Anthropology.net

Energy Use by Eem Neanderthals

A paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science by Bent Sørensen of the University of Roskilde in Denmark, discusses how European Neanderthals living in the Eemian interglacial, dated to around 125,000 years bp  might have conserved much needed energy by drying and storing meat,  wearing fitted clothing, and sleeping beneath blankets of mammoth skin, behaviours that would have greatly increased their chances of surviving decreasing temperatures with the onset of ice ages.

Because Neanderthals were far more robust than ourselves and experienced lives of great physical duress, energy acquisition and conservation would have been of prime importance to them, especially when we consider that hunting trips in pursuit of large herbivores would have involved the physical challenges of attacking the prey at close quarters,  transportation of large quantities of meat back to camp  – drying large quantities of freshly killed lean meat greatly reduces the weight burden, and moreover prevents it from quickly rotting. Fatty meat on the other hand does not preserve well, and rots more quickly than lean meat.

The paper also presents a good case for the idea that contrary to many depictions of barefooted archaic humans draped in ill-fitting animal skins, (which would have afforded little in the way of protection from the elements) it seems more likely from the scarce archaeological evidence, that they wore clothes that fit and sturdy foot-wear to boot. Not only would this have been the case during colder glacial eras, but also during warmer spells, when sleeping at night would have required the use of covers or blankets, when night-time temperatures would have dropped.

Abstract:

An analysis of energy use by Neanderthals in Northern Europe during the mild Eem interglacial period is carried out with consideration of the metabolic energy production required for compensating energy losses during sleep, at daily settlement activities and during hunting expeditions, including transport of food from slain animals back to the settlement. Additional energy sources for heat, security and cooking are derived from fireplaces in the open or within shelters such as caves or huts. The analysis leads to insights not available from archaeological findings that are mostly limited to durable items such as those made of stone:

Even during the benign Eem period, Neanderthals faced a considerable heat loss problem. Wearing tailored clothes or some similar measure was necessary for survival. An animal skin across the shoulder would not have sufficed to survive even average cold winter temperatures and body cooling by convection caused by wind. Clothes and particularly footwear had to be sewn together tightly in order to prevent intrusion of water or snow.

The analysis of hunting activity evolvement in real time further shows that during summer warmth, transport of meat back to the base settlement would not be possible without some technique to avoid that the meat rots. The only likely technique is meat drying at the killing site, which indicates further skills in Neanderthal societies that have not been identified by other routes of investigation.

Although only the abstract is available at the Journal of Archaeological Science, the paper is reproduced (PDF) in its entirety at Professor Sørensen’s website, affording us the opportunity of gleaning further insights into the lives of Neanderthals living in north-western Europe 125,000 years ago, a time when the climate is estimated to have been fairly similar to the current conditions, and one that was capable of supporting plenty of food on the hoof, and extensive woodlands which in turn allowed Neanderthals to exploit timber, not only as fuel for the fire, but quite possibly for the occasional hut as well – suggestions that they built wind-breaks for example, is further testament to their technological prowess.

Additionally, consideration is given as to how they would have coped with the cold during long glaciations, when the fauna they hunted would have changed, focussing more on mammoth, which appear to have been virtually absent from this part of Europe during warm intervals. Here’s an excerpt from the paper addressing this very topic:

Read the rest of this entry »

A new paper published in Anthropological Science claims that comparative skull analyses between the hobbit skull and various others from H. sapiens and a plethora of archaic others, indicates to the authors of this study that the diminutive humans, whose remains were discovered on the island of Flores descended from Asian Homo erectus.

The paper is free to access, and although I haven’t had time to read it through, looks set to cause yet more rumblings in the ongoing debate between those who contend H. floresiensis was a microcephalic H. sapiens, and those who believe that an entirely new species of human has been discovered. Here’s the abstract…

Since its first description in 2004, Homo floresiensis has been attributed to a species of its own, a descendant of H. erectus or another early hominid, a pathological form of H. sapiens, or a dwarfed H. sapiens related to the Neolithic inhabitants of Flores. In this contribution, we apply a geometric morphometric analysis to the skull of H. floresiensis (LB1) and compare it with skulls of normal H. sapiens, insular H. sapiens (Minatogawa Man and Neolithic skulls from Flores), pathological H. sapiens (microcephalics), Asian H. erectus (Sangiran 17), H. habilis (KNM ER 1813), and Australopithecus africanus (Sts 5).

Our analysis includes specimens that were highlighted by other authors to prove their conclusions. The geometric morphometric analysis separates H. floresiensis from all H. sapiens, including the pathological and insular forms. It is not possible to separate H. floresiensis from H. erectus. Australopithecus falls separately from all other skulls. The Neolithic skulls from Flores fall within the range of modern humans and are not related to LB1.

The microcephalic skulls fall within the range of modern humans, as well as the skulls of the Neolithic small people of Flores. The cranial shape of H. floresiensis is close to that of H. erectus and not to that of any H. sapiens. Apart from cranial shape, some features of H. floresiensis are not unique but are shared with other insular taxa, such as the relatively large teeth (shared with Early Neolithic humans of Sardinia), and changed limb proportions (shared with Minatogawa Man).

The putative link to H.erectus isn’t entirely unexpected, if only from a geographical perspective, because the island of Flores was also home to these archaic humans some 840,000 years ago – as with the so-called hobbits, nobody is quite sure how they managed to arrive on an island so long ago, when a sea crossing was the only available means of access.

(via Mundo Neandertal)

image via online paper

Reference:

The Origin of Homo floresiensis and its Relation to Evolutionary Processes Under Isolation. (PDF) (HTML) G.A. Lyras, M.D. Dermitzakis, A.A.E. Van der Geer, S.B. Van der Geer, J. De Vos. Anthropological Science 117(1), 33–43, April 2009.

There’s a new online resource for anthropologists, or anyone with an interest in the field, which allows members to set up or join groups that relate to their own sphere, communicate with one another, announce events, write blogs and post to forums, add media content, and so on – all under the umbrella of the Open Anthropology Cooperative.

The OAC came into being on May 29th, 2009, since when nearly a thousand people have signed up, and 84 groups have been started, some of which are mainstream, and many of which concentrate on more specific areas. Here’s an overview from their About page:

Anthropology has a distinguished past, but it has an even greater future. This is bound to depend on professionals and students of anthropology; and we hope that those of us who are already committed to the discipline will find here like-minded anthropologists, as well as new tools, resources and opportunities for collaboration.  The Open Anthropology Cooperative is not just for the members of an academic discipline; we welcome anyone for whom our conversations are interesting.

An engaged anthropology for the 21st century should also be an interdisciplinary project aiming to discover what we need to know about humanity as a whole if we would make a better world. Such a project depends on making full use of the emerging social and technical synthesis entailed in the digital revolution. It also means engaging with a new kind of inequality, the digital divide.  The OAC was launched on 28 May 2009 by a group of friends who met on Twitter before joining Ning.

The most important word in our title is the first. Open access, open membership, open to sharing new ideas, open to whatever the organization might do or become; open to everyone, as in ‘open source’. We have already started many discussion groups, blogs, a forum and places to share a variety of ideas and materials. This is just the beginning: we expect to hold virtual conferences, to add podcasts, publish longer pieces online and incorporate a variety of social networking devices into our exchanges.

The OAC is for all of us to explore and elaborate. Let the people take over! To help out with that, we have a small team of administrators (below) and an OAC Policy Forum where you can participate in shaping the Cooperative’s development. We encourage initiatives using languages other than English.

I’d imagine OAC would be of great interest to many readers of this site, and because there is far more there already than I can briefly cover here, I’d suggest having a browse round the various parts of the site, check out the groups. The signing up process is quick and straightforward, and indeed necessary for those wishing to interact with existing members, who hail from a wide variety of locations, bringing to the site a great scope of interests and backgrounds.

As I’ve only just signed up, it’ll be a while before I find my way around, but I’m hoping that over coming weeks and months there will be discussions, events and content posted there that will merit further mention in these pages. I came across this video for example, Tales From The Jungle: Margaret Mead, which begins by looking at her work in Samoa and the later controversy that arose, all which I’m hoping to cover as part of another post,

Open Anthropology Cooperative

image from here

Two items of news that have appeared over the last day or two, and which I’d otherwise have definitely submitted to the recent edition of Four Stone Hearth, concern analyses of mastodon and mammoth bones, the first of which leads a researcher to suggest he has good evidence that humans were inhabiting the Americas as far back as 33,000-50,000 bp, whilst the second story indicates that the mammoth may have survived in Britain as recently as 14,000 bp, about 7,000 years later than previously thought.

The first story concerns the vexed question of when the Americas were first occupied by humans, which as will have been apparent over recent times, has seen the Clovis First theory finally, if belatedly laid to rest. Archaeological and genetic evidence points to an occupation by at least 15,000 bp, but even these early dates may not tell the whole story, with researchers pointing to a variety of sites in places like Valsequillo in Mexico, where claims for 40,000 year-old footprints have been made, caves with shell middens in Baja California, the site at Topper and others to suggest a human presence tens of thousands of years before the immediate antecedents of Clovis were around.

Dr. Steven Holer, Curator of Archaeology at the Denver Museum of Natural History and Science,  has conducted extensive research into fractured mammoth and mastodon bones dated 20,000 bp and older, which he contends could only have been broken by humans wielding hammerstones, and although no artefacts or humans remains have been found in context, he’s convinced that he has proof of a very early human presence. Quoted recently in Indian Country Today, he explains his current theories:

“Several scientists, me included, are producing evidence of a much older Native American occupation of the continent,” he said, adding that, as has happened in the past, “the scientific establishment has underestimated the time depth of the Native American occupation of the Americas.”

A practitioner of experimental archaeology, Holen studies the patterns of breakage in mammoth bones, extrapolating and recreating the kind of instrument and force required to create such fractures and hypothesizing possible implements that could be made from the shattered remains.

“The only way these could be broken in the past as we see it is by humans using hammerstones.”  Although stone tools have not yet been found with the bones, “You don’t have to have stone tools – you have to have evidence of human technology.”

The uses of fractured bones may have varied, including that of the mammoth from Nebraska recently radiocarbon-dated at 33,000 before present (BP).

For the sake of brevity, I’ll refer readers to two papers he has authored, (here and here – both pdf), which add a great deal more background to the sites he’s excavated, and include embedded photos of various bones that appear to exhibit signs of human modification. Moreover, he makes a point of  explaining why he believes these bones were not gnawed by carnivores or trampled by other mammoths, quoting the observations of contemporary researchers who have examined African elephant bones that had been killed by humans and modified by scavengers.

The second story, covered in Science Daily, takes us to the county of Shropshire in Britain, where in 1986, the so-called Condover mammoths were discovered. With the advent of what are described as more accurate radiocarbon dating techniques, Professor Adrian Lister, in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in London, claims he has been able to establish that the mammoth survived in Britain until 14,000 years ago, long after the glacial maximum at around 21,000 bp, which was previously thought to have killed them off. This later date is believed to correspond with the theory that the warming climate and ensuing loss of habitat accounted for the demise of the mammoth, rather than their suffering an extinction event at the hands of overly enthusiastic Pleistocene hunters.

There are three related papers published in the current edition of the Geological Journal, all of which are free to access, and details of which appear below.

image: mammoth femur, Denver Museum of Nature and Science

References:

Holen, S. R., 2007. The Age and Taphonomy of Mammoths at Lovewell Reservoir, Jewell County, Kansas, USA (PDF | 790KB). Quaternary International (in press)

Holen, S. R., 2006. Taphonomy of Two Last Glacial Maximum Mammoth Sites in the Central Great Plains of North America: A Preliminary Report (PDF | 979KB). Quaternary International 142-143:30-43.

Late-glacial Remains of Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) From Shropshire, UK: Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Geochronology of the Condover Site (PDF) (p 392-413) J. D. Scourse, G. R. Coope, J. R. M. Allen, A. M. Lister, R. A. Housley, R. E. M. Hedges, A. S. G. Jones, R. Watkins Published Online: Jun 18 2009 7:22AM DOI: 10.1002/gj.1163

Palaeoenvironmental Context of the Late-glacial Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) Discoveries at Condover, Shropshire, UK (PDF) (p 414-446) J. R. M. Allen, J. D. Scourse, A. R. Hall, G. R. Coope Published Online: Jun 18 2009 7:22AM DOI: 10.1002/gj.1161

Late-glacial Mammoth Skeletons (Mammuthusprimigenius) from Condover (Shropshire, UK): Anatomy, Pathology, Taphonomy and Chronological Significance (PDF) (p 447-479) Adrian M. Lister Published Online: Jun 18 2009 7:22AM DOI: 10.1002/gj.1162

Appearing as an essay in Nature, this linked article describes how in 1995, Russell Ciochon,  who had described a 1.9 million year-old fossil jaw found in the Sichuan province of China as belonging to Homo habilis, with the implication that later Homo erectus in Asia was a direct descendant, has changed his mind, instead attributing the fossil material to one or more mystery ape populations. The article begins thus:

Fossil finds of early humans in southeast Asia may actually be the remains of an unknown ape. Russell Ciochon says that many palaeoanthropologists — including himself — have been mistaken.

Fourteen years ago, a Nature paper by my colleagues and I described a 1.9-million-year-old human jaw fragment from Longgupo in Sichuan province, China1. The ancient date in itself was spectacular. Previous evidence had suggested that human ancestors arrived in east Asia from Africa about 1 million years ago, in the form of Homo erectus. Longgupo nearly doubled that estimate. But even more exciting — and contentious — was our claim that the jaw was related to H. habilis, a species of distinctly African origin. If this descendant of H. habilis had arrived so early into southeast Asia, then it probably gave rise to H. erectus in the Far East, rather than H. erectus itself sweeping west to east.

For many years, I used Longgupo to promote this pre-erectus origin for H. erectus finds in Asia. But now, in light of new evidence from across southeast Asia and after a decade of my own field research in Java, I have changed my mind. Not everyone may agree; such classifications are always open to interpretation. But I am now convinced that the Longgupo fossil and others like it do not represent a pre-erectus human, but rather one or more mystery apes indigenous to southeast Asia’s Pleistocene primal forest. In contrast, H. erectus arrived in Asia about 1.6 million years ago, but steered clear of the forest in pursuit of grassland game. There was no pre-erectus species in southeast Asia after all.

He recounts how he apparently mistakenly identified worn molars, found in the vicinity of possible stone tools which led him to conclude that he had found a pre-erectus fossil. However, in 2005 he changed his mind, after having studied other fossil teeth shown to him by Wang Wei of the Guangxi Natural History Museum.

( via Mundo Neandertal)

Reference:

The Mystery Ape of Pleistocene Asia by Russell L. Ciochon

Nature 459, 910-911 (18 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/459910a; Published online 17 June 2009

Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

In regards to my previous post from yesterday, I’d like to quickly share this quote I’ve found from Clay Shirky, a Interactive Telecommunications teacher at NYU. He spoke to TED last year on Facebook, Twitter, and the like, and he was recently asked to comment about the usage of these tools in Iran. Here’s what he had to say,

“… this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.”

Check more of his question and answer session with TED.

A fragment of a Neanderthal skull, dated to between 40,000 and 60,000 years has been recovered from the bottom of the North Sea, marking the first ever occasion such a find has been made, according to researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, in collaboration with the University of Leiden. According to isotopic data, this archaic human, believed to have been a young adult male, had an almost exclusively carnivorous diet, while analysis of the skull portion suggests he may have resembled other Neanderthals such as La Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie 1, dated to between 50,000 and 60,000 years, the oldest age that has far been suggested for the so-called Zeeland Ridges Neanderthal.

The North Sea, as we’ll read later, has long attracted the attentions of archaeologists, who regard what they refer to as Doggerland as being a vast site of great importance, preserving a drowned landscape which once attracted animals and humans in large numbers.

The fragment of skull, which clearly exhibits a robust brow-ridge, typical of Neanderthals, was found by Luc Anthonis, described as a private fossil collector, as he was sieving through shells after a dredging operation, at Middeldiep, about 15 miles off the coast of Zeeland in the Netherlands. Indeed, according to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, this is also the first known Dutch Neanderthal, although there have been past rumours of Neanderthal fossils having been obtained by private collectors after similar finds at sea.

According to Jean-Jacques Hublin, this location in the high latitudes was at the extreme northern limit of the Neanderthal range, and their survival instincts would have been under duress – however, if the individual was living prior to the onset of the last glaciation, I’m not sure the weather at 50-60 kya would have been so cold as to have challenged the Neanderthals to their very limit, who had already survived two previous ice ages. And although Professor Hublin suggests the North Sea Neanderthals as a marginal population, I get the impression that many Neanderthals – who inhabited a vast stretch of Eurasia from Portugal to at least as far as the Altai region of Siberia – were never populous, and groups remained largely isolated from one another.

No carbon dating has been performed on the specimen, because to obtain the required amount of collagen would have required the destruction of  about half the skull fragment, and despite the fragmentary evidence on hand, researchers have determined that while alive, the Neanderthal had a benign tumour, an epidermoid cyst, which apparently is very rarely found in modern humans. By mapping this specimen of frontal skull onto recreations of the previously known Neanderthals mentioned above, it has been possible to create an image of what the researchers believe to have been a good match for the Zeeland Neanderthal.

Despite this being the first human fossil recovered from the North Sea – or indeed from any ocean in the world – many other fossils of extinct Ice Age fauna have been dredged up over the years, as have stone tools, reflecting a past era in the Pleistocene when sea levels were about 100m lower than the present day, and the current sea bed was dry land. this environment was capable of supporting a large suite of flora and fauna, in a geographical range extending from modern-day Britain, clear across to what we now know as the Netherlands and even parts of Scandinavia. Here’s a word from Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London…

‘This is a very significant discovery,’ said Professor Chris Stringer, human origins expert at the Natural History Museum, who directs the AHOB project. ‘The skull fragment represents the first ancient human found from below the sea – who knows what else we may find down there!’

‘For most of the last half-a-million years, sea levels were significantly lower than today, and at times, substantial areas of the current North Sea were dry land,’ says Stringer.  ‘There were extensive river systems with wide river valleys, lakes and floodplains and these areas were rich habitats for large herds of herbivores and the animals that preyed on them, including early humans.’

‘Isotope analyses of this North Sea Neanderthal match other specimens in suggesting a diet dominated by meat.’  Stringer adds, ‘Woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horse, reindeer and other Pleistocene mammal fossils are brought ashore every year by the fishing industry and from other dredging operations, and some fishermen now concentrate on collecting fossils rather than fish!’

However, as he notes in his comments to BBC News, the exact context of the find is unknown, and opines that with the right submersible technology available, archaeologists in the future might be able to examine the sea floor in detail, and record findings in situ.

A paper describing the find, written by Jean-Jacques Hublin is slated to appear in the Journal of Human Evolution, under the title, ‘Out of the North Sea. The Zeeland Ridges Neandertal’,

On a final note, the Neanderthal skull fragment is on display at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, from June 16th to September 27th 2009.

See also: Spectacular Discovery of First-ever Dutch Neanderthal, the First Fossil Hominin  Ever Yielded by a Sub-marine Site (pdf) Max Planck Institute

and: Evidence For Palaeoindian Hunters Beneath Lake Huron

N.B. Journal of Human Evolution – Volume 56, Issue 1, Pages 1-86 (January 2009) – free access to some interesting sounding papers, although I can’t find any indication as to when the Zeeland Neanderthal paper will appear.

I remember taking an ethnography class as an undergrad about the social, cultural, and political revolutions that happened in the Soviet block in the 80′s and 90′s. We discussed topics like how news was disseminated and how there was a massive identity shift. It seems as if this weekend, I saw something similar but not what was traditionally found on television, traditional media, or in a classroom. For the first time in a I witnessed a massive revolution on the Internet.

If you’ve happen to be living in a cave for the last several days let me summarize in a few sentences what I’m talking about. Iran held elections last Friday. The votes were counted at an alarming quick rate, and the incumbent, Ahmadninejad was proclaimed the winner. This immediately outraged Iranians, as they swarmed to the booths in unprecedented numbers to vote — most saying they’ve voted for Mousavi, a reformist. Immediately they took the internet, to voice their concerns and disapproval.

Revolt

And here’s where the revolution began.

Videos of demonstrations were uploaded to YouTube. Photos to Flickr, TwitPic, and the like. Groups and events were organized on Facebook. Short updates were announced on Twitter. Those that didn’t partake in demonstrations posted to their blogs and news spread like wild fire. Photos and video clips from cell phones functioned as our eyes as the Islamic Republic began preventing foreign official press from filming and documenting the protests. I heard from family back in Tehran that these sites were quickly blocked by the government firewalls, but fellow freedom seekers outside of Iran setup proxy servers and SSH tunnels and tweeted about it. Outsiders began DDOS’ing the Islamic Republic news sites to prevent them from spreading propaganda.

I have no idea if the protests in Iran will spark a political revolution. If it does, it will be unlike the 1979 Islamic revolution which was lead by an exiled leader at the time. These current protests are internally lead.

Rise Up Found on TwitPic

The revolution I am speaking about is not particularly about Islamic Republic but rather on the failures of traditional media and the identify shift observed. Twenty years ago the public relied on CNN to cover news on Tienanmen Square. We were consumers then. But CNN has more or less failed in coverage, leading to the great #CNNFail hashtag on Twitter. Where news and media couldn’t logistically cover news, citizen journalists did.

Have we come to understand our new roles and responsibilities as members of this interconnected world… to communicate, share and sympathize?

I hope so.

I’m excited about this shift. As you may know, I am pretty deeply integrated in social media sites, like Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc. I have been registered Twitter user for a couple years now. Up until this weekend, I have used it to mirror my favorite items from my RSS reader. Now have I come to understand the power & purpose of Twitter #iranelection.

EDIT 8:30PM Pacific Time: The New York Times has just written a very similarly inspired article titled, “Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online.” Check it out!

In a paper published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Christopher Henshilwood, Francesco d’Errico and Ian Watts report on their recent findings at Blombos, following on from the 2002 excavations which revealed what were then the earliest known example of humans having deliberately incised patterns into chunks of red ochre, some time around 77,000 years ago.

Here’s the abstract of their paper…

Powerful categories of evidence for symbolically mediated behaviour, variously described as ‘modern’ or ‘cognitively modern’ human behaviour, are geometric or iconographic representations. After 40,000 years ago such evidence is well documented in much of the Old World and is widely considered as typifying ‘modern human culture,’ but earlier evidence is rare. In Africa, this includes two deliberately engraved ochre pieces from c. 75,000 year old levels at Blombos Cave, Western Cape, South Africa and the greater than 55,000 year old incised ostrich egg shell from the Diepkloof shelter, located in the same province.

Here we report on thirteen additional pieces of incised ochre recovered from c. 75,000–100,000 year old levels at Blombos Cave. These finds, taken together with other engraved objects reported from other southern African sites, suggest that symbolic intent and tradition were present in this region at an earlier date than previously thought.

These finds come from the same site as the 2002 finds, apparently from sediments dated 72 kya, 77 kya and 100 kya respectively – intriguingly there are plans to investigate even older levels, the finds being described thus at Science News…

A microscopic analysis indicates that ochre designs were made by holding a piece of pigment with one hand while impressing lines into the pigment with the tip of a stone tool. On several pieces, patterns covered areas that had first been ground down.    Geometric patterns on the ochre pieces include cross-hatched designs, branching lines, parallel lines and right angles.  Pigment powder had also been removed from many of the recovered ochre chunks. Incised patterns may have served as models for pigment designs applied to animal skins or other material, the scientists speculate.

These latest finds have further fuelled the debate between what exactly defines modern human behaviour, with the authors opining that as a deliberate effort was made to convey meaning by incising the stone, and that moreover, this practice was passed on over the next 25,000 years (presumably to the more recent Blombos material), modern behaviour can be ascribed.

There are objections to this theory, most notably from Nicholas Conard, who was in the news recently, following his discovery of an Aurignacian figurine from Hohle Fels, Swabia in Germany, who counters that fully modern behaviour of this type only emerged when anatomically modern humans began creating figurative art at the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic boundary.

For their part, Henshilwood and d’Errico maintain that people of the Early Upper Palaeolithic were merely drawing on a long-established symbolic tradition which had already been in place for over 60,000 years.

“What makes the Blombos engravings different is that some of them appear to represent a deliberate will to produce a complex abstract design,” Henshilwood says. “We have not before seen well-dated and unambiguous traces of this kind of behavior at 100,000 years ago.”

However, it’s not clear whether any artistic or symbolic behaviour can definitely be attributed to these chunks of ochre – if, for example the ochre itself was used for applying a dash of colour to another medium, it’s hard to imagine why the artists should have wanted or felt the need to decorate their raw material. For all we know, the person doing the inscribing may have been delegated with grinding up the ochre, before it was taken away to be used elsewhere by others present, leaving the grinder alone, to the extent he or she became bored, and started doodling with what was nearest to hand, in this case a sharp piece of stone applied to the ochre. Perhaps more detailed images will offer some further clue as to their perceived complexity, and whether any element of overall design can be determined from the artefacts.

However, the fact that the authors make reference to unidentified sites elsewhere in the region which have yielded similar artefacts, and moreover that the crossed lines on one of the depicted chunks of ochre strongly resembles the 2002 Blombos find, would seem to suggest that this was much more than mere doodling, though why this specific method of incising should have persisted for so long is puzzling, unless of course the same message or signal was being conveyed through all those tens of millennia, although of course that gets us no nearer to guessing what those signs might have been, or why they were considered so important.

One cultural, or at least communal event that would have remained the same over all that time would have impacted on communities would have been death, and it’s tempting to suggest that some kind of funerary or mortuary practice was involved. We know that death and the dead have on some occasions preoccupied humans from burials going back all the way through the Upper Palaeolithic, and ochre use in association with the bones of the dead, wasn’t  unknown to all.

Such is the ostensible simplicity of the incised lines, it seems faintly possible that if older finds are made in the vicinity, they might be even more complex in their design, if we assume that sufficient cognitive ability and manual dexterity were present in those individuals alive 100,000 years ago at Blombos.

On a related note, John Hawks has some related and cogent comment on demography and the emergence of modern behaviour in his post, Learning, population size, and “modern human behavior”, in which he reflects on another recent paper, “Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior.”, mentioned elsewhere on this blog.

Reference:

Engraved Ochres From The Middle Stone Age Levels At Blombos Cave, South Africa

Christopher S. Henshilwood, Francesco D’errico, Ian Watts
Journal of Human Evolution (31 May 2009)
doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.01.005

Here’s the abstract of a recent paper at PNAS, in which the authors propose that a mutation on the TIRAP gene amongst our earliest European ancestors may have enabled them to tweak their immune systems to the extent they were better equipped to fight illnesses such as malaria and tuberculosis.

Adequate responses by our innate immune system toward invading pathogens were of vital importance for surviving infections, especially before the antibiotic era. Recently, a polymorphism in Mal (Ser180Leu, TIRAP rs8177374), an important adaptor protein downstream of the Toll-like receptor (TLR) 2 and 4 pathways, has been described to provide protection against a broad range of infectious pathogens. We assessed the functional effects of this polymorphism in human experimental endotoxemia, and we demonstrate that individuals bearing the TIRAP 180L allele display an increased, innate immune response to TLR4 and TLR2 ligands, but not to TLR9 stimulation. This phenotype has been related to an increased resistance to infection.

However, an overshoot in the release of proinflammatory cytokines by TIRAP 180L homozygous individuals suggests a scenario of balanced evolution. We have also investigated the worldwide distribution of the Ser180Leu polymorphism in 14 populations around the globe to correlate the genetic makeup of TIRAP with the local infectious pressures. Based on the immunological, clinical, and genetic data, we propose that this mutation might have been selected in West Eurasia during the early settlement of this region after the out-of-Africa migration of modern Homo sapiens. This combination of functional and genetic data provides unique insights to our understanding of the pathogenesis of sepsis.

Although the paper is behind a paywall, its content and implications are discussed in this article, SNPwatch: Genetic Variation May Help Immune System Put Up Just The Right Amount Of Fight, over at The Spittoon.

In another article that discusses the innate immune system, Science Daily have this, Autoinflammatory Disease Model Reveals Role For Innate, Not Adaptive, Immunity.

Reference: Functional And Genetic Evidence That The Mal/TIRAP Allele Variant 180L Has Been Selected By Providing Protection Against Septic Shock

Bart Ferwerda,  Santos Alonso, Kathy Banahan et al

Published online before print June 9, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0811273106