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The Mystery of the Coin That Shouldn’t Exist

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Scientists recently analyzed a Peruvian 10-cent piece with an unexplained origin.A decade ago, a funny money mystery fell into the hands of scientists and students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima.The university had been acquiring 19th- and 20th-century Peruvian coins from local dealers, and graduate students in the chemistry department were analyzing the pieces for their thesis work. But one coin, a 10-cent piece known as a dinero, stood out.The dinero was marked “1899.” The problem was that official records indicated no coins of that denomination were minted in Peru that year — according to the people who made the money, the coin never existed.Most international coin catalogs don’t list 1899 dineros, said Luis Ortega, a chemist at the university. And in the rare cases that they do, there is often only a note of “counterfeit” with no further detail, Dr. Ortega said. “No one was able to provide more information about it.”Now Dr. Ortega and Fabiola Bravo Hualpa, a doctoral student, believe they have shed new light on the mystery of the coin that came from nowhere. In a paper published last year in the journal Heritage Science, they described how they subjected one of the two known 1899 dineros to a barrage of scientific analyses, illuminating its possible origins and the role it might have played during an unstable era of South American history.To the naked eye, the 1899 coin resembles other dineros: It’s silver in color and features the same coat of arms and seated woman that represents the goddess of liberty. And it’s remarkably similar in size to other dineros minted around the turn of the 20th century — about the dimensions of a U.S. dime.But when Dr. Ortega and Ms. Bravo Hualpa bombarded the 1899 coin with X-rays and measured the light it re-emitted, they determined that the dinero was largely made of copper, zinc and nickel. This alloy is known as nickel silver. It’s commonly used to make silverware and ornamental objects and has a silvery appearance, but it contains no silver. Genuine dineros produced by the Lima Mint, on the other hand, are roughly 90 percent silver.Dr. Ortega and Ms. Bravo Hualpa also found that the 1899 dinero contained traces of iron, cobalt and lead. Those impurities imply that the coin was counterfeited long ago, not more recently, the researchers suggest. Such contaminants are characteristic of older alloys because of limitations in technology at the time. “The refining methods were not as good as they are now,” Dr. Ortega said.The presence of impurities, paired with the coin’s worn faces, suggests that it was produced in the 19th or 20th centuries, the researchers concluded. But given that nickel silver wasn’t widely used for coins or tokens in Peru at that time, it’s likely that this coin was created abroad, the researchers suggest. Its producer might have therefore been wholly unaware that no dineros were officially minted in 1899.“The counterfeiter probably didn’t realize that that coin didn’t exist,” Dr. Ortega said.He said that an influx of low-value coinage would have been welcomed in Peru at the dawn of the 20th century. The country’s economy was reeling from the recent War of the Pacific, and the government was focusing on printing larger-denomination paper bank notes to pay off international loans; in 1899, the Lima Mint produced roughly one-tenth the number of silver coins it produced just five years earlier.As a result, people in Peru were using coins from neighboring nations or even cutting their own country’s coins in half to conduct small transactions. “Counterfeiters found a field of opportunity,” Dr. Ortega said.Dineros were low-denomination coins used by everyday people. Studying this coin, and the economic and political situation that prompted its creation, can therefore be illuminating. “If you want to study our society, you don’t want to look at a Ferrari,” said Laura Perucchetti, an archaeometallurgist at the British Museum in London, not involved in the research. “You want to look at a Volkswagen or a Ford.”Dr. Ortega is not finished studying counterfeit coins and their historical context. He plans to meet with a collector based in Lima who amassed an assortment of coins ostensibly minted from the 1830s through the 1960s. Another 1899 dinero has already surfaced in that collection, and he is on the lookout for more.“There must be a few around,” Dr. Ortega said. More

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    Checking Privilege in the Animal Kingdom

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    Researchers say the human concepts of intergenerational wealth and inequality are useful for studying some animals’ behavior.Some North American red squirrels are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They live in pine forests where the adults defend caches of food. Without a cache of their own, many baby squirrels won’t survive the winter. But each year, some squirrel mothers abandon their territory, bequeathing all their food to one or more babies who stay behind. These young squirrels are much more likely to survive until the spring.Across the animal kingdom, there are other examples of species that share resources such as territory, tools and shelter between generations. In a paper published last month in Behavioral Ecology, a trio of researchers argue that we should call this phenomenon the same thing we call it in humans: intergenerational wealth.Those young, pine-cone-rich squirrels, the scientists say, are children of privilege. When George Orwell wrote in “Animal Farm” that some animals were more equal than others, he was trying to shed light on the human ideological conflicts of the time. The researchers hope to use the analogy in the opposite direction. Applying a human lens, they say, can help us understand the roots of inequality in animals.Jennifer Smith, a behavioral ecologist at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., said the idea for the paper arose early in the pandemic, in conversations that she and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, had over (of course) Zoom. They saw how Covid-19 was highlighting health disparities and other inequalities around the world. The scientists began to wonder if they could learn more about inequality by studying it in animals.“When we started looking for it, we found lots and lots of examples,” Dr. Smith said.Young red grouse are more likely to succeed in establishing their own territories when their fathers and other kin are nearby. Hyena daughters born to high-ranking mothers inherit their status, and get dibs on fresh meat. Some chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys crack nuts using stone tools that their parents used before them.Animal wealth may be passed down to nonrelatives, too, as in paper wasps that take over shared nests or hermit crabs that seek better real estate.Some capuchin monkeys crack nuts using stone tools that their parents used before them.T. Milse/Juniors Bildarchiv GmbH, via AlamyTo study wealth transfers between animals, scientists can ask concrete questions: Does a lizard that lives with its parents survive longer? Does a monkey with access to larger nut-cracking rocks go on to have more children and grandchildren? Biologists can explore animal privilege without tackling all of the topic’s cultural complexities in humans.By seeking similarities between privilege in people and animals, Dr. Smith hopes to unlock a greater understanding of inequality in the natural world. “For me, it’s very exciting to study the rules of inequality in nonhuman animals,” she said. “To see this across so many different species was quite surprising. And we’re just touching the surface.”Next, she’s planning to expand her survey, looking at wealth and privilege across thousands more animal species.“The use of terms like ‘privilege’ and ‘perpetuating the cycle of privilege’ is a little bit unusual” in animal research, said Jenny Tung, an evolutionary anthropologist and geneticist at Duke University who focuses on how social factors affect health in primates. “In part because they’re a bit loaded for us as humans to read.” But she thinks the idea of using a human lens to look at how animals pass down resources has promise.“That is potentially tremendously useful,” Dr. Tung said. The idea “opens up a whole tool chest of ways to understand” where inequality comes from among animals, she said.Siobhán Mattison, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who has studied inequality in human societies, also thinks that combining the anthropology of privilege with animal biology has potential. “Humans are animals,” she said. “We are undoubtedly influenced by some of the same things that drive inequality in other animals.”That doesn’t mean animals can answer every question about how inequality arises in humans, Dr. Mattison added: “Humans are vastly more cooperative than most other species.” Our cultural institutions can reinforce inequality, she said, but they can also fight against it.Although Dr. Smith is primarily hoping that insights from humans can teach her more about inequality in animals, she does think the science could work in the opposite direction too. Some of the rules scientists discover in animals might apply to humans.She stresses, though, that finding inequality in nature isn’t the same as justifying it. Her research “could be misinterpreted as saying, ‘Well, it exists everywhere, so we can do nothing about it,’” Dr. Smith said.Unlike other animals, “We’re able to understand this phenomenon,” Dr. Smith said, “and then explicitly act to choose how we use that knowledge to create social change.” More