Anthropology.net

In an upcoming publication in the Journal of Human Evolution will be an interesting study that should get all y’all dental anthropology buffs excited. It comes from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The study will use synchrotron microtomography, a form of visualization that was developed bypaleontologist Paul Tafforeau.

Like computed tomography, a technique we saw used in the analysis of the Chorapithecus teeth, synchrotron microtomography uses x-rays to create cross-sections of a 3D-object that can be used to recreate a virtual model without destroying the original model. The team is applying this technique to able to see inside the teeth of humans and Neandertals to reveal tiny daily growth lines without any damage to these invaluable fossils. They’re doing it in hopes of resolving the long-standing debate over developmental differences between Neanderthals and our Homo sapiens.

They are specifically analyzing the two Neandertals from Le Moustier and Krapina against to early Homo sapiens from Qafzeh and Jebel Irhoud. It should be a really interesting study.

I’ll keep you posted.

PNAS finally published one of the two sets of ecological explanations for the Out-of-Africa theory in “East African megadroughts between 135 and 75 thousand years ago and bearing on early-modern human origins.” The second publication “Ecological consequences of early Late Pleistocene megadroughts in tropical Africa” also came out earlier this week.

If you didn’t catch this the first time I brought it up in September, the quick one sentence summary is these studies focused on evidence of ancient megadroughts from sediments cored from the bottom of Lake Malawi and comparing those findings with similar records from Lakes Tanganyika and Bosumtwi.

After a whole lot of logistical challenges, the team extracted a series of cores, some as much as 1247 feet (380 meters) long that spanned  hundreds of thousands of years. Cores like these give a high level of resolution into the prehistoric ecology. Often oceanographers and climatologists use cores like these to study the diversity of plankton, aquatic invertebrates, etc. to reconstruct the flora and fauna at particular point in time. The authors found indicators of drought present in the cores from sampling species of invertebrates and plankton that only live in shallow, turbid, algae-rich waters — a situation very different from the deep, clearwater lake that Malawi is now.

This would have been a significant change to East Africa’s ecological make up… What was once tropical Africa was extraordinarily dry about 100,000 years ago, facilitating the migration of humans out of the Africa.

I want to thank Kambiz for the kind introduction. For those of you not familiar with my name, I had a previous book that addressed issues of interest to the anthropology community: Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It (Public Affairs, 2000). It was generally received well, with good reviews in The New York Times, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Scientific American, among others, but it certainly came in for fire from cultural anthropologists. I committed the biggest atrocity known to modern cultural anthropologists and post-modernists: finding genetic legitimacy in the folk concept of “race.”

The research into “race” has evolved significantly in seven years with sophisticated haplotype, such as one by studies by Neil Risch and Esteban Burchard. Humanity is in the early stages of a biotechnological revolution that is transforming our understanding of the nature of human nature––the commonalities that bind us, but also the differences that confer uniqueness in individuals and often distinguish one group from another. We are far from understanding either the genetic makeup or the origins of complex traits, from behavior to intelligence. Because of the blur of culture and the environment, we may never be able to do so completely. But we are getting closer, and this is not just fanciful speculation.

Our collective challenge is what we do with these nuanced notions of race and racial stereotypes. Armand Marie Leroi, the respected evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London has written:

“Race is merely a shorthand to enable us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences. But it is shorthand that seems to be needed. One of the more painful spectacles of modern science is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between ‘ethnic groups’.”

I’d appreciate some feedback from readers of this site.