Anthropology.net

John Hawks shares with us news of a new hominid discovery. Similar to the post from a couple days ago, this is news of mandible of Homo erectus. Unlike the Serbian mandibular fragment, this is a complete jaw and was discovered at the Thomas I quarry near Casablanca by a French-Moroccan team co-led by CRNS research Jean-Paul Raynal.

The Thomas quarries are part of a series of quarries in a suburb of Casablanca called Hay Hassani. Thomas I has already yielded hominid remains. In 1969 another jaw was discovered, but it was only the left mandible and since then four human teeth were excavated. Other quarries nearby, such as Oulad J’mel and Sidi Abderhamane have also yielded interesting Acheulian archaeological finds in the past.

If you want more information about the Thomas, Oulad J’mel, and Sidi Abderhamane localities, I found this link pariticularly useful. The importance of Thomas 1 is also mentioned several times in Desmond Clark’s ‘History of Africa‘ text, which is offered by Google Books — so check it out. In the meantime, we’ll have to wait until a full analysis is done and submitted to a journal to know more about the the specimen and the geological context it came from.

Update July 2nd, 2008: Bram shared a link with a photo of the forementioned fossil. Here it is, click to see the original news (in French).

I stumbled upon this list of 10 ‘extraordinary’ burial ceremonies that I want to pass onto you. Since we’re a anthropology focused community, it is very possible that you’ve heard of most of these rituals. I knew of several of them, but learned some new things as well.

The following are ones I found particularly noteworthy:

1. Air Sacrifice – Mongolia
   The lama, the spiritual leader of the community is,

   “the only one allowed to touch the corpse, and a white silk veil is placed over the face. The naked body is flanked by men on the right side of the yurt while women are placed on the left. Both have their respective right or left hand placed under their heads, and are situated in the fetal position…

   …The body is taken away from the village and laid on the open ground. A stone outline is placed around it, and then the village dogs that have been penned up and not fed for days are released to consume the remains. What is left goes to the local predators.

   The stone outline remains as a reminder of the person. If any step of the ceremony is left out, no matter how trivial, bad karma is believed to ensue.”

2. Sky Burial – Tibet
   

   “The deceased is dismembered by a rogyapa, or body breaker, and left outside away from any occupied dwellings to be consumed by nature…

   …The ceremony represents the perfect Buddhist act, known as Jhator. The worthless body provides sustenance to the birds of prey that are the primary consumers of its flesh.”

3. Pit Burial – Pacific Northwest Haida
   The Haida of the American northwest coast,

   “…Simply cast their dead into a large open pit behind the village.

   Their flesh was left to the animals. But if one was a chief, shaman, or warrior, things were quite different.

   The body was crushed with clubs until it fit into a small wooden box about the size of a piece of modern luggage. It was then fitted atop a totem pole in front of the longhouse of the man’s tribe where the various icons of the totem acted as guardians for the spirits’ journey to the next world.”

4. Predator Burial – Maasai Tribe
   The Maasai of East Africa, perform traditional burials but are reserved for only chief.

   “The common people are simply left outdoors for predators to dispose of, since Maasai believe dead bodies are harmful to the earth.”

5. Skull Burial – Kiribati
   The inhabitants of the tiny island Kiribati, in the South Pacific, lay out the dead in the house for as long as twelve days, they then bury the dead.

   “Several months after internment the body is exhumed and the skull removed, oiled, polished, and offered tobacco and food. After the remainder of the body is re-interred, traditional islanders keep the skull on a shelf in their home and believe the native god Nakaa welcomes the dead person’s spirit in the northern end of the islands.”

Clearly, there’s a theme to the ones I found interesting. I’m very curious to with how others view the body as a vessel. In contrast to many Judeo-Christian burials, these ones I’ve outlined don’t adorn their dead with fancy gravestones and a $6,000 coffin. Instead, they believe the body should be returned into the ecosystem.

Some of the commenters in the original post added some more interesting burial practices not mentioned, such as the Hanging Coffins in the Philipines. I’ve got one to add that is similar with the ones I plucked from the Brave New Traveler post, the Zoroastrian burial rites.

Being Iranian, Zoroastrian culture is pretty deeply engrained. I’ve known for sometime that Zoroastrian people used to present the corpse to a dog, preferably a dog with a spot above each eye which is thought to have increased the efficacy of its gaze. This ritual is repeated five times a day. Since Zoroastrian religion revolves around light and fire, after the first rite, a fire is brought into the room and is kept burning until three days after the removal of the corpse to the Tower of Silence during daytime.

The Tower of Silence is composed of three areas, one for men, women, and children respectively. The corpses are exposed there naked and presented to vultures. Once the vultures do their thing, the remains are dried by the sun and then are buried into the central well.

I’m very curious to know the origin of this ritual, because of the remarkable similarity between the Mongolian and Tibetan practices. As you know the Mongols control Persia and Tibet for quite sometime, where I suspect these practices were exchanged, amongst other memes.

Do you have any interesting burial practices to share with us?

Introduction

Before I dive into the concept of race, I just want to thank Kambiz for this opportunity to broaden not only my perspectives but everyone else’s as well. I am very excited to discuss subjects that interest me and make people think critically about culture and society. I am looking forward to this personal challenge to hold my own writing with an anthropological community. I humbly thank you all in advance!

Historical Context

All the history books that I have read suggest that race was first recognized when the Europeans came over to America and saw the Native Americans. But what did the Europeans think of the peoples on their trade routes? What was different about the Native Americans that sparked a racial hierarchy to begin? Or is it our history books that are flawed due to being written by either by Americans or Europeans and are therefore biased?

The main concern of the Europeans was religion and how people of different colors fit into that scheme. Were they also “Children of God or soulless creatures that needed to be saved? The discussion of the “conversion” of “savages” is an entirely different bag of issues, so to speak. But this is, nevertheless, the beginning of the mistreatment of people for their skin color…in theory.

Definition

The definitions that I am referencing are from “The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality” with Tracey E. Ore describing race as “a group of people who perceive themselves and are perceived by others as possessing distinctive hereditary traits.” Whereas ethnicity would be “having cultural traits such as language, religion, family customs, and food preferences.” I state the definition of ethnicity because the two can be confused with one another but they can also be intertwined.

Reason for Race, Not Justification

It is human nature to categorize things to make our reality more palatable. Also, it is a coping mechanism for status. Something as simple as the color of one’s skin can denote their position in a hierarchy and can save a conversation. One does not have to talk to someone to figure out their status if they can just look at them and know according to their skin color, hypothetically speaking. Now, I am not saying we all do this, but realize that ingrained within each one of us is our culture that society has presented to us since birth. I believe, no matter who you are looking at, you will make some sort of assumption or employ some sort of stereotype to that person. This may include race but more importantly hierarchy or status judgment.

Construction through Society

Race is a very dynamic human category. It is not the same anywhere at any given time due to the different constructs set up within a society and the personal translation of that construct. The construction is solely based upon the “recipe” for race throughout the society’s history. In America, race started out by the decision of whether or not the peoples of darker skin were animals or men. That is a pretty intense construct to break out of after years of this type of thinking and teaching! It has taken decades…no centuries to even come face to face with the equal rights issues because people are just stuck in society’s cultural mind of oppression!

Not only sociocultural factors are involved but a more “exact” science as well: biology. Scientists justified oppression due to skin color by coming up with biological factors that proved “they” were inferior to them. We have outgrown this phase (for the most part), though, which is relieving. There is still a commanding argument on whether or not biology has anything to do the color of skin of anyone. Yes, the color of skin varies but does it make someone biologically different to the point of them being inferior or superior?

Conclusion

The conception of race is truly in the eyes of the beholder. It depends on who is looking, judging, assuming and has little or nothing to do with biology but the history of a society that makes assumptions or stereotypes of people of darker skin to create a social hierarchy that is visible or easily identified. There is variation of skin colors depending on the region of one’s origin. But the emphasis put behind the skin is the creation of race. The emphasis that is put in place by a sociocultural system is where the interpretation and conception of race stems from. Race is just an idea and not a fact of inferiority.

John Hawks just pointed out a press release announcing a new hominid from Serbia. The site is a cave in the Sicevo Gorge. The site is dated to the Middle Pleistocene, or around 130,000 to 250,000 years old. The press release doesn’t provide a definitive dating technique, just saying that the,

“The [remains were] found at a depth of four meters, below a Neanderthal village.”

The specimen is a mandibular fragment with three complete teeth. Dusan Mihailovic, the leader of the excavations at Sicevo Gorge thinks the jaw is of a Homo erectus, but again the press release doesn’t provide any information of a thorough comparative analysis…

Here’s a photo of Dusan Mihailovic holding the mandible:

I have brought up Paul Ehrlich a lot lately. And this morning Razib emailed me a link to an interview of Ehrlich by Carl Zimmer on Bloggingheads.tv, so I felt compelled to share the interview with you.

In the discussion, Zimmer and Ehrlich discuss Ehrlich’s new book, “The Dominant Animal, the ‘overrated idea of a meme,’ why the study of cultural evolution needs its own theoretical framework aside from evolutionary biology.

I’m particularly interested in the last topic, which comes in at the 20 minute mark, since Ehrlich coauthors links to natural selection in his latest PNAS paper but advocates that social scientists need to step up to the plate and explain why cultures have evolved. The most noteworthy remark Ehrlich makes on this topic is,

“The ball is really in the court of social scientists today. They’ve got to get reorganized and particularly get rid of their preposterous disciplinary boundaries. How can you possibly be a political scientists without knowing economics and sociology and vice versa.”

The two also talk about other selected topics on population growth and the nuances that come with it.

Ancient mtDNA from 22 individuals from two sites in Southern Denmark have been isolated, sequenced and analyzed. The two sites are Bøgebjerggård and Skovgaarde. On the map to your right, they are marked as B for Bøgebjerggård and S for Skovgaarde. They date to the Danish Roman Iron-Age period, or approximately 2000 to 1600 years ago. Bøgebjerggård yielded the remains 15 individuals, but only 8 were analyzed in this paper: 4 males, 3 females, and 1 individual whose sex could not be determined. Skovgaarde yielded the remains of 19 individuals, but only 14 were analyzed for this paper:  1 male, 9 females, and 4 individuals whose sex could not be determined.

The report of the ancient mtDNA analysis has been published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. In the paper, “Rare mtDNA Haplogroups and Genetic Differences  in Rich and Poor Danish Iron-Age Villages,” I did not read about any discussion of a sterile excavation. It seems as if the remains were removed and curated at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, in the University of Copenhagen for several decades. Owen Lovejoy and other notable phyiscal anthropologists have analyzed the remains to determine sex and the age at death.

The fact that a sterile excavation was not done and at least a half dozen analysts touched the remains, presumably with non-sterile technique, is troublesome for any accurate ancient DNA analysis. One way the authors of this paper compensated was to sample mtDNA from within teeth that were still sitting snug in the alveolus.

DNA isolation and amplification was done in a clean laboratory with the highest grade reagents. The authors mention all the precautions they took to avoid contamination. I would not expect anything otherwise! The products of the PCR were further amplified using Topo TA cloning. I do not know why.

Approximately, 340 bases of the Hyper Variable Region 1 (HVR-1) of the mitochondrial genome was amplified of from 22 individuals. In some cases isolations from three teeth were used per individual, but I can’t tell if they were combined because there was not enough DNA or if they were keep seperately as part of a validation control layer.

Once the sequences were acquired, the authors performed a haplogroup comparison of the samples to a ‘private’ mtDNA database they maintain. There was not a discussion about how robust their private database is and that is very concerning. If their database was relatively small, i.e. not many samples, that would seriously hinder their ability to resolve fine differences. What is just as curious is that there was no discussion about why the authors decided to use their own database! There are large, accurate datasets out there that many people use. The authors could have also compared their sequences to these public datasets to validate their results!

Either way, the big headline find from this sequence comparison is that one individual, a male, from Bøgebjerggård carried the haplogroup R0a in his mitochondrial genome. This haplogroup is rarely found in modern Danish populations and not found in any of the other ancient Danish remains. This haplogroup is, however, found in sporadically in South Eastern Europe populations but predominately found in populations of Arab ancestry — Bedouins in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemenites and Ethiopian Jews, and Somalis.

Ask yourself is this surprising? No it is not. In April we read of archaeological evidence of Middle Eastern coins from the 7th century in Sweden. This indicates people were actively migrating back and forth between the Near East and Northern Europe, exchanging goods and probably exchanging genes.

Does this finding warrant headlines like, “Adolf Hitler’s Aryan theory rubbished by science” appearing in the newspaper the Telegraph? No, it does not. Like I said, this finding isn’t surprising nor does it mean that 1 individual in Iron-Age Denmark throws off the whole genetic composition of an entire population. The overwhelming majority of Danes do not carry this haplogroup. So, the presence of the remains of male with with the haplogroup R in his mtDNA simply suggests he is of Near Eastern descent.

Melchior, L., Gilbert, M., Kivisild, T., Lynnerup, N., Dissing, J. (2008). Rare mtDNA haplogroups and genetic differences in rich and poor Danish Iron-Age villages. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 135(2), 206-215. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20721

Cultural evolution has been a pretty active and heated topic in the anthropology blogosphere, especially between Martin, afarensis, and I. Afarensis continued the discussion today, returning to this topic but on the projectile point scope.

In some sort of weird coincidence, the professional press has also chimed in — not explicitly on projectile points, but on cultural evolution. I tip my hat to Simon Greenhill, who found these these two relevant pieces and posted about them in his blog HENRY. The first, a review on “Evolution in Archaeology,” by Stephen Shennan­ has been published in the Annual Review of Anthropology journal. The second, this column in Seed Magazine by Paul Ehrlich — who recently published a research paper in PNAS on cultural evolution, as well as a back and forth series of letters with a criticizer of his work.

Shennan is well versed in cultural evolution. He is one of the co-authors of a text titled, “The Evolution of Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach.” In his Annual Review of Anthropology review, Shennan describes the history of how people have approached cultural evolution. He brings up the differences in the two analytical camps, ‘one centered on cultural transmission and dual inheritance theory and the other on human behavioral ecology,’ and how they have effected answering evolutionary questions with archaeological data. In summary, he effectively advocates that we need to find and agree on new, consistent ways of using archaeological data to answer evolutionary questions.

Ehrlich’s message starts out on a similar tone. In his second paragraph, he writes how we do not really “understand how cultures evolve.” He pays particular attention to the ambiguous nature of culture — something that “composed of overlapping phenomena from languages, religions, institutions, and socially transmitted power relationships to the information embodied in artifacts ranging from potsherds to jumbo jets,” and how it hard to extract patterns from all these varying sources that seem so bogged down with noise.

But Ehrlich ultimately reconsiles in that culture can be analyzed broadly, and under the same theoretical constraints that we analyze genetic evolution — so long as we through out that cultural evolution is progressive. His piece transitions into a summary of his recent research, but I still recommend you read it because it does a much better job with translating the science than I can, since he was one of the authors behind the piece.

Both are effective pieces in synthesizing evolutionary theory with the concept of culture. It is very problematic for one to discuss both or refute that culture doesn’t evolve without a strong understanding of the theoretical basis of evolution, selection, and change.

News of Neandertal tools from an Early Upper Palaeolithic site called Beedings, north east of Pulborough in West Sussex, United Kingdom is emerging. So far the BBC News is the only major news source running this, but smaller local news papers such as the West Sussex Gazette have also published news on this subject.

Team leader Matthew Pope of Archaeology South East has restarted excavations at the Beedings site. Beedings was first excavated in 1900, over one hundred years ago. Then, over 2,300 stone tools were uncovered as foundations were being dug for what is now the Beedings Castle (which is apparently for sale). Last year Roger Jacobi of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project published an analysis of these tools in a paper titled, “A Collection of Early Upper Palaeolithic Artefacts from Beedings, near Pulborough, West Sussex.” From what I can tell, the publishing journal, unfortunately, doesn’t have a working system for people to access the article.

Jacobi understood the tools showed strong resemblances to other tools from northern Europe dating to between 35,000 and 42,000 years ago, putting this site right in the Late Paleolithic. This meant either an early colonization date of Britain by anatomically modern humans or an occupation by technologically advanced and late surviving Neandertals.

The diversity and type of the tools from Beedings is more extensive than any other found in the region. They are mostly all long refined blades or cores where these blades were knapped from. Such tools come from technologically advanced cultures, with an understanding of where to find the raw material, and how to finely knap them.

Because of this advanced tool kit, Pope considers the Neandertals of this area were thriving and far from struggling to survive — which has been proposed by many as one of the reasons why Neandertals went bye-bye. Pope comments,

“Unlike earlier, more typical Neandertal tools these were made with long, straight blades – blades which were then turned into a variety of bone and hide processing implements, as well as lethal spear points…

…We also discovered older, more typical Neanderthal tools, deeper in the fissure. Clearly, Neanderthal hunters were drawn to the hill over a long period time…

The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology – not a people on the edge of extinction.”

Barney Sloane, Head of Historic Environment Commissions at English Heritage added, supporting Pope and Jacobi,

“The tools at Beedings could equally be the signature of pioneer populations of modern humans, or traces of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy the region.

This study offers a rare chance to answer some crucial questions about just how technologically advanced Neanderthals were, and how they compare with our own species.”

How does Pope know for sure that these tools are made by Neandertals? We know there were probably eight major incursions into Britain by humans, and the British people of today are essentially new arrivals – products only of the last influx 12,000 years, indicating the other seven migrations failed… In other words those inhabitants went bye-bye too. Stone tools from a quarry at Lynford, near Norwich indicate Neandertals occupied Britain some 60,000 years ago.

So the hype spun by Pope, and the BBC, you know the enthusiasm that the tools from Beddings prove Neandertals were sophisticated and in ‘ complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials,’ isn’t entirely novel. Neandertals had to be in command of the landscape and materials to cross either the North Sea or the English Channel from mainland Europe and enter Britan. Furthermore they had to have been in command of fashioning functional tools to take down large mammals, like mammoths and woolly rhinoceros — two prey species associated with Neandertal sites in the United Kingdom, which they survived off of for thousands of years.

This reminds me of this other hyped up Neandertal finding which I wrote about in February. Then, the press was going crazy over how some isotope analysis (creative methodology but not a very enlightening result) proved Neandertals were mobile. Again, hardly a novel concept… but I’m wondering why everyone still considers Neandertals as clueless cavemen? We’re far past that understanding. We know their tool set has been ‘advanced,’ they migrated all over Eurasia and the Middle East and had bodies and brains much like ours — if not larger. Given the wealth of archaeological and morphological evidence, it is time to stop spinning this pop-culture representation of Neandertals as dumb bipedal apes.

One last thing, you maybe interested in this 2 minute news video where Matthew Pope simply explains hypes up the tools to the BBC News.

Ari Löytynoja and Nick Goldman have developed a new method that detects and distinguishes insertions and deletions in genomes. Their work was published in the most recent issue of Science. While Löytynoja and Goldman didn’t explicitly write how their new algorithim, described in, “Phylogeny-Aware Gap Placement Prevents Errors in Sequence Alignment and Evolutionary Analysis,” impacts our understanding of human evolution and how we compare primate genomes, it is an important to understand what they’ve accomplished.

Up until now, people compared and contrasted sequencing similarities of multiple genomes using a tool that does a multiple sequence alignment. A commonly used tool is called CLUSTALW. And I’ve used it a lot. CLUSTAL will take long strings of DNA sequences and align them based upon their shared similarities. When a sequence is the same between the samples, they are matched… When sequences aren’t the same, they are marked as gaps. Every consecutive pairwise match between two or more sequences are given a score, and every gap is given a penalty.

Many different alignments are computed and the one with the best score is presented. Phylogenetic trees are drawn off of these sequence alignments. The problem is that this method disregards judging if a length difference between two sequences is a deletion in one or an insertion in the other sequence. This ultimately and systematically creates errors in comparisons of genetic sequences of different species… check it out for yourself, the image below shows the traditional alignment on the left and the new alignment algorithim on the right:

This is where Löytynoja and Goldman’s new algorithm, PRANK, a phylogeny aware algorithm, shines. The phylogeny-aware approach,

“flags the gaps made in previous alignments and, using evolutionary information from related sequences to indicate whether each gap has been created by an insertion or a deletion, permits their “reuse” for inserted characters without further penalty in the next stage of the progressive alignment. In addition, information from closely related sequences can be used to infer sites as “permanent” insertions that cannot be matched in subsequent alignments, so that distinct insertion events are correctly kept separate even when they occur at exactly the same position. If related sequences indicate that a gap is caused by a deletion, flags are removed and no further free gaps at that position are permitted, and the effect is correctly targeted on insertions only.”

Löytynoja explains,

“Say we are comparing the DNA of human and chimp and can’t tell if a deletion or an insertion happened. To solve this our tool automatically invokes information about the corresponding sequences in closely related species, such as gorilla or macaque. If they show the same gap as the chimp, this suggests an insertion in humans.”

In their sample set, they compared sequences of primates to primates, primates to rodents, and primates to all mammals, they were able to identify that insertions are far more common in primate evolution than deletions. Furthermore, the frequency of deletions have been exaggerated because of the inability of previous tools to effectively detect them… which makes me wonder if primates, relatively recent in evolutionary times has been under a relaxed, diversifying level of positively selection? Like some sort of explosion of adaptive radiation of the taxon… I haven’t completely thought this thru, just something that popped into my mind while writing this.

Loytynoja, A., Goldman, N. (2008). Phylogeny-Aware Gap Placement Prevents Errors in Sequence Alignment and Evolutionary Analysis. Science, 320(5883), 1632-1635. DOI: 10.1126/science.1158395

According to these press reports, Debbie Argue, of the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology, has produced a new cladistic comparison of Homo floresiensis to many other H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. habilis specimens. I read the releases, and it seems like some gracile australopithecines were also in the comparison set… at least Australopithecus garhi… not too sure though. Her matrix was based off of 40 character states off of the crania and 30 characters off of the mandibles of H. floresiensis and the comparative sample.

She presented her results to her university’s Archaeological Science Conference in February… the news of it is just leaking out now. Her work suggests that the tiny Homo floresiensis are not a biproduct of strong insular dwarfism. A form of speciation also seen on Flores in several species, including a dwarf Stegodon.

Here’s a summary of her results:

• Homo floresiensis is more similar to H. ergaster or H. habilis, indicating that H. floresiensis and H. habilis share a common ancestor.
• H. floresiensis has an arm-leg length ratio that resembles Australopithecus garhi. I don’t know where this is coming from because her character set seemed to be based soley off of skull measurements and not post cranial measurements. Furthermore, LB1, the type specimen for H. floresiensis has a cranial capacity of 417cc. A. garhi had a cranial capacity of 450cc. To Argue, this indicates,

“Flores seems to have evolved around the time of A. garhi, given its primitive arm-leg ratio, whereas H. habilis was moving towards the modern human ratio around the same time…

…[which] means some hominin must have moved out of Africa about two million years ago, which is half a million years earlier than the Dmanisi hominin, which is supposedly the earliest out of Africa.”

This conclusion is in line with conclusion made by academics in September. But the most liberal assesment of when hominins began occupying Flores Island is around 94,000 years ago, there’s a massive gap in the archaeological and fossil record that needs to be acounted for.