Anthropology.net

Previously on Anthropology.net, we saw the news from Morocco regarding the discovery of ochre-stained beads fashioned from 13 pierced shells of Nassarius gibbosulus, a coastal dwelling mollusc, which in this instance were collected from a beach some 40km/25 miles distant from the Cave of Pigeons in Taforalt – indicating that this particular resource was considered valuable enough to make a round trip – assuming the cave was the point of departure and return – which might well have meant an overnight stay near the beach was required, before the return journey was undertaken the following morning. To further recap…

“By taking into account the distance of the coast at that time and the comparison with natural alteration of shells of the same species on today’s beaches, the two scientists inferred that prehistoric humans had selected, transported and very probably perforated the shells and colored them red for a symbolic use. Moreover, some shells showed traces of wear, which suggests that they were used as adornments for a long time: they were very likely worn as necklaces or bracelets, or sewn onto clothes.”

The shells and the context in which they were found were subjected to a veritable barrage of dating techniques, and as far as I can tell, the 82,000 bp date seems secure , and they can also be considered in a wider context…

“Noticing that the beads belong to the same species of shell and bear the same type of perforation as those uncovered in previous excavations at the paleolothic sites at Skhul in Israel and at Oued Djebbana in Algeria , Marian Vanhaeren and Francesco d’Errico were thus able to confirm the validity of these two discoveries. Everything therefore seems to indicate that 80 000 years ago the populations of the eastern and southern Mediterranean shared the same symbolic traditions. To back up this hypothesis they point to other sites in Morocco where Nassarius gibbosulus beads from the same period are also found.”

The authors go on to make an interesting observation regarding the the differences between shell use in the Middle Palaeolithic of Africa and the Near East, and their later use in the Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia, from about 40,000 bp onwards… Read the rest of this entry »

So my big announcement I eluded to earlier is that I’ll be gone for the next six weeks on a paleontological dig in Ethiopia. Specifically, I have been invited to be a part of the Kesem Kebena Project. Paraphrased from my university’s website,

“the goal of the Kesem-Kebena project is to assess and salvage whatever archaeological and paleontological resources that lay in the way of destruction by construction activities, agriculture, population relocation, and other development associated with both the Kesem and Kebena reservoirs.

I’m really excited about this. I consider this is an opportunity of a lifetime. I hope we find some interesting fossils and artifacts — maybe perhaps something that can extend our understanding of human evolution and the fossil record. There’s a good chance we will. Ethiopia has perhaps the most complete record of human origins of any country, with a record of fossils and artifacts documenting human evolution from our earliest ancestors to the first members of our species, Homo sapiens.

Many famous paleoanthropological findings make up Ethiopia’s fossil record and here are some of them in no particular order:

• Lucy, a 3.5-3.2 million year old fossil australopithecine found in the Hadar region of Ethiopia.
• 4.4-million-year-old fossils of Ardipithecus ramidus.
• The Bodo cranium, a 600,000-year-old cranium that is intermediate in shape between Homo erectus and H. sapiens, perhaps H. heidelbergensis.
• Australopithecus garhi, a 2.5 million year old fossil found in the Awash River valley in the Afar region of Ethiopia.
• Omo I and II, possible intermediate fossils related to Homo sapiens sapiens from the Kibish formation (~200,000/100,000 years ago) in the Omo Valley.
• A one-million-year-old Homo cranium from the Danakil (Afar) depression.
• Australopithecus anamensis dated from about 4.1 million years ago.

From what I understand, I’ll be doing a lot of hiking and surveying around the areas in between the Kesem River, which its dam is nearing completion, and the Kebena River, where a sister dam is planned for the future. These two rivers ultimately feed into the Awash river, the famous river where many of the above fossil hominids were found. I’ll be a bit south east from where all these hominid fossils were found, which can mean two things — undisturbed fossil beds or areas devoid of fossils. I’m hoping for undisturbed fossil beds.

We will be surveying Pliocene and Pleistocene sedimentary deposits. Paleontologically speaking, this is an interesting time for all sorts of evolution. In the Pliocene to Pleistocene epochs, we see a transition from the australopithecine hominids to the Homo lineage and the emergence of larger mammals, elsewhere — and I’ll be smack dab where that all happened!

Aside from the paleoanthropology, I am very very interested in Ethiopia culturally. You know when you know that something will be enchanting? That’s how I feel about Addis Ababa. I’ll spend a week or so there, maybe hit up the National Museum, and then move out of the city.

In the past, on the old Anthropology.net, I blogged about the Hamer, Surma, Mursi, Dassanech, and the Danakil cultures which border both Ethiopia and Kenya. These people are/were largely pastoralists and the interesting thing about them is their ‘forced’ transition to more sedentary lifestyles. I won’t be near most of them, though. These people are mostly in southern Ethiopia. Instead, I will be spending most of my time on the borders of the Amhara, Oromiya, and Afar people, which will be just as interesting, if not more, since I know little about the Amhara and the Oromiya.

There’s a good chance I will not either have time to blog and/or have internet access. I’m gonna do my best to blog when and if I have access, but just in case will keep an old fashioned field journal full of notes, thoughts, and drawings. I’ll transcribe and scan them into blog posts here when I have time. If you wanna keep up to date with my travels, your best bet is to check out my Tweets or my Flickr stream regularly because I’ll be uploading pictures as a backup there, and twittering is quick and easy blogging.

In my absence, I’ve invited half a dozen bloggers, some regular bloggers from the old Anthropology.net and some new ones, to help maintain, administer, and keep the blog active. I’m really humbled that they are willing to help out.

But, now I need to go.

See ya later,

Kambiz

Razib has found a New Scientist article that brings up the question of how human were Neandertals? And by that we are asking what level of complexity can we attribute to Neandertals based off what we have found in the archaeological record?

For a long time, Neanderthals were considered dumb old cave peoples, and that’s why I use the noun Neanderthal in this sentence. But new findings have been coming in waves that challenge their stereotypes as thick skulled bruts. For example, Terry Hopkinson of the University of Leicester, UK, tells New Scientist that,

“[Neandertals] incorporated different forms of tool construction into a single technique, and learned to cope with the ecological challenges posed by habitats in eastern Europe.

“There has been a consensus that the modern human mind turned on like a light switch about 50,000 years ago, only in Africa,” says Hopkinson. But the putatively modern traits accompanying the change, such as abstract art, the use of grindstones and elongated stone blades, and big game hunting began to accumulate in Africa from 300,000 years ago, he says. “It was the same in Europe with Neanderthals, there was a gradual accumulation of technology.” If Homo sapiens developed human traits gradually, then why not Neanderthals?”

The article goes on to provide an example of Neandertal’s cultural complexity when they developed a new form of stone tool by fusing façonnage and the débitage techniques.

I know Kelly, one of our old Anthropology.net bloggers had some experience studying Neandertal technology, known as Mousterian and Châtelperronian cultures, the latter is hypothesized to be synthesized from the incoming modern humane Aurignacian tradition. From my zooarchaeology background, there are other examples that document Neandertals are complex beings. The one example that comes to my mind is a 1998 finding of a possible bone flute found in a Neandertal site, the Divje babe I cave in the Idrijca river valley at Šebrelje.

Another hotly debated piece of Neandertal humanity, is the burial at Shanidar Cave, where archaeologists found pollen from flowers on and around the Neandertal individual. They interpreted it as a form or mourning, or paying respects, like we do too, but others contest that it’s just flowers or pollen that blew over the bodies.

We’ll probably never know what really happened in Shanidar, but I think we can all agree that Neandertals were not simple club doting ogres. On the contrary, they made complex stone tools and survived in harsh environments, subsiding on large game and sparse vegetation. But just how human were they, that may never be really answered.

About seven days ago I shared with you news about how a new Nascan skeleton shows signs of sacrifice, and this week I got some more sacrifice & archaeology to share with you. This time we’re moving up from Peru to what is now Mexico, where skeletons of two dozen children killed in an ancient mass sacrifice have been found in a tomb at a construction site in Tula, Mexico.

The chamber contained 24 skeletons of children believed to have been sacrificed between A.D. 950 and 1150, according to Luis Gamboa, an archaeologist at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

All but one of the children were between 5 to 15 years of age, and they were likely killed as an offering to the Toltec rain god Tlaloc, Gamboa said.

The Toltec, a pre-Aztec civilization that thrived from the 10th to 12th centuries, had not been previously thought to have sacrificed children.

But the ritualistic placement of the skeletons, cut marks on bones, and the presence of a figurine of Tlaloc led Gamboa to conclude the children had been sacrificed to bring rain.

“To try and explain why there are 24 bodies grouped in the same place, well, the only way is to think that there was a human sacrifice,” Gamboa told the Reuters news agency.

“You can see evidence of incisions, which make us think they possibly used sharp-edged instruments to decapitate them.”

While this maybe the first signs of evidence of the ritualistic sacrifice of children for the Toltec, it is not all too much of a surprising finding because cultures during this period in Central Mexico, such as the Aztecs, also sacrificed all sorts of people ritually. The Aztecs were profoundly influenced by the Toltecs, so the existence of Toltec child sacrifice is not at all surprising, as mentioned by Robert Carmack, an anthropologist at the University of Albany. Read more here.

Hat tip for Afarensis for finding the following paleoanthropology gem on the internet. In my opinion it is quite hard to find quality photos of fossil hominid skulls and this one can double as a mask to boot!

This fossil skull is commonly known as the Black Skull and identified as the species Australopithecus aethiopicus. From Footsteps Throughout Time,

Discovered near Lake Turkana, Africa, in 1985 by Richard Leakey, and reconstructed by Alan Walker, the Black Skull (KNM-WT 17000) is the most diagnostic specimen of Australopithecus aethiopicus ever found. It is referred to as the Black Skull because the manganese in the soil turned the bones black during mineralization. It has been dated to 2.5 million years ago.

The Black Skull is really fascinating because it shares early Australopithecus afarensis traits with later Australopithecus robustus traits, making it an unusual and important find. Because of its distinct morphology, the Black Skull is considered to be the earliest robust species to date. Like other australopithecines, A. aethiopicus may have had hominid characteristics such as the ability to walk bipedally.

And now the Black Skull!

In an interesting synthesis of contributions from architects, archaeologists and Roman historians, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities over at the University of Virginia, has announced that they have rebuilt Rome… digitally. They spent the last 10 years compiling architectural data, from model of the city kept at a museum, of 7,000 buildings to make a 3-D model of the city.

I got word of this thru BBC News, but Afarensis also broke the word after reading Science Daily‘s report on it.

The simulation takes place in AD320, which is said to be the city’s peak, when it had grown to a million inhabitants.

I’ve checked out the videos and the images, posted on the project’s website: RomeReborn 1.0 and they are impressive. A word of caution, before you jump on over to watch the videos… preemptively turn down your speakers’ volume. Take my advice, I practically blew out my ear drums. Aside from having incredible loud music, the videos and images, do exactly what the project’s purpose is to do… to represent Roman civilization at its height.

From a cultural heritage point of view, this is a cool project. It feels like a really specialized version of CyArk, a similar project aimed at creating 3D models of cultural heritage sites and archiving them on the internet before the real buildings begin to collapse and disappear.

Speaking of cultural heritage and important sites, I stumbled up on news that the World Monument Fund updated its list of the top 100 endangered sites for 2008 this week. Many of these sites are threatened by the effects of global warming & climate change, such as erosion, rising water tables, and pollutants in the air.

Bringing all this news together, it will be really cool if people begin to improve upon CyArk and RomeReborn technologies and start documenting and gathering data on these endangered sites before they disappear.

What’s happening to the Hadza, their forced displacement for the most absurd reason ever, is for the lack of a better term really messed up. I personally can’t help but think that it is inhumane to be selling their lands, homes, and lifestyles to Arabs who want to go safari where they used to live. And for the Tanzanian government to be such a massive sellout to their own people is a disgrace. Makes me wonder if they have any morals?

In reaction, some of us have blogged about it and also been trying to contact international agencies to help do something. We do not want to see the Hadza lose their land.

One of the best things we can do, I can think of at this time, is good ole arm waving and hollerin’ to bring attention to the matter. Since Christopher O’Brien’s excellent and emphatic post really transfered a personal attachment to this issue, I’ve submitted it to Digg to get more people alerted. I urge you to help start saving the Hadza and their culture by raising awareness to this violation and at least help digg up Chris’ post — it is the least we can do as anthropologists, in my humble opinion.

In this post, I will share with you two things. The first is what I consider a rather comprehensive series of skulls showing human evolution with a chimpanzee skull on the left end, and a modern human skull on the right. The intervening skulls belong to various fossil hominids, all arrayed in chronological order:

This image should be showing you how human evolution played out on the form of the primate skull. We retained forward facing eyes. The most glaring change I note is that from an ancestral ape you can see how our brains have been getting bigger and bigger and our teeth smaller and smaller.

I have some slight problems with this image, though. The biggest problem, and a common misconception I see in regards to understanding human evolution, is the whole we descended from chimpanzees train of thought. This image compounds it. The lineage of primates that have become the chimpanzees have been evolving independently of the human lineage. And because the non-human primate fossil record is rather spotty — it is hard to see these types of trends and transitions that we see in the above image happen along in chimpanzees.

Working on that note, this composition implies that our ancestral form was a chimp and once the chimp and human lines diverged then humans went through many natural selection events while chimps just remained stagnant as chimps. That’s wrong. Chimps and humans share a common ape ancestor.

Aside from using this image to clarify trends and misunderstandings in human evolution, the second thing I wanted to do with this post was warm you up to some good news in regards to my involvement on a physical anthropology project. That’s all I can say for now. I’ll be trickling posts like these to wet your appetite.

This morning, I was contacted by Lindsay, a promotions assistant to one of my favorite TV shows, NOVA, about the premiere of a new episode of Bone Diggers. She asked me to help spread the word about this upcoming show that may interest any osteology buffs out there.  

The show is the last of the series and is airing Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 8pm ET on PBS. It will document the search for the remains of one of the world’s most bizarre prehistoric creatures—a giant predatory marsupial lion called Thylacoleo. 

While I know this ain’t exactly anthropology (it’s more general paleontology)  it seems like it will give people a taste of what any sort of dig is like, and that’s why I’m sharing this with you. Furthermore, Lindsay tells me that they will also discuss the threat of fossil poachers which also plagues paleoanthropology and archaeology digs as a whole. The one direct anthropological topic that the show will discuss is what finally if human hunters were responsible in overwhelming giant Ice Age creatures.

Anyways, you should definately check out this last episode of Bone Diggers, and also become a regular viewer of NOVA if you aren’t already. Why? Because, NOVA is an example of quality television, and I always learn something when I watch it.

I wrote previously about mankind’s attempts to resurrect some faunal components of the Pleistocene, but here’s a story about mankind’s attempts to obliterate one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies that has survived (just about) to the present day. This from MSNBC…

…members of the dwindling Hadzabe tribe, who now number fewer than 1,500, say it is being unduly hastened by a United Arab Emirates royal family, which plans to use the tribal hunting land as a personal safari playground.

The deal between the Tanzanian government and Tanzania UAE Safaris Ltd. leases nearly 2,500 square miles of this sprawling, yellow-green valley near the storied Serengeti Plain to members of the royal family, who chose it after a helicopter tour.

Apparently, the Abu Dhabi royal family were concerned that hunting lands they already used nearby, had become overcrowded by too many members of the same royal family, who are evidently enthusiastic hunters. One detail that caught my eye was the way in which the royals surveyed their new sport-hunting domain from a helicopter – too bad they didn’t have the courage to explain direct to the Habadze why they are about to be denied access to what little they have left in the way of land resources. Here’s a look at one of the ways in which the Hadzabe, like many before them, have gradually been ground down… Read the rest of this entry »