Anthropology.net

I caught some obscure news of an upcoming conference in Los Angeles that’s packing panels with some big names in anthropology, such as Frans de Waal, Ian Tattersall, Craig Stanford, Donald Johanson, Marc Hauser, Christine Kenneally, and Bruce Lahn. They’ll all be discussing “What Makes Us Human?” which also happens to be the title of the conference.

I’m pretty sure this question has at least once been on almost every human’s mind, and I’m really interested to know what’s gonna be discussed. Unfortunately, the short notice and the awkward timing of the conference (starting the morning of Monday, April 28 and running through Tuesday, April 29) won’t work with my schedule. That’s unfortunate, but the press release does indicate the media will have the opportunity to interview six panelists, which hopefully will result in news pieces and what not. If any readers are gonna attend, please contact me and let me know what you think of the conference.

A related sidenote, earlier this year, one of the panelists, Marc Hauser discussed what he thinks are four factors that make human cognition unique at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I covered that news and a little discussed brewed about. You maybe interested in checking it out.

One last thing that caught my eye, the press release mentions,

“News of the recently discovered ancient European toothed hominin jawbone fragment, as reported in the March 27, 2008 scientific journal Nature, has raised more questions about human origins. This important find comes at a time when some of the world’s most respected thinkers and researchers… will have the opportunity to discuss its significance.”

I don’t think that the 1.2 million year old mandible from Atapeurca makes any significant waves in figuring out what makes us human. The mandible only tells us that first settlement of Western Europe could be related to a really early migration out of Africa.

The Journal of Human Evolution has released a new article in press announcing the discovery of a new archaic Homo sapiens specimen from Lake Eyasi, Tanzania. It is a rather modest paper, with no real ulterior motive underwritten… which I’ve come to appreciate. In the paper, the authors describe the geochronology and the morphology of the new fossil frontal bone (EH06).

This ain’t the first big paleoanthropological discovery from Lake Eyasi. The lake has yielded other hominid remains, the most famous of which is Eyasi 1. Prior to this new paper, these fossils could not be dated accurately. They resemble archaic Homo sapiens which places them somewhere in the later Middle Pleistocene and have some unique traits that are shared with Neandertals, like a suprainiac fossa. But, without a definitive chronological control, these fossils have been disregarded in regards to the temporal and spatial distribution of Homo sapiens.

So how old is this new frontal bone? Well the authors didn’t date the frontal bone itself, instead they sampled 5 wildebeest teeth from the same bone assemblage that the hominid frontal bone was found from. The authors used several dating techniques, like electron spin resonance and ²³⁰Th/²³⁴U — a method that calculates the time since uranium was deposited into the sample. Some of the samples had too much thorium in them to get an accurate date, but for some of them the authors were able to extract a date. Correlating these dates with the ones from ESR the authors were able to figure out that the wildebeest teeth and most likely the hominid frontal bone are 88,000 to 132,000 years old. This date coordinates with other archaic Homo sapiens fossils ages.

I won’t repeat the description of the fossil, because I don’t consider it as impactful as the actual geochronology. I will however post this gorgeous image of the fossil from the original paper.

With a date on this frontal bone, we now know a little bit more about the timing and spread of early humans within Africa.

DOMINGUEZRODRIGO, M., MABULLA, A., LUQUE, L., THOMPSON, J., RINK, J., BUSHOZI, P., DIEZMARTIN, F., ALCALA, L. (2008). A new archaic Homo sapiens fossil from Lake Eyasi, Tanzania. Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2008.02.002

The next Four Stone Hearth will be published this coming Wednesday, April 23rd, and for this edition, Hominin Dental Anthropology will be the hosting blog, so if you have any anthropology articles you’ve written or read that you’d like to see included, please send them along, either to Jason at Hominin Dental Anthropology, or by submitting here.

There is still an ongoing need for bloggers willing to host this carnival, with the next vacant slot on May 18th – so if you’d like to host a future edition, just drop a line to host@fourstonehearth.net

More reports have been coming out of last week’s meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and one that has caught my attention is a news article summarizing Bill Jungers‘ research on the Homo floresiensis foot morphology. Jungers recently published a research paper reanalyzing Orrorin bipedalism, along with his colleagues.

For this presentation, Jungers looked at the more or less complete left foot of LB1 and says that H. floresiensis had, “flat, clown-like feet.” The photo above are the fossilized H. floresiensis foot bones. In relation to the tibia and fibula fragments, these feet are larger.

From the New Scientist article,

Jungers’ team estimated the length of the hobbit’s feet, which were unusually large for its metre-high frame. “Sort of like a young girl wearing her mum’s shoes,” Junger says…

…And because of their long feet, H. floresiensis probably had to bend its knee further back than modern humans do, resulting in a sort of high-stepped gait. “You would watch these hobbits walk and say they’re walking a little funny,” Jungers says.

The foot had other peculiar features as well. For one, its big toe was quite short compared with the others, similar to earlier hominids such as Australopithecus. However, the shape of the toes, even the short big toe, is like modern human ones, Jungers says. “It has a human morphology and an ape-like proportion,” he says.”

So, he’s associating this morphology with a primitive hominid condition. Not all too novel…. a group did the same last fall, but with the wrist bones.

Nonetheless, I’m not convinced. Why?

A 2006 paper in the open access journal Anthropological Science investigated the big feet morphology of modern humans in Polynesia, which is close to Indonesia. That study found out that Polynesians have much longer and wider feet and hands than the other populations tested. The study gets into a discussion on how micro-evolutionary processes affected this phenotype. It is possible something similar happened to LB1. I’m still uncertain whether or not what we call H. floresiensis are anything but mutant modern humans

For those that wanna read the 2006 paper on big feet phenotype in Polynesia, the citation to that paper is right here:

GONDA, E., KATAYAMA, K. (2006). Big feet in Polynesia: a somatometric study of the Tongans. Anthropological Science, 114(2), 127-131. DOI: 10.1537/ase.00097

Rex Dalton is back on the Palau issue that got so much attention last month. He’s investigated the facts in much more detail than he did previously and does not necessarily have kind words for the research behind the Palaun fossils. He has written up his news feature in the latest issue of Nature. The piece is titled, “Archaeology: Bones, isles and videotape.” I want to disclose that while I did take the bait and switch after reading the original PLoS One article, I became very doubtful after I read Dalton’s first expose on the matter. I expressed the facts on this site, and as you may know, a very interesting debate ensued in the comments.

Now, I don’t mean to rehash the same arguments but I do want to spend some time looking into this issue a bit more. Why? Because mistakes like this, mistakes on how Berger conducted research and messed up local politics in Palau, on how the National Geographic Society meddled with the scientific and publication process, are critical to evaluate and learn from in order to prevent these things from happening again.

This is a serious problem, especially when one of the forefront voices of anthropology here on the web reduces these issues as, “irrelevant to the scientific evaluation of the manuscript.” I’m sure he is just as concerned as we all are in doing good science, but as I’ve said before the scientific evaluation also relies on how the research was done. It is very possible that he’s saying such because he wants to protect his reputation with the National Geographic Society, an institution that funds lots of paleoanthropological research. But, we should always put aside these considerations when doing good science is compromised. So, if you can’t tell, with this post I wanna emphasize that we be considered with doing good, ethical science first and foremost and then worry about the fortune and glory, the funding and publicity. In order to do so, I’ll review this recent case as an example of how not to do good, ethical science.

The first issue I wanna address, and perhaps the one that raises many concerns is how Berger et al. concluded what they did. I’ve taken a look at the data sets, and come to realize that the possibility the ‘Palaun dwarfs’ were nothing more than normal-sized island dwellers but juveniles, is very high. Why? Well, Berger et al. say that the 61 skeletal elements from the caves suggest the people were on extreme low end of the range, but I really only read three or so bones were used per measurement of body size. Seems like a very selective sample size to document small peoples… From these three or so measurements, are we to assume that the thousands of other bones in the cave are also small bodied people? No!

To add to that discrepancy, Scott Fitzpatrick criticized that many of the body size estimates were based off of long bones that did not have the shaft fragments, making it really hard to estimate height. Fitzpatrick did research on bones dating from a similar time period and in a nearby cave, about 4 kilometers away. He found femora, with the shaft and the head of the bone, and his analysis shows that those people were of normal height. Michael Pietrusewsky shares this concern and is quoted in Dalton’s piece saying,

“The more I read their paper, the more I am convinced it is complete nonsense and cannot be accepted as serious science.”

Ouch. That’s not only a direct jab at Berger et al. but also a shank to John Hawks, who was editor of the paper and screened it for scientific validity. Moving onto National Geographic’s impact in the science behind this paper, let me also quote John Hawks’ incisive commentary in his FAQ related to this publication,

“In this case, National Geographic funded the work and apparently produced a documentary about it. Their production wasn’t disclosed to the journal, and I view it as irrelevant to the scientific evaluation of the manuscript…

…I would tend instead to ask these questions: Does the Nature Publishing Group (NPG), in publishing Rex Dalton’s piece, have a vested interest in the credibility of their own journals, in comparison to open access outlets like PLoS?…”

John Hawks completely turned the table on Nature and Dalton, skimming over the fact that the National Geographic Society, the organization that produced the documentary in secrecy, leaving the publishing journal out of the picture, had more of a vested interest in making a buck out of investing in Berger’s project than NPG discrediting PLoS.

You maybe wondering, “How he can say something like this?” Through the multitude of media outlets the National Geographic controls, such as their magazine, television shows, and popular website — you can’t even begin to say Nature is on economic par with them. And while people seem to only use National Geographic Magazine as toilet reading material, to line doctor and dentist office waiting tables, and to house as memorabilia, the fact that the National Geographic Society is a popularizer of science is obvious. The National Geographic Society reports on science and reaches millions of peoples, which turns into millions of dollars in potential revenue generated from ads.

Nature is used by a much more specialized demographic, and is a credible more prestigious source of peer reviewed high impact science, where most of its content comes from first hand sources. While Nature does sell ads, I would venture to say that the National Geographic Society has more of a vested interest in spreading their documentary over TV than the target audience Nature‘s piece reached. Based upon the shear size of the National Geographic Society conglomerate compared to NPG, it is just absurd to even consider that the Society didn’t have anything but bling bling in sight when they accepted Berger’s grant request, hell a representative from the NGS even admitted that.

To further discrete Berger’s dedication to the hard science, Dalton scrounged up this awesome tidbit:

“In other areas of his research, Berger has worked on a planned television series featuring him called Fossil Hunter, which uses the slogan “entertainment first, science second”.”

With that sorta information, I’m not surprised to read further on that one of the bone-yielding caves was off-limits to visitors. Berger just marched right into the caves without fully figuring out if he could. Other researchers, more in tune with cultural issues, such as Timothy Rieth, discovered the Omedekol cave over ten years before Berger. He,

“viewed the mouth of the other cave… but didn’t venture inside even though bone piles could be seen. “I don’t just go inside burial caves on vacation because it’s fun…”"

When Berger forced a emergency grant to study the caves, after he trespassed over it, it instigated a political power struggle between the Koror government and the state Council of Chiefs. And that’s why Dalton previously got a disapproving quote from a Palaun chieftan, to which Chris Sloan — from the NGS, commented on this site saying that “a disgruntled tribal leader who had been left out is not a surprise.” Gosh, how arrogant!

Aside from the massive holes in Berger et al.’s analysis, and the horrible reviews it got by one of the reviewers, we should also fold in the fact that National Geographic outclassed the publishing journal by releasing the documentary before the embargo was lifted. We should also consider how Berger did not respect this tribal burial ground, and how his and the Society’s urgency in excavating and producing a documentary in hopes it was another hobbit cash crop, not only compromised a very thorough investigation, but also the socio-political framework of Palau.

While we’re on the subject of Neandertal language capabilities, I want to share with you news from last week’s annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. I wasn’t there, I know a couple people who went but they didn’t tell me about Robert McCarthy‘s research. Robert has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice, and presented his findings.

He’s not the first to have done this. Phil Lieberman estimated the dimensions of the larynx based off of skull sizes of Neandertals in the 1970′s. His work showed that Neandertals did not have a larynx like humans to catch the subtlety of modern human speech. Lieberman worked with McCarthy to simulate Neanderthal speech based on new reconstructions of three Neandertal vocal tracts.

By modeling the sounds the Neanderthal pipes would have made, McCarthy’s team engineered the sound of a Neanderthal saying “E”. He plans to eventually simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence. I’ve uploaded the sound bites for you to listen to and to be really honest, I don’t hear an “E.” I hear a sheep or a goat, but you can try figure out what you hear.

Here’s the human voice:

And here’s the Neandertal voice:

Haha, I’m laughing as I type this. I find the sounds really hilarious, especially because I expected Neandertals to have a really low pitched voice. Neandertals were more robust and larger than modern humans, and in my experience, modern humans that are larger and more robust than average have deep voices on average. So to hear high pitched “E”‘s from this simulation, I find it comical.

Anyways, for the linguists out there, McCarthy, explained that the difference in vocalizations was because Neandertal cranio-facial anatomy lacked the ability to produce “quantal vowel” sounds that underlie modern speech. Quantal vowels are necessary in providing audible cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another.

Like I said, I don’t know exactly how McCarthy reconstructed these vocalizations. Since Lieberman collaborated with McCarthy, I expect that he did similar work. Furthermore, since only fossils of Neandertals remain, McCarthy had to compare and contrast the anatomical similarities and differences of humans and Neandertals to the vocalization. Is that the right way to do this?

Well, in 1999, David DeGusta and crew slammed Kay et al. for concluding Neandertal’s hyoid morphology indicated they were capable of modern language in, “Hypoglossal canal size and hominid speech.” So, I’m a bit skeptical.

One of my favorite papers from last year was the investigation of FOXP2 allele in Neandertals. It seems like it was one of your favorite papers too, that post gets a lot of hits still! That being said, I think we’ll all appreciate a brand new paper (in works) on this specific topic. It was caught first by Dienekes, and then Razib.

The authors behind the new paper, “The Timing of Selection at the Human FOXP2 Gene,” don’t accept that the FOXP2 allele modern humans and Neandertals carry coulda originated over 300,000 years ago — in a shared common ancestor of both species. Instead, they wonder if the sequence similarity observed is attributed to low rates of gene flow between modern humans and Neandertals, or even contamination.

The issue of contamination was raised last year, at the same time by Sung Kim and Jeffrey Wall, but on a much larger scale… Sung Kim and Jeffrey Wall had beef with quality of the 1 million base pair sequence of Neandertals.

The authors of this new paper,

“collect additional data and introduce a modeling framework to estimate levels of modern human contamination of the Neandertal samples. We find that, depending on the assumptions, additional control experiments may be needed to rule out contamination at FOXP2.”

I don’t have advance access to the manuscript, but from what I can read in the abstract, I know I’ll appreciate it a lot. Why? Well, I’ve personally been doing a lot of research on FOXP2 and know how conserved it is. There are very few differences in the sequence of FOXP2 alleles from chimps and humans, so there maybe even fewer differences in the sequence of FOXP2 alleles of other hominins to humans. The ways Neandertal fossils are collected, even in the most sterile conditions, could introduce modern human DNA that will alter conclusions and the fact that the authors of this new paper hone in on that, is something I look forward to reading.

I wanna know your thoughts on this issue. The issue is about cognitive differences between the sexes, which is always a hot anthropological issue. Recently, Sheril Kirshenbaum from The Intersection posted some examples of NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 report. The results of the report indicate that females are much less adept in answering science and engineering questions compared to males.

Don’t believe me? Here’s some egregiously outstanding examples:

The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. (Correct answer: True)

85% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
75% of all females answered this correctly.

All radioactivity is man-made. (Correct answer: False)

77% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
64% of all females surveyed answered this correctly.

The universe began with a huge explosion. (Correct answer: True)

40% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
27% of all females surveyed answered this correctly.

The center of the Earth is very hot. (Correct answer: True)

85% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
75% of all females surveyed answered this correctly.

Electrons are smaller than atoms. (Correct answer: True)

61% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
48% of all females surveyed answered this correctly.

How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun? (Correct answer: One year)

66% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
46% of all females surveyed answered this correctly.

Lasers work by focusing sound waves. (Correct answer: False)

62% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
32% of all females surveyed answered this correctly.

Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. (Correct answer: True)

47% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
40% of all females surveyed answered this correctly.

A doctor tells a couple that their genetic makeup means that they’ve got one in four chances of having a child with an inherited illness. Does this mean that if their first child has the illness, the next three will not? (Correct answer: No)

90% of all males surveyed answered this correctly.
84% of all females surveyed answered this correctly

There’s been a lot of discussion on threads of each of Sheril’s posts, where people questioned if this disparity between the sexes was because the test makers were male, or something about the test environment affected the ability of females to perform as well. These situations could be a factor, but when about 75% of of female respondents incorrectly answer how the universe was started, or when over half of females surveyed don’t know the span of 1 cycle of the Earth around the Sun… I begin to think if there’s something much larger going on — it could be biological, or it could be something cultural. What do you think?

Daniel Tight at the University of Minnesota has announced the completion of his dissertation, “The Role of Perceptual Learning Style Preferences and Instructional Method in the Acquisition of L2 Spanish Vocabulary,” on Linguist List. The abstract details a study which measured the effectiveness of preferred learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) in 128 intermediate-level L2 college Spanish students. Each of the students’ first language was English. Students studied 36 vocabulary words: 12 in their preferred learning style, 12 in a less-preferred style, and 12 in mixed modality instruction. An additional 12 non-studied words were used as a control. The results showed that individual learning style preference bears minimal relevance to L2 vocabulary acquisition, particularly when compared to mixed modality instruction.

Results of a repeated-measures ANOVA indicated that subjects performed equally well on the vocabulary posttests, regardless of learning style preference. Overall, mixed-modality instruction was more beneficial than instruction in a more-preferred modality, which in turn stimulated greater learning than instruction in a less-preferred modality. Such differences were statistically significant on the 1-week and 1-month posttests. Further analysis revealed, however, that differences between the more- and less-preferred modalities were primarily an artifact of the large number of visual learners, combined with an overall effectiveness of visual instruction for all subjects, rather than a product of style matching in general.

Although these style preferences have for years allowed students to individualize learning experiences, it appears the most effective method is to combine visual, kinesthetic, and auditory media. At least, for L2 concrete noun acquisition. Sounds like a great way to keep Broca, Wernicke, and your occipital lobe busy before a Spanish midterm.

Nature has put up a little teaser book review of Amos Nur & Dawn Burgess’ new book, “Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology and the Wrath of God.” The book investigates the possibility that earthquakes are a cause for the collapse of many ancient civilizations. Nur is a geophysics professor, and my understanding is that he advised Dawn Burgess on her dissertation in the field of geology. If that’s true, both of them have adequate background to look at the archaeological and geological record for the effects of earthquakes. From the Nature piece, they ask how,

“earthquakes might be detected in the archaeological record, by analysing geological formations, faults, structural movement, human remains, the collapse of pillars and walls, and inscriptions. Nur wonders if earthquakes played a part in the collapse of ancient civilizations. Might they explain the enigmatic and quick disappearance of so many Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean during a mere 50 years around 1200 BC.

Most archaeologists today say that earthquakes have had little to do with historical demises. They prefer to attribute the collapse of civilizations to human agency: war, invasion, social oppression, environmental abuse and so on. The conventional explanation of the Bronze Age collapse involves maritime invasion by the mysterious Sea Peoples, whose identities have long eluded scholars…”

Nur and Burgess bring up many recent examples of how earthquakes decimated civilizations, cities, etc. They cite the destruction of the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1755, a 1812 earthquake that preceeded the collapse of Simón Bolívar’s Venezuelan republic, and the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 that decimate the majority of Tokyo.

The Nature article favorably reviews the book, and primes us that it may, “deliberately irritate many archaeologists.”