Anthropology.net

I accidentally forgot to leave out some very critical drama surrounding the Palau findings that I just reported on. Next Monday, March 17th 2008, the National Geographic Channel will be running a documentary titled, “Mystery Skulls of Palau.” The National Geographic Channel is funded by the National Geographic Society, the very group that Lee Berger sought out to fund the excavation of the Palau fossils after he discovered them.

Rex Dalton, of Nature News, has looked into this issue a bit more. Dalton, if you don’t know, has been reporting for Nature News on paleontology, anthropology and the like for almost ten years. He’s also specialized in figuring out scientific misconduct. In his report on the Palau findings, “Pacific ‘dwarf’ bones cause controversy,” Dalton’s covers most of the basics that is running in the press but he’s also got some juicy bits about how Berger’s irked some government officials in Palau.

“The new claim was first disclosed in a commercial movie produced by the National Geographic Society, which partially funded Berger’s work. Although the movie is not scheduled for broadcast in the United States until 17 March, it was shown in Asia on 1 March, before the journal publication, drawing criticism.

In Palau, some officials and traditional leaders are concerned that sacred burial sites were exploited for movie-making rather than scientific purposes. Adalbert Eledui, the state resource manager who oversees the region, describes the movie as “unscientific” and says he should have had notice before it was broadcast to protect the sites from an expected influx of visitors. Now, he says, resource managers may need to build cages to restrict access to the caves….

…Most of the island’s chiefs had never visited the caves before last week, because Palauans typically avoid burial sites. Palau’s paramount chief Yutaka Gibbons told Nature that he had heard about the bones from people talking in a restaurant about the movie. “This shows disrespect to our people, country and laws,” he says. “Before they did anything, they should have sat with us.” Berger says he believed that traditional leaders had been briefed on his work in the caves.”

Seems like this is unfolding into a perfect example of how to not conduct paleoanthropological research in another country. I just don’t get it how anthropologists, people trained in the study of humans, can often disregard notifying officials and representatives of the government about what is ultimately their fossils. It seems common courtesy to inform Palauans with a simple memo,

“Hey, we found some interesting bones in your backyard. You may wanna know about it. Can we work together with you on this?”

I can only speculate that the story behind the Palau findings went something like this… Berger was kayaking around these Micronesian islands and stumbled upon these findings. He saw an opportunity, and he sought out a big institution with big money to fund his work. The National Geographic Society of course, didn’t hesitate to fund Berger. They would love to make some sensational headlines, especially if these 25 or so individuals were hobbits like Flores. The Society mobilized to make a documentary out of this and all along the people of Palau were left out of the loop.

This isn’t the first time that the National Geographic Society has been entangled in a mess like this. I can think of the drama surrounding the hasty excavation of Selam as one of the more prominent examples of when external interests pushed aside doing good science. Also, the questionable dating of Omo I and II, funded also by the Society is ill-received by many. In this situation, as outlined by the quotes from chieftains and Palauan government officials, critical information wasn’t passed down to the people who these bones belong too.

Tim White shared a comment about this problem in Dalton’s writeup,

“This looks like a classic example of what can go wrong when science and the review process are driven by popular media.”

To which Berger defended,

“he didn’t know the movie was scheduled to premiere before the journal report came out.”

Bollocks. I don’t buy it. It is no secret that Berger was bed fellows with the National Geographic Society in getting these bones out of the ground, so why didn’t he nor the Society tell Palauans about this? It seems awfully hegemonic and disrespectful to not give the people of Palau a bit of a heads up! Don’t you think?

PLoS One completely surprised me today by releasing this paper, “Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia.” The research comes from South African and American researchers, and the paper was edited by John Hawks, who apparently can really keep a secret it seems. I had no idea about this study and find it a really remarkable find since fossils of another small bodied human, Homo floresiensis, were found about 1,000 miles south of these new findings.

If I read this correctly, a minimum of 25 individuals have been found. Lots more will be found according the authors, which is always welcoming to me. The Palau fossils are of small people, similar in size to the Flores hominins. Preliminary analysis of more than a dozen individuals, including a male weighing about 43 kg and a female weighing about 29 kg, document that these were tiny. Analyzing some of the cranial and dental features like the distinct presence of a maxillary canine fossa, a clearly delimited mandibular mental trigone, moderate bossing of the frontal and parietal squama, a lateral prominence on the temporal mastoid process, reduced temporal juxtamastoid eminences and an en maison cranial vault profile with the greatest interparietal breadth high on the vault indicates that these individuals were simply small H. sapiens adapted for life on a small island.

So how were these bones found? Lead author, Lee Berger, writes to National Geographic News that he was kayaking around rocky islands about 370 miles east of the Philippines, when he found the bones in a pair of caves in 2006. Crazy story! I wish I would find something like that while vacationing. He reports that the,

“the [Ucheliungs and Omedokel] caves were littered with bones that had been dislodged by waves and piled like driftwood. Others had remained buried deep in the sandy floor, and more, including several skulls, were cemented to the cave walls.”

Radiocarbon dating was applied to pinpoint an age for the bones. The antiquity of the bones is between 1,410 and 2,890 years ago, which is remarkably much more recent than 18,000 year old antiquity of the Flores hominins. Along with the small size, the Palau fossils have similar features to H. floresiensis, such as their pronounced supraorbital tori, non-projecting chins, relative megadontia, expansion of the occlusal surface of the premolars, rotation of teeth within the maxilla and mandible, and dental agenesis.

But again, Berger and colleagues do not infer from these features any direct relationship between the peoples of Palau and Flores; however, they conservatively write that these similarities may be a common adaptation in humans of reduced stature. In their own words,

“Based on the evidence from Palau, we hypothesize that reduction in the size of the face and chin, large dental size and other features noted here may in some cases be correlates of extreme body size reduction in H. sapiens. These features when seen in Flores may be best explained as correlates of small body size in an island adaptation, regardless of taxonomic affinity. Under any circumstances the Palauan sample supports at least the possibility that the Flores hominins are simply an island adapted population of H. sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.”

Again the paper is published in PLoS One, which is an open access journal. That means you can download the original report and read it for yourself for free. I really recommend you do, this seems like one of the more significant paleoanthropological finds for 2008. Here’s the citation:

Berger, L.R., Churchill, S.E., De Klerk, B., Quinn, R.L., Hawks, J. (2008). Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia. PLoS ONE, 3(3), e1780. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001780

Last night I caught some of the new History Channel show, “Journey to 10,000 BC.” I really didn’t know about in advance to tell y’all. Had I known before hand I woulda surely made an announcement. But no worries, if there’s anything I know about channels like Discovery and History, is that they replay these sorts of episodes so much. Actually, if you’re interested in catching it, it will show again on Saturday, March 15 at 8 p.m.

Anyways about the show, I’m thinking History Channel put this out to coincide with the movie 10,000 B.C., which not surprisingly isn’t that accurate of a movie. Not like I expected it to be remotely realistic, but still I kinda hoped that it would be somewhat informative because it is about as much education most people will get about prehistory in their entire life. Anyways, “Journey to 10,000 BC” wasn’t much better. It had horrible cut scenes and exclusively focused on life in North America about 13,000 years ago. A lot of other very important things were happening elsewhere, such as the emergence of Neolithic revolution, i.e. the Natufian culture that shoulda been also included.

Even though I subscribe to the Siberian origin of native Americans, I did appreciate how Dennis Stanford made a cameo and explained his hypothesis that the Clovis archaeology could have originated from sea-faring Soluteran people from Europe. For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, some of the first archaeological evidence in the Americas are associated with a type of stone tools found in Clovis, New Mexico. The Clovis typology is significantly different from Siberian archaeology, see Siberian tools around that time were largely modified ivory points with a blade inset. Clovis tools were much different. Clovis tools are highly refined thin, fluted projectile points created using bifacial percussion flaking.

Dennis Stanford publicized his hypothesis in 2004, along with colleague Bruce Bradely, in this paper, “The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the New World.” Like I indicated earlier, Stanford suggests that 13,000 years ago or so Europeans made boats and crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. With lower sea levels then, this was more feasible than nowadays… and by then people were crossing large bodies of water all over the world, i.e. Polynesia and the Pacific. The problem with Stanford’s hypothesis is that there’s no evidence of boats in the America’s from that time period, nor is there a genetic European signature in Native American populations. Stanford says that the reason why boats haven’t been found is that sea levels have risen since then and obliterated any trace of boats… convenient. Anyways, his idea is a bit out there, and not substantiated much. It is really possible that the reason why Clovis typology is unique is that arose in the Americas independently.

I also appreciated the discussion the show gave to climate change and glaciation events in North America. This sorta information isn’t readily inserted into shows like these, and help viewers visualize large scale environmental changes. But, I really couldn’t get over the cheesy cut scenes where a prehistoric woman with remarkable Vogue-like complexion was taken down by a smilodon, and early people crossing massive waves in unconvincing boats canoes. So it is totally up to you to watch, I neither recommend it nor thoroughly think it is a waste of time. If you don’t know much about the peopling of the Americas, this show maybe a great introduction to some lines of evidence.

Bradley, B., Stanford, D. (2004). The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the New World. World Archaeology, 36(4), 459-478. DOI: 10.1080/0043824042000303656