest and thickest mandibles and biggest molar teeth. Mary and Louis Leakey found the first large molar in their work at Olduvai Gorge in 1955, followed in 1959 by the discovery of the OH 5 skull. Other discoveries at Olduvai Gorge would follow over the years, including the OH 80 specimen, a case in which teeth were recovered together with a few parts of the postcranial skeleton.

Most of the known sample of P. boisei comes from the Turkana Basin. Many of the major discoveries of this species were made by specialists working with Richard and Maeve Leakey, who started fieldwork at Koobi Fora and Ileret in 1968. The species is the most common hominin in the fossil deposits of the Turkana Basin from around 2.3 million to 1.5 million years ago.

The overall picture of P. boisei body size and postcranial anatomy is less well known than for P. robustus. Postcranial fossil fragments from the East African Rift System sites usually cannot be attributed to species unless researchers find them with teeth or identifiable cranial fragments. But in recent years, researchers have made progress on understanding P. boisei body size and anatomy through some new discoveries of partial P. boisei skeletons and comparative study of P. robustus fossils. One partial skeleton from Koobi Fora, KNM-ER 1500, comes from an individual that was similar in size to the small “Lucy” skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, around 30 kilograms, while the OH 80 partial skeleton represents a larger individual of 45 to 50 kilograms. Paranthropus boisei had strong arms, with large muscle attachments on the humerus and a highly curved ulna shaft. As in the case of P. robustus, this may mean that climbing was important in the behavioral pattern of P. boisei. Tool use was also important to this species, with finger and hand bones showing the same potential as in P. robustus.
Paranthropus aethiopicusFirst appearance: 2.8 to 2.5 million years, Shungura Formation, Omo Valley, Ethiopia
Last appearance: 2.3 to 2.1 million years ago, Shungura Formation, Omo Valley, Ethiopia
Holotype: Omo 18-1967-18 partial mandible, Shungura Formation, Omo Valley, Ethiopia
Named by: Camille Arambourg and Yves Coppens in a brief 1967 note named this fossil Paraustralopithecus aethiopicus, providing a diagnosis in a second article in 1968. Other researchers later referred the species to Australopithecus, and then to Paranthropus, as ideas about the relationships and rank of these hominins changed over time.
Etymology: Paraustralopithecus comes from Greek, meaning “near Australopithecus”, and aethiopicus refers to Ethiopia.

The French team working as part of the 1967 International Palaeontological Research Expedition to the Omo River found a hominin mandible from an area they designated Omo 18. As they described the jaw, Camille Arambourg and Yves Coppens claimed it was different from any other hominin known at that time. Still, the fossil preserves only the body of the mandible and tooth roots, without any of the tooth crowns. This makes it challenging to evaluate whether other fossils discovered since 1967 may belong to the same species.

Fact sheet for the Omo 18-1967-18 mandible.

The name aethiopicus might have been forgotten were it not for the discovery in 1985 of a skull from the Lomekwi area of the western Turkana Basin. The KNM-WT 17000 skull, known as the “Black Skull” for its dark manganese oxide staining, came from an individual that lived around 2.5 million years ago. The skull has no tooth crowns remaining. But the large remaining tooth roots make clear that its molars and premolars were similar in size to P. boisei. The large sagittal and nuchal crests also fit what is seen in the later species. But other aspects of the skull look different from P. boisei, including its sloping and prognathic face, relatively small brain size, and shape of the joint that connects the skull and mandible.

Alan Walker and Richard Leakey, who described the KNM-WT 17000 skull, attributed it to Australopithecus boisei. At least one scientist thought the skull deserved its own species name, naming it Australopithecus walkeri. But the fossil record was a bit more extensive than these two specimens.Walker and Leakey had also described a jawbone from Kangatukuseo, near Lomekwi, which seemed similar in shape and size to Omo 18-1967-18. Between this time and 1.9 million years ago, when Paranthropus boisei is well-represented at Ileret and Koobi Fora, only fragmentary fossils from the Shungura Formation are known. Researchers who studied those fossils during the late 1980s and 1990s, led by Gen Suwa, recognized that the “robust” lineage had changed over time. Molars and premolars became larger, and some aspects of tooth shape evolved to be more boisei-like over time. The earlier fossils, in their view, were something different.

The “Black Skull”, KNM-WT 17000, from Lomekwi, Kenya.

These researchers and others of the late 1980s recognized the earlier part of the “robust” lineage in the Turkana Basin as Australopithecus aethiopicus. This is where things still stand today, except that many researchers separate the “robust” species into Paranthropus. But the fossil record does not make clear exactly when and where the boundary between P. aethiopicus and P. boisei may have existed, or whether there was any distinct boundary at all.
Jaws and molars

Early scientists who studied these species had some strong ideas about their large jaw muscles and molars. When Louis Leakey saw the OH 5 fossil, he came up with the name “Nutcracker Man” to describe what he saw as a powerful bite. During the 1950s, John Robinson described many of the P. robustus fossils from Swartkrans as well as Au. africanus from Sterkfontein. He came to the idea that the differences between these species were a result of their diets. In his view, the large molars and jaws of Paranthropus marked them as vegetarians, while the more generalized teeth of Australopithecus pointed to a more omnivorous diet. In his view, the vegetarian lifestyle meant that P. robustus did not make the stone tools that were found with the species at Swartkrans.

Two species that lived at the same time in the East African Rift System are Homo habilis and Paranthropus boisei. Their jaws and teeth were very different in size and morphology.

Today anthropologists know much more about how Paranthropus species used their teeth. Engineering models show that the faces and jaws of these species were indeed capable of exerting and withstanding great force. At the same time, their big, flat molars were less efficient at transmitting strong force to the foods that they ate. Michael Berthaume and Kornelius Kupczik suggested one possible explanation: strong jaws may have compensated for big teeth, which were themselves more useful for resisting wear than biting down on hard foods.

Sharing big teeth and jaws did not make Paranthropus all eat alike. Foods leave microscopic scratches and pits upon the surfaces of teeth, and the markings on Paranthropus boisei teeth show that they chewed on tough foods like leaves and stems, rather than hard foods like nuts and seeds. They seem to have used their big jaw muscles like cows or gorillas, sometimes chewing for hours each day. On the other hand, P. robustus teeth show a more diverse array of scratches and pits, suggesting that they had a varied diet. For that species, being able to undertake long bouts of chewing may enabled flexibility of food choices. That impression is confirmed by studies of the isotopes of carbon and calcium in the tooth enamel. The diet of almost all P. boisei individuals was strongly focused toward foods with carbon derived from warm-season grasses. Paranthropus robustus and P. aethiopicus consumed foods from a wider array of sources, very much like Australopithecus africanus and early species of Homo. All of these species were using stone tools, and in South Africa P. robustus used bone tools, possibly for insect foraging.

Relationships of Paranthropus species

Most scientists accept that the three species P. boisei, P. aethiopicus, and P. robustus are close relatives of each other. This close relationship is supported by many similarities in their jaws, teeth and skulls. No other hominins have the expanded molar dimensions and thickened enamel that these species share, nor do any other hominins have premolars that have evolved toward a molar-like shape in the same way. Such are derived or apomorphic in the three species of Paranthropus.

Of course these species also have some differences from each other. The strongly sloped face profile of the KNM-WT 17000 skull resembles earlier hominins like Au. afarensis more than it does the later P. boisei skulls, for example. But this kind of plesiomorphic similarity does not provide evidence of a close relationship, because it is also shared with other, more distantly related species. In this case, it's the vertical face orientation shared by P. robustus and P. boisei that is the derived trait, different from the relatives of both species. This may reflect a close relationship between these two species compared to the earlier P. aethiopicus. From comparisons like these anthropologists build their understanding of the phylogenetic tree.

Considering the shared derived traits of P. robustus and P. boisei, many researchers accept them as sister species. The record of Paranthropus fossils before 2.3 million years ago is harder to assess, but fossils like KNM-WT 17000 and Omo 18-1967-18 do not share all the derived traits of later Paranthropus. Some researchers think that P. aethiopicus was the common ancestor of P. robustus and P. boisei. In this scenario, the adaptation to powerful chewing first arose sometime before 3 million years ago in an early population of big-jawed hominins that became P. aethiopicus. Around 2.3 million years ago, the populations in the East African Rift System evolved the derived set of features found in P. boisei. The fossil record does not make clear when Paranthropus first reached southern Africa, but the lack of some P. boisei features in P. robustus suggests that the two species diverged before 2.3 million years ago.

Yet there has always been some doubt about whether jaws tell the whole story. The features that link the three “robust” species are almost all connected with a single function: heavy chewing. Individuals with thick jawbones also tend to have tall jawbones and larger jaw muscles. Scientists may choose to count those as separate traits, but they all evolve in concert with each other. Their correlation makes these traits weaker evidence of relationship than they might seem. Anthropologists cannot easily look beyond the jaws, teeth, and bones of the skull—such elements are, after all, most of the fossil record.

Over the years some anthropologists have suggested that maybe the South African P. robustus may actually have evolved from Au. africanus or some other ancestor within southern Africa. If that idea were correct, then the South African P. robustus may have evolved its large jaw musculature, large molars, and large molar-shaped premolars in parallel with the East African P. aethiopicus—P. boisei lineage. Some of the Australopithecus fossils from Sterkfontein and Makapansgat do have very large molars and jaws that overlap with P. robustus in their size and thickness. These traits are among the reasons why Au. africanus is placed as a sister branch to the three Paranthropus species in most analyses of hominin phylogeny. Still, over the last forty years most analyses have supported the idea that the similarities of P. robustus and P. boisei was unlikely to have been a result of parallel evolution.
Paranthropus extinction

The earliest fossils attributed to Paranthropus are two teeth from Nyayanga, Kenya, where they come from sediments between 3 million and 2.6 million years old. With only two teeth, there's not enough information to know for certain if these teeth are P. aethiopicus or potentially yet another, earlier, species. This site near Lake Victoria is also the earliest known archaeological site with Oldowan stone tools, which suggests that the large-toothed Paranthropus existed in a technological world from its very beginning.

So when Homo first arose, Paranthropus was our senior partner. Both P. robustus and P. boisei were long-lived species, each originating by 2.3 million years ago and becoming extinct more than a million years later. African climates and environments changed a great deal during that long period of time. Paranthropus found ways to thrive, its fossils more common than those of other species that lived at the same time, including every kind of early Homo. It's a mystery why this successful lineage became extinct.

There is no satisfying answer, but there are clues. Paranthropus coexisted comfortably with several varieties of Homo, including one of the most well-known hominin species of all, Homo erectus. In Africa, Homo erectus has been found in sites from nearly two million years ago up to a little under one million. It was a cosmopolitan species, with both early and late sites at the extreme ends of the continent. And of course, H. erectus spread out into Asia shortly after it first evolved, becoming the first transcontinental hominin species. Whatever Homo erectus had, it was not enough to extinguish P. robustus or P. boisei. Still, each of the big-toothed species was limited to its region, with little sign that there was much gene flow between them. Possibly the most surprising fact is that P. boisei never seems to have been successful in the Afar region of Ethiopia, where so many other fossil hominins have been found. The trade-off between behavioral flexibility and tailoring to specific ecological surroundings is one that most species face. Maybe later Paranthropus populations oriented themselves less toward dispersal and more toward fitting in where they already lived.

While H. erectus kept going strong in Asia after one million years ago, in Africa things were changing. Humanlike species diversified further. One form would become the ancestors of H. naledi. Another was a new species with a larger brain than H. erectus. Populations of this human species, already separating genetically by one million years ago, would eventually merge to become the global Homo sapiens. This dawning Middle Pleistocene world was the one that gave rise to us. Whether a place for Paranthropus long remained in this world no one can yet say.

Still, it's likely that we are missing the whole picture. Their reputation as a hominin side-branch has distracted some scientists from the anatomical reality that Paranthropus shares a whole lot with our closer relatives. To be sure, the molars and premolars of P. boisei are very large and different in shape from early species of Homo. But P. robustus did not always fit this stereotype. That species overlapped greatly with Australopithecus africanus and early species of Homo in molar and premolar sizes. Some recent research suggests that some fossils long classified as early members of Homo were actually Paranthropus instead. A smaller-toothed population of Paranthropus might well be hiding in our fragmented fossil record.

Maybe the reason why the more extreme Paranthropus species ultimately became extinct is because earlier populations sometimes mixed with—or even evolved into—more humanlike species. If so, this divergent group may have been one earlier channel of the braided stream. Widening the window of sites in southern Africa will be central to solving this evolutionary mystery.

Notes: The recent work pointing to small Paranthropus teeth that may have been wrongly attributed to Homo is on the enamel-dentin junction of South African hominins by Clément Zanolli and coworkers (2022). I've expanded on this in a previous post: “Secrets within the teeth of the first Homo fossils.”

Active debate over the relationships of Paranthropus occupied much of the late 1980s into the 2000s, with researchers gathering more and more data to understand whether the various species are close relatives. Although this has quieted down since, some researchers still favor a hypothesis in which southern African Australopithecus gave rise to P. robustus, or possibly to all Paranthropus species.

Readers interested in the dietary evidence should check out a recent review by Matt Sponheimer and coworkers, titled “Problems with Paranthropus”. I discussed evidence of tool use by Paranthropus species at length in my post, “All the hominins made tools”. There are many ins and outs of the association of postcranial evidence with Paranthropus, especially in the Turkana Basin, and the recent paper by Carol Ward and coworkers attributing KNM-ER 1500 to P. boisei is a good introduction to that topic.

Guide to Australopithecus species
These ancient human relatives include the first species with evidence of upright walking and running like humans. They represent more than a third of our evolutionary history.
John HawksJohn Hawks

Guide to Sahelanthropus, Orrorin and Ardipithecus
These fossil species between 8 million and 4.4 million years old include some of the earliest members of the hominin lineage.

References

Arambourg, C., & Coppens, Y. (1967). Sur la découverte, dans le Pléistocène inférieur de la vallée de l’Omo (Éthiopie), d’une mandibule d’australopithécien. Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires Des Seances De l’Academie Des Sciences. Serie D: Sciences Naturelles, 265(8), 589–590.

Berthaume, M. A., & Kupczik, K. (2021). Molar biomechanical function in South African hominins Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. Interface Focus, 11(5), 20200085. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2020.0085

Braga, J., Chinamatira, G., Zipfel, B., & Zimmer, V. (2022). New fossils from Kromdraai and Drimolen, South Africa, and their distinctiveness among Paranthropus robustus. Scientific Reports, 12(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-18223-7

Leakey, R. E. F., & Walker, A. (1988). New Australopithecus boisei specimens from east and west Lake Turkana, Kenya. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 76(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330760102

Martin, J. M., Leece, A. B., Neubauer, S., Baker, S. E., Mongle, C. S., Boschian, G., Schwartz, G. T., Smith, A. L., Ledogar, J. A., Strait, D. S., & Herries, A. I. R. (2021). Drimolen cranium DNH 155 documents microevolution in an early hominin species. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01319-6

Mongle, C. S., Strait, D. S., & Grine, F. E. (2023). An updated analysis of hominin phylogeny with an emphasis on re-evaluating the phylogenetic relationships of Australopithecus sediba. Journal of Human Evolution, 175, 103311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2022.103311

Smith, A. L., Benazzi, S., Ledogar, J. A., Tamvada, K., Pryor Smith, L. C., Weber, G. W., Spencer, M. A., Lucas, P. W., Michael, S., Shekeban, A., Al-Fadhalah, K., Almusallam, A. S., Dechow, P. C., Grosse, I. R., Ross, C. F., Madden, R. H., Richmond, B. G., Wright, B. W., Wang, Q., … Strait, D. S. (2015). The Feeding Biomechanics and Dietary Ecology of Paranthropus boisei. The Anatomical Record, 298(1), 145–167. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.23073

Sponheimer, M., Daegling, D. J., Ungar, P. S., Bobe, R., & Paine, O. C. C. (2023). Problems with Paranthropus. Quaternary International, 650, 40–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2022.03.024

Susman, R. L. (1988). Hand of Paranthropus robustus from Member 1, Swartkrans: Fossil Evidence for Tool Behavior. Science, 240(4853), 781–784. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.3129783

Susman, R. L. (1991). Who Made the Oldowan Tools? Fossil Evidence for Tool Behavior in Plio-Pleistocene Hominids. Journal of Anthropological Research, 47(2), 129–151. https://doi.org/10.1086/jar.47.2.3630322

Ward, C. V., Hammond, A. S., Grine, F. E., Mongle, C. S., Lawrence, J., & Kimbel, W. H. (2023). Taxonomic attribution of the KNM-ER 1500 partial skeleton from the Burgi Member of the Koobi Fora Formation, Kenya. Journal of Human Evolution, 184, 103426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2023.103426

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I'm a paleoanthropologist exploring the world of ancient humans and our fossil relatives.

Cybersecurity Challenges at the World Economic Forum

The 54th Annual Meeting of The World Economic Forum took place in Davos, Switzerland, this past week, and cybersecurity and AI were again top topics. Here are some highlights.

January 21, 2024 • GOVTECH
Dan Lohrmann

Adobe Stock/immimagery
How can we gauge what world leaders in the public and private sectors are currently thinking about cybersecurity and upcoming innovations in technology? One excellent way is to examine the speeches, interviews, media reports and white papers that come out of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, each January.

In a blog post last year, I highlighted the surprising cyber focus at the 2023 World Economic Forum.

On Friday, Jan. 19, 2024, The Financial Times offered this story: The top takeaways from this year’s World Economic Forum.


They lead with “AI needs DEI”: “The spectre of a ‘Hal’ — the evil AI character in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey — hangs heavily over Davos this year, amid fears that artificial intelligence will not only unleash existential risks (i.e., computers outsmarting humans), but concentrate power in a way that increases inequalities. Worse still, as Alex Tsado, co-founder of the nonprofit group Alliance4ai told me, voices outside rich nations have so far been largely excluded from the development and deployment of AI. Alliance4ai, however, is fighting to rectify this in Africa. And while diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is out of fashion at some businesses amid a political backlash, Big Tech companies know they need to offset criticism around the biases in AI.”

Second on their list is “Digitisation for good.” At the end of the section they mention this story: “The most memorable tale for me involves aircraft toilets: I was told that the U.S. government is deploying machine learning systems to analyse waste water samples when planes land at airports to scan for new viruses. Think of this when you next fly.”





CYBER UPDATES

As in previous years, The World Economic Forum published a Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2024. This report is issued in conjunction with Accenture.

In the executive summary, they lead with this: “In 2023 the world faced a polarized geopolitical order, multiple armed conflicts, both scepticism and fervour about the implications of future technologies, and global economic uncertainty. Amid this complex landscape, the cybersecurity economy grew exponentially faster than the overall global economy, and outpaced growth in the tech sector. However, many organizations and countries experienced that growth in exceptionally different ways.

"A stark divide between cyber-resilient organizations and those that are struggling has emerged. This clear divergence in cyber equity is exacerbated by the contours of the threat landscape, macroeconomic trends, industry regulation and early adoption of paradigm-shifting technology by some organizations. Other clear barriers, including the rising cost of access to innovative cyber services, tools, skills and expertise, continue to influence the ability of the global ecosystem to build a more secure cyberspace in the face of myriad transitions.

"These factors are also ever-present in the accelerated disappearance of a healthy “middle grouping” of organizations (i.e., those that maintain minimum standards of cyber resilience only)."

Their main points include (with percentages and details in the report link):
There is growing cyber inequity between organizations that are cyber resilient and those that are not.

Emerging technology will exacerbate long-standing challenges related to cyber resilience.
The cyber skills and talent shortage continues to widen at an alarming rate.
Alignment between cyber and business is becoming more common.

Cyber ecosystem risk is becoming more problematic.

There are many more related resources available at the World Economic Forum cybersecurity website.


OTHER FEATURED THOUGHTS FROM DAVOS
Watch this interview from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, who sees opportunities in AI and cybersecurity:

Another big theme was building trust. This website has trust quotes from top leaders. Here are a few:

Antonio Guterres: "When global norms collapse, so does trust. I am personally shocked by the systematic undermining of principles and standards we used to take for granted. I am outraged that so many countries and companies are pursuing their own narrow interests without any consideration for our shared future or the common good.”

Professor Klaus Schwab: "Open, transparent conversations can restore mutual trust between individuals and nations who, out of fear for their own future, prioritize their own interests," said the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. "The resulting dynamics diminish hope in a brighter future. To steer away from crisis-driven dynamics and foster cooperation, trust and a shared vision for a brighter future, we must create a positive narrative that unlocks the opportunities presented by this historic turning point."

Jagan Chapagain, the chief executive officer and secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
met with the World Economic content team for a special conversation on his goals and lessons learned: "A lot of the crisis we are facing around the world, the underlying issue has been the lack of trust. And with the technology growing — and of course the AI we are talking about also here — is of course the technology brings a lot of positives, but also if it is not used, it can also contribute in eroding the trust. And that's where I think it's extremely, extremely important that the leader's job is focused on the positive and build or contribute to building the trust.”

I also like this Bloomberg article which highlights how "OpenAI Is Working With US Military on Cybersecurity Tools":

“OpenAI is working with the Pentagon on a number of projects including cybersecurity capabilities, a departure from the startup’s earlier ban on providing its artificial intelligence to militaries.

“The ChatGPT maker is developing tools with the U.S. Defense Department on open source cybersecurity software — collaborating with DARPA for its AI Cyber Challenge announced last year — and has had initial talks with the U.S. government about methods to assist with preventing veteran suicide, Anna Makanju, the company’s vice president of global affairs, said in an interview at Bloomberg House at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday."

FINAL THOUGHTS

A reminder about cybersecurity threats came when Swiss websites hit by DDoS attacks during World Economic Forum in Davos: “Swiss websites were hit by a wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this week, likely orchestrated by pro-Russian hackers. According to the Swiss National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC), the attacks temporarily disrupted access to several websites run by the Federal Administration — the government's executive branch.

“'The cyberattack was promptly detected and the Federal Administration's specialists took the necessary action to restore access to the websites as quickly as possible,' said NCSC’s statement."

I suspect we will be hearing much more on the topics of building cybersecurity, building trust and generative AI regulation in the years ahead.


Dan Lohrmann is an internationally recognized cybersecurity leader, technologist, keynote speaker and author.

Cryptographers Just Got Closer to Enabling Fully Private Internet Searches

Three researchers have found a long-sought way to pull information from large databases secretly. If the process can be streamlined, fully private browsing could be possible.

ILLUSTRATION: ALLISON LI/QUANTA MAGAZINE

THE ORIGINAL VERSION of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

WE ALL KNOW to be careful about the details we share online, but the information we seek can also be revealing. Search for driving directions, and our location becomes far easier to guess. Check for a password in a trove of compromised data, and we risk leaking it ourselves.

These situations fuel a key question in cryptography: How can you pull information from a public database without revealing anything about what you’ve accessed? It’s the equivalent of checking out a book from the library without the librarian knowing which one.

Concocting a strategy that solves this problem—known as private information retrieval—is “a very useful building block in a number of privacy-preserving applications,” said David Wu, a cryptographer at the University of Texas, Austin. Since the 1990s, researchers have chipped away at the question, improving strategies for privately accessing databases. One major goal, still impossible with large databases, is the equivalent of a private Google search, where you can sift through a heap of data anonymously without doing any heavy computational lifting.

Now, three researchers have crafted a long-sought version of private information retrieval and extended it to build a more general privacy strategy. The work, which received a Best Paper Award in June 2023 at the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing, topples a major theoretical barrier on the way to a truly private search.

“[This is] something in cryptography that I guess we all wanted but didn’t quite believe that it exists,” said Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a cryptographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the paper. “It is a landmark result.”

The problem of private database access took shape in the 1990s. At first, researchers assumed that the only solution was to scan the entire database during every search, which would be like having a librarian scour every shelf before returning with your book. After all, if the search skipped any section, the librarian would know that your book is not in that part of the library.

That approach works well enough at smaller scales, but as the database grows, the time required to scan it grows at least proportionally. As you read from bigger databases—and the internet is a pretty big one—the process becomes prohibitively inefficient.

In the early 2000s, researchers started to suspect they could dodge the full-scan barrier by “preprocessing” the database. Roughly, this would mean encoding the whole database as a special structure, so the server could answer a query by reading just a small portion of that structure. Careful enough preprocessing could, in theory, mean that a single server hosting information only goes through the process once, by itself, allowing all future users to grab information privately without any more effort.

For Daniel Wichs, a cryptographer at Northeastern University and a coauthor of the new paper, that seemed too good to be true. Around 2011, he started trying to prove that this kind of scheme was impossible. “I was convinced that there’s no way that this could be done,” he said.

But in 2017, two groups of researchers published results that changed his mind. They built the first programs that could do this kind of private information retrieval, but they weren’t able to show that the programs were secure. (Cryptographers demonstrate a system’s security by showing that breaking it is as difficult as solving some hard problem. The researchers weren’t able to compare it to a canonical hard problem.)

From left: Wei-Kai Lin, Ethan Mook, and Daniel Wichs devised a new method
for privately searching large databases.
PHOTOGRAPH: IAN MACLELLAN AND KHOURY COLLEGE OF COMPUTER SCIENCES/NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY

So even with his hope renewed, Wichs assumed that any version of these programs that was secure was still a long way off. Instead, he and his coauthors—Wei-Kai Lin, now at the University of Virginia, and Ethan Mook, also at Northeastern—worked on problems they thought would be easier, which involved cases where multiple servers host the database.

In the methods they studied, the information in the database can be transformed into a mathematical expression, which the servers can evaluate to extract the information. The authors figured it might be possible to make that evaluation process more efficient. They toyed with an idea from 2011, when other researchers had found a way to quickly evaluate such an expression by preprocessing it, creating special, compact tables of values that allow you to skip the normal evaluation steps.

That method didn’t produce any improvements, and the group came close to giving up—until they wondered whether this tool might actually work in the coveted single-server case. Choose a polynomial carefully enough, they saw, and a single server could preprocess it based on the 2011 result—yielding the secure, efficient lookup scheme Wichs had pondered for years. Suddenly, they’d solved the harder problem after all.

At first, the authors didn’t believe it. “Let’s figure out what’s wrong with this,” Wichs remembered thinking. “We kept trying to figure out where it breaks down.”

But the solution held: They had really discovered a secure way to preprocess a single-server database so anyone could pull information in secret. “It’s really beyond everything we had hoped for,” said Yuval Ishai, a cryptographer at the Technion in Israel who was not involved in this work. It’s a result “we were not even brave enough to ask for,” he said.

After building their secret lookup scheme, the authors turned to the real-world goal of a private internet search, which is more complicated than pulling bits of information from a database, Wichs said. The private lookup scheme on its own does allow for a version of private Google-like searching, but it’s extremely labor-intensive: You run Google’s algorithm yourself and secretly pull data from the internet when necessary. Wichs said a true search, where you send a request and sit back while the server collects the results, is really a target for a broader approach known as homomorphic encryption, which disguises data so that someone else can manipulate it without ever knowing anything about it.

Typical homomorphic encryption strategies would hit the same snag as private information retrieval, plodding through all the internet’s contents for every search. But using their private lookup method as scaffolding, the authors constructed a new scheme which runs computations that are more like the programs we use every day, pulling information covertly without sweeping the whole internet. That would provide an efficiency boost for internet searches and any programs that need quick access to data.

While homomorphic encryption is a useful extension of the private lookup scheme, Ishai said, he sees private information retrieval as the more fundamental problem. The authors’ solution is the “magical building block,” and their homomorphic encryption strategy is a natural follow-up.

For now, neither scheme is practically useful: Preprocessing currently helps at the extremes, when the database size balloons toward infinity. But actually deploying it means those savings can’t materialize, and the process would eat up too much time and storage space.

Luckily, Vaikuntanathan said, cryptographers have a long history of optimizing results that were initially impractical. If future work can streamline the approach, he believes private lookups from giant databases may be within reach. “We all thought we were kind of stuck there,” he said. “What Daniel’s result gives is hope.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

4 never-before-seen octopuses discovered in deep sea off Costa Rica

TEUTHOLOGY; OCTOPUS STUDIES

News
By Ashley Balzer Vigil 

Enigmatic octopuses that have been newly discovered in the waters off Costa Rica add to a growing registry of deep-sea dwellers.

A mother octopus broods her eggs near a small outcrop of rock unofficially called El Dorado Hill. When a female octopus broods (which can be a time span of multiple years), she does not eat and dies around the same time that her eggs hatch. 

(Image credit: ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute) 

Last month a team of scientists visited an ethereal nursery on the seafloor off Costa Rica, where they watched in awe as a new generation of deep-sea octopuses gently emerged from a quivering cluster of oblong, semitranslucent eggs.

Now the researchers have confirmed these deep-sea dwellers are members of an entirely new, yet-to-be-named species, nicknamed the "Dorado octopus." And they have announced they've discovered three more new deep-sea octopus species on top of that.

"Finding four new species of octopuses on just two expeditions is exciting, revealing some of the rich biodiversity of the deep sea and hinting at how much more waits to be discovered," says Jim Barry, a deep-sea ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who was not involved in the expeditions.

The nursery visit last December was part two of a Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition that took place six months earlier. Then, too, researchers witnessed baby deep-sea octopuses emerge from eggs that their respective mothers were brooding near hydrothermal vents on the same underwater rock formation, called the Dorado Outcrop (hence the new species' nickname). The octopuses' proximity to the vents suggests these creatures may have evolved to use warmth from the seeping hydrothermal fluid to accelerate the incubation process—which is notoriously long for many deep-sea creatures, leaving their offspring vulnerable to predators for extended periods.

The team collected some octopus specimens near the vents and others farther away and brought them to the Zoology Museum at the University of Costa Rica. Fiorella Vásquez, a research assistant at the Zoology Museum, and Janet Voight, associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, then set out to classify the creatures.



An octopus hatchling emerges from a group of eggs at a new nursery, first discovered by the same team in June, at Tengosed Seamount off Costa Rica. (Image credit: ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute (CC BY-NC-SA))


The Dorado octopus is remarkably similar to the pearl octopus (Muusoctopus robustus), which a separate team of researchers previously found brooding eggs near hydrothermal vents off central California. To distinguish the Dorado octopus as a separate species in the recent investigation, the scientists made careful observations and descriptions of the different octopuses, such as measuring their arms and enumerating their suckers. "The two species share an unusual morphology, having smallish eyes, a robust body and fairly short arms," Voight explains. "It's the details that separate them."

Of the three additional species the team identified farther from the hydrothermal vents, two are also members of the genus Muusoctopus. They have double rows of suckers on their arms and lack an ink sac––other traits that are characteristic of the genus.

"But they look really different," Voight says of these two species. For both, large eyes are the most obvious difference from the Dorado octopus. And one of the species is reddish, with long arms, while the other has a lighter shade on its top side and a darker one underneath.


Brooding mother octopuses often curl themselves up, with tentacles and suckers facing out. Researchers believe this to be a defensive position that warns off predators. When a female octopus broods (which can involve a time span of multiple years), she does not eat and dies around the same time that her eggs hatch. (Image credit: ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute (CC BY-NC-SA))


The fourth species is an oddball. "It was just so unlike anything I had seen; I didn't know where to assign it," Voight says. But she and Vásquez observed a single row of suckers on each of the animal's arms and strange bumps on its skin, which they say could place this species in the genus Graneledone. Voight notes, however, that "its bumps aren't quite like what I expected to see, and it's really pale-colored, so it's a bit of an enigma."

These three other newfound species are also officially nameless so far. The researchers collected additional specimens that they're still poring over to determine the best classifications. Subsequently they'll have to meticulously describe and illustrate each species, run that information through peer review and then, if accepted, the species names will enter the scientific literature.

"We have so much to explore in the deep ocean, and part of that exploration is to find new species," Vásquez says. "Every step we take to learn a little more about what is at the bottom of our ocean will help us to conserve it."

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The expedition also identified a rare deep-sea skate nursery — which the scientists are calling Skate Park — and three new hydrothermal springs. Expedition co-leader Jorge Cortés-Núñez, a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Costa Rica, says "we have samples and data for many years to come, motivation to continue along that line of research, and powerful information and images to justify the protection and conservation of the deep sea, not only of Costa Rica but of all the ocean."

This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.

Volcanic Ash Helps Pinpoint First Appearance Of Complex Life On Earth

David Bressan

FORBES
Senior Contributor
I deal with the rocky road to our modern understanding of earth
Jan 21, 2024

Tribrachidium heraldicum, one of the most enigmatic critters from the Ediacaran fauna.

D.BRESSAN

A new study has for the first time precisely dated some of the oldest fossils in the world, helping to track a pivotal moment in the history of Earth when the first multicellular life appeared.

In 1947, geologist Reginald C. Sprigg announced the discovery of fossils of possible animal-like creatures from the Ediacara Hills in Australia. Preliminary dating of the rock formations revealed that the Ediacara Fauna was living more than 500 million years ago in a shallow sea.


These fossils occur so early in the evolutionary history of animals that in many cases they appear to be experimenting with different ways to build large multicellular bodies. They include many weird organisms of unknown affinity, like Dickinsonia, a sort of hybrid between a worm and a jellyfish, Charnia, a segmented and branched organism, or Tribrachidium, showing a threefold rotational symmetry not found in any modern animal.

Using volcanic ash layers like bookmarks, a new study pinpointed exactly one of the earliest occurrences of Ediacara-like fossils in the geologic record.

“Located in the Coed Cochion Quarry in Wales, which contains the richest occurrence of shallow marine life in Britain, we used outfall from an ancient volcano that blanketed the animals as a time marker to accurately date the fossils to 565 million years, accurate down to 0.1 per cent,” so lead author PhD student Anthony Clarke, from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group within Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences U.K.

This discovery also helps correlate the Welsh site with similar fossil sites worldwide. Ediacaran fossils are known from over 40 sites located in South Australia, Ukraine, Newfoundland, Namibia and around the White Sea. Most Ediacaran strata date from about 580 to 539 million years in age.

Based on the age and the preserved species, the Welsh fossils appear directly comparable to the famous fossils of Ediacara in South Australia, eastern Newfoundland and the White Sea area, explains study co-author Professor Chris Kirkland.

The temporal and faunal similarities suggest that the Ediacaran organisms were quite more successful in evolutionary terms than previously believed. They were part of an ancient living community with global distribution, colonizing shallow- to deep-sea environments existing at the time around the first continents.

Ruling the seas for roughly 96 million years, the Ediacara fauna went extinct about 539 to 500 million years ago in the first known mass extinction, marking the end of the Proterozoic and the beginning of the Phanerozoic—the time in Earth's history ruled by modern animals.

The full research paper,"U–Pb zircon-rutile dating of the Llangynog Inlier, Wales: constraints on an Ediacaran shallow 1 marine fossil assemblage from East Avalonia" was published in the Journal of the Geological Society and can be found online here. Additional material and interviews provided by The Geological Society.

‘America Is Under Attack’: Inside the Anti-DEI Crusade

ESG, CRT, DEI WHY ARE THESE WORDS SO NASTY

(apologies to Hair)

Nicholas Confessore
Updated Sun, January 21, 2024 

The backlash against “wokeism” has led a growing number of states to ban D.E.I. programs at public universities. Thousands of emails and other documents reveal the playbook — and grievances — behind one strand of the anti-D.E.I. campaign.

 (The New York Times)

In late 2022, a group of conservative activists and academics set out to abolish the diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Texas’ public universities.

They linked up with a former aide to the state’s powerful lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who made banning DEI initiatives one of his top priorities. Setting their sights on well-known schools like Texas A&M, they researched which offices and employees should be expunged. A well-connected alumnus conveyed their findings to the A&M chancellor; the former Patrick aide cited them before a state Senate committee.

The campaign quickly yielded results: In May, Texas approved legislation banishing all such programs from public institutions of higher learning.


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Long before Claudine Gay resigned from Harvard University’s presidency this month under intense criticism of her academic record, her congressional testimony about campus antisemitism and her efforts to promote racial justice, conservative academics and politicians had begun making the case that the decadeslong drive to increase racial diversity in America’s universities had corrupted higher education.

Gathering strength from a backlash against Black Lives Matter and fueled by criticism that doctrines such as critical race theory had made colleges engines of progressive indoctrination, the eradication of DEI programs has become both a cause and a message suffusing the American right. In 2023, more than 20 states considered or approved new laws taking aim at DEI, even as polling has shown that diversity initiatives remain popular.

Thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times cast light on the playbook and the thinking underpinning one nexus of the anti-DEI movement: the activists and intellectuals who helped shape Texas’ new law, along with measures in at least three other states. The material, which includes casual correspondence with like-minded allies around the country, also reveals unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles. And despite the movement’s marked success in some Republican-dominated states, the documents chart the activists’ struggle to gain traction with broader swaths of voters and officials.

Centered at the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank with close ties to the Donald Trump movement and to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the group coalesced roughly three years ago around a sweeping ambition: to strike a killing blow against “the leftist social justice revolution” by eliminating “social justice education” from American schools.

The documents — grant proposals, budgets, draft reports and correspondence, obtained through public records requests — show how the activists formed a loose network of think tanks, political groups and Republican operatives in at least a dozen states.

They sought funding from a range of right-leaning philanthropies and family foundations and from one of the largest individual donors to Republican campaigns in the country. They exchanged model legislation, published a slew of public reports and coordinated with other conservative advocacy groups in states like Alabama, Maine, Tennessee and Texas.

In public, some individuals and groups involved in the effort joined calls to protect diversity of thought and intellectual freedom, embracing the argument that DEI efforts had made universities intolerant and narrow. They claimed to stand for meritocratic ideals and against ideologies that divided Americans. They argued that DEI programs made Black and Hispanic students feel less welcome instead of more.

Yet even as they or their allies publicly advocated more academic freedom, some of those involved privately expressed their hope of purging liberal ideas, professors and programming wherever they could. They debated how carefully or quickly to reveal some of their true views — the belief that “a healthy society requires patriarchy,” for example, and their broader opposition to anti-discrimination laws — in essays and articles written for public consumption.

In candid private conversations, some wrote favorably of laws criminalizing homosexuality, mocked the appearance of a female college student as overly masculine and criticized Peter Thiel, a prominent gay conservative donor, over his sex life. In email exchanges with the Claremont organizers, writer Heather Mac Donald derided working mothers who employed people from “the low IQ 3rd world” to care for their children and lamented that some Republicans still celebrated the idea of racially diverse political appointments.

Lagging achievement for African Americans and other racial minorities, some argued privately, should not be a matter of public concern. “My big worry in these things is that we do not make ‘the good of minorities’ the standard by which we judge public policy or the effects of public policy,” wrote Scott Yenor, a conservative Idaho professor who would come to lead the anti-DEI project for Claremont. “Whites will be overrepresented in some spheres. Blacks in others. Asians in others. We cannot see this as some moral failing on our part.”

In a statement for this article, Claremont said that it was “proud to be a leader in the fight against DEI, since the ideology from which it flows conflicts with America’s Founding principles, constitutional government and equality under the law. Those are the things we believe in. Without them there is no America. You cannot have those things with DEI.”

The institute added, “Repeatedly, and in public, we make these arguments to preserve justice, competence and the progress of science.”

Naming ‘the Enemy’

In recent decades, amid concerns about the underrepresentation of racial minorities on campus, American universities have presided over a vast expansion of diversity programs. These have come to play a powerful — and increasingly controversial — role in academic and student life. Critics have come to view them as tools for advancing left-wing ideas about gender and race, or for stifling the free discussion of ideas.

In response, officials in some states have banned DEI offices altogether. Others have limited classroom discussion of concepts like identity politics or systemic racism. A growing number of states and schools have also begun eliminating requirements that job applicants furnish “diversity statements” — written commitments to particular ideas about diversity and how to achieve it that, at some institutions, have functionally served as litmus tests in hiring.

But in early 2021, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and Trump’s reelection defeat, the Claremont organizers were on the defensive. The documents show them debating how to frame their attacks: They needed not only to persuade the political middle but to energize conservative politicians and thinkers, many of whom they regarded as too timid, or even complicit with a liberal regime infecting U.S. government and business.

Thomas Klingenstein, a New York investor who is both Claremont’s chair and a top Republican donor, offered a glum perspective in March that year.

“Rhetorically, our side is getting absolutely murdered,” Klingenstein wrote to Yenor and another Claremont official. “We have not even come up with an agreed-on name for the enemy.”

One problem, Yenor reported to his colleagues, was that many lawmakers were reluctant to take on anything called “diversity and inclusion.” Terms like “diversity,” he argued, needed to be saddled with more negative connotations.

“I obviously think social justice is what we should call it,” he wrote. “We should use the term that is most likely to stigmatize the movement that is accurate and arises from common life.” While nobody wanted to seem in favor of discrimination, he argued, “social justice” could be “stigmatized so that when people hear it they can act on their suspicions.”

At the time, a like-minded activist, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, was popularizing an alternative catchall with his attacks on “critical race theory” — a once-obscure academic framework that examines how racism can be structurally embedded in seemingly neutral laws or institutions.

In short order, Republican officials and activists around the country set out to ban critical race theory — or anything that could be successfully labeled “CRT” — from schools. But Yenor believed such bans were not far-reaching enough.

“Bans on CRT and its associated ideologies are a lot of smoke or boob-bait for the bubbas,” he wrote to Klingenstein and others that August. To combat leftism in America, conservatives would need to wage a much broader war. The Claremont group kept tinkering.

By 2022, as Claremont and allies like the Maine Policy Institute and a Tennessee group called Velocity Convergence rolled out early research, the approach had changed. Their public reports began to borrow from Rufo’s rhetoric, attacking “critical social justice” or “critical social justice education.”

When Claremont and the Texas Public Policy Foundation turned to the state’s public universities in early 2023, they circled back to “diversity,” but with a twist.

“Academics and administrators are no longer merely pushing progressive politics but are transforming universities into institutions dedicated to political activism and indoctrinating students with a hateful ideology,” warned a report on Texas A&M. “That ideology is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).”

A Donation Opportunity

“Woke” politics was not just a threat to American life. It was also a fundraising opportunity. By spring 2021, as parents grew impatient with COVID school closures or skeptical of “anti-racist” curricula in the wake of the Floyd protests, Claremont officials had begun circulating urgent grant requests to right-leaning foundations.

“America is under attack by a leftist revolution disguised as a plea for justice” reminiscent of “Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution,” Claremont’s president, Ryan Williams, wrote in a draft proposal for the Jack Miller Family Foundation.

Liberals dominated the world of higher education, the Claremont proposals said. What was needed was a frontal attack on public university systems in states where conservatives dominated the legislatures.

Claremont officials would partner with state think tanks and with the hundreds of former fellows scattered through conservative institutions and on Capitol Hill. They would catalog the DEI programs and personnel honeycombed through public universities. Then they would lobby sympathetic public officials to gut them.

In the proposals, Claremont set a first round of targets, in states including Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

“Our project will give legislators the knowledge and tools they need to stop funding the suicide of their own country and civilization,” Claremont pledged in an August 2021 draft proposal to the Taube Family Foundation.

The Wisconsin-based Searle Freedom Trust had separately agreed to fund a Claremont effort to inventory what it considered “CRT courses” that had “metastasized throughout Higher Ed,” according to the draft proposal. Another proposal, drafted for the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation in May 2022, aimed to dissect how red states could disentangle themselves from federal funding and mandates that, in Claremont’s view, advanced social justice ideology. Related proposals went to at least eight foundations in total. (Representatives of the Taube and Rupe foundations did not reply to emails and phone messages seeking comment.)

Ultimately, according to one document, the Claremont organizers hoped state lawmakers across the country would pass sweeping prohibitions on teaching “social justice programming.”

As the project progressed, Claremont made plans to prospect for donors at a Dallas country club and at the Palm Beach, Florida, home of Elizabeth Ailes, the widow of Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes. Growing anger among older conservatives helped open the spigot.

“The Searle kids don’t like wokery,” wrote Chris Ross, a Claremont fundraising official, in a December 2021 email, apparently referring to adult children of the trust’s late benefactor, Daniel Searle. (A representative of the Searle trust disputed whether Claremont officials had knowledge of the Searles’ political views.)

Among other efforts, the Searle trust agreed to back a project examining critical race theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The school had been roiled that fall by the cancellation of a science lecture by Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who, like a plurality of Americans, opposed aspects of affirmative action in higher education.

The following year, a Utah scientist and renewable-energy consultant, along with his wife, kicked in $25,000 for the project. It had “really caught their imagination,” Ross wrote, because of their “ongoing concerns about their grandchildren and wokeism.” Secrecy was essential. “This work will be done more easily if the wokesters at MIT don’t see it coming,” he wrote.

Under the Banner of Freedom

The Claremont effort seemed to diverge from others on the right who had long urged academic institutions to renew their commitment to ideological diversity. In one exchange, some of those involved discussed how to marshal political power to replace left-wing orthodoxies with more “patriotic,” traditionalist curricula.

“In support of ridding schools of CRT, the Right argues that we want nonpolitical education,” Klingenstein wrote in August 2021. “No we don’t. We want our politics. All education is political.”

Yenor appeared to agree, responding with some ideas for reshaping K-12 education. “An alternative vision of education must replace the current vision of education,” he wrote back, adding, “In the short-term, state legislatures could get out of the business of banning and get into the business of demanding — demanding the certain conclusions about American history be delivered.”

State legislatures, he proposed, could strip “educational professionals” of the power to decide what to teach and even shorten the school day so that young people would spend less time in class. They might pass laws letting private citizens sue school board members with financial ties to the “education industry.”

At the same time, individuals and groups involved in the effort seemed to grasp that academic freedom could be a politically useful frame for their attacks.

In a 2023 exchange, Yenor and two associates discussed how to defend Amy Wax, a conservative law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Wax had drawn the ire of administrators and students there for once opining, among other things, that the United States would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” and that Black people felt “resentment and shame and envy” over the “Western peoples’ outsized achievements and contributions.”

Filing a grievance claim against the university, Wax’s lawyer apparently asked David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College, for a statement of support. Azerrad, in turn, sought his Claremont friends’ advice.

Yenor had experience with such situations. Two years earlier, he had faced Title IX complaints at Boise State University following a speech in which he argued that feminism had made women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” Amid the uproar, Boise State officials defended the right of faculty to “introduce uncomfortable and even offensive ideas.”

Now Yenor advised his friend Azerrad to aim his statement at a liberal audience — to defend Wax on the grounds that if she were fired, it would only embolden red-state lawmakers to fire controversial left-wing professors.

“But don’t we want this to happen?” Azerrad asked.

“Yes,” replied Yenor. “But your audience doesn’t want it to happen.”

In an email, Azerrad described the exchanges as “flippant banter” that “do not discuss substantive policy matters.” A spokesperson for Claremont said that both Yenor and Klingenstein believed that “intellectual diversity and free speech are not ends in themselves but means to other important ends, including a vision of education.”

‘More Wholesome Policies’

Even as they sought to stigmatize and defeat left-wing ideas, academics and activists in the Claremont orbit seemed cognizant that some of their own views were outside the mainstream.

In a 2021 exchange among academics at Claremont, Hillsdale and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Yenor discussed edits to an essay he was planning to publish in First Things, a conservative journal. His editor, he said, wanted Yenor to be less “prudent” in his writing about homosexuality, encouraging him to voice ideas like — as Yenor characterized it — “Our sexual culture will not heal until ‘faggot’ replaces ‘bigot’ as the slur of choice,” or, “Our sexual culture will not be healed until we once again agree that homosexuality belongs in the closet and that a healthy society requires patriarchy.” (“Since they are my views, I have tried to do that,” Yenor wrote. In the end, he settled for tamer language.)

In casual discussions with like-minded academics and activists, some of those involved in the anti-DEI effort mocked what they considered liberals’ obsession with hierarchies of oppression. Some evinced a frank dislike of gay people.

In an exchange last May, Yenor, two former Trump administration officials with Claremont ties, and Mac Donald discussed a court case in India about same-sex marriage. Mac Donald — a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who last spring published a book titled “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty and Threatens Lives” — was not formally connected to Claremont’s anti-DEI efforts but corresponded frequently with those who were.

She speculated in the May exchange that it would be “fun to see” what liberals would say about Indians if the court conferred same-sex marriage rights but Indians refused to “go along.” “How will western elites explain the benightedness of yet another group of POCs?” In response, Yenor noted that “not tons of asian countries have SSM,” but rather, “more wholesome policies like prison” for gays.

Last spring, Mac Donald emailed some of the same people about news reports that a boyfriend of Thiel — nominally their ally in the rising “national conservatism” movement — had committed suicide after a confrontation with Thiel’s husband at a party. Calling the episode “a scandal,” she opined that gay men “are much more prone” to extramarital affairs “on the empirical basis of testosterone unchecked by female modesty.” She added mockingly that a friend had once tried to convince her “how wonderful Thiel’s ‘husband’ was.”

Neither Mac Donald nor a Manhattan Institute spokesperson replied to emails seeking comment.

Yenor and his allies bristled at the conventions of academic life as overly solicitous toward female and nonwhite students. He sometimes shared routine emails from administrators at his home institution, Boise State, deriding them as examples of being “ruled by women.” On one occasion, he forwarded a Boise State email featuring a photo of a female computer science student with close-cropped hair and a plaid shirt. “Gynocracy update!” Yenor wrote.

Riffing on the woman’s masculine appearance, his friend Azerrad chimed in with a correction: “Androgynococracy update.”

In another email to Yenor, Mac Donald reflected on a further “curse of feminism”: the proliferation of “nannies of color” in her Manhattan neighborhood and the “bizarreness” of women entrusting their children to caregivers from “the low IQ 3rd world” while devoting themselves to making partner at a law firm.

Mac Donald, some Claremont friends and a conservative Canadian professor also discussed a routine in which comedian Bill Burr took feminists to task for the low attendance at WNBA games. (“None of you showed up! Where are all the feminists?”)

When Mac Donald asked why the comedian hadn’t been “canceled,” Williams, Claremont’s president, pointed out that Burr was “married to a black woman, which helps.”

It was “the usual pet black phenomenon,” Mac Donald replied. “We are all just SO grateful if there is a black who does not overtly hate us.” She went on to rail against a libertarian podcast that praised former President George W. Bush for selecting Black people for his Cabinet, “as if there is any talent required to make quota appointments.”

The Movement Grows

Since 2021, the network’s anti-DEI campaign has spread to at least a dozen states, according to the documents.

In Tennessee, where Claremont partnered with Velocity Convergence, one of the anti-DEI reports they produced reportedly circulated among Republican state lawmakers as they worked to pass a bill limiting how universities could teach or train students about “divisive concepts.” A spokesperson for the University of Tennessee said in a statement that the report’s conclusions “seem to be based on subjective criteria, made-up definitions and the opinions of the authors” who obtained information from online searches and public records but “made no attempt to understand the information through questions or interviews.” Tennessee’s governor signed the new law in April 2022.

Susan Kaestner, Velocity’s founder and a veteran Republican operative in the state, said that “the obsessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is effectively reducing viewpoint diversity on Tennessee campuses.”

Last year, Claremont organizers forged connections with the Arkansas Senate’s Republican leader. In Alabama, they partnered with a group called Alabamians for Academic Excellence and Integrity. Jeff Sessions, a former U.S. attorney general and a supporter of the Alabama group, was among those who provided funds for a Claremont report, “Going Woke in Dixie?,” that focused on Auburn University and the University of Alabama.

After it was released last summer, according to another email, Samuel Ginn, a wealthy Auburn alumnus and donor to both the school and Claremont, confronted the university’s president, Christopher Roberts, and pressed him to address the report’s findings.

“The president then told him, ‘Things will change,’” a Claremont fundraiser wrote to Yenor and other officials there.

An Auburn spokesperson said in an email that Roberts “has no recollection of the comment that was attributed to him.” Efforts to contact Ginn were unsuccessful.

Before the 2022 midterm elections, the group also teamed with Republican political operatives and a think tank in Maine — where Klingenstein owns a vacation compound — to gather examples of “DEI in action” in the state’s public universities and K-12 schools. Klingenstein suggested highlighting examples of putatively odd-sounding college courses, as another conservative group had done in a report about left-wing influence at Bowdoin College in Maine. (Among them were “Queer Gardens” and “Sex in Colonial America.” Bowdoin responded by defending its coursework and calling the report distorted and “meanspirited.”)

After the group published a report on “critical social justice” in Maine’s K-12 classrooms, Klingenstein noted in one email that despite the need to reform public schools, the group faced difficulty figuring out what was “actually happening on the ground.” He praised the report but acknowledged it was “necessarily rather anecdotal.”

Even so, the work could be wielded as a bludgeon. By fall 2022, the effort had expanded to include an advertising campaign against the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills. The campaign, funded by Klingenstein, was spearheaded by a national advocacy group called the American Principles Project, which in turn operated through a front group called Maine Families First.

Citing the Maine K-12 report, among other sources, ads from the group misleadingly claimed that Mills was “distributing pornography to our children,” referring to “Gender Queer,” a graphic memoir for young adults that includes sexually explicit scenes. (In fact, according to a report by Maine Public Radio, the book had appeared on one American Library Association list of gay-themed literature, a link to which could be found on the website of the Maine Department of Education.) All told, the group would spend nearly $3 million on ads attacking Mills.

‘Just the Beginning’

Mills went on to win reelection. But the anti-DEI campaign has gained ground in more Republican-leaning states. Claremont has claimed credit for helping pass the most wide-ranging bans, in Florida as well as in Texas. Last January, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas issued an executive order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory in schools.” In North Carolina in June, Republican lawmakers passed a law banning public universities and other agencies from requiring employees to state their opinions on social issues, a move Democratic lawmakers said was aimed at DEI programs more broadly. Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, issued a similar executive order in December.

Last year, Claremont officials also courted DeSantis, then a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination and the governor most closely associated with anti-DEI policies. The institute dispatched Yenor to Florida to run a new office in Tallahassee, appointing him as its “senior director of state coalitions.” (On Sunday, DeSantis suspended his presidential bid.)

In early April, as DeSantis prepared to announce his presidential campaign, he visited Klingenstein. In an email, Klingenstein told Claremont officials that DeSantis had agreed to give Yenor access to his top political and government aides. Klingenstein also said he’d urged the governor to do a better job explaining to voters why “wokeism” was dangerous.

Appearing on the campaign trail in subsequent weeks, DeSantis began to offer a more expansive definition of the term — while mentioning “woke” so many times that some reporters began keeping count.

But as DeSantis’ presidential bid sputtered and conservative campaigns against left-wing education began to lose traction in some parts of the country, people involved in the anti-DEI effort began to retool once again. In June, the American Principles Project circulated a memo detailing the results of several focus groups held to test different culture war messages.

For all the conservative attacks on diversity programs, the group found, “the idea of woke or DEI received generally positive scores.” Most voters didn’t know the difference between equality and the more voguish term “equity,” oft-mocked on the right, which signifies policies intended to achieve equal outcomes for different people, not simply equal opportunities.

“DEI was thought to consist more of comfort with diverse workplaces than affirmative action or anti-white hiring practices. When we got into the details of specific DEI initiatives (race-based quotas, affirmative action, diversity for diversity’s sake), they were mostly opposed.”

The memo was sent by an associate to Klingenstein and Williams, along with an undated draft speech apparently written for Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., who founded the House Anti-Woke Caucus last January. (Banks’ spokesperson did not reply to an email seeking comment.)

For Banks and other Republicans, the controversies over antisemitism on campus this fall provided a fresh opportunity to make their case. With some student protesters defending or even valorizing the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas, criticisms of campus DEI programs began to gain more of an audience among liberals. In December, when House Republicans summoned Gay to Capitol Hill, along with the presidents of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, they argued that diversity programs were the root cause of antisemitic rhetoric on campus.

As the presidential election looms, Republicans are embarking on a renewed campaign against the higher education institutions they have long criticized, now under the banner of eradicating anti-Jewish hate. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is investigating Harvard and other schools, and the scope of the inquiry is expected to expand.

“This is just the beginning,” pledged Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., whose questioning of Gay helped set in motion the Harvard president’s resignation. “Our robust congressional investigation will continue to move forward to expose the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions and deliver accountability to the American people.”

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