Anthropology.net

In an excellent example of how chemistry and archaeology run hand to hand, Thomas Fenn a graduate student from in anthropology at the University of Arizona, Tucson has sampled isotopes from copper jewelery of sub-Saharan Africa,

“three of which result from the slow decay of radioactive elements such as uranium. Fenn used the relative quantities of these to date the copper ore used to make the items, and distinguish one source of copper from another. “

His results show that the ingots from sub-Saharan Africa have shown a signature of copper ore from Morocco. This strongly suggests that trans-Saharan trade began hundreds of years earlier than previously thought. Even more remarkably, Fenn began to find copper that was clearly from Morocco in items that archaeologists had dated to as far back at 400 AD! That means people we crossing one of the world’s largest deserts to trade copper, among other things. He presented his findings at the American Chemistry Society meeting on 26 March in Atlanta, Georgia.

Considering there’s somewhat of a wildfire of discussion on the group of siblings from Turkey, who walk on all fours both on this site and around the entire blogosphere… I thought I’d share with you John Hawks’ critical view on it. He calls it a “publicity blitz ” and states that we are all being played.

I personally have beef with people calling it backwards evolution, or the evidence of ape-like men. If you don’t believe me, I’m serious! Check out the headlines from this Google News search query! There’s titles like “evolutionary throwback” and “missing link ” which all exemplify how misunderstood evolution, locomotion, and genetics all really are.

Going back to John Hawks, he clarifies this all. He questions the science of it, wondering about is this behavior due to genetic mutations, and about “true quadrupedalism ” He also wonders about the scientific merit of this paper, since the lead author published in his own journal! Hawks says,

“Tan’s paper has but a single reference in its bibliography — to himself. And he’s an editor of the journal, International Journal of Neuroscience. It happens every year or so that some paleoanthropology story breaks about a paper in some non-anthropological journal. These don’t benefit from peer review by paleoanthropologists. “

If you know me, you know I like being critical — so I really suggest you take the news of Turkish quadrupeds with a grain of salt and read what John Hawks has gotta say about it.