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A couple days ago Science published a peopling of the Americas paper. The paper is based on ancient mtDNA analysis of hair from a site in Greenland called, Saqqaq, also known as Qeqertasussuk, Disko Bay. The authors were able to identify a unique haplogroup, not shared by other Native Americans, which suggests that a different group from north Asia settled in what is now Greenland and then disappeared.

The paper is titled, “Paleo-Eskimo mtDNA Genome Reveals Matrilineal Discontinuity in Greenland.” The twigs associated with the site were dated by Carbon-14 to be roughly 4,000 – 3,100 years old. Four human long bones were excavated but were in poor condition. A clump of permafrost-preserved hair was also excavated. While hair is mostly made up of keratin protein polymers, the shaft of hair follicles often are an abundant source of well-preserved ancient DNA.

The authors first honed in on this, first PCR amplifying, cloning and sequencing just the mtDNA HVS1 sequences. It was found that the hair derives from a single clade, Hg D2. D2 is shared with Aleuts of the Commander Islands as well as Sireniki, Yuit, Chukchi, Buryat, Khamnigan, Yakut, and Evenk peoples. Hg D2 is not found in any European and Inuit populations, and that determined that there was no contamination from the excavators.

Unlike the other ancient DNA paper we heard about earlier this week, the authors of this paper decided to sequence the complete ancient human mtDNA genome. The FLX sequencing-by-synthesis developed by 454 Life Sciences and Roche Diagnostics was used primarily, as well as traditional pyrosequencing for shorter segments. The genome was sequenced approximately 11 times over and approximately 16,497 bp of the 16,569 base pairs genome was assembled. All of the Hg-diagnostic SNPs they found in their first pass, the HSV 1 trial, were re-confirmed, further validating no contamination.

Comparing the Saqqaq genome to the Cambridge Reference Sequence indicated the Saqqaq differs at 40 SNPs. At these 40 SNPs, no detectable contamination or mosaic sequence variation was found. Comparing this nearly complete mtDNA genome to 300 complete Native American mtDNA genome sequences indicates that the Saqqaq sample is distinctly different from modern and ancient Neo-Eskimo people. From the paper,

“The sample is closely related to D2a1a, a common mtDNA haplogroup found among Aleuts, in particular those of the Commander Islands, who are descendants of a forced colonization of the Medny and Bering Islands in the mid 19th century. The sample is also closely related to a subset of the Siberian Sireniki Yuit. However, the Saqqaq sequence is unique, and does not share specific mutations with these groups (n.p. 8,910 for D2a1a and n.p.16111-16366 for D2a1b) but rather branches off of the root of D2a1 on the basis of two homoplasmic (n.p.14226-16092) and the putatively heteroplasmic (n.p.11234) private mutations.

Based on the contemporary Sireniki Yuit and Aleutian mtDNA data, the coalescence of the D2a1 clade was estimated to 2,000±3,400 years using the synonymous transition clock (23) or 7,500±4,500 years when the clock is calibrated over all coding region sites.”

This cladogram provided in the original paper documents the differences much better:

The observation that ‘Hg D2 derives from an Asian specific Hg D4e and not from any of the 5 Native American founding haplogroups,’ indicates to the authors that migrations that first lead human populations to colonize the far North of the New World all the way to Greenland first. This is not a crazy claim, we now know there were multiple migrations into the Americas and the current mitochondrial diversity of Native Americans indicates very few ancestral mothers, but with this new study we now know the diversity of Native Americans was at least diverse in at least one more lineage.

Gilbert, M.T., Kivisild, T., Gronnow, B., Andersen, P.K., Metspalu, E., Reidla, M., Tamm, E., Axelsson, E., Gotherstrom, A., Campos, P.F., Rasmussen, M., Metspalu, M., Higham, T.F., Schwenninger, J., Nathan, R., De Hoog, C., Koch, A., Moller, L.N., Andreasen, C., Meldgaard, M., Villems, R., Bendixen, C., Willerslev, E. (2008). Paleo-Eskimo mtDNA Genome Reveals Matrilineal Discontinuity in Greenland. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1159750

I don’t know how I missed this paper, “Stand and shuffle: When does it make energetic sense?” It was published last month in the Journal of Physical Anthropology. I’m sharing it with you now because the bipedalism is heavily studied in anthropology. Bipedal locomotion is perhaps one of only traits that is predominately ‘human.’

The two authors, Patricia Kramer and Adam Sylvester, are well versed in the origin of hominid bipedalism and locomotor energetics. In this new paper they test the hypothesis that shuffling emerged as a precursor to walking as a way of saving metabolic energy.

They developed a mathematical model that calculated the energetics and metabolic efficiencies of locomition based upon body plan. For a chimp to bipedally move about distances greater than about 50 feet, it was found that it would not be metabolically efficient. But it shuffling distances less than 30 feet was for the chimp. They used the chimp model because they say that a chimp’s body plan is very much like that of our last common shared ancestor.

This conclusion is in line with three posts I shared last year on the energetics of bipedalism, especially the latter two where I tackled a common question asked by people, “If upright walking is so energetically favorable, why do apes still “knuckle-walk”?” and “Chimpanzees Gait Energetics & The Origin of Human Bipedalism.”

Sylvester, A.D., Kramer, P.A. (2008). Stand and shuffle: When does it make energetic sense?. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 135(4), 484-488. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20752

Survival International, the non-profit organization that helps tribal peoples defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own futures has released new aerial photos of uncontacted peoples at the border of Brazil and Peru. The photographs are remarkable, the people are depicted shooting at the aircraft with arrows and throwing stones. You may have also noticed that they appear to have body paint, which is not Photoshopped — the males are painted in a redish-orange color and the female(s) are painted in black.

I don’t really appreciate how the press is handling this news. There’s a lot of conjecture being spun, such as absurd captions that read, “The tribespeople are likely to think the plane that took this photograph is a spirit or large bird.” Really? How do you know for sure that they think the plane is a bird or a spirit, Michael Hanlon? Perhaps they are just scared out of their minds that there are people in the air? I think it is pretty pitiful that outsiders really belittle tribal peoples, especially in scenarios like this where we know little to nothing about them!

Anyways, it is pretty phenomenal news. The irony is that last year, almost to the date, another previously uncontacted tribe in the Amazon was discovered — the Metyktire.

Michael Tomasello, a well known comparative psychologist, has a column in today’s New York Times where he writes on, “How Are Humans Unique?” In the piece, Tomasello argues that our cultural, linguistic, economic and tool-use have all come about because of our tendency for “collective cognition.”

His argument stems from two of his recent papers, the first, “Comparing Social Skills of Children and Apes,’ was authored along with Frans B. M. De Waal, Christophe Boesch, Victoria Horner, Andrew Whiten, Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, María Victoria Hernández-Lloreda, Brian Hare. Many of the same authors also joined Tomasello on the other paper, “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis,” which I covered on Primatology.net in September 2007.

The latter paper compared the congitive and problem solving skills of two & half-year-old human children to those of chimps and orangutans ranging from 3 to 21 years old. The results showed that both are comparable in numerical and spatial skills. When comparing social skills, the human kids excelled over the chimps. An example, the toddlers learned how to open a container by imitating what they saw, where as the chimps did not mimic… Thus, the kids made connections like, “stick helps open box.” The chimps relied on trick of trial and error. The authors summarized that imitation is a fast way acquire a lot of knowledge and may have paved the way for our departure from these primate cousins – and ultimately allowed us to develop the complex social culture we have today.

The more recent paper, also involved comparing the social and cognitive abilities of children and chimps. Tomasello and his team concluded that humans recognize and commit to group tasks. Chimps, on the other hand, do not have such expectation of others. If and when the chimps did communicate, they did it to get others to do what they want. I’ll confirm that from my own experience with working with apes, gorillas, that they communicated to me almost exclusively to get what they want. In their experiment, communication amongst children was to share information.

Tomasello argues that only humans pretend. According to him humans imagine, and this ability has allowed us to build institutions. These adaptations, Tomasello writes, set us apart from apes, thereby allowing us to build modern civilization.

I believe I have seen and experienced non-human imagination in gorillas and also chimps. I, by no means have the accolades that Tomasello has, nor the experiences he has in analyzing psychological research but I think it is really hard to definitively say that only humans can imagine and pretend. To do that we’d really have to get ino their minds. I just don’t understand how we can know if non-human primates do or do not imagine.

If you’re interested in this topic, we have in the past, had some short discussions on what traits have made humans unique, such as this one summarizing Marc Hauser’s postulates. I also think you’ll enjoy this 60 second audio summarizing the discussion, made by Christie Nicholson, of Scientific American — which she draws a tangent to social networking sites, something I commented about last September.

Today’s big anthropological headline is based upon this brand new open access PLoS One paper, “Evidence of Authentic DNA from Danish Viking Age Skeletons Untouched by Humans for 1,000 Years.” The paper is written well, has lots of controls, and establishes some protocols on how to recovery ancient DNA. Despite these good things, I think I have found some minor holes in this paper, which I’ll address in this blog post.

The above photo is of the excavation of the skeletal remains sampled in this current study. The remains come from the Gladegil burial site near Otterup, Denmark. Gladegil has yielded 3 males, 4 females, and 3 other individuals whose sex can’t be determined. Carbon-14 dating has revealed that the site is approximately 1,000 years old and is a Christian burial site. As you can see the excavators are in sterile bunny-suits, worn to prevent contamination of modern DNA during the exhuming process. I wonder if this new image of archaeologist will replace the dusty-rugged Indiana Jones type-caricature?

The authors of this paper extracted only mtDNA only from the teeth and associated artifacts, so the title of this paper is misleading, it should have been rewritten “Evidence of Authentic mtDNA…” You may not see this as a significant issue, but I think it is. Other researchers and editors have made sure titles are as accurate as possible, so why then did this one get the green light? While mtDNA is DNA, mtDNA is different from nuclear DNA. First of, there are a lot more copies of the mitochondrial genome compared to the nuclear genome, that’s because cells have one nucleus (for the most part) but many mitochondrion. The mitochondrial genome is much smaller and also is a completely different entity from the nuclear one. It is circular, whereas the nuclear genome is linear. Lastly, the nuclear genome is less stable and that makes extracting and sequencing it from any sample, ancient or not, a much more challenging task.

Anyways, mtDNA was isolated in a clean room by grinding the teeth and what not into a pulp. The highest quality reagents and kits were used, according to the authors. Another misleading aspect of this study is that the entire mtDNA genome was not sequenced, only a portion of the genome, the hyper-variable region 1 (HVR-1) was amplified by quantitative PCR. The HVR-1 is a pretty informative region of the mitochondrial genome, some haplogroups can be identified but it is by no means a high-resolution indicator. If the authors extracted the HVR-2, a region with a lot more haplogroups, the analysis woulda been much more thorough.

I didn’t find any discussion on how the samples were sequenced. Given that the HVR-1 is small, roughly 560 base pairs, I’m thinking a standard dideoxy chain terminated method was used. I guess it is so common nowadays that people don’t even write it in their preliminary publication. I didn’t check the supporting materials. The HVR-1 sequences from the skeletal were aligned based upon known Inuit mtDNA.

The DNA of everyone who was involved with the excavation, extraction, sequencing was also sequenced, to screen for any possible contamination. I give the team kudos for including that in their study. It is critical for anyone doing ancient DNA work, also forensic DNA work, to not only keep track of everyone that handled the samples but also include their DNA in the sequence analysis.

Based upon the haplogroup distribution, the samples were attributed to be of Viking ancestry. To clarify, the presence of haplogroup I and G6 have also been seen relatively higher frequencies in other Viking populations. Hg I is not observed in any ancient Italian, Spanish, British, and central European populations. Again, if HVR-2 was included, this woulda been a more robust association of ancestry…

In general this was a graceful little paper. But after reading it, I don’t see what and where the big umph of this paper is to warrant so much play in the press. There have been much more challenging successes in ancient DNA work that didn’t get as much attention as this paper has gotten. And like I said, it is ultimately a report of an isolation and sequence comparison of only 500 base pairs… which is much easier to do than a nuclear one. I’d like to have seen at least the HVR-2, that woulda given me more of a meal-deal. Perhaps more will be done is a good template for ancient DNA work? At the very least it is an effective template for how to excavated ancient-but-recent DNA and what controls to include in the analysis.

Melchior, L., Kivisild, T., Lynnerup, N., Dissing, J., Ahmed, N. (2008). Evidence of Authentic DNA from Danish Viking Age Skeletons Untouched by Humans for 1,000 Years. PLoS ONE, 3(5), e2214. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002214

About 9 months ago, I shared some news of language extinction and the conservation efforts of K. David Harrison and David Anderson. My coverage was far from a thorough treatment of the subject, partially because I know little about the problem and the ways to remedy it. Fast forward to today, where I come across this video posted by Simon Greenhill on his blog HENRY.

The video is an interview of well spoken linguistic anthropologist K. David Harrison, by host Mark Molaro. In the video, David touches on many aspects, such as ownership of a language and what he considers ‘the greatest conservation challenge’ of humans. For anyone interested in the subject, I recommend you check out this 26 minute interview. Harrison integrates cultural issues as well as the importance of knowledge locked in unknown languages that can be useful to other disciplines such as botanists and zoologists.

Ownership of a language is a critical concept to understand. Speakers of widely spoken languages such as English, French, Chinese, Spanish, may not consider much ownership to their language. But to those who are one of the few speakers of a dying language, such as Chulym where only 30 or so speakers are alive, feel more attached to their language — it is something they identify with.

Harrison also outlines ‘the greatest conservation challenge’ of humans. See, every 2 weeks or so a language dies off. In contrast, species are going extinct at a much slower rate and yet a monumental conservation effort is put into saving this from happening. But studying, saving and/or curating languages aren’t given the same dedication as ecological or archaeological conservation. It is ironic that language, perhaps the most complex monument to human genius, has been ignored in our efforts to conserve the rest of the world.

Support is required from outside to conserve language, and with that a change in the ways we approach language is needed. Harrison suggests that while curating a language is critical to the conservation, understanding the folk taxonomy, a.k.a. the folksonomy, is also imperative. He brings up examples of different single word terms to refer to different reindeer in some Siberian languages. When translated, these single words unravel into elaborate, information packed phrases. He uses that to explain how often times there is a lot of local knowledge hidden lesser spoken language, that can span millennia. Harrison advocates that other researchers entertain the possibility that languages are an untapped resource for knowledge.

But to do that, a restructuring of how we consider discovery is needed. We, as academics, are largely stuck in this colonial paradigm of how discovery is approached. Many zoologists, botanists, even anthropologists and archaeologists discover new things without absorbing native knowledge. It is an awfully imperial way of looking about it, if Western culture doesn’t know about it the rest of the world never know about it! But who’s to say local peoples didn’t know about a certain plant or animal for ages prior to the “Western discovery”? We need people to acknowledge the vast body of knowledge out there, locked in indigenous, endangered languages.

Harrison wraps up his talk emphasizing how language is an infinite system, and I couldn’t agree with him more. He’s put particular consideration on local knowledge, but there is also a lot of knowledge that can be extracted from language — such as human migrations, which will have gaping holes if languages are allowed to erode at the rates they are now.

An new article in press, to be published in the Journal of Human Evolution will announce new hominin remains from Uzbekistan. The remains were actually found five years ago, and are the first hominin findings from the country in over 65 years! The remains were discovered in two Middle Paleolithic sites, the Obi-Rakhmat Grotto and Anghilak Cave. From the abstract,

“The material from Obi-Rakhmat (OR-1), a subadult represented by part of a permanent maxillary dentition and a fragmentary cranium, expresses a relatively Neandertal-like dentition coupled with more ambiguous cranial anatomy. The remains from Anghilak Cave include a non-diagnostic, diminutive right fifth metatarsal (AH-1). These findings are important additions to the Central Asia hominin fossil record.”

The paper, “New hominin remains from Uzbekistan,” is pretty straightforward. Obi-Rakhmat Grotto sits just west of the Kyrgyzstan border. It is a very rich in archaeology… lots of elongated Levallois blade blanks have been recovered. There is also a large zooarchaeological record, which shows taphonomic modification by humans, i.e. cut-marks, burning, etc.

Obi-Rakhmat deposits have been dated with AMS radiocarbon dating of charcoal, U-series dating of travertines, and electron spin resonance (ESR) on ungulate teeth. The radiocarbon dates exceeded the limits of the method, the U-series suggests the deposits are anywhere from 70,000–100,000 years old. ESR from the top strata date to 57,000–73,000 years old, while the bottom strata is dated to be 87,000 years old. The human remains from Obi-Rakhmat are represented by 6 isolated permanent maxillary teeth and over 120 crania fragments. Here are photos of the human remains from Ob-Rakhmat:

Obi-Rakhmat has been studied for over 45 years, where Anghilak Cave is a more recent discovery. There aren’t as many Levallois debitage in Anghilak as Obi-Rakhmat. According to the authors, the archaeology of Anghilak appears to be analogous to those of Kunji Cave, Iran (a Paleolithic site with small retouched tools). Preliminary radiocarbon dates from Anghilak suggest it is somewhere between 43,900-38,100 years old. Only one human remain was recovered from Anghilak, a metatarsal picture below:

The Obi-Rakhmat remains are thought to be single child, aged 9-12 years old, represented by the specimen name OR-1. The morphology of OR-1 dentition suggest this kid was a Neandertal. The first molar exhibits a skewed occlusal surface, the premolars exhibit some Neandertal traits. The cranial fragments, such as the relatively thick parietal of OR-1 further suggest that it was a Neandertal. Some other cranial fragments, such as the presence of a foramen in the parietal are seen in at least 37% of modern human. Neandertals, such as Amud 1, Shanidar 1, Tabun 1, Skhul 4, 5, and 9 lack such a foramen.

Making inferences from the temporal fragments of OR-1, the authors suggest that the external acoustic meatus of OR-1 is much lower, a trait seen in modern humans as well… but looking at the morphology of the inner ear, OR-1 has a small and wide posterior semicircular canal, a trait seen in Neandertals. The metatarsal from Anghilak, AH-1, isn’t representative enough to determine a species nor age — all we can tell is that it is human.

In general this description of the remains sound a lot like Teshik-Tash. The hominin remains from Teshik-Tash, the only other site in Uzbekistan yielding hominin fossils, are just as fragmentary and mixed in traits as OR-1. A recent genetic study of the Teshik-Tash remains suggest it was Neandertal, and I’m thinking that OR-1 and AH-1, if excavated under sterile conditions, may also need genetic analysis to confirm.

GLANTZ, M., VIOLA, B., WRINN, P., CHIKISHEVA, T., DEREVIANKO, A., KRIVOSHAPKIN, A., ISLAMOV, U., SULEIMANOV, R., RITZMAN, T. (2008). New hominin remains from Uzbekistan. Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2007.12.007

PLoS Genetics has published a new population genetics paper. It summarizes the order by which the world was peopled through the use of a new statistical model. This has been a big question in anthropology, and has often relied on archaeology, linguistics, and ethnography to supplement the genetic and physical data. I don’t mean to imply that the question has been completely answered with this new paper — but it is a new approach to asking a very critical question.

The paper is titled, “Inferring Human Colonization History Using a Copying Model.” This study is based off of inheritance patterns of 2,000 SNPs from the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) dataset from 2006. The dataset comes from 927 individuals from 53 different populations. Not all populations are included in this dataset, so there are gaps… But for any anthropologist out there who is interested with the tempo certain human populations radiated as well as their ancestry patterns, this open access paper is a must read.

The new “copy model” resolves much finer details because it compares the structure of chromosomes — i.e. how the haplotypes spread on a chromosome are inherited. This makes it possible to delve further back in time and identify smaller genetic contributions. You may know that other models have resorted to single loci, such as the Y-chromosome or mtDNA. It has been argued that these models oversimplify heredity. By analyzing shared parts of chromosomes across the entire human genome, the researchers believe their method can cope with much larger datasets, suggesting that over 500,000 genetic markers can be compared and contrasted in the future.

This paper has yielded both consistent and surprising results. For starters, the results are right inline with the Out of Africa model. In the video clips below, you can see that for yourself

Inferred history of the peopling of the world.

Donors are listed at the bottom in order according to the mean number of individuals that are used. Click to see the original movie in high res.

Did you noticed that the San are the beginning population? That’s obviously because the San of Southern Africa are the first population in the ordering of chromosomes. According to Spencer Wells, the San are one of the oldest, if not the oldest, peoples in the world based upon the Y-chromosome. Exactly one month ago, a study of mitochondrial genetic diversity within Africa kinda challenged this claim. But because this study used the HGDP dataset from 2006, the results are restricted to the populations included in the sample. The San gave rise to the Biaka, Bantu, and Mbuti populations which are all below the Sahara.

The last lineage to arise in Africa are the Mozabites, and based upon the 2,000 SNPs they have less in common with other African populations than the others African populations have with themselves. The authors suggest that this observation is because there was a bottleneck in the Mozabites that is not shared by any other African population.

The Mozabites gave rise to all the Central Eurasian populations in the HGDP sample. The Mozabites also gave rise to the Central European populations. The first three populations to arise in Europe are the French, Tuscans, and Italians. Several Near Eastern and Central Asian populations also contributed to the peopling of Central Europe.

East Asians have an entirely distinct source of ancestry from European peoples. The Uygurs and Hazara gave rise to Cambodian, Mongolian, Oroquen, Xibo, Yi, Tu, Daur, and Naxi people of East Asia. The Han also received their ancestry from the Xibo and other populations. Just how distinct is this cut-off? Well, less than 10% of Europeans show ancestry from the Uygurs. Almost no Europeans show ancestry from the Hazara. The authors suggest that this observation is because the East Asian populations were established independently from Europeans and only relatively recent admixture has affected the 10% Uygur-ness in European populations.

Many populations in Europe have exhibited distinct genetic, cultural, and linguistic traits such as the Basque. This study has shown that the Sardianians, Russians, Orcadians, and the Basque show strong similarities to other Europeans — but have a lot more Near Eastern and Central Asian ancestry markers than other Europeans. For example, the Basque show some of their ancestry come from the Hezhen, a far Eastern population.

The Pacific Islanders receive ancestry from the Melanesians and Cambodians — not surprising. The first Native American populations (the Colombians) share ancestry to the Hazara, Han, and Xibo, also not surprising. But since modern people were screened, the Colombians show European ancestry — it is most likely because of the outstanding European occupation of the Americas in the last 500 or so years.

The somewhat surprising finding (at least surprising to the authors, editors of the paper, and apparently the bloggers at the Spittoon) is that there’s strong Mongolian ancestry signal in the Pima people. This is distinctly differently from the Colombians, who have a much different ancestry. The authors write that this suggest independent waves of migration in the Americas which contradicts ‘the current consensus.’

I believe that this statement should be revised because a more recent paper, published after this current paper was submitted, suggests that the Americas was peopled in multiple waves. I’m kinda surprised the editors didn’t catch this. I’m also surprised the the bloggers behind the Spittoon, the 23andMe blog, didn’t catch this. They are in the population genetics and personal genomics business, I expect them to keep current on their literature. Anyways, I was talking to Razib about this and he suggested if some sort of Na-Dene phenomenon could be happening. Definitely possibly… what do you think?

Inferred history of chromosomes for individual populations

Each frame shows the path that chromosomes took from their origin in Southern Africa in reaching the population labelled in each frame. The width of each line indicates the proportion of the chromosomes that travelled by that route, with the diameter of the circle indicating the total proportion of chromosomes that went via that location (diameter of San = 1.0). Values were estimated recursively, working backwards from the labelled population to the first by assuming that the amount of genetic material passed on by each population was proportional to the number of donor individuals it contributed. Click to see the original movie in high res.

This paper is not the first to work around the single loci comparison critique, but it is successful and provides a template for others to work on. I’m really interested to see this same model applied to more SNPs and more populations.

Hellenthal, G., Auton, A., Falush, D., Przeworski, M. (2008). Inferring Human Colonization History Using a Copying Model. PLoS Genetics, 4(5), e1000078. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000078

Today is Anthropology.net’s one year anniversary on WordPress.com. I’ve been running this blog for more than one year but I decided to scrap some of the old site because of technical difficulties. It was a bittersweet decision. Initially, Anthropology.net lost a lot of readership. All the inbound links were broken, and that dropped the site’s page rank with the search engines.

Despite these losses, Anthropology.net has bounced back remarkably — even surpassing the readership it once had. One of the major successes I have seen is that Anthropology.net has had over half a million unique visitors to the site! That translates to an average of 1,400 visitors a day. My high school wasn’t even that large. To think that a population larger than my entire high school is visiting this niche site on a daily basis is amazing and humbling. The graph below documents the traffic growth per month for this last year.

But visits alone haven’t built Anthropology.net into what it has become. Commenting on the posts has also skyrocketed. Anthropology.net currently hosts over 1,350 of our comments. While I moved some of the old content last year, I could not migrate the comments at all. To think that you all are submitting your thoughtful comments everyday is a testament to dedicated and lively community behind this site.

This growth in traffic and commenting has all been because of the move to WordPress.com. The move relieved a lot of the system administration woes that bogged me down in the past. I remember having to deal with database backups, upgrades, and performance issues all the time. This took up time and energy from reading science papers and writing about them. I now have more time to read and write more thoroughly.

With these successes in mind, I really look forward to the future. I know I’ve made some massive mistakes on more occasions than I’d like to admit. I also know I frequently make smaller mistakes. I’m always catching my typos and grammatical mistakes after I hit the publish button, which is embarrassing. These are things I’ve been learning to improve on along the way… and I’m not deterred from continuing to blog here one bit.

One last thing… I’ve always been curious to know a bit more about Anthropology.net’s readers. I think it is important to know just to understand where people are coming from and at what levels Anthropology.net reaches. I know from the Facebook fanpage, which has 231 fans, that 65% of our readership are female. The majority of the fans are between the ages of 18-34. This is somewhat useful, but is limited to only those with Facebook accounts and subscribed as fans of Anthropology.net.

So to get a better break down, I’ve setup this short 10 question survey. Please fill it out honestly. The survey closes on Saturday, May 31st 2008 at midnight, Pacific Standard Time. I’ll share the results with everyone once it is done. If you don’t think the survey captures who you are, please comment in the thread below! I’m really interested in knowing more about y’all.

Tomorrow, the next installment in the Indiana Jones series of films is set to come out. The film is subtitled, “and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” I’m extremely excited. As a child, I really enjoyed the other three movies. My favorite was “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” I’ve been eagerly anticipating this new one when word got out last year.

Not many share my enthusiasm. Actually, some anthropologists have always been a hyper-defensive about the Indiana Jones movies, especially in the ways they popularize archaeology. Archaeologists, at least the ones I’ve worked with, don’t carry whips, and they aren’t so full of bravado. They are more systematic and analytical in their fieldwork and research compared to Dr. Jones. For these reasons, archaeologists have been concerned that Indiana Jones improperly portrays a professional in the discipline.

The most notable and recent reaction has been of Rex’s from Savage Minds. You can tell from his tone in sharing the news that Harrison Ford, the actor that plays Indiana Jones, being elected onto the board of directors of the Archaeological Institute of America is not something that particularly brings joy. Many professional archaeologists have dedicated their life’s work and effort to getting the position that Ford has been elected into. Understandably, they may feel stifled to read that Ford takes a spot, not because he’s done any archaeological research, but because of the impact his acting of a fictional character has had in making archaeology entertaining. In that regard, someone set out to write-up a somewhat serious yet comical mock denial of tenure for Indiana Jones, which found through Kerim’s Twitter post, another Savage Minds blogger.

I’m not gonna voice the same arguments, because I find Indiana Jones rather harmless and the reactions of some professionals to be way overboard. In fact, I attribute some of the reasons as to why I have interests in human prehistory to these films. And I believe most laymen realize archaeology isn’t so whimsical. People aren’t so dumb to think that archaeologists snap whips and regularly address women as, “Dolls.” Most people can figure out that they are just films, and Indy is just a character. Furthermore, we have not heard such defensive protests from people in the spying or policing sectors in reaction to James Bond or RoboCop. It seems like these professionals don’t feel threatened by movie character — so why then are archaeologists so vocal?

I am, however, interested in the inspiration behind Indiana Jones films. The new film, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” spins away from the “and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “and the Last Crusade,” recipes in that it is not based on struggle between Nazi and Allied archaeological interests. The two latter titles also kinda allude to what they are based on — biblical archaeology. But what’s this new one based off of?

As I understand it, the new film takes place in an Mesoamerican/Mixtec context. Indiana Jones takes charge of recovering a stolen crystal skull. Adorned skulls have been a big part of many Mesoamerican cultures. For example, many murals, stellae, and statues from Mayans to the Nazca show images of people with skull-icons as jewelry. Some Aztec skulls fortified with polished Jade. Our own popular culture also reveres the adorned skull, whether it be on a belt buckle or a diamond encrusted skull. I reviewed some of their significances in this post, which also happens to be one of the most popular Anthropology.net posts of all time. Many explain the reasons why humans have decorate skulls because of our fascination with death.

But what about crystal skulls? How did the film makers even get the idea of saving the crystal skull? Is there an archaeological record of crystal skulls? This is where an article in press, to be published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, comes in. The paper, “The origin of two purportedly pre-Columbian Mexican crystal skulls,” reviews the origin of the two most well known crystal skulls — one in British Museum and the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Both skulls were sold the the organizations under the guise that they are pre-Columbian artifacts.

There’s been a lot of back and forth between those that defend and contest their antiquity. Many years ago, geologists looked at the crystalline structure of the British Museum’s sample, and thought it was made of quartz excavated from a Brazilian rock quarry in 1940′s. The archaeological context of each skull is unknown, and no other quartz skulls have been found from any Mesoamerican/Mixtec archaeological excavation.

In the new research paper, several academics continue this investigation — analyzing the two skulls and comparing them based to what we know about pre-Columbian Mixtec technology. We know that stones weren’t cut with the wheel in pre-Columbian Mixtec cultures. Both skulls show micro-abrasions similar to stones cut with a wheel. Also, if you’ve seen photos of each skull, they look nothing like Mixtec artifacts. In fact they resemble more Art Nouveau style than anything else. I’ve put up photos of each in this post.

These findings lead to the conclusion that the British Museum skull was worked in Europe during the nineteenth century. The Smithsonian Institution skull was probably manufactured shortly before it was bought in Mexico City in 1960; large blocks of white quartz would have been available from deposits in Mexico and the U.S.A. And thus even the foundation of this movie, the pursuit of recovering the crystal skull artifact, is based on faux pseudo-archaeology. Not surprising… since the other three were based upon finding the Arc of the Covenant, glowing rocks, and the Holy Grail.

SAX, M., WALSH, J., FREESTONE, I., RANKIN, A., MEEKS, N. (2008). The origin of two purportedly pre-Columbian Mexican crystal skulls. Journal of Archaeological Science DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2008.05.007