Anthropology.net

The Archaeology Channel – Welcome

As many readers of this blog will be aware, The Archaeology Channel is a fantastic resource, which since 2000 has provided a superb and fascinating collection of online archaeology videos from around the world, all of which are free to access, which in this day and age, makes it a rare resource indeed.

However, as we are all aware, this day and age marks an era of unprecedented financial uncertainty, which means that initiatives such as TAC, which rely heavily on membership and pledge drives to raise funds to be able to continue their work, are particularly vulnerable to sudden downturns in the economy, as would-be donors draw in the purse strings, tighten their belts and hope for better times.

On that sombre note, I have just been made aware that the latest pledge drive by The Archaeology Channel has dramatically failed to live up to expectations, which has prompted this note from Rick Pettigrew…

This request for help is going out to existing and former supporting members of The Archaeology Channel (www.archaeologychannel.org).   We began our Spring Pledge Drive on June 2 with the goal to raise $5000 in pledges by June 15.  So far, our hopes have been dashed, as we have only $50 in pledges.

I realize this may be a poor time of year for this type of fund-raiser, but for a variety of reasons we were not able to conduct the drive in April as we had intended.   Because we have lost so much in underwriting income since last October, our financial condition has become quite weak, so we have to rely more and more on our Membership Program for support.

The failure of our Spring Pledge Drive would make our situation even more precarious.    To take part in the Pledge Drive, just go to www.archaeologychannel.org and take a look at the featured video in the center of the Home Page.  There we are updating our Pledge Drive message every day with a link to an archive of our daily videos.

If you have not renewed your TAC Membership, please take this opportunity to do so.  If you are up-to-date but able to expand on your existing support, please do so now.  If you know others who would be receptive to our plea for support, please tell them without delay.

We launched TAC back in 2000 and have made great progress in bringing the human story to people everywhere through media on the Internet.  Please help us get past this bump in the road and continue making progress in our efforts to create better understanding of our shared human cultural heritage.   Thank you very much.

Richard M. (Rick) Pettigrew, Ph.D.,
RPA President and Executive Director Archaeological Legacy Institute
4147 E. Amazon Dr. Eugene, OR 97405 USA

Although to many of us, the sum of 5 grand seems like riches beyond our wildest dreams, in the context of the online community and the millions of people out there with even only a few bucks to spare, this amount seems a very small price to pay for ensuring that projects like The Archaeology Channel not only survive for now but continue far into the future, providing content of great benefit to us all; with enough people chipping in, this target of $5,000 would seem to be eminently attainable.

The survival of TAC, whilst obviously being important in the short term, will also have a beneficial effect on similar enterprises set up in the future, as the precedent will have been established, meaning that potential investors and sponsors will have a solid guideline with which to persuade them that there is sufficient interest and support already in place. If TAC goes down, potential investors in the future may well be discouraged by what they perceive to have been a lack of support that led to its cessation, making it that much harder for archaeologists to fund their own film-making, whilst at the same time depriving them of an audience, and ourselves of access to their invaluable work.

On Becoming Modern : Ruth Mace 324 (5932): 1280 : Science

The June 5th edition of Science carries a feature which includes two anthropology papers discussing aspects of the late Palaeolithic, one of which examines the role altruism might have played in the evolution of hunter/gatherer (forager) societies as an alternative to warfare, whilst the other suggests that early Upper Palaeolithic cultures such as the Aurignacian may in part have sprung up as a result of increased population density. Both papers are reviewed by Ruth Mace from University College, London, who also appears in the June 5th Science podcast. Here’s her written introduction in Science…

“Unlike other animals, humans cooperate with nonrelatives in coordinated actions, decorate their bodies, build complex artefacts (useful or otherwise), talk, and divide themselves into linguistic groups. To understand the evolutionary basis of such behaviors, anthropologists must consider not only issues connected to social evolution in animals, but also the implications of the possible coevolution of genes and culture.

Two articles in this issue examine aspects of human social evolution: On page 1293, Bowles (1) investigates the origins of altruism toward one’s own social group, while on page 1298, Powell et al. (2) study the emergence of cultural complexity. Based on empirical evidence and modeling, both studies suggest that the demographic structure of our ancestral populations determined how social evolution proceeded.”

At least one anthropologist, Richard Klein of Stanford University, vehemently disagrees, ascribing instead a genetic change in the human brain around 50,000 years ago to account for a perceived set behavioural changes that have been cited as being for example, a significant factor in the extinction of the Neanderthals at the expense of anatomically modern humans.

Here are the abstracts to the two papers, the second of which appears in full at Science…

Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors? by Samuel Bowles

Since Darwin, intergroup hostilities have figured prominently in explanations of the evolution of human social behavior. Yet whether ancestral humans were largely “peaceful” or “warlike” remains controversial. I ask a more precise question: If more cooperative groups were more likely to prevail in conflicts with other groups, was the level of intergroup violence sufficient to influence the evolution of human social behavior? Using a model of the evolutionary impact of between-group competition and a new data set that combines archaeological evidence on causes of death during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene with ethnographic and historical reports on hunter-gatherer populations, I find that the estimated level of mortality in intergroup conflicts would have had substantial effects, allowing the proliferation of group-beneficial behaviors that were quite costly to the individual altruist.

Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior by Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas.

The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.

With regard to the first paper, just to briefly add that I’m not exactly clear how ‘altruism’ is defined – if modern society can provide any meaningful model, it seems clear that the suggestion or perception of altruism being bestowed on a society are more common than societal acts of altruism per se. Machiavelli might not have had a direct prehistoric counterpart, but I can imagine that deceit and gullibility played just a large a part as altruistic behaviour, and if that catastrophic warfare was occasionally avoided, the survivors would stand a greater chance of sustaining community as well as allowing for the birth of future generations.

The content of the second paper is mentioned at Bloomberg, in an article ‘Ancient Art, Music Flowered as Communities, Not Brains, Grew ‘, as we see from this clipping…

“Researchers used genetic estimates of ancient population sizes, archaeological artifacts and computer simulations of social learning. They found complex skills involving abstract thinking would be passed down through generations and across groups only when populations reach a critical level, according to the study in tomorrow’s edition of the journal Science.

Increased interaction between groups, the sharing of ideas and the exchange of raw materials that led to the flowering of human culture may explain why concentrated centers of industry, such as California’s Silicon Valley, produce technological innovations, said Mark Thomas, 44, a senior author of the study and a senior lecturer at University College London in England.

“People learn from their parents or teachers in their group, and this model demonstrates you have to have a critical number of people learning to develop complexity,” Adam Powell, 28, a co-author of the study and a doctoral student at the London university. “The actual invention of all these technologies was probably very common, but was only passed on as density increased.”

As numerous studies over recent years have shown, perhaps most famously at Blombos Cave, modern humans were using coloured ochre and etching patterns into surfaces a good 40,000 years before cave painting and figurative art became much more widespread, and there is evidence from elsewhere in Africa of the use of ochre, manufacture of shell beads etc., dating back tens and even hundreds of thousands of years beforehand. Moreover, the use of fire to treat resin in the manufacture of adhesive for use in hafting tools is first known from the Neanderthals (who were probably the first to bury their dead) at around 80,000 years ago, again by moderns at around 60 kya, whilst evidence of ochre use, modification of pebbles, rocks and shells goes back to the Lower Palaeolithic. These factors indicate that the crucial components required for complex cognitive thought and lateral thinking were in place at the emergence of the first anatomically modern humans, the lifespan of the Neanderthals and quite possibly other archaic species before them.

Here’s the reaction that the second paper prompted from Richard Klein…

“Not everyone is convinced the demographic model caused the behavioral change. Richard Klein, an anthropology and biology professor at Stanford University, said the study is flawed because the examples it cites of human behavior prior to 50,000 years ago are either misdated artifacts or are open to interpretation as to their level of advancement.

“They have it wrong,” Klein said in a telephone interview. “This paper does not belong in print.”  Klein is a proponent of a competing theory that attributes the development of modern human behavior to a genetic change to human brains 50,000 years ago.  “These behaviors appear to have been part of a package that significantly enhanced human fitness — the ability to survive and reproduce,” Klein wrote in a study that was published last year in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology. “It is in this sense that they signal true evolutionary change as opposed to mere historical change.”

The point to make is that innovative technologies and behaviours could have been invented, forgotten and discontinued many times over during the course of the entire Palaeolithic, but because populations were sparse, largely isolated from one another, constantly on the move, and prone to dying out, passing down innovations – and even language – through many generations simply wouldn’t have been possible. Some early humans would have come up with ideas and inventions, maybe passing them on for a few or more generations, whilst many others would have led less technologically and culturally advanced lives, yet still survived perfectly adequately. This would in part have been because low population densities would have meant less competition for resources, and therefore less pressure to redesign lifestyles, lithic industries or even diet – unless of course, there was radical climate change, such as a glaciation, post-glacial melt and related large-scale faunal extinction.

With no definitive evidence of the appearance of a single master-gene which presumably would have switched on some sort of automatic modernity module in humans, I’m more inclined to agree with elements of the population theory – it might not cover all the bases, but if people were spending increasing amounts of time in each others’ company, it seems a lot easier to imagine that over the centuries and millennia, behavioural models would noticeably change as a result of new and unexpected stresses placed upon them, and become a great deal more complex, especially once the built, or constructed environment began to emerge, notably at Göbekli Tepe and its sister sites, around 12,000 years ago.

References:

Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors? Samuel Bowles (5 June 2009)     Science 324 (5932), 1293. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1168112]Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas (5 June 2009)     Science 324 (5932), 1298. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1170165]

Science Podcast (5 June 2009)     Science 324 (5932), 1341-b. [DOI: 10.1126/science.324_1341b]

The American Journal of Human Genetics has published an article titled, “Correcting for Purifying Selection: An Improved Human Mitochondrial Molecular Clock,” in which a more accurate method of dating ancient human migration, even when no corroborating archaeological evidence exists, is announced.

How does was this done?

The authors started with a sample of 2,000 fully sequenced mtDNA genomes. Not only does this increase the accuracy, but also the precision, ultimately allowing for more narrow temporal ranged. Furthermore, the new method integrates the process of natural selection, which normally skews migration results. In doing so, they authors confirmed that their new methodology works by comparing it against known colonization of Polynesia in the Pacific (approximately 3,000 years ago), and the Canary Islands (approximately 2,500 years ago) extracted from archaeological data.

Aside from confirmation, some more ‘surprising’ results have also been extracted. Last author, Martin B. Richards comments,

“We can settle the debate regarding mankind’s expansion through the Americas. Researchers have been estimating dates from mtDNA that are too old for the archaeological evidence, but our calculations confirm the date to be some 15,000 years ago, around the time of the first unequivocal archaeological remains.

Furthermore, we can say with some confidence that the estimate of humanity’s ‘out of Africa’ migration was around 60-70,000 years ago — some 10-20,000 years earlier than previously thought.”

The press release says that the team has made their  simple calculator freely available on on the University of Leeds website. But I can’t seem to find it, but the supplemental data includes an Excel spreadsheet version of the calculator for you to use and dissect. Anyone got the link to the online calculator?

Pedro Soares, Luca Ermini1, Noel Thomson, Maru Mormina, Teresa Rito, Arne Röhl, Antonio Salas, Stephen Oppenheimer, Vincent Macaulay, & Martin B. Richards (2009). Correcting for Purifying Selection: An Improved Human Mitochondrial Molecular Clock American Journal of Human Genetics

Yuchanyan Cave

I’ve admitted that cultural anthropology rarely gets its fair share on this blog, but I must also confess I don’t spread the love with archaeological news. Hopefully you’ll forgive me a bit today, because thanks to Luis, there’s news of the discovery of the oldest known pottery  — 17,500-18,300 years old from the Yuchanyan Cave in the Hunan province of China that I wanna share with you.

Let me remind you that the Yuchanyan cave also yielded the oldest kernels of rice in 2005 so it’s not too surprising to find old vessels to store the rice. The big shake up here is that previously, the Jōmon of Japan were considered to be the inventors of ancient pot making, with vessels dated to an age between 16,000 and 17,000 years ago.

Yuchanyan Pot

One thing that isn’t properly clarified in news media buzz is that that act of firing clay and making figurines has twice as long as vessel making. In fact, ceramic objects, such as Gravettian figurines likes the Venus of Dolní Věstonice those from Dolni Vestonice, Czech Republic, a clay statuette of a female figure, is dated to 29,000–25,000 BCE. The distinction here is that the Yuchanyan pot is oldest known clay vessel.

You can read the full text of the study, published as an open access paper in the journal PNAS.

Boaretto, E., Wu, X., Yuan, J., Bar-Yosef, O., Chu, V., Pan, Y., Liu, K., Cohen, D., Jiao, T., Li, S., Gu, H., Goldberg, P., & Weiner, S. (2009). Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and bone collagen associated with early pottery at Yuchanyan Cave, Hunan Province, China Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900539106

Over at Primatology.net, I’ve written about a new ‘missing link’, Anoiapithecus brevirostris (IPS43000) from Abocador de Can Mata, Spain. I’m cross posting it here for two reasons, one to generate traffic and interest in that post but also to let you know that the specimen which is 11.9 million years old has a wide array of modern and derived characteristics that the authors argue suggest that the origin of our family is a phenomenon that took place on the Mediterranean region during the time span comprised between their arrival from Africa by about 15 Ma, and about 13 Ma. Wacky.

Anoiapithecus Brevirostris (IPS43000)

Of course every paleoanthropologist wants to say their fossil find is the origin of humanity. Apparently there’s no shame in doing so… But given that one of Anthropology.net’s most popular posts discussed an origin of humans for apes and that I’ve researched a bit about Eurasia hominoids last year, I think you should be interested in this being at least a new fossil in the paleoanthropological/primatological record.

I’ll be closing the comment thread on this post so as to carry the discussion over on Primatology.net, so hop on over and discuss where you think humans evolved and what you think about Lluc, Anoiapithecus Brevirostris (IPS43000) — a fossil that deserves more ‘human evolution’ centered discussion than Ida, a.k.a. Darwinius massillae.

Moya-Sola, S., Alba, D., Almecija, S., Casanovas-Vilar, I., Kohler, M., De Esteban-Trivigno, S., Robles, J., Galindo, J., & Fortuny, J. (2009). A unique Middle Miocene European hominoid and the origins of the great ape and human clade Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811730106.

Viktor Deak's reconstruction of Homo heidelbergensis (Stage 5)

About a year and half ago I enrolled in an anthropology seminar even though I was getting a Master’s in Biology. I did so just to keep some sanity amongst the molecules, reactions and abstract names for genes I was immersed in. I thoroughly enjoyed it and wrote up a review on the evolution of human skin color for my final.

One of my classmates, I remember, decided to focus his term paper on the intersection between science and art in paleoanthropological reconstructions. Reconstructing faces and bodies from paleoanthropological samples takes an intimate knowledge of comparative anatomy and a healthy dose of artistic imagination to fill in the gaps and fragmentations in the fossils. I don’t know what became of his paper, but having taken a science illustration class as an undergraduate, his curiosity in investing paleolithic and anthropological reconstructions sparked my personal interests.

Viktor Deak, one of the world's top paleoartists (Erik Olsen/The New York Times)

Fast forward to today’s New York Times, featuring an article on Viktor Deak’s work. I don’t remember my classmates name but if you’re out there, or to anyone else interested in how this is done, you should check out this entertaining article. Deak is among the world’s leading paleoartists. Chances are you’ve seen his handy work when looking at a reconstruction of Homo habilis, Australopithecus afarensis or Paranthropus boisei. He answers many questions, one of the biggest being how he got into the field,

“One of his first sculptures was done at a family barbecue, a human skeleton from chicken bones. Other defining moments, he said, included a book of dinosaur illustrations his Budapest grandfather bought for him, seeing Luke Skywalker get a robotic hand and watching an eighth-grade science film of Mr. Gurche playing Pygmalion to a fossil skull. (Mr. Deak was born in Hungary but grew up in Connecticut.) His big break came when he was a School of Visual Arts student sketching in the natural history museum…”

Seems like he and I have many similar interests. I too was fascinated with dinos, robots (especially in Star Wars) and bones as a child. There’s a lot of multimedia linked with the article, such as video and this exceptionally cool 360 degree panorama of his studio in New York City. I like the corner above his monitors, full of toys! I think I could get lost in that place for weeks.

Viktor, if you stumble upon this post. Keep up the great work!

There’s an interesting discussion brewing about on Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog about the ancestral discord between the genetics and craniometric traits of native American populations. I wanted to point it out to all in case you don’t subscribe to Dienekes. The discussion revolves around a rather new PLoS One paper addressing the observation that while native American mtDNA remained relatively static since the Holocene, the cranial morphology of the group has undergone major shifts. The paper is open access and can be found at this link, “Discrepancy between Cranial and DNA Data of Early Americans: Implications for American Peopling.”

Dienekes addresses 3 hypotheses as to why this could be. I generally subscribe to the third hypothesis he mentioned. But in focusing on the paper I have found some concerns about the study sample. Firstly the samples originate only from Argentina. I’m not surprised about this as the researchers are Argentinian scientists, however how can one draw ‘implications for American peopling’ when the sample is confined to 16 individuals from Patagonia and the Pampas? What happened to checking out specimens from Brazil, central America, and the northern territories?

Furthermore, the samples come from a 1,500 year time frame…  starting at 7,800 years ago. We know the earliest migrations to the Americas started 40,000 years ago and people didn’t just make a B-line to Argentina. Populations dispersed. So to make conclusions about Paleoamerican and Amerindian groups based off of 16 skulls from a narrow spatial and temporal window in the peopling of the Americas is flawed, even if these 16 skulls seem to be consistent with morphological and genetic variation patterns interpreted as differences between Paleoamerican and Amerindian groups.

I don’t want this to turn into a time old critique on sample size and distribution analysis. I think we all know that bioarchaeological and paleontological studies also have many reasons to narrow samples. Sometimes it is political, while other times it is based plainly on accessibility to samples as to why a study is narrow. But that doesn’t give anyone an excuse to go ahead and publish it!

Perez, S., Bernal, V., Gonzalez, P., Sardi, M., & Politis, G. (2009). Discrepancy between Cranial and DNA Data of Early Americans: Implications for American Peopling PLoS ONE, 4 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005746