Anthropology.net

I want to congratulate Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy on being elected membership to the National Academy of Sciences because of his excellence in original scientific research.

Membership into the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a pretty prestigious honor, because other NAS members include, “Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Thomas Edison, [and] more than 170 members of the NAS [who] have won the Nobel Prize.” Lovejoy will also join the ranks of other famous anthropologists who have been bestowed the title, such as Erik Trinkaus, Tim White, F. Clark Howell, Clifford Geertz, Frans de Waal, and Lewis Binford. If you are curious, here is the complete list of every anthropologist who has been a member of the NAS.

Kent State’s President Lester A. Lefton has congratulated Lovejoy,

“Dr. Lovejoy’s pioneering research helped put Kent State on the academic map nationally and internationally, and his outstanding teaching has inspired many of our students to become top scientists in their own right. Having this world-class scholar in our midst is a source of tremendous pride for the entire Kent State community and we are thrilled that Dr. Lovejoy’s stellar career has been recognized with this rare and richly deserved honor.”

The following is a summary of some the important accomplishments of Lovejoy:

• Reconstruction of “Lucy” – the nearly complete fossil of a human ancestor that walked upright more than three million years ago.
• His works on developing theories integrating paleodemography and human origins modeling.
• His research on Ardipithecus ramidus.
• His research on a new possible human ancestor, Australopithecus garhi.
• His role as a clinical professor of anatomy at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.
• More than 100 articles in publications such as Science, Nature, Bioessays and Scientific American.

Pretty impressive body of work, if you ask me. I’m happy this has happened because, while I have never met Dr. Lovejoy, I have read his comments on posts here and there, especially on Scientific American articles relating to paleoanthropology and human evolution… which I consider a testament his interests in the study. Or in other words, the man takes time to engage the community by commenting and discussing physical anthropology outside of the class room and his office hours, in a informal setting.

Again, Dr. Lovejoy if you are out there, congratulations — you deserve the recognition.

I first got word of Mary Douglas’ death from Rex’s post over at Savage Minds. It seems like a lot of good anthropologists have passed away this year, such as F. Clark Howell. Douglas was a cultural anthropologist, and from Wikipedia, she was,

“well known for her writings on human culture and symbolism. She was also considered a follower of Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.”

I appreciated Mary Douglas because she meticulously examined how people across different cultures give meanings to their reality. She further examined how this reality is expressed by their cultural symbols. In this way she found some universal patterns in symbolism. The best example of her work, in my opinion, was her book Purity and Danger.

To a read a more thorough summary of the life of Mary Douglas, I recommend both the Gaurdian and The Times‘ obituaries on her. Also, the New York Times has just published an obituary on her as well.

Courtesy of Wired through InstaPundit, is this remarkable photo of a Mursi tribesman in Southern Ethiopia with an iPod as well as his trusty AK-47 and ethnic getup.

I’m not sharing this to make a freak show out of this site, but rather to document an interesting phenomenon — where high technology meets traditional life in East Africa. I doubt Steve Jobs really imagined a tribesman would be iPodding it up — I for one never thought of it.

As an undergraduate, I was one of the lucky ones. I was part of some ground breaking archaeological research. Between 2002-2004 I spent roughly the last years of time as a student in anthropology working with Dr. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez on a zooarchaeology project. She was my mentor then, and kinda still is now.

I was employed as a lab tech under her grant. The grant funded research that focused on assessing what the hell happened to the Northern Fur Seals (Callorhinus ursinus) which once inhabited the Monterey Bay area. Specifically, we worked on a archaeological site right next to Moss Landing Marine Labs. At this job, my primary role was to identify bones and bone fragments. It was hard work and involved a lot of creativity and a strong background in osteology and comparative anatomy.

Reconstructing a species, let alone an ecological community based upon hundreds of tiny bone fragments is challenging. Often I had to employ logical shortcuts, for example marine mammals have more dense bones than their terrestrial counterparts. So if I had a bone in front of me that was more dense than the rest, but not quite complete to tell what it was — at least I had something to narrow down the scope, it was most likely a marine mammal.

Working on faunal identification from bones for a couple years, I noticed that there was once a lot of Northern Fur Seals there. I don’t quite remember the minimum number of fur seals we estimated, but it was staggering. And nowadays, if you have ever been to Moss Landing there are about umm zero Northern Fur Seals… except maybe the one or two that wash up dead from exhaustion, starvation, and/or shark or killer whale attacks. What was even more remarkable was that I saw the evidence that humans where the ones that killed off the Northern Fur Seals.

See bone is a pretty remarkable medium, not only does it help organisms move around and function. It caries a lot of information about life history. Diet and nutrition reflects a lot on bone robusticity and chemistry. Any traumatic event, such as a fracture, persists on bone for millenia. Above all, any processing such as butchering done on bone, by humans, gives one a big clue about what happen, who was eating what, and what sort of behaviors can we infer from the ways these humans hunted and processed these animals.

Time and time again, I saw Northern Fur Seals with bashed in skulls, indicating me that whoever hunted these animals clubbed them. We found a few spear points and other stone tools. But in general, these people didn’t waste resources, such as spears nor arrows, on them… and that made sense. There’s no reason to spear an animal that can’t really run away, may as well use brute force. Pretty extreme hunters. These seals were most likely killed on the beach front where they usually bask and have rookeries.

The animals were then dragged out about a half mile away, at the Moss Landing Marine Lab site, to be cut up and processed perhaps at a temporary village. Long bones, such as femur, have traces of cut marks, which tell me the meat was removed there and the bones with rest of the carcass was thrown off into a midden pile. Some of the bones were charred black, telling me that some people feasted on the animals right there and then. Whoever they were, they were hungry about 1,000 years ago.

After graduation, I no longer could be supported by the educational grant. I moved off to the big bad world. I hadn’t heard on what was happening with this project since then, until now. I was checking my regular anthro-blogs, and noticed a headline from Afarensis that caught my eye. He titled his blog post, “Archaeology and Northern Fur Seals” and as I read his description of the research it sounded awfully familiar.

Low and behold, Diane, my adviser and mentor, had just published a paper on the results of this project in PNAS. She collaborated with a lot of other people who brought in biochemical and ecological evidence. The paper has been published under this title, “The shifting baseline of northern fur seal ecology in the northeast Pacific Ocean,” and here is the abstract,

“Historical data provide a baseline against which to judge the significance of recent ecological shifts and guide conservation strategies, especially for species decimated by pre-20th century harvesting. Northern fur seals (NFS; Callorhinus ursinus) are a common pinniped species in archaeological sites from southern California to the Aleutian Islands, yet today they breed almost exclusively on offshore islands at high latitudes. Harvest profiles from archaeological sites contain many unweaned pups, confirming the presence of temperate-latitude breeding colonies in California, the Pacific Northwest, and the eastern Aleutian Islands. Isotopic results suggest that prehistoric NFS fed offshore across their entire range, that California populations were distinct from populations to the north, and that populations breeding at temperate latitudes in the past used a different reproductive strategy than modern populations. The extinction of temperate-latitude breeding populations was asynchronous geographically. In southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and the eastern Aleutians, NFS remained abundant in the archaeological record up to the historical period ~200 years B.P.; thus their regional collapse is plausibly attributed to historical hunting or some other anthropogenic ecosystem disturbance. In contrast, NFS populations in central and northern California collapsed at ~800 years B.P., long before European contact. The relative roles of human hunting versus climatic factors in explaining this ecological shift are unclear, as more paleoclimate information is needed from the coastal zone.”

If heavy handed science writing ain’t your thing… you maybe interested in reading the official press release about this publication from my alma matter.

Aside from the research experience I gained at this position, I learned a lot about forming intelligent conclusions and behaviors from archaeological material. In this situation, the abundance of fur seal bones indicates that people exploit food sources to extinction in times of need no matter who they are and what sort of cultural background they come from.

Any egyptologists out there? In case there are one or two of you, or in case archaeology is your thing, you’ll hopefully be excited to hear that,

“Archaeologists got a royal surprise last week when they stumbled upon the tomb of a powerful official of the Egyptian court from 4,000 years ago.

Scientists from Belgium’s Leuven Catholic University discovered the intact tomb in the Deir Al-Barsha necropolis in El Minya, about 150 miles (241 kilometers) south of Cairo, while excavating another burial site, Egypt’s culture ministry reported Sunday.

The tomb is of Henu, a courtier and real estate manager during the tumultuous First Intermediate period (2181 to 2050 B.C.) of Egyptian history.

A cache of intact, painted statuettes of people at work, such as women making beer and pounding cereal, were arranged in the tomb.

Other statuettes featured a man working clay with a hoe and two other men carrying a bag of clay suspended from a pole.”

Click on the following image to read more:

Welcome to the new Anthropology.net.

After almost two years running Anthropology.net on Drupal, I got sick of all the time and energy I spent in administering the site. I got sick of maintaining databases and regular backups, and frustrated with upgrades and patches. Worrying about keeping spammers at bay with Drupal’s less than adequate spam protection troubled me. When the site was under heavy traffic, Drupal and my webserver served up webpages slower than molasses. And once my webhost pulled a Catch-22/blackmail scam on me, stating that they will permanently throttle down the resources allotted to the site unless I consider upgrading the to a higher level (and more expensive) hosting plan, I decided it is time to change.

So, I fell back on WordPress. Tried and true, WordPress is an awesome blogging platform. It is simple, clean, and powerful. It does one thing, and it does it excellently. With WordPress we will have the ability to auto-save posts as drafts, which is a blessing after having lost an unimaginable number of posts due to unforeseen internet errors. Search functions will finally be restored, and trackbacks will actually now work… making it easier to network and find information. Furthermore, WordPress.com cuts out all the administration woes that I encountered, and will help me focus on writing good content — which I prefer any day to the later.

In order to make this move, I sacrificed all the content we have built in the last two or so years. There’s no way to really move it all over here and make it just work. The old Anthropology.net won’t be gone though, it will be archived at http://old.anthropology.net indefinitely. Above all, to make this move successful, we need you to continue to this community in its new home.

So please continue to visit this site. If you were subscribe to our RSS feed, make sure you update your RSS Reader to the new RSS address — http://anthropologynet.wordpress.com/feed/. And as always, pull up a chair, read the site and comment your heart away.

In the recent past, I have blogged thrice about Genghis Khan. I consider him an important man in anthropology. Some may vilify him, some may consider him a hero, but without a doubt I hope we can agree that he contributed a lot modern cultures — most notably a mail system and unified currency to areas of the world where this technology did not exist before.

Among other things Genghis Khan contributed to the modern world, has been his genes. It has been hypothesized that about 16 million people have some of his genetic make up. To test this hypothesis, researchers investigated Y-chromosomes with representatives of 18 nations of Northern Eurasia.

The paper is titled, “Distribution of the male lineages of Genghis Khan’s descendants in northern Eurasian populations.” Here is the abstract:

“Data on the variation of 12 microsatellite loci of Y-chromosome haplogroup C3 were used to screen lineages included in the cluster of Genghis Khan’s descendants in 18 northern Eurasian populations (Altaian Kazakhs, Altaians-Kizhi, Teleuts, Khakassians, Shorians, Tyvans, Todjins, Tofalars, Sojots, Buryats, Khamnigans, Evenks, Mongols, Kalmyks, Tajiks, Kurds, Persians, and Russians; the total sample size was 1437 people). The highest frequency of haplotypes from the cluster of the Genghis Khan’s descendants was found in Mongols (34.8%). In Russia, this cluster was found in Altaian Kazakhs (8.3%), Altaians (3.4%), Buryats (2.3%), Tyvans (1.9%), and Kalmyks (1.7%).”

Science Daily has a summary of their findings, but also check out Razib’s comments…

“Discussions on Genghis Khan’s offsprings began about three years ago when foreign researchers (Zerijal and joint authors) published findings on Y-chromosome variability with 2,123 inhabitants of different regions in Asia, except for its Russian part. The researchers discovered a whole cluster of closely-related lines, which fanned from a common ancestor. The investigations proved that this cluster originated from Mongolia about a thousand years ago, and its distribution coincided surprisingly with the boundaries occupied by the Mongol Empire at that time.

Based on this coincidence, the researchers have assumed that the Y-chromosomes described by them belonged to Genghis Khan and his offsprings. Representatives of the Genghiside dynasty, due to their social status, had a lot of opportunities to leave posterity, and, to all appearances, broadly enjoyed their advantages. Russian and Polish researchers continued the search for the Genghisides in practically non-investigated territories of Northern Eurasia.

The Mongolian State was established in 1206 as a result of Mongolian tribes consolidation by Genghis Khan, it broadened significantly in the future having absorbed the territory of China (Great Khan ulus), Central Asia (Chagatai ulus), Iran (Ilkhan State) and Russia (Golden Horde). The power of khans of the Golden Horde, founded by Batu Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, embraced the territory of a significant part of contemporary Russia (except for Eastern Siberia, Far East and regions of ultima Thule), Northern and Western Kazakhstan, Ukraine, part of Uzbekistan (Khoresm) and Turkmenia.

The geneticists investigated Y-chromosomes of 1,437 men-representatives of 18 ethnic groups in that territory: Altai Kazakhs, Altai-Khizhis, Teleuts, Khakasses, Shor, Tuvinians, Todjins, Tofalars, Soyotes, Buryats, Khamnigans, Evenks, Mongolians, Kalmyks, Tajiks, Kurds, Persians and Russians. The researchers discovered a cluster of male lines possessing a common ancestor, supposedly Genghis Khan, the frequency of the “ancestry” Y-chromosome variant being the highest. The largest share of the Genghisides fell on Mongolia (about 35 percent). In the Russian population, the highest number of the Khan chromosome carriers are among the Altai Kazakhs – 8.3 percent. From 3.4 to 1.7 percent of the Genghisides are also found among the Altai people, Buryats, Tuvinians and Kalmyks.

The researchers point out that despite such detailed investigation of ethnic groups in Southern Siberia, the ‘Genghiside’ cluster was discovered only in the populations boundary to Mongolia, where from the Mongol Empire originated in 1206. Russian principalities were in the Golden Horde allegiance since 1248 through 1480. Nevertheless, men from the Genghis Khan clan left no genetic trace in Russia. The researchers hope that further investigation of the Y-chromosome variability will allow to significantly extend our knowledge about evolution and history of Russian ethnic groups formation and about the origin of individual clans making part of them.”

I have two shameless plugs to share with you, both from my other project Primatology.net. They are both primate related, so there are some applications to anthropology.

The first is a link to infanticide, which may appease you evolutionary psychologists out there. There’s new evidence and discussion on female led infanticide among a chimpanzee group in Uganda.

The second link is paleoprimatology related. The discovery of a new Old World primate skull, classified as Aegyptopithecus zeuxis has some important implications as far as sexual dimorphism and primate brain evolution.

The results of an international genetic research effort has come out from two Australian universties, and is being reported as a confirmation of the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis. This study isn’t as cool in concept as the microbiotic comparison between human populations, but it is an important supplement. The researchers analyzed,

“the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome DNA of Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians from New Guinea. This data was compared with the various DNA patterns associated with early humans.

The results showed that both the Aborigines and Melanesians share the genetic features that have been linked to the exodus of modern humans from Africa 50,000 years ago.”

I mentioned how this research is important supplement, because the fossil record of Australia and New Guinea differs so significantly it has been difficult to prove what’s really going on, paraphrased from Peter Forster’s quote here. This is a case where genetic data clears up some confusion in fossil analysis. He goes on to say,

“For the first time, this evidence gives us a genetic link showing that the Australian Aboriginal and New Guinean populations are descended directly from the same specific group of people who emerged from the African migration.”

I can’t seem to track down the publication in PNAS, but I’ll keep my eye out for it. Furthermore,

“The DNA patterns of the Australian and Melanesian populations show that the population evolved in relative isolation. The two groups also share certain genetic characteristics that are not found beyond Melanesia. This would suggest that there was very little gene flow into Australia after the original migration.”

From my alma mater comes a research study where African mole rats are used as a point of reference to understand the diets of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. I caught this new yesterday off of Nature but Yann has also shared it with us.

The basic method, isotopic analysis, is a tried and true method in paleoecology, archaeological chemistry, and other related sub disciplines. What’s cool about this study is how a living model, mole rats and their dietary habits are analogous to early hominin ones. See, its believed early hominins like australopithecines ate tubers which are primarily C₄ plants – special plants that fix carbon differently from other plants. Many C₄ plants in Africa are tubers, and australopithecines had gnarly molars, very robust and dense… made to literally chew on rock hard roots . Check out the following images:

This alternative form of carbon fixation leaves unique trace elements in the bones and skeletons of the animals that eat them. Since mole rats also consume these C₄ tubers, comparing the isotopes yields some interesting conclusions about the diets of early hominins.

Pretty creative comparison, no?

The paper is titled, “The isotopic ecology of African mole rats informs hypotheses on the evolution of human diet.”