Anthropology.net

John Hawks blogged about a very real threat to the rich caves at Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay, South Africa. See the run off from the Pinnacle Point Golf and Country Club is leaking into the caves and will affect the soil chemistry and dating. The problems are outlined in more depth in this news bit, published in the latest issue of Science, “Runoff Threatens Early Human Site.”

The caves at Pinnacle Point are pretty remarkable sites. Just this past year we read how important they are in a Nature paper, which outlined early humans harvested food from the sea, employed complex bladelet tools and used red pigments in symbolic behavior 164,000 years ago. This research behind this paper, “Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene,” was lead by Curtis Marean, pictured to the right.

Kris Hirst, of archaeology.about.com put up an informative breakdown on one of the caves at Pinnacle Point, PP13B.

“The oldest level, dated by OSL to 164,000 years ago, includes both Levallois and bladelet (Howiesons Poort-like) technologies, and 57 pieces of pigment (red ochre). Ten of the pieces were definitely used (ground or scraped). The faunal assemblage is limited to shellfish, collected primarily from nearby tidal pools.

If the 164,000 year old date proves correct, Pinnacle Point represents the oldest known use of shellfish and an early use of ochre. Most interesting are the bladelet technologies–Howiesons Poort are dated to ca 70,000 years old; the Pinnacle Point assemblage is not Howiesons Poort, but shares some technological characteristics. All of these features indicate a sophisticated level of human behaviors thought until recently to have been associated with the Upper Paleolithic.”

A judge recently declined to protect the archaeological site. I hope the $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Human Origins program that Marean secured will factor in some level of conservation effort, or emergency recovery before anymore damage is done.

Koenig, R. (2008). ARCHAEOLOGY: Runoff Threatens Early Human Site. Science, 320(5881), 1273a-1273a. DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5881.1273a

On Primatology.net, I just blogged about some unethical marketing tactics by Palabea.com that I want you to be aware of. Palabea is a startup social networking site with something like 50,000 users. There are some press reports circulating the wires promising Palabea will provide users with an opportunity to talk with “Albert,” a cyber chimp who has a Facebook profile. They are using the “Albert, the CyberChimp” fanbase to leverage growth in their site and generate revenue.

In that post, I address how the principle investigator, John Marlowe is fake. I also talk about how the institutions and publications are also fake. A founder of Palabea is the registered owner of CyberChimps.org, the online platform of the Cyber Chimp spin machine. Furthermore, the photos of “Albert” are doctored images of Ayumu, a real chimp, who is studied to understand primate cognition. Here are two examples:

I have no interest in slamming down Palabea. But I do not want misleading marketing to affect the public’s understanding of primatology. There is some honest primate cognition research out there, experiments that explore non-human language capabilities. This sort of hyped up fake stuff jeopardizes the scientific process and the integrity of primatology; it needs to be regulated… Palabea’s marketing will confuse the public by establishing fake institutions, projects, individuals, and “information.” I really don’t want this misinformation to spread to the mainstream press.

In order to prevent this poor attempt at viral marketing from spreading further, I’ve submitted my Primatology.net post to Digg. Please digg this news up and let others know about it.

One other way to help out is to add Albert the CyberChimp as a friend on Facebook and report the fake profile. I would do it myself, but “Albert” banned me from being his friend after I published the Primatology.net post! It is against Facebook’s Terms of Service (under the User Conduct section) to have fake profiles, and Albert’s is no-where-close to real.

“In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to: … impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;”