Anthropology.net

News from the cave known as Grotte des Pigeons, Taforalt, in Eastern Morocco, where for the past ‘four to five’ years, the Institute of Archaeology from Oxford University have been excavating, during the process of which they have discovered beads fashioned from shells.

The beads themselves comprise 12 Nassarius shells – Nassarius are molluscs found in warm seas and coral reefs in America, Asia and the Pacific – which had holes in them and appeared to have been suspended or hung. They were covered in red ochre.

Similar beads have been found at sites in Algeria, Israel and South Africa which are thought to date back to around the same time or slightly after the finds from Taforalt.

The other sites are known to us as Skhul Cave, situated on Mount Carmel, in Israel, and of course, the 77,000 bp finds from Blombos Cave down in South Africa; 3 beads from the Skhul site may be 100,000 years old – moreover, there is a single pierced shell from Oued Djebbana in Algeria, which is thought to be 90,000 years old, based on the stone tools found in the same context.

It is notable that shells from all these sites are Nassarius, and that in each case the sites were situated some distance from contemporary coastlines – it wasn’t as if people were just strolling down to the beach and collecting what they found lying there – instead, it would appear that people were deliberately embarking on journeys of a day or more, with the specified intention of collecting, and returning with their desired materials, choosing only this type of shell for perforation, in some cases covered in red ochre, and then worn as personal adornment. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t got much time to read the following paper, review and translate it for ya but P-ter of Gene Expression has and done so. The paper comes out of PLoS Genetics‘ press and is titled, Localizing Recent Adaptive Evolution in the Human Genome. You should be interested because P-ter calls this a “magnificent paper, and should be required reading for anyone interested in the field of human evolutionary genetics.” From P-ter’s run down of important things too look out for, I’ve plucked off two things that I find interesting to anthropology:

1. They find selected loci in pathways for skin color (including SLC24A5) and hair morphology in Europeans. It’s always seemed somewhat obvious that the major visible differences between population groups should be selected for, but this provides important evidence in favor of that.
2. There seems to be much evidence for selection making populations different, less so for selection affecting all populations equally. Human evolution is continuing, and making us genetically different.

So we are all evolving unequally and there seems to be strong changes in genes that we attribute to the manifestation of race, such as skin color. Very interesting. I wonder how that may change our discipline’s definition of race as a social construct?