Anthropology.net

Remember when I brought up the news that Stanford’s anthropology departments were merging back? It wasn’t too long ago, maybe two weeks or so? I bring this up because The Stanford Daily is running a juicy column on the tensions the merger has caused. Most of the complaints are coming from the bio-arch side, such as John Rick and James Fox. Here’s a rather scathing comment from John Rick,

“The administration has shown itself to be idiotic in the way they’ve approached the whole thing…”

The piece mentions how the faculty is still struggling to understand the motivation behind the merger of the two departments, and if you read the comments, so are some of the students. What’s really curious is how James Ferguson was chosen as the new chair of the Anthropology Department. Ever so outspoken Rick comments on it,

“In this case, there were no faculty consulted, and the chair was appointed for five years, which is an unusually long time.”

Well, I wish Stanford the best of luck. It seems like some people gotta just suck it up and deal with all the shuffling. I must say, I also don’t understand why there was such urgency to merge the two back together either. They were working great as separate entities.

FOXP2 is thought to be a language gene. It is highly conserved in most mammals but in humans there are two unique mutations in the protein caused by nucleotide substitutions at positions 911 and 977 of exon 7. It is thought to be a language gene because humans who have one FOXP2 copy have speech impediments and deficiencies in orofacial movement.

Now with all the progress in sequencing the genome of Neandertals, it seems like some anthropologists and biologists from Max Planck and institutions in France and Spain got curious about finding out the whether or not Neandertals have the same two mutuations as modern humans do in their FOXP2 gene.

Their work has been published today, in Current Biology under the following title, “The Derived FOXP2 Variant of Modern Humans Was Shared with Neandertals.” Thanks to one of our readers, Hugo, who sent me this paper I’ve had a chance to read this outstanding paper. Now, if you’ve been keeping track of the Neandertal genome project, I know what you’re thinking, “What about the inconsistencies with Neandertal sequences!?!”

Well the authors, Johannes Krause and team, were very careful about this from the beginning. They made sure the two bones from El Sidrón cave in Asturias were extracted under sterile condition. They also amplified the FOXP2 gene using Neandertal specific primers. That was done so that little to no modern human genes shoulda been targeted for amplification.

After a whole lot of cycles, sequencing, and alignment, the team found out that the Neandertals carried FOXP2 that was identical to that of present-day humans in the only two positions that differ between human and chimpanzee. Speicifcally, at position 911 on exon 7 of the Neandertal FOXP2, threonine is swapped for aspartic acid just like humans and also at position 977 of the Neandertal FOXP2, arginine replaces serine… just like in humans. Sending the samples to other lab to reproduce the experiments yielded the same results.

While the authors are a bit cautious, saying that the whole genome of the Neandertal will provide much more resolution in comparing FOXP2 genes, I do want to point out that this new finding messes up the results of Pääbo, who showed that the mutations in FOXP2 in modern humans were very recent, maybe less than 200,000 years ago in 2002. The authors kinda sorta challenge Pääbo’s conclusion,

“Leaving out the unlikely scenario of gene flow [between the two lineages], this establishes that these changes were present in the common ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals. The date of the emergence of these genetic changes therefore must be older than that estimated with only extant human diversity data, thus demonstrating the utility of direct evidence from Neandertal DNA sequences for understanding recent modern human evolution.”

So the common ancestor of Neandertals had this unique allele of FOXP2. Does that mean they had language capabilities? Does this mean Neandertals had language capabilities… I’d sure hope so because at this point in human evolution, erectines like Neandertals and their culture were widespread. Their ability to communicate in some higher form or another was crucial for their ubiquity in Europe and Asia.

So I’ve been contacted by a press agent for Pop!Tech, an annual ‘thought’ leadership summit convening next week in Camden Maine. Seems like there’s a lot of these sorts of summits happening. Normally I’d blow off sharing this news with you because this site is not a free for all posterboard of conference promotions and rarely do any of these conferences have a tangent to anthropology.

But, because Nina Jablonski is gonna be giving a talk, I thought I’d share it with you.

If you’re awake, you can view her Pop!Tech talk on Saturday, October 20, 2007 between 9 and 10:30 a.m. EST over at their live webcast. Also you can submit questions to the stage by emailing questions@poptech.org.

Right on the coat tails of Jon’s post on discussing race comes an interview with Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a really distinguished and now emeritus population geneticist from Stanford, in Nature News. His work has been very controversial because he has consistently resisted the notion that ‘race’ has any useful biological meaning.

His work has been outlined because of the “inappropriateness of [his use of] predefined racial categories [to sort] genetic diversity.” And his ambitious proposition to start the Human Genome Diversity Project was accused of “cultural insensitivity, neocolonialism, and biopiracy.” There are a lot more criticism of him floating out there, even Bill Poser in Language Log nailed Cavalli-Sforza’s take on linguistics.

He’s been outright labeled as a racist, and in this Nature News interview he defends himself,

“How did you feel about being accused of racism?
Well, many mistakes are made and that was a very curious one. I’d argued for decades that the concept of ‘race’ defined by external characteristics — such as skin colour, size variations or facial fat — is nonsense. These visible characteristics evolved under natural selection, mostly to cope with local environments, and have no deeper base.

I didn’t get angry or depressed, I only regretted how much time the objections cost to the project development.”

Similarly, Erika Check Hayden writes in Nature News on how similar we are on a base by base level, but we seem different in so many ways in phenotype. At the very end Erika drops a link to Pardis Sabeti, who is lead author of a new publication using HapMap project extensively to identify specific genes linked to human diversity.

Here’s the information of on the paper, “Genome-wide detection and characterization of positive selection in human populations,”

“With the advent of dense maps of human genetic variation, it is now possible to detect positive natural selection across the human genome. Here we report an analysis of over 3 million polymorphisms from the International HapMap Project Phase 2 (HapMap2). We used ‘long-range haplotype’ methods, which were developed to identify alleles segregating in a population that have undergone recent selection, and we also developed new methods that are based on cross-population comparisons to discover alleles that have swept to near-fixation within a population. The analysis reveals more than 300 strong candidate regions. Focusing on the strongest 22 regions, we develop a heuristic for scrutinizing these regions to identify candidate targets of selection. In a complementary analysis, we identify 26 non-synonymous, coding, single nucleotide polymorphisms showing regional evidence of positive selection. Examination of these candidates highlights three cases in which two genes in a common biological process have apparently undergone positive selection in the same population:LARGE and DMD, both related to infection by the Lassa virus, in West Africa;SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, both involved in skin pigmentation, in Europe; and EDAR and EDA2R, both involved in development of hair follicles, in Asia.”

Seems like a very interesting read. Hat tip to Razib.

Bernard Wood who you may know already, and if you don’t he’s a colleague of Richard Leakey and one of the most published paleoanthropologists out there, will be talking at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Saturday, October 27th, 2007. It will be a free lecture.

The title of his presentation, “Recent Advances in Our Understanding of Human Evolution will be at 5 p.m. in room 270 of the Hale Science Building. Wood will also be giving a talk the day prior, on October 26th at 4 p.m. in Hale 270. He’ll be discussing the problems with human evolutionary studies.

I really wish I could make it out to Boulder, Colorado next week, but it doesn’t seem like it will happen. If anyone wants to front my airfare, I gladly go! But realistically, if any readers of this blog goto University of Colorado at Boulder or live nearby, I highly recommend you go there. If you do end up attending, please share your thoughts, photos, etc. of the talk with us.

I just mentioned that I’ve been out of the loop. Aside from banging my head against the desk over Aaron Filler’s paper, I’ve also been developing the framework to a database of hominin fossil remains. I’d like to share it with you in this post. I’ve creatively named the project, Hominin Database. I coulda gone with a much more elaborate name… but in this age of search engine optimization and human readable formats, I figured having hominin and database will get people to what they wanna see.

I’m developing this project because paleoanthropology desperately needs a public repository of fossil remains. And by no means am I the first. People have tried to do it in the past and have failed for some reason or another. Some were just poorly executed, with confusing user interfaces and strange data structuring. Others weren’t kept up. Others were closed access. With more and more fossils coming out of the ground, we need to get something up there fast before we fall really far behind.

The site is pretty easy to use and has a web 2.0 feel. I’ve got Google Maps going on as well as a dynamic time line which are unique ways to browse the database. If there are 3-D views of the fossils, such as CT scans, I plan to make those available. As of right now I’m not planning on placing any credit other than the authors of the primary publication to each fossil because I know how particular paleoanthropologists are about their fossils. Hopefully this will facilitate some community growth.

Anyways, enough cheer leading… there only 5 fossils currently and a handful of known bugs with the site, mostly formatting issues because of browser inconsistencies. The time feature doesn’t seem to show data in geochronological order… which is something I have to fix. And there’s also some minor problems with the map view too. Basically the site is still in ‘alpha’ not yet ‘beta’ and not even close to being production.

Besides introducing this pet project, I wanted to extend and invitation out to people to help propagate the site with fossils. If you want to help, please comment here or shoot me an email and I’ll get in touch with you. The submission form is very straight forward. If you don’t or can’t help submit fossils, please give me some criticism on what works, what doesn’t, etc.

I’ve been under the radar for several days.

I’ve been struggling to understand this paper, “Homeotic Evolution in the Mammalia: Diversification of Therian Axial Seriation and the Morphogenetic Basis of Human Origins,” from Aaron Filler of Harvard’s Anthropology department. All I can really make sense of it is that there’s a probability that bipedalism originated way earlier than we think right now. And that chimpanzees, gorillas, and the like, were mutants that reverted back to a more primitive primate body plan.

Filler suggests this because of a transformed hominiform type of lumbar spine found in Morotopithecus bishopi, an extinct hominoid species that lived in Uganda more than 21 million years ago. In the paper he compares human vertebra to the Morotopithecus, which both show an absence of the styloid process and relocation of the lumbar transverse process. Because of this transformation, he suggests Morotopithecus, along with three upright bipedal species from the Early Miocene, were bipedal long before any Australopithecine.

His analysis is very thorough but it is honestly hard to accept. If you wanna read more about Morotopithecus, you maybe interested in this, “Postcranial functional morphology of Morotopithecus bishopi, with implications for the evolution of modern ape locomotion.”

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.