Anthropology.net

Many thanks to Amanda at Sherd Nerd for hosting this latest edition, and it’s good once again to see a good and impressive set of contributions from far and wide – my advice would be to head on over, and have yourself a good read.

The next edition of FSH, the twentieth, is being hosted by Afarensis, on August 1st, so there’s plenty of time to read the current edition and write something for the next.

For those interested in submitting relevant material, Martin at Aardvarchaeology is hosting the next Carnival of the Godless, on Sunday, June 22nd. (TJ)

image of Karnak from here

News from Abu Dhabi, where the recent find of some Levallois stone tools has pushed back the earliest known human occupation of the region from 7,500 years to somewhere between 35,000 and 150,000 years. I assume from these dates that the people responsible were either Neanderthals, or else early modern humans who were not part of the putative African exodus of around 50,000 bp, but who had either left Africa long before, or to go down the multi-regional route, humans that had evolved in Asia from Homo erectus populations dating to the Middle or Lower Palaeolithic, although this last idea is currently out of favour with the main body of palaeo-anthropological opinion. Here are some details of the finds, made by Dr Walid Yasin, manager of the archaeology division at the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage…

He (Dr. Walid Hasin) said that a number of flint cores and flakes of Levallois technique were collected from the site. Artifacts made of this technique were first discovered in the nineteenth century at the archaeological site of Levallois, near Paris.

Similar artifacts have been found in Europe, Africa and Asia. In the Near East, they are usually associated with Neanderthal man.

The dating of Abu Dhabi artifacts is, however, estimated to fall in the Middle Palaeolithic (150,000-35,000 years ago), according to Dr Ganim Wahida, a pre-historian from Cambridge University, UK, who specialises in this period.

“The significance of this major discovery lies in the fact that it alters our understanding of the beginning of first human activities in Abu Dhabi which seem to go back to the Old Stone Age, as opposed to the New Stone Age, some 7,500 years ago,” Yasin added. Read the rest of this entry »

I just spotted this link to the trailer, 10,000 BC, over at Kris Hirst’s webpage at About.com: Archaeology, about which she comments as follows…

“A new movie is apparently due out in 2008 called 10,000 BC, which might be a kind of interesting movie to see,except that apparently humans were into iron metallurgy and sophisticated stone masonry back then, which we actually weren’t until several thousands of years later. Oh well. It’s probably almost as good without Raquel Welch in a furry bikini.”

This synopsis at Rope of Silicon gives a brief idea of what we can expect to feast our eyes upon next March…

It was a time when man and beast were untamed and the mighty mammoth roamed the earth. A time when ideas and beliefs were born that forever shaped mankind. 10,000 B.C. follows a young hunter (Steven Strait) on his quest to lead an army across a vast desert, battling saber tooth tigers and prehistoric predators as he unearths a lost civilization and attempts to rescue the woman he loves (Camilla Belle) from an evil warlord determined to possess her.

I for one will be waiting to catch this latest offering from the people who brought us, amongst others, ‘Indepence Day‘- although it appears unlikely we’re going to be getting much in the way of a realistic reconstruction of life back then, it will interesting to see how much further we have come since “One Million Years BC“, made back in the 1966, a remake of the 1940 original. If they manage to avoid some or all of the clichés that usually accompany stories of this kind, maybe it will be a good film in its own right, but I guess many will writing this film off before it even hits the screens. A recent film with prehistoric connections which I, and my 11 y’old son enjoyed a lot more than I thought we would was ‘A Night At The Museum‘ (TJ)

“10,000 B.C” is due out 7th March, 2008, here’s a link to the main site

see also: Mammoth Bone Dwellings

and: Don’s Maps – Mezhiric – Mammoth Camp

Image: Painting in red on the front of mammoth skull found at the entrance to one of the huts at the mammoth hunter’s settlement at Mezhirich in the former Soviet Union. It is thought that the red design may represent the flames and sparks of a fire.

Photo: K. Sklenar, ‘Hunters of the Stone Age’

Nothing like a good lurid headline on which to end the day, and to give us with an apt example, the Guardian has conjured up this gem to furnish their report on the mysterious Bili apes. For many years the stuff of legend, the apes, named for the local area, were eventually observed in the flesh, in once instance chomping away on the carcass of a leopard. This, if true, is surprising enough, but not as odd as the idea that it may even have killed its feline prey, a behaviour never before reported in apes, but corresponds to rumour that has persisted locally for some time. There doesn’t appear to be any explanation of how this killing of a leopard by one or more apes might have been accomplished, or whether or not they could have made and/or used weapons, such as rocks, or trapped it in some fiendish device. The Bili or Bondo Mystery Apes are to be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and are described thus in Wikipedia…

The Bili Ape is massive by chimpanzee standards. Heights can exceed 5 feet (about Gorilla height), their skulls are larger than chimp skulls, and their footprints are larger even than gorillas. Unfortunately, there have been relatively few detailed observations of the Bili Ape and no thorough examination of either remains or a living Bili Ape in captivity. They are also various(ly) described as having silver backs and even snouted faces (uncommon).

The locals in Bili refer to Bili Apes as “Lion Killers”. While chimps tend to stay in the trees and make good prey for big cats, Bili Apes nest on the ground like gorillas and have been reported to hunt lions. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several reports out today, including this at Science Daily, discussing recent research by Professor David Raichlen et al, in a paper called “Chimpanzee locomotor energetics and the origin of human bipedalism”, published in the July 16th early edition of PNAS (abstract)…

Bipedal walking is evident in the earliest hominins [Zollikofer CPE, Ponce de Leon MS, Lieberman DE, Guy F, Pilbeam D, et al. (2005) Nature remains unknown. Here, we analyze walking energetics and biomechanics for adult chimpanzees and humans to investigate the long-standing hypothesis that bipedalism reduced the energy cost of walking compared with our ape-like ancestors [Rodman PS, McHenry HM (1980) 434:755-759], but why our unique two-legged gait evolvedAm J Phys Anthropol work on juvenile chimpanzees [Taylor CR, Rowntree VJ (1973) 52:103-106]. Consistent with previousScience 179:186-187], we find that bipedal and quadrupedal walking costs are not significantly different in our sample of adult chimpanzees.

However, a more detailed analysis reveals significant differences in bipedal and quadrupedal cost in most individuals, which are masked when subjects are examined as a group. Furthermore, human walking is 75% less costly than both quadrupedal and bipedal walking in chimpanzees. Variation in cost between bipedal and quadrupedal walking, as well as between chimpanzees and humans, is well explained by biomechanical differences in anatomy and gait, with the decreased cost of human walking attributable to our more extended hip and a longer hindlimb. Analyses of these features in early fossil hominins, coupled with analyses of bipedal walking in chimpanzees, indicate that bipedalism in early, ape-like hominins could indeed have been less costly than quadrupedal knucklewalking.

That’s a huge saving of energy, and it might be asked why chimps haven’t also adopted an upright gait, as they would presumably also feel the benefit in their daily energy reserves. Hopefully, more research like this, but conducted across the entire range of Pan, will throw further light on why other apes haven’t also become fully bipedal.

One consequence of standing upright is that it enables the human body to lose or dissipate heat much more efficiently, and I’m tempted to wonder whether it was factors such as these that actually allowed early hominids, dwelling closer to the Equator, to think more clearly in their daily travails – that old saying about ‘thinking with cool heads’ comes to mind – so maybe they found it easier to make decisions and think in innovative ways, over the long-term, when they began to spend a great deal more time standing upright. Read the rest of this entry »