What Rocks Know That Scientists Forgot

I spend most of my working life writing about biological inheritance — who gets credit for discovering a gene, which communities' genomic data gets commercialized without consent, how the CRISPR patent wars keep playing out along lines that look suspiciously like old colonial maps. So when I watched earth scientist Anjana Khatwa deliver her Royal Institution lecture this April 🧬, the thing that hit me wasn't the geology — though the geology is genuinely gorgeous. It was the recognition. She's describing the exact same epistemological fight, just in a different substrate.

Her book, The Whispers of Rock: Stories from the Earth — longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Winifred Holtby Prize, per the RI's description — opens with a question that sounds almost naïve until you sit with it: can rocks speak? What Khatwa actually means is sharper than that. She means: whose account of what rocks say gets treated as knowledge, and whose gets treated as folklore?

Petra, and the thing about geological inheritance

Khatwa starts in Jordan, inside the Nabataean caves of Petra — specifically inside a cave where mineral-rich groundwaters filtered through 500-million-year-old sandstone over tens of millions of years, depositing iron oxides and manganese that paint the walls in swirling pinks, reds, and purples that look AI-generated. They're not. The Ishrin Formation predates plants with root systems. There was no soil. Just rivers carrying quartz grains south from North African mountains, those grains settling in layers, compressing, cementing — and then the slow stain of minerals moving through, making something that looks like abstract art.

I cover genetic inheritance professionally. The thing that struck me watching Khatwa describe this is that rock works the same way genes do: it's information passed forward through deep time, legible if you know the language, carrying the conditions of its origin inside its structure. "To touch a rock," she says, "is to travel to a time and a space that no longer exists. It only exists in our hearts and our minds." That's not poetic license. That's literally what lichenometry is. That's what stratigraphy is. The rock is the record.

The question is who we trust to read it.

Two ways of reading the same stone — and why the answer isn't symmetric

Here's where I have to be direct, because the version of this I'd write if I were trying to sound neutral would actually mislead you.

Khatwa draws a parallel between what scientists do and what indigenous communities have always done: sit with a landscape, observe it carefully over time, build explanatory frameworks for what you're experiencing. At Delicate Arch in Utah — land tied primarily to the Ute and Navajo Nations — Khatwa notes that Native American tribal leaders would spend days at these arches and natural bridges on vision quests, "communing with the rock," listening to the landscape, bringing back knowledge for their communities. "This is exactly what indigenous people have been doing for thousands and thousands of years," she says. "We as scientists have slightly forgotten how we can listen to those stories."

That framing is generous and largely accurate. But it papers over something real: these two ways of knowing have not been treated as equivalent. They have never been treated as equivalent. The same Western scientific institutions now applauding the synthesis were, for centuries, actively destroying the conditions that allowed indigenous knowledge systems to survive — through land dispossession, through the suppression of language and ceremony, through the literal criminalization of the practices Khatwa is describing as proto-scientific wisdom.

I'm not saying Khatwa is wrong to celebrate the convergence. The convergence is real and worth celebrating. The Awahnichi story of Tísayac — the woman whose tears stain the granite face of what Europeans named Half Dome — has been passed down for roughly 6,000 years. Khatwa argues that the black lichen streaking the rock face corroborates this timeline, noting that slow erosion rates and lichenometry point to the lichen being thousands of years old. (This specific dating figure comes from her lecture rather than a published lichenometry study, so treat it as a suggestive parallel rather than a pinned scientific finding — but the methodological point stands: lichen dating is real, and the slow-change environment of Yosemite's granite makes long timelines plausible.) A community that has been looking at that mountain every day for 200 generations would notice things that a geologist parachuted in for a field season would miss. That's not mysticism. That's longitudinal observation at a scale Western science rarely achieves.

But here's what I keep coming back to in my own beat: when plant biologists finally "discover" a medicinal compound that indigenous communities have used for generations, the patent goes to the lab, not the community. When a genetic dataset built from a specific population's DNA produces a diagnostic tool, the IP belongs to the institution. The knowledge gets extracted, reframed in a language the academy recognizes, and the originators become a footnote at best, invisible at worst. Khatwa is arguing that geology and indigenous cosmology tell the same stories — and she's right. The harder question is what we do with the fact that one of those storytellers has been systematically excluded from the rooms where scientific authority gets distributed.

The Kojiki and the limits of interpretation

The Japan section of the talk is where this gets genuinely complicated, and I want to flag it fairly. Khatwa walks through the geological reality of Japan — a subduction zone where the Pacific plate dives beneath the continental crust, generating the volcanic chain that gives Japan 80% mountainous terrain and constant seismic activity — and then layers over it the Shinto creation narrative from the Kojiki, Japan's oldest surviving chronicle (712 CE). In that text, the deities Izanagi and Izanami give birth to countless kami, spirits of nature, before their final child Kagutsuchi — the fire deity — kills his mother in childbirth. Izanagi, grief-struck, dismembers Kagutsuchi and scatters the pieces.

Khatwa reads this as the volcanic archipelago explained through myth. That's a compelling interpretive move, and the emotional logic tracks — if you're an 8th-century person experiencing earthquakes and eruptions, you're going to build a cosmology that metabolizes that terror. But I want to be precise about what the text does and doesn't say. The Kojiki names Kagutsuchi as the fire deity specifically, not a volcano deity — the volcanic island causation framing is Khatwa's interpretive layer, not an established reading of the text. The parallel she's drawing is suggestive and probably right in its broad strokes, but it's her synthesis, not a settled scholarly consensus. That distinction matters when we're talking about the epistemic status of indigenous knowledge — we should be careful not to validate it only when we can retrofit a Western geological explanation, because that just recenters Western science as the arbiter.

What actually changes

Khatwa's pitch, distilled, is this: the disconnection from the geological world isn't just an aesthetic loss. It's an epistemic one. We've inherited a framework where rocks are scenery — inert backdrop to the "real" story of living things — and that framework costs us. It costs us in scientific knowledge (the indigenous ecological knowledge that gets lost when communities are displaced is genuinely irreplaceable observational data). It costs us in our relationship with geological time, which is the only timescale on which climate change makes sense. And it costs us in something harder to name — the sense that the ground under your feet has a history you're embedded in, not just standing on top of.

She describes the moment she rediscovered Mataji in her mother's home temple in Slough — a rock representing the incarnation of 21 Hindu goddesses, including Parvati, goddess of the mountain and the Himalayas. She'd suppressed that whole framework to build her career as a Western-credentialed earth scientist. "For decades, I'd kind of pushed those experiences away so I could exist in my world as a scientist." Then a forgotten rock in her mother's temple reminded her that she'd always had two vocabularies for the same thing — and that discarding one hadn't made her a better scientist. It had made her a less complete one.

I find this specific story harder to argue with than any of the geology, honestly. The pressure to strip cultural context in order to be legible to Western scientific institutions is not unique to earth science. It's the water my sources swim in every day. The researchers who have to translate their communities' knowledge into the grammar of a Nature paper to get it taken seriously. The ones who don't, and watch their work get dismissed.

If Khatwa's argument lands — really lands, not just as an applauded lecture at the Royal Institution but as an actual reorientation in how geology departments hire and what counts as valid data — it doesn't just enrich earth science. It's a proof of concept that the knowledge systems we've been discarding as unscientific were never unscientific. They were just untranslated. And the cost of that mistranslation compounds, the same way errors compound when they're written into the foundation layer.

The rock has always been keeping score. We're the ones who stopped listening.

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Mei Zhang covers biotech, genetics, and the future of medicine for Buzzrag. She is pursuing an MS in Bioethics part-time and has definitely had arguments about the dishwasher.