Anthropology.net

Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, is announcing the discovery of a very old hominid footprint found in the Western Desert of Egypt, near Siwa.

BBC News broke this news to me, but Yahoo News is also covering it.

“This could go back about two million years,” antiquities council chief Zahi Hawass was quoted by Reuters as saying. However Khaled Saad, director of pre-history at the council, said it could be older still…

Scientists are now conducting carbon dating tests on plants in the mud where the footprint is in order to pinpoint its precise age.

Unfortunately, I can’t confirm if the photos of a footprint circulating around on some blogs are the actual footprints discovered. Rather than misinform y’all, I’ll have to sit tight until official photographs of them come from Hawass.

And also, unlike Hawass, I’m not jumping up for joy saying this, “could be the most important discovery in Egypt.” The significance of these footprints, if they really are older than two million years ago, is pretty outstanding. These footprints, along with the ones found at Laetoli, could be further evidence of early hominids walked upright before large brains had evolved…

But, I can’t help but wonder if the carbon dating will even work? The current maximum radiocarbon age limit lies in the range between 58,000 and 62,000 years (approximately 10 half-lives). This limit is encountered when the radioactivity of the residual ¹⁴C in a sample is too low to be distinguished from the background radiation. Maybe another dating technique would be more useful?

I love little archaeology news bits like the following, because such findings are like a time machine to me. They give us a window into how humans lived daily life back in the day.

The story starts off with Sarah Pickin, a student who was helping excavate a site called Kierikkikangas in Finland. While digging, she found a lump of birch bark tar complete with neolithic tooth prints! The image to your right is the actual chewing gum she found. The birch bark tar contains phenols, which are antiseptic compounds.

University of Derby Professor Trevor Brown comments on the finding,

“It is generally believed that neolithic people found that by chewing this stuff if they had gum infections it helped to treat the condition. It’s particularly significant because well-defined tooth imprints were found on the gum which Sarah discovered.”

What is even more cool about this finding is that when I was in Ethiopia, and we would come across tree sap while trekking. The Afar would chew it as if it were chewing gum.

A bit of ethnoarchaeology for ya.

We even made a song about it, “Elemma mira taloleh,” which translates to, “Elemma chews gum.” We would sing this as a mantra. I tried the tree sap gum and it was delicious.

Anyways, I’m getting off topic. Sarah Pickin also found a,

“beautiful four centimeter long worked slate arrow which is from the so-called “Typical Comb Ceramic period” 3500-4000 BC.”

Here’s a photo of her holding up the arrow head.

From Slashdot, is news of new upcoming science 2.0 hotness called SciVee. Think of it as YouTube for Science. It comes by way of a partnership between the National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center.

This is such an awesome idea, and I hope it will revolutionize the way we communicate science.

Why is it such a good idea? Well, in the past, I’ve uploaded science videos, such as footage of chimpanzees doing what chimps do, to accompany reviews of research papers directly to YouTube. When I uploaded the video I underestimated the impact actually seeing a chimpanzee in the unique behavior that was documented in the research paper.  It now has over 80,000 views and two comments shy of breaking 200.

Having this sort of multimedia available helps people digest the otherwise dense content much more easily,

“Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee‘s creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues and to the general public.”

Personally, I learn material much better when it comes from the mouth of one the authors of a paper. Most often, no one knows the content of a paper better than the people who wrote it, so to have an author explain their research in normal lingo is a phenomenal concept. I don’t know why anyone hasn’t jumped on an idea like this before.

But SciVee has some flaws that I see will hinder its growth. It is yet another social network to sign up for and yet another one to keep track of. I recently withdrew from over a dozen networks because they weren’t growing fast enough for me to be a part of.

Why founders of SciVee couldn’t fold this sort of service into an already established technology like YouTube, I don’t know. YouTube already has a massive userbase. A community of that size could not only expose videos and generate more discussion, but more people can be potentially educated, as opposed to a small, not-yet-cohesive community.

Furthermore, SciVee videos are currently kinda sorta proprietary in that I currently have no easy way to embed videos into blogs, and that will greatly determine how much I/we will use this service. Once SciVee understands the importance of blogs in communicating and distributing research, that may change… but for now, it is lacking a big feature that helped make YouTube, Google Video, etc. the big multimedia powerhouses they are now.

But I totally welcome this sort of innovation, especially as someone interested in the intersection of technology and anthropology. I hope some of the big names in anthropology start embracing new technology like this to distribute their research, thoughts, ideas. We’ll see if they do.

Cannibalism is a pretty hot topic in three of the sub-disciplines of anthropology. Physical anthropologists and forensic ones love to find evidence of cannibalism in human and hominin remains. Why? Because it rocks our understanding of ‘normal’ human behavior. One example that comes to mind is White’s book about cannibalistic practices 1,000 years ago in Mancos. Another are the remains of Neandertal long bones from Krapina, one of the largest Neandertal sites, which show human bones were broken to eat the bone marrow.

Cultural anthropologists and archaeologists are also way into cannibalism. Cannibalism is often a defining cultural practice. When in 1878, a Fijian minister and three teachers, were killed and eaten by Tolai tribespeople on the Gazelle Peninsula of Papua New Guinea, that area of the world was stamped with the label of being home to blood thirsty human flesh eaters. Once cultural anthropologists flocked over there to study the people, they understood that tribesmen were carrying out longstanding practices with people they saw as enemies. The whole relative aspect of it surfaced later much later.

But now the descendants of Papua New Guinea cannibals, those who killed and ate four Fijian missionaries 130 years ago, have just apologized, as if it means anything.

Fiji’s High Commissioner to PNG, Ratu Isoa Tikoca accepted the apologies at a reconciliation ceremony near Rabaul in PNG’s East New Britain Province yesterday in front of thousands of people.

“We at this juncture are deeply touched and wish you the greatest joy of forgiveness as we finally end this record disagreement,” Ratu Tikoca said.

What are your thoughts on apologizing on matters like this? Does it mean anything to you?

Yesterday and today have been slow days as far as anthropology news.

But no worries, I’ve been scouring the internets for content and came across Mauricio Antón’s portfolio of paleontological illustrations. He’s drawn up some entertaining but run-of-the-mill representations of humans and their ancestors, such as these Ergasters on a hunt, this antecessor collage, and a reconstruction the Bodo cranium into a portrait of a hominin.

But this family portrait of Atapuerca humans is not a normal paleoanthropological illustration. It is hilarious. I love how he took something modern, like a family photo, and made applied it to prehistoric humans. Made my day.

This Science paper just came out from my alma mater, UCSC, and it should be a very interesting read:

Human Genome Ultraconserved Elements Are Ultraselected

Ultraconserved elements in the human genome are defined as stretches of at least 200 base pairs of DNA that match identically with corresponding regions in the mouse and rat genomes. Most ultraconserved elements are noncoding and have been evolutionarily conserved since mammal and bird ancestors diverged over 300 million years ago. The reason for this extreme conservation remains a mystery. It has been speculated that they are mutational cold spots or regions where every site is under weak but still detectable negative selection. However, analysis of the derived allele frequency spectrum shows that these regions are in fact under negative selection that is much stronger than that in protein coding genes.

Oh yes, this new transposon piece is also intriguing. I guess I gots reading to do.

By way of the Discovery Channel, I’ve got some cool Egyptology news to share with you. The Brooklyn Museum is planning to extensively analyze its collections of Egyptian mummies in the coming weeks. One of the first mummies they analyzed, known as Demetrios, died sometime around 94-100 AD, and is already revealing some interesting results. To your right is a reconstruction of a portrait of Demetrios. He was excavated from a Roman cemetery in Hawara, Egypt in 1911.

In the photo below, you see Demetrios being prepped for the analysis, X-ray fluorescence. X-ray fluorescence exposes objects and materials to short wavelength beams of energy that excite atoms and cause them to release radiation. This radiation has energy characteristics of the atoms within the object, so the technique helps researchers to determine what chemicals might be present.

After the rays bombarded Demetrios, the red decorated linens you see in the photo that wrap him, matched the chemical composition of lead from Spain’s Rio Tinto region, known for over 5,000 years of silver mining. Museum conservator Lisa Bruno comments,

Spain either exported raw lead, a by product of silver, to be made into Spanish paint before making its way to Egypt…Imported materials would have been hard to come by and therefore probably expensive, so Bruno and her team now speculate that Demetrios was a very wealthy individual. “Red shroud mummies,” of which Demetrios is an example, are exceptionally rare, with only 10 known to exist in the entire world.

Only males received the full red treatment, with females having just touches of red on their more multicolored linen wrappings.

Red shroud mummies have portraits painted on wood that were placed over the wrapped bodies. Although Demetrios additionally had the number “89″ painted on the wood, a CT scan revealed he likely was in his 50′s at the time of his death. Bruno said his portrait does indeed look like that of a distinguished gent in his 50′s.

Lawrence Boxt, director of cardiac MRI’s and CT scans at New York’s North Shore University Hospital, supports the theory that Demetrios was wealthy because he “died a quiet, natural death” with little wear and tear on his bones and body, which otherwise would have suggested a typical laborer’s life.

Boxt even thinks slaves or other workers might have carried around Demetrios, due to the relatively pristine and unused nature of his bones.

This study is pretty fascinating. Using high tech methods, archaeologists reveal not only how widespread trade was throughout the Roman empire, but also give a little bit of insight to how the world worked 2,000 years ago.

For those of us into prehistoric art, the University of Bristol is running a press release announcing a possible Palaeolithic engraving discovered at Cheddar Caves and Gorge by members of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society (UBSS).

The engraving, appears to be an outline drawing of a mammoth. The image on your right, is all I have to show off of it, and it really doesn’t look like anything other than the side of a cave to me. It is estimated to be about 13,000 years old.

Even more fascinating is the claim that the engraving technique of this drawing at the Cheddar caves mimics famous French and Spanish decorated caves.

From the press release,

The team, led by Graham Mullan and Linda Wilson, has carried out investigations in a number of the Cheddar Gorge caves. The latest find is of a possibly late Upper Palaeolithic engraving in a small alcove in the main showcave, Gough’s Cave.

Graham Mullan said: “Unlike our previous finds of abstract designs in the caves in this area, this is a clear representation of an animal. We are more confident that at least part of it was humanly made and the subject material places it firmly in the latter part of the last Ice Age. Finds of mammoth ivory of that age have been made in this cave in the past indicating that these animals would have been known to the inhabitants.

“Although the cave has been studied by many archaeologists, this engraving has previously escaped notice because it is quite difficult to make out. For this reason, a careful study has been made and this announcement was delayed until we were reasonably confident of the attribution.”

Bob Smart of Cheddar Caves and Gorge said: “We welcome yet another indication of how important the Cheddar Caves were to our ancestors 13,000 years ago, and hope this will broaden the general understanding of early British life. We were intrigued when Graham and Linda first suggested this project, and are delighted that they have brought it to a successful conclusion both in Gough’s Cave and in Long Hole. We congratulate them on the persistence and perceptivity with which they have brought to light evidence which had been overlooked for a century.”

The most current issue of the Four Stone Hearth is up at Archaeolog, and I’ll be honest… I’m a little curious about what’s going on with our anthropology blogging carnival.

This current issue has six entries, five from the same blog, and I know there shoulda been at least one more post. I submitted an entry on August 12th, specifically the Ilert fossil review, but it is not in the current issue.

I don’t know why it didn’t show up.

Maybe my Aug. 12th email with the submission got marked as spam? So, I commented on the Archaeolog post asking to see if they got my submission. It has been a long while since I submitted my comment, but my comment hasn’t shown up. Either the authors haven’t gotten around to approve my comment or they decided to moderate it.

This whole situation is no big deal really. However, I can’t help but to wonder if something fishy is going on? I hope not. When I organized the Four Stone Hearth, I didn’t plan for our anthropology blog carnival to be selective.

Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, is actually no stranger to me. She has linked up Anthropology.net before, and ever seen then I’ve subscribed to her site’s RSS feeds.

When I caught news that the New York Times is running a book review of her new title, I was intrigued. The book seems more expansive than just a run down on current lingustic studies. It integrates anthropology, genetics, neuroscience, and much more. Here’s some excerpts that should spark some interest,

“…In the last decade or so, language evolution has eased toward the front burner, attracting the attention of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and geneticists. Their search is the subject of “The First Word,” Christine Kenneally’s lucid survey of this expanding field, dedicated to solving what she calls “the hardest problem in science today.”

…One nut to crack is the nature of language itself, and here Ms. Kenneally introduces the unignorable presence in virtually every linguistic debate, Noam Chomsky. Mr. Chomsky and his many adherents regard language as a uniquely human endowment, centered in a specific area of the brain…. Animals, in this view, do not have language, nor do they think. The reasons that humans speak, or how language might have made its way to the human brain, do not matter. It may simply be that in a linguistic version of the big bang, a language mutation suddenly appeared, and that was that.

This view now faces many rivals… language evolved to meet the need for communication. Ms. Kenneally ushers onto the stage researchers who have discovered that many animal species possess language like skills previously unimagined and, without benefit of syntax or words, have a complicated inner life. They believe that the study of animal language and gestures could shed light on a possible protolanguage stage in human development.

The idea that language is restricted to a specific area of the brain has been more or less discarded. Brain researchers now believe that language tasks are assigned throughout the brain. Moreover, some linguists now believe that language is a two-way street. It’s not something emanating from the brain of a communicating human. It actually changes the processes of the brain.”

The New York Times favorably reviews her book, but I must disclaim that she is a freelancer who frequents the publication so it maybe a bit biased. Much more objective reviews, such as the two on Amazon.com currently, also favorable review it. I for one will try and get my hands on the book soon, I’ve queued it up on my wishlist.

Related Anthropology.net content, EHL Linguists try to identify a time where there was only one language.