Anthropology.net

I was debating whether or not to post this over at Primatology.net because it involves orangutans and the research of them. But, I decided not to because the topic, bipedalism, is almost uniquely human in the mammalian world. We are exclusively bipedal, except for that brief period of our lives where we crawl. Bipedialism, as you may have guessed, is the mode of locomotion in which an organism walks upright on two legs.

I once took a Physical Anthropology class titled, ‘Anthropology of Movement’ where we studied how humans and their ancestors most likely moved around. We analyzed fossils, studied gait, and compared anatomical features to other apes and animals. After that class, I understood that the predominant theory on the origins of human bipedalism, based upon the observations from the fossil record, is that human ancestors developed the ability to walk upright after leaving the treetops to live on the African savanna. Thus, we see evidence that bipedalism first appeared in the hominin lineage of primates, of which we humans are classified as a part of.

New research just published in Science is contending this hypothesis. Here is a link to the paper, “Origin of Human Bipedalism As an Adaptation for Locomotion on Flexible Branches.”

Researchers from the Universities of Birmingham and Liverpool studied how Sumatran orangutans of Gunung Leuser National Park in Indonesia moved about the canopy of the rain forest. Here’s a brief summary of what they observed,

“On sturdier branches the orangutans use all four limbs. But on thinner branches in search of fruit, the apes move on two legs and use their arms for balance.”

The authors are using this to argue that human bipedalism is “less of an exploitation of a locomotor behavior retained from the common great ape ancestor.” This behavior implies that prehistoric apes may have developed upright walking while still living in the trees—well before human ancestors ever descended to the ground. A big challenge, if you ask me. The authors hypothesize that upright bipedalism in human ancestors was most likely an adaptation to moving and feeding on ripe fruit in the peripheries of trees. In co-author Robin Crompton’s own words,

“When they are on the very fine stuff, they are using bipedalism… It shows that bipedalism can be adaptive in the trees. People have suspected that it evolved in the trees, but no one has been able to see a sensible reason why it should happen.”

Crompton has been pursuing this question for a while now. I’ve scavenged up a 2004 press release from his university where he discussed what type of gait can be analyzed from Lucy’s, the australopithecine, fossil remains. In this new paper, Crompton et al. have almost conveniently shifted from analytical to observational methods, of a perfect model organism that lives in trees.

I personally don’t buy it as a 100% replaceable theory to what we know from the fossil record right now. In their abstract, the authors say that, “some recent paleontological evidence suggests that adaptations for bipedalism arose in an arboreal context.” What now? Just because a population of orangutans resort to tight rope walking doesn’t mean our ancestors did. What if this behavior, this adaptation, arose in the orangutan lineage independently of our own? …A type of convergent evolution. It is possible. Also, what about orangutans walking upright on the ground? There’s a big distinction between walking along some branches and shifting to exclusive terrestrial movement.

Brian Richmond, biological anthropologist, at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., seems to also share my reasoning. He says,

“This is interesting and a very good study of how orangutans climb and walk in trees, but it’s not a study of our distant ancestors…. It tells us something about how primates other than ourselves use bipedalism. That could tell us something about how bipedalism might have been used by our distant ancestors. But it doesn’t tell us what actually happened. It doesn’t show us the origins of our own human bipedalism.”

This research is very interesting. There’s no doubt about that. What I have doubts about, and what I don’t quite get, is how can the authors explain orangutan bipedal tendencies to human bipedal dependencies?

Our bodies, humans that is, are made to be bipedal. Our vertebrae curve and become more dense lower in our bodies to deal with distributing our weight. Likewise, the pelvic girdle distributes weight even more down on two robust, long, bones called the femur. We sacrifice flexibility in our lower limbs for the added strength and stability that is needed to be bipedal.

In orangutans, the design and function of the pelvis does not resemble something that’s made to bear weight. Instead, the orangutan pelvis is flexible. Orangutans can practically rotate their legs 360 degrees, like we do in our arms.

References:

• BBC – Upright walking ‘began in trees’.
• National Geographic News – Upright Walking Started in Trees, Ape Study Suggests.
• Science – Walking on Trees.

My colleague, Dr. Pedram Khosronejad of the Society of Iranian Anthropology, sent me this call for contributions. I thought I’d help him out and spread the word.

The content will eventually be published in an edited book, from what I understand. Here is what Pedram is looking for,

“The aim of this volume is to broaden the discussion on Iranian war cinema through the categories of martyrdom, national identity, ethnic diversity and discourses on gender. In this volume focus will be on both feature and documentary films, and also on topics such as:

• Iranian war cinema as a propaganda machine.
• The political framework of Iranian war cinema.
• Identifying the theological attitudes and socio-cultural aspects of war and
  martyrdom in Iranian war cinema.
• Investigating the dichotomy of presence and absence through testimony,
  survival and memory as well as the representation of war symbols in Iranian war cinema.
• Comparative studies between Iranian war cinema and war cinema in general.

More topics will be considered of course. Papers should be about eight thousand words in length. Black and white illustrations can be included. Papers should reach Dr. Pedram Khosronejad, the editor, by the end of November 2007, if possible.

Below the fold, I have included an excerpt from Pedram’s email to me that briefly explains martyrdom, the Iranian Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq war.
Read the rest of this entry »

Vincenzo Formicola, of the University of Pisa in Italy, has studied three different European burial sites dating to between 26,000 and 8,000 B.C. These dates fall smack dab in the Stone Age and offer a unique insight into the behaviors of early Europeans, because the graves,

“include the remains of physically disabled people hint at ritual human sacrifice there…

Skeletons such as those of a teenage dwarf and a girl with malformed bones were found buried alongside able-bodied dead. This indicates that human sacrifices may have been an important ritual activity among ancient hunter-gatherer tribe…”

Formicola analyzed the bones from the Sunghir children in Russia, the interment of youngins in unsual positions of Dolní Vestonice in Moravia, and the adolescent dwarf from Romito Cave in Italy. These three sites were discovered in 1957-1964, 1986, and 1909 respectively. They are well studied sites, and from the beginning were remarkable because they had children in them. People have hypothesized that natural this kids all died from diseases or accidents, because their burials lack a ‘funeral’ feel. Formicola thinks these kids were sacrified because they all have similarities in age and sex, which suggests there’s some sort of selective practice.

I’ve picked up some illustrations of two site burials if you are curious to see how they look. I got these images all from Don’s Maps, an excellent resource on archaeological sites.

The first is an artistic depiction of the Sunghir burials. Two children, aged 8 and 13, are buried head to head with elaborately decorated clothes and other jewellery. Notice that the perforated disc is shown here as being atop a wooden lance.

As you can see the bodies of these preteens were discovered with grave goods, “including about 5,000 perforated ivory beads thought to have been sown into caps and clothing.” The bones had been covered in red ochre, a pigment made from clay. Other items include:

• Perforated arctic teeth
• Ivory pins
• Carvings
• Disk-shaped pendants
• Giant spears made of mammoth tusks

A great bit of detail must have gone into this burial, Formicola has commented on this saying,

“Each bead would have taken more than an hour to make, the children’s burial may have been planned before they died some 24,000 years ago. The enormous amount of time required to prepare all those ivory objects leads one to wonder whether this ceremony was foreseen long in advance.”

The next image is another illustration but this time of the triple burials of Dolni Vestonice. In this burial, the bodies of three teenagers were discovered in a common grave. Two of the skeletons were heavily built males. By its slender proportions, the third was judged to be female, aged seventeen to twenty. A marked left curvature of the spine, along with several other skeletal abnormalities, suggested that she had been painfully crippled. The two males had died healthy, in the prime of their lives. The remains of a thick wooden pole thrust through the hip of one of them hinted that his death might not have been entirely natural. A sidenote, Erik Trinkaus worked on the Dolni Vestonice burials.

The Dolni Vestonice triplet burials were arranged in an unusual position, with the hands of one male placed on the middle skeleton’s pelvic region, which had been also been covered in red ochre.

Unfortunately, the Romito caves example isn’t all too well illustrated — maybe because it was excavated almost 100 years ago. This grave is unique in that it holds the remains of an adolescent dwarf held in the arms of an adult female. Both of these skeletons bodies lie under an elaborate engraving of a bull.

Formicola has taken all the similarities of these burials and has synthesized an argument — all of these commonalities can be explained by ritual human sacrifice. He has published his findings in Current Anthropology, under the title, “From the Sunghir Children to the Romito Dwarf.” The big controversy with this explanation he has derived is that this practice has not yet been recorded from the Upper Paleolithic period, nor do any of the bones show signs of homicide.

Ritual sacrifice is known from other large, hierarchical societies but not really in Stone Age Europe. What Formicola is suggesting implies that Stone Age European cultures were more structured than we believed them to be. Formicola says, the sites stress the complexity of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies and the symbolic importance of the burials they left,

“Disabled people may have been selected because they were seen as different. These individuals may be feared, hated, or revered… Using information drawn from burials and art we can better [understand] the expressions of the beliefs and rituals left by these populations.”

References:

• Exceptions that Prove the Rule, #3: Paleolithic Royalty? – Anthropik.
• Human Sacrifice Clues Found in European Stone Age Burials – National Geographic News.
• Evidence From Ancient Graves Raises Questions About Ritual Human Sacrifice Among Hunter Gatherers In Europe – ScienceDaily.

I want to share with you news about some yet to be released research on the role of two genes, ASPM & Microcephalin, in language tone, which has just hit the press releases. ASPM & Microcephalin are known to play a role in brain development of primates. The role of these two genes in language tone has not been investigated until now.

Language tone has direct tangents to both human evolution and linguistic anthropology. Now that I think of it even cultural anthropology has a lot to do with language tone. Not convinced? Well check out what Razib has found… an excellent example, plucked from a TimesOnline article, that describes this tangent,

“In tonal languages, which are most common in South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, subtle differences in pitch can change the meaning of vowels, consonants and syllables. Nontonal languages, which prevail in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, use pitch only as a way of conveying emphasis or emotion.

The new findings from the University of Edinburgh also suggest that the very first human languages were probably tonal, sounding more like modern Chinese or Zulu than English or French. The genetic profile that appears to predispose to nontonal languages evolved only about 5,800 years ago, implying that all languages were probably tonal before that.”

So understanding the genetic origins and differences of language tone between human populations can tell us a lot about how genes have influenced which languages are spoken around the world today. Two linguists, Dan Dediu and D. Robert Ladd have been searching to find the genetic foundations for the differences tone, as heard in modern day languages,

“During a study of linguistic and genetic data from 49 distinct populations, the authors discovered a striking correlation between two genes involved in brain development and language tonality. Populations that speak nontonal languages (where the pitch of a spoken word does not affect its meaning) have newer versions of the genes, with mutations that began to appear roughly 37 thousand years ago.”

Their work will soon be published in PNAS, but until that happens you’re gonna have to run with my examples if you don’t quite understand what’s going on.

UPDATE, the paper has been published, “Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin“  – so feel very free to ignore my ramblings below. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lotta anthropology goodness surfacing on the internets today, and I’ll try to share some of the ones that sparked my interests. The first is an application of archaeology, specifically geoarchaeology, in solving the mystery on how Alexander the Great conquered the island of Tyre.

I’m assuming everyone knows who Alexander the Great was. In the first half of the year 332 B.C., Alexander was preoccupied in capturing the Phoenician city Tyre, the naval base of the Persians. Alexander’s engineers are reported to have built a 1,000m long walkway that allowed him cross the seas and seize the offshore island. The legend goes as follows,

“[The walkway is] said to have been at least 200 feet wide. It was constructed from stones and timber from the old city of Tyre on the mainland…

For a while the Tyrians laughed at Alexander’s project. At first they would row boats across the channel and harangue the Macedonians. Their laughter turned to concern when they saw the walkway was going to be completed. The Tyrians ignited a barge and drove it into the first walkway. The towers on the walkway caught fire and several of Alexander’s men lost their lives. Alexander gave orders for the work to continue, and that the walkway itself should be widened and more protective towers be built.

Alexander was able to obtain ships from Sidon, Greek allies and Cyprus to form a blockade around Tyre. When the walkway was within artillery range of Tyre, Alexander brought up stone throwers and light catapults, reinforced by archers and slingers, for a saturation barrage. Battle engineers constructed several naval battering rams which smashed through the walls of Tyre. Though courageous, the Tyrians were no match for Alexander’s troops. Over 7,000 Tyrians died in the defense of their island. In contrast, only 400 Macedonians were killed.”

So the problem with this story is that archaeological evidence of this walkway hasn’t yet been found! If he had his engineers build it, it would have been a phenomenol feat. We’d at least see something preserved in the archaeological that indicates there was once a path that Alexander used to raid Tyre. Anything really… the stones that paved the walk way would be a place to start but I’ll even take artifacts that showed evidence of infrastructure needed to build it. And that’s exactly what has stumped some classical archaeologists for quite sometime, there’s practically zilch to show there ever was a road made to connect to Tyre.

A new PNAS publication aims to solve this mystery by providing a three-phase geomorphological hypothesis on how Alexander’s engineers used a Holocene sand spit to their advantage. This paper is titled, “Holocene morphogenesis of Alexander the Great’s isthmus at Tyre in Lebanon,” and here’s the part of the abstract that matters,

“Settled since the Bronze Age, the area’s geological record manifests a long history of natural and anthropogenic forcings. (i) Leeward of the island breakwater, the maximum flooding surface (e.g., drowning of the subaerial land surfaces by seawater) is dated 8000 B.P. Fine-grained sediments and brackish and marine-lagoonal faunas translate shallow, low-energy water bodies at this time. Shelter was afforded by Tyre’s elongated sandstone reefs, which acted as a 6-km natural breakwater. (ii) By 6000 B.P., sea-level rise had reduced the dimensions of the island from 6 to 4 km. The leeward wave shadow generated by this island, allied with high sediment supply after 3000 B.P., culminated in a natural wave-dominated proto-tombolo within 1–2 m of mean sea level by the time of Alexander the Great (4th century B.C.). (iii) After 332 B.C., construction of Alexander’s causeway entrained a complete anthropogenic metamorphosis of the Tyrian coastal system.”

So there you have it, folks. Alexander’s engineers used roughly 8,000 years of geomorphology to good use. They didn’t necessarily slave away and toil on filling in land. Instead they took a natural geological feature and exploited it.

This application of geoarchaeology, in solving this historical war-time mystery, is another example of how anthropology has been applied as well as how it has integrated geological sciences in explaining this event in human history, behavior, and engineering. It shows how archaeological questions can also be answered without having artifacts right there in front of one self.

Related readings:

• Nature on, “How geology came to help Alexander the Great.”

Cultural anthropology specializes in many aspects of explaining who, what, where, why, and how people live the ways they do. Cultural anthropologists identify unique traits of a certain culture, or way of life. We as a public usually draw the lines between the similarities and differences to our own cultures and the ones introduced to us by the cultural anthropologists.

One example of such work came out in 1964, by Hajime Nakamura, who wrote the book, “Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples.” This text is full of comparative works showing the similarities and contrasts between Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese cultures and modes of thought. It still remains a classic. Dr. Nakamura toned his book on comparing and contrasting creation myths; stories of explaining how the world came to be from each respective culture’s points of view.

And that’s what I want to introduce to you in this post: creation myths. What is not unique to just one culture is that every culture that comes to my mind has a creation myth. While each story may be completely original and unique in its own right when compared to one another, the fact that it is a creation myth remains a connecting force across cultures, times, and places.

For example, the Maya have the Popol Vuh, or story where the creation of humans is attributed to the three water-dwelling feathered serpents who first made emotionless wooden humans and then destroyed them and casted them down to humans.

Sounds like a pretty crazy story at first.

But take a moment and ask yourself, “What similarities do I see in this story to say the Judeo-Christian creation story — the one where God made humans out of clay”

You’ll begin to see that even some creation myths, as outlandish as they may seem, have some similarities here and there. Many creation myths from the Middle East and adjacent areas have these types similarities as well. The most notable is the role of a virgin mother figure, who beared a son by not having sexual intercourse with a divine being and remaining a virgin. Biologically, this is impossible to humans — but it seemed prevalent enough that this certain substory shows its face in both the Judeo-Christian story, i.e. the origins of Jesus Christ and also in Buddha’s origins.

And with that, I realize I’m digressing. What I really wanted to share with you, is something I stumbled up on Digg , LiveScience’s collection of the ‘top 10′ creation myths. I really don’t get how they determined the top ranking but it is a nice little quick introductory comparison of ten different creation myths. My personal favorite is number three on the list, the Hindu Cosmology’s Rendezvous with Brahma,

“The Hindu cosmology contains many myths of creation, and the principal players have risen and fallen in importance over the centuries. The earliest Vedic text, the Rig Veda, tells of a gigantic being, Purusha, possessing a thousand heads, eyes, and feet. He enveloped the earth, extending beyond it by the space of ten fingers. When the gods sacrificed Purusha, his body produced clarified butter, which engendered the birds and animals. His body parts transformed into the world’s elements, and the gods Agni, Vayu, and Indra. Also, the four castes of Hindu society were created from his body: the priests, warriors, general populace, and the servants. Historically later, the trinity of Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer) gained prominence. Brahma appears in a lotus sprouting from the navel of the sleeping Vishnu. Brahma creates the universe, which lasts for one of his days, or 4.32 billion years. Then Shiva destroys the universe and the cycle restarts. Relax everybody, the current cycle has a couple billion years left.”

You may also be interested in Ahura Mazda in Persian creation mythology — Ahura Mazda is believed to be the earliest monotheistic god to surface in religion and a influential figure in Judeo-Christian religions.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of documented creation myths out there. I hope I have sparked your interests in carrying out a cross cultural comparison of creation myths. The internet is an excellent resource to begin your studies, people have documented nearly every imaginable culture’s creation myth online — from Western African ones of the Mande, Yoruba, and Cameroon to the Inuit creation story.

Of course I am biased when I say that I consider anthropology one of the coolest disciplines. But I have reasons as to why I hold this opinion. One of the reasons is that anthropology has and will always be a discipline that integrates and applies methods from other disciplines. The following new research I will share with you is a prime example of what I’m taking about.

In 1999, near the city of Taiyuan, in the Shanxi province, central China, archaeologists uncovered an astonishing find. You may remember it. I do. It is considered one of the most important archaeological finds in China because this Sui dynasty tomb held a sarcophagus with artifacts from the west. The man buried in the tomb went by Yu Hong and inscriptions in his tomb describe him as chieftain of the Central Asian people who had settled in China during the Sui dynasty (A.D. 580 to 618). Yu Hong died in 592 A.D. His wifey died several years later, and was laid to rest by his side.

If you want, there’s a documentary of the discovery of Yu Hong’s tomb on Amazon’s video download service, Unbox.

I’ve been always curious about this site because of the western artifacts inside his tomb. After doing some digital digging, I found drawings of the reliefs in Yu Hong’s tomb. I have scattered the images around this post. Being Iranian, I clearly can see that these images are not as much Chinese as they are Persian. They look like the images you see on Persian miniatures and inside the Persian Book of Kings, the Shahnameh.

This totally now makes sense, because what is known of Yu Hong is that his career started in service of the most powerful nomadic tribe at the time, known as the Ruru. Adapted from Wikipedia, the Ruru were,

“a confederation of pre-Mongolian nomadic tribes from the northern borders of China that were kicking it strong until about the late 4th century to 6th century. The Rouran are said to be the later appeared in Europe as the Eurasian Avars or Tartars”

More importantly, Yu Hong was posted as an emissary to several countries, including Iran. So now the puzzle pieces start fitting into place. Yu Hong was probably a worldly traveler, making his way up and down the Silk Roads that connected much of Asia to Europe and the Middle East.

But what remained to be answered is what is known of Yu Hong?

In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B publication, several geneticists from the College of Life Science and the Ancient DNA Laboratory, Research Center for Chinese Frontier Archaeology, at Jilin University in Changchun, China have tried to answer what can be known of Yu Hong’s ancestry from his genes. They analyzed his mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which only comes from the mother’s side. They have reported their findings in the following paper, “Evidence of ancient DNA reveals the first European lineage in Iron Age Central China,” and the paragraph below is the abstract where I have highlighted the most important findings,

“Various studies on ancient DNA have attempted to reconstruct population movement in Asia, with much interest focused on determining the arrival of European lineages in ancient East Asia. Here, we discuss our analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of human remains excavated from the Yu Hong tomb in Taiyuan, China, dated 1400 years ago. The burial style of this tomb is characteristic of Central Asia at that time. Our analysis shows that Yu Hong belonged to the haplogroup U5, one of the oldest western Eurasian-specific haplogroups, while his wife can be classified as haplogroup G, the type prevalent in East Asia. Our findings show that this man with European lineage arrived in Taiyuan approximately 1400 years ago, and most probably married a local woman. Haplogroup U5 was the first west Eurasian-specific lineage to be found in the central part of ancient China, and Taiyuan may be the easternmost location of the discovered remains of European lineage in ancient China.”

Now that’s just the genetic evidence they have gathered from his maternal side, so when you read National Geographic claim that this man was European — be a bit skeptical of the headlines. Remember, his Y chromosome can show a much different data. For all we know, his Dad coulda been part of the haplogroup G and married a U5 haplogroup wife which ended up being Yu Hong’s mom. Until his Y chromosome is analyzed, we may never know. What we know is that at least half of Yu Hong genes were most likely European.

We already knew that Asia was intimately connected with the rest of the world. It did not remain a separate world, although many people may consider that. There are a lot of linguistic, mythological, cultural, musical, medical, etc. similarities between East Asia and East Europe and the Middle East. I mentioned this before, and I’ll say it again, this is so because trade roads were used for thousands of years to connect this massive continent. So this study isn’t all to surprising.

What this study is is a classic synthesis of multidisciplinary approach, with archaeological and genetic evidence. Despite the mtDNA only evidence, the fact that there’s Western artifacts in this tomb and that correlates to genetic data of the inhabitants just simply seem like it goes hand in hand. I hope more archaeological studies do this, especially with the advances we are making in ancient DNA studies.

References:

• Tim Jones reports on, “European Man Found in Ancient Chinese Tomb, Study Reveals” at his blog, Remote Central.
• The Sarcophagus of Yu Hong – The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.
• Razib reports on, “Round Eyed Chinese” at his blog Gene Expression.
• Razib reports on , “Round Eyed Chinese Part n” at his blog Gene Expression.

by Carl T. Feagans
If I tickle or play with my daughter, I’m immediately attacked (playfully) by the family dog that will defend her to the end. With the exception of dinosaurs, my daughter’s favorite two animals are dogs and horses and it’s reflected in her movies, toys and play. She loves to watch movies like Shaggy Dog, the Beethoven series, Flicka, Spirit, and two or three others about either horses or dogs. She has a dozen or so each in stuffed animals and often pretends to be a dog or horse as she plays.

My daughter, at five years old, accepts without question something that I think people have accepted for thousands of years: dogs and horses are special friends to humanity. I’ve been thinking of this special relationship that humanity has shared with a few, select species (dogs, horses, and cats) recently, partially because of my daughter’s own affinity for them, but also because it’s an obvious fact of humanity that is universal. Sure, there are other species of animals humans seem preoccupied with, but none so loyal, noble or revered as the three in parentheses above. To explore these relationships in detail I looked in the peer-reviewed literature to see what others had to say. In this short piece, I’ll discuss dogs and the information is found primarily in Darcy F. Morey’s article, Burying key evidence: the social bond between dogs and people, in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Morey’s main focus is on the funerary practices that people have carried out with dogs over thousands of years. Most anthropologists accept that the dog was the first domesticated animals and burials are found worldwide which date as far back as 12,000 to 14,000 years. Dogs are mostly buried individually and in ritual fashion as if they were a family member, often in positions intended to provide “comfort” as with paws under the head or with the head resting on the body. The consistent nature of body positioning at burial within each region gives the ritualistic quality, and the facts that people took the time and effort to bury the canine corpse below ground and carefully positioned provide evidence that dogs had special status for people in antiquity. In addition, many dog burials have been found with grave goods, including carefully positioned soft-shell clams at a grave site in Puerto Rico.

In other cases, dogs have been found buried with people, presumably the dog’s owner, suggesting that the relationship was such that when the owner died the dog was interred to provide continued companionship. Burials such as this were found in Kentucky at Indian Knoll (ca. 3000 BCE), where there were instances of children buried with two dogs. What better, more loyal companion to send into the afterlife to look after your child?

Morey quotes William Webb, the archaeologist that worked the Indian Knoll site in the 1960’s and 1970’s:

… one must conclude that dogs were often killed at the time of burial of their owner, and buried with them perhaps as a symbol of continued association in the spirit world.

And, to quote Morey:

What is most intriguing, of course, about their possible “continued association in the ‘spirit world’” is what such a projected association signifies about their relationship with people in life.

In Ashkelon, Israel during the Persian Period (ca. 500 – 300 BCE), approximately 1000 individual dogs were buried in individual graves in what can only be described as a dog cemetery. Over half of the burials were puppies and none showed signs of brutality, suggesting that the cause of death was disease or injury. If nothing else, the Ashkelon cemetery demonstrates that the idea of a pet cemetery is not something new and that people here accepted their dogs as members of the family.

The dog has been with us, archaeologically, for 12,000 to 14,000 years. That is to say, the archaeological record doesn’t reveal any contexts of domesticated dogs prior to 14,000 BP, the oldest context generally accepted to be at Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, ca. 14,000 BP. At this site, a single piece of a dog jaw is associated with a human grave. Geneticists, at one point, attempted to pin down the domestication point at around 100,000 to 130,000 years ago, based on mutation rates. However, more recent data in canine genetic research puts that point at around 15,000 to 40,000 years ago – wide range, to be sure, but one that is more in line with the archaeological record. It’s been suggested more than once that the dog probably domesticated itself, living on the fringes of human settlements and slowly adapting to accept and coexist with people, living off of their trash (yes, people in antiquity had trash, archaeologists call them middens).

My dog thinks she’s a person. No doubt about it. As I write this, she’s lying on the couch on her back, dead asleep and snoring. When I go to bed, I know she’ll follow, jump on the bed, give me a quick “kiss” on the cheek then curl up at the foot of the bed where she’ll stay till sunrise. The best thing about a dog is that the love you get is unconditional. Even abusive humans are loved by their dog victims. Dogs provide services that extend beyond companionship by service to the blind, the autistic, the elderly, and the very young. There are even dogs that can alert their owner to impending seizures. Not to mention drug dogs, guard dogs, search dogs, rescue dogs, and cadaver dogs. And the list goes on I’m sure.

Next time, I’ll look at the relationship between people and horses.

Source
Morey, Darcy F. (2006) Burying key evidence: the social bond between dogs and people. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33(2), 158-175.

So let’s get back to the basics here and answer the above question. Why? Because, I’ve been asked this question far too many times and decided that I’ll be proactive about it and put out a little summary post on what neolithic means, when did it happen, and what exactly happened.

Etymologically speaking, neolithic can be broken down into two parts. One is the “neo” meaning new. And the other is “lithic” which is stone. If you put the two together you get new stone. From that, Neolithic is used to describe an era and way of life in human evolution. Specifically this era was the last of the stone ages.

The first evidence of Neolithic culture popped up about 10,500 years before the present in the Levant, an area currently known as Jericho and/or Palestine. The evidence I speak of is archaeological signs that the first agricultural revolution occurred during this period, a critical transition from nomadic hunting and gathering lifestyles that characterized much of prehistoric humanity to agriculture and settlement and ultimately civilization. This transition also heralded in a massive restructuring in social organization and a new dawn in technology. Roles became more specialized.

This way of life had several characteristic waves, and with each it propagated out of the Near East to other areas of the world. The current classification is as follows:

• Neolithic 1 — Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA)
  • Major characteristic of PPNA is true farming.
• Neolithic 2 — Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB)
• Neolithic 3 — Pottery Neolithic (PN)
  • Distinctive cultures
  • Pottery technology

The best way I can personally think of documenting how significant the changes that occurred during the Neolithic, is by showing you a comparison of stone tools. The two images you see here are examples of Paleolithic and Neolithic stone tools. While I know these two periods are displaced by thousands of years, little changed up until the short time period that catalyzed the Neolithic. The photograph on the left is Paleolithic stone tools from Nubia and on the right are Neolithic stone tools from the middle east.

So do you see the significant differences between the two technologies? I hope you do. Now imagine how these differences represent an analogy to how entire ways of living changed upon the Neolithic and then you should get a feel for how important this period was.

I don’t quite know how to categorize the following post, because while it is fundamentally more physical anthropology, the whole issue that is being addressed is cultural. See, geneticists have been shifting the number of human genes for some time now. A good estimate is that humans have a little under or around 30,000 genes. You maybe confused, thinking, “Hey the human genome has been sequenced! Why are we working with estimates?” Well the human genome has been sequenced but there are gaps. Lots of them. There were two ways the human genome was sequenced, and the way that prevailed was the quick and dirty way.

Aside from having a hastily assembled genome, we really don’t know what a gene is. That definition shifts far more often than the number of genes in a particular genome. Once upon a time, a gene was a unit of heredity. It still is, but that definition is too vague. A gene is now any sequence of DNA that is transcribed. It doesn’t have to be a transcribed then translated into a protein, because there are a lot of products from a sequence of DNA that functions just dandy as RNA.

So now that we have an understanding of what a gene can be, it gets more complicated because genes are modified a lot in non-bacterial organism (i.e. us!). After being transcribed, an RNA molecule can be spliced or edited. Sections can be cut out here or there or even there or here. This process is called alternative splicing. So from one gene, many different products can be made depending on how it is edited or used. That begs one to ask then, is it not the number of genes that an organism has but the number of ways it can be alternatively spliced?

You’d think that’s what people would be asking, especially if they are scientists, but apparently a lot of people have their panties in a wad about the small number of genes we have. At least that’s what the science writers are touting out there. They keep rekindling the flame that we have almost as many genes as nematode, you know those tiny microscopic worms! That bugs a lot of people. Especially those that think humans are the greatest things to ever roam the Earth. People want to think they have the most; the most intelligence, the most prowess, the most genes. And the disappointment that has come with the fact that we don’t have that many genes, plays out as an ego deflation, which is exactly where the cultural aspect comes into play.

While humans are extraordinary in our own respects, we are predisposed to think of ourselves as the end all be all of evolution. Often we ponder how will we evolve, as if it is an answer even worth solving. This is a problem. And I think anthropology should step up to the plate and address it. We are ultimately in the business of explaining what it means to be human — so why do we think we have to have the most?

It seems like biochemist Dr. Larry Moran, who writes in his blog Sandwalk, also sees this problem but in a much different light. He nails one of Science‘s top questions, “Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?” as a matter of ignorance on behalf of science writers — and I’m relieved that he has at least addressed it. I’m relieved that there is some sanity out there amongst the scientific community. Here’s exactly how Dr. Moran has phrased is argument,

“[This is] a very “wrong” question that reflects an ignorance of the scientific literature and a profound misunderstanding of evolution, developmental biology, and gene expression. Humans have exactly the number of genes that we expect. They don’t need to have many more genes than fruit flies or worms because a small number of unique genes are all that’s required to make significant differences in development. They don’t need to have special complexity mechanisms to “explain” anything because there’s nothing that needs explaining. Human genes are fundamentally the same as those in Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), Caenorhabditis elegans (nematode worm), and Arabidopsis thaliana (a small flowering plant).

This “top 25 question” illustrates exactly the problem that I alluded to earlier. You don’t recognize the important questions in science by polling science writers and editors. The “right” questions are the ones being asked on the frontiers by the creative experts who are thinking outside the box. This is an “inside the box” question and very few of those ever turn out to be important.”

Dr. Moran, you are right. This is a non-sensible question to even bug ourselves with and I agree that science writers shouldn’t always be asking the important questions. However, I see the blame ultimately come down to our modern day cultures. We have disengaged ourselves so much from the rest of the living world that we can’t fathom to think there are living things with bigger genomes than our own. Our science writers are merely appeasing to the ignorance of the general public. This is what the masses want answered. The unanswerable tripe. I consider it a sad revelation, more of an ego deflation that this is what we preoccupy our collective minds with than the number of our genes.