Anthropology.net

Map of Grape Domestication

I got some archaeobotany for you to start your weekend off right with — a new open access study in PNAS announces a genome wide association of 8,000 years of grape domestication, spanning the Eastern Caucasus to Western Europe. Lead author Sean Myles of Cornell University wrote in the abstract,

“support a geographical origin of grape domestication in the Near East. Grape growing and winemaking then expanded westward toward Europe, but the degree to which local wild sylvestris from Western Europe contributed genetically to Western European viniferacultivars remains a contentious issue. Our results … all support a model in which modern Western European cultivars experienced introgression from local wildsylvestris.”

In related wine archaeology, earlier this week, UCLA archaeologist Hans Barnard published the findings of a 6,000 year old uncorked wine barrel in Armenia. The barrel was discovered in the Areni-1 cave near the Iranian border. The results were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, but you can read a bit more about it here.

Hope you found these two tidbits as interesting as I did. Cheers to a good weekend!

Myles, S., Boyko, A., Owens, C., Brown, P., Grassi, F., Aradhya, M., Prins, B., Reynolds, A., Chia, J., Ware, D., Bustamante, C., & Buckler, E. (2011). Genetic structure and domestication history of the grape Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1009363108

Another video to share with you, this time the trailer to Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This is a 3D film shot inside Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France. These are some of the oldest cave paintings known. The film seems to have good reviews on IMDB and is set to be released on March 25th, 2011 in the UK.

What do you think?

Inspired by the Dodecad Ancestry Project by Dienekes Pontikos and Eurogenes Ancestry Project by David Wesolowski, Zack Ajmal (with the help of Razib Khan) has started the Harappa Ancestry Project. Zack explains the motivation behind this project,

“It is a project to analyze (autosomal) genetic data of participants of South Asian origin for the purpose of providing detailed ancestry information. So the focus of the project is on South Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.

The project will collect 23andme raw genetic data from participants to better understand the ancestry relationships of different South Asian ethnicities.

I have named it after Harappa, an archaeological site of the Indus Valley Civilization in Punjab, Pakistan.”

There was a nice deal running on 23andme about a month ago for their ancestry & health kit that worked out to be $160 for 1 year. I hopped on board, got my kit, spat in the tube and sent it off. It is currently being analyzed. My ancestry is one of the populations Zack is looking for — so I’ll be sending my data to him. I can’t wait.

If you have had a 23andme genetic testing, you should consider participating in this project. It looks to be very interesting.

This seems really fascinating.

Razib has done rounded up a nice review of Dienekes‘ Dodecad data to answer some prelim questions on the genetic of Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a very interesting cultural and paleontological area of the world. I had the pleasure of being a part of a field group several years ago and had a wonderful time. A good summary of the ADMIXTURE analysis done by Dienekes, reorganized by Razib, is shown below:

I don’t have much to add to his post, other than to hand you over there and to check it out. You may also wanna read more about the Dodecad Ancestry Project in this Nature News piece.

Image via Wikipedia

A Homo floresiensis premolar will be drilled, and DNA extracted, according to a Nature News piece passed on by Razib, John Hawks, and Dienekes. This is not the first attempt at extracting hobbit DNA, the news article explains,

“Five years ago, two teams, one from ACAD and one from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, attempted to recover DNA from another H. floresiensis tooth excavated in 2003. Both attempts failed.

Now, a team led by Christina Adler, a geneticist at ACAD, has found that standard sampling procedures could be responsible for the failure to get DNA from the hobbit and some other ancient specimens.”

I’ve been out of the loop for a couple years and have lost track on the advances made in ancient DNA studies. I do remember there was a big hub-bub regarding contamination from excavators and degradation of DNA. Maybe some of the new techniques overcomes these problems.

The lead, Adler, recently published a paper on the advances, titled, “Survival and recovery of DNA from ancient teeth and bones.” Again, I don’t have time to read it and give you a summary because I am studying for my board exams. It seems like the paper advises extracting DNA from the cementum of teeth which has way more DNA than the normal source of aDNA, dentin… But if you’re curious about ancient DNA sequencing, this should be an interesting read.

Nonetheless, it should be very interesting to see what comes from this attempt. I wish the team the best of luck and eagerly await the results.

A quick bit of linguistic anthropology to round off your Wednesday afternoon. Greek linguist, Ioanna Sitaridou, located a population of people in Northeastern Turkish villages, near the Black Sea (or Pontus), speaking the Romeyka dialect of ancient Greek. Ancient Greek has not been in use for thousands of years, so a finding like this can give us a bit of insight into how the language sounded. The reason the language has survived is a bit confusing to me, she explains it is due to religion,

The Romeyka speakers are devout Muslims and were therefore exempt from the large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey that took place in 1923, she said.

She’s been mapping the grammatical structures and variations in use as well as recording audio and video of the villagers telling stories. The ultimate aim of the research is to explain how Pontic Greek evolved. According to this source, she gave a talk last year about here research. Did anyone attend? What was it like? Like most of the world’s dialects, they are at risk of extinction especially due to emigration from Trabzon and the Turkish majority.

Hat tip to Stephen Chrisomalis, who blogged about this on Glossographia. You can read more about this language re-discovery at the Independent…

I’m happy to introduce another guest blogger to the Anthropology.net family, Jay Fancher. Jay is a recent graduate of Washington State University’s Ph.D. program in anthropology. His doctoral dissertation is an ethnoarchaeological analysis of animal bone assemblages produced by modern Aka and Bofi foragers of the Central African Republic. This research explores how observing hunting and butchering behaviors of modern African pygmies can help us better interpret animal bones discarded by prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

He also holds B.A. degrees in Theatre Arts (Film) and Anthropology at Humboldt State University and an M.A. in Anthropology at Washington State University. Jay’s professional interests include: hunter-gatherer studies, evolutionary ecology, zooarchaeology, vertebrate taphonomy, and sharing anthropological perspectives with non-specialists and the general public. In addition to academic writing, he is also currently interested in the popularization and politicization of science.

My undergraduate focus was in zooarchaeology, and I knew of the doctorate program at WSU back when I was exploring future options. I know it is an excellent program. Suffice to say, I’m very enthusiastic about having Jay on board. I believe he’ll offer a great mix of topics and look forward to reading his posts.

I’m excited to introduce, Matthew Magnani, as a new guest blogger here at Anthropology.net. Matthew is now a junior at Binghamton University, with interests in biological anthropology and archaeology. He plans to pursue a PhD in archaeology or paleoanthropology, revolving in some way around Neandertals.

This last summer he did field work at an Upper Paleolithic site in France, and will return this year to continue excavating. In May and June of this upcoming year also plans on conducting research at the American Museum of Natural History, working with fossil casts from Zhoukoudian. Matthew also writes for Pipedream, Binghamton University’s main paper, as an opinion columnist. Lastly he has recently founded an undergraduate research journal, which is due to come out for the first time this spring.

Matthew seems like an outstanding budding academic and I look forward to the voice and insight he provides to Anthropology.net. Be sure to keep an eye out for his upcoming posts!

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is a strange organization. I often wonder how it operates, but then I realize I don’t even wanna know because there’s often no real logic to their madness. Take into consideration these cases:

Case 1: About 4 years ago the AAA decided to close access to almost all their journals, directly against the Federal Research Publication Access Act. This spurned a lot of discussion regarding ownership of publication, author’s rights and the AAA’s motivation behind it. Most of us wondered how could the AAA, who didn’t fund the research, produce the data, and write up the analysis, close off the information to the world? Here was a bit of my outcry over the matter, archived by afarensis in June of 2006,

“The hypocrisy that surrounds the AAA when it begged for anthropologists to protest to the US government to not cut funding but their recent resiliency to not give back is outstanding in this matter. I don’t get why the AAA won’t open their eyes and see that this form of publishing helps to ensure long-term access to scholarly articles. Unlike articles that are licensed in traditional article databases, like their closed AnthroSource, public libraries and institutions of the people (like universities) can create local copies and repositories of these resources. People, by working together to make repositories of open access literature, can ensure continued access to these scholarly publications into the distant future.”

From this idiocy, a nice project spun off but hasn’t in my opinion been a viable alternative. Unfortunate.

Case 2: Once upon a time the AAA was an organization that scoffed at social media and Web 2.0, specifically blogs. It’s hard to dig up exact references since many links have died… But I do distinctly remember them issuing a statement saying blogs are useless forms of communication, with a little wink wink nod nod to this said blog.

When they redesigned their homepage a couple of years ago, they deployed several blogs. They even sent me emails asking for link exchange. Sure people are allowed to change their minds, but I wondered what’s with the change in heart? Suffice to say, I didn’t add them back.

Case 3: The AAA just had their annual meeting and yes, everyone’s reporting that decided to do away with science. It’s true, Peter Wood of the Chronicle, writes on them actively deciding to nix science out of the Mission Statement. I’ve copied and pasted the presumed edits to the mission statement he provided below the read more link.  Another related decision made is defining the role of AAA, away from ethnography and scientific experiments and observations to anecdotal and subjective journalism… Again without ethnology and ethnography — what is cultural anthropology?

Alice Dreger of Fetishes I Don’t Get, writes on some of the anger she experienced from other scientific anthropologists,

“The primatologist Sarah Hrdy (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote, “My reaction is one of dismay-actually, even more visceral and stronger than that-albeit not surprise.” The scientists I talked to want to know (as I do) exactly what is the AAA Executive Board’s justification for all this. They are confused about whether they should bother to fight, or just give up and depart the AAA already.”

The Society for Anthropological Sciences, a division of the AAA, objected to these changes, I am sure most do. I don’t understand why this change is being done. In a time and age when we need to strive to objective data to make informed decisions, this organization is moving away from that, and consciously. Why?

Could it because anthropology is largely not considered a science outside of the discipline — so the AAA chooses embrace what most think of us?

Again it is hard to get into the minds of such a dysfunctional organization. They seem to never make the right decision. An analogy that works in my mind is the AAA is to anthropologists as the Clerical Theocracy of the Islamic Republic are to Iranian population. As many governments help make decisions to move forward and advance their society, both the AAA and the mullahs regress their organizations further back in time.

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