Anthropology.net

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I feel somewhat vindicated. Remember the post where I criticized hominin cut marks from over 3 million years ago? Others have also had an eye of suspicion and have published their concerns in PNAS this week.

I was wrong in considering the croc marking differential to the cut marks. But I was not wrong in thinking they author of the original paper made the wrong conclusions. The authors of this new paper raise up an even more logical explanation, and carried out a more thorough analysis. Here’s part of their argument from the abstract,

“The Dikika research group focused its analysis on the morphology of the marks in question but failed to demonstrate, through recovery of similarly marked in situ fossils, the exact provenience of the published fossils, and failed to note occurrences of random striae on the cortices of the published fossils (incurred through incidental movement of the defleshed specimens across and/or within their abrasive encasing sediments). The occurrence of such random striae (sometimes called collectively “trampling” damage) on the two fossils provide the configurational context for rejection of the claimed butchery marks. The earliest best evidence for hominin butchery thus remains at 2.6 to 2.5 Ma, presumably associated with more derived species than A. afarensis.”

Trampling vs. Cut Marks (The image in A is courtesy of R. Blasco and J. Rosell. The images in B, D, and F are modified from McPherron et al.)

Looking back at the comment thread, I got a lot of flak. Aside from being wrong about the croc markings, I won’t deny that my post was inflammatory and incited a lot of the response. But many who know just a bit about the fossil and archaeological record, may find it extraordinary to believe australopithecines were using stone tools to extract food from flesh and bone from ‘indirect’ evidence. Of more concern was the lack of exhaustive exploration into other possibilities.

I remember as an anthropology undergrad one of my professors designed a hands-on experiment for us. If memory serves me correctly, this was for a zooarchaeology class. She acquired some beef bones from the local butcher and gave us stone tools. We were instructed to extract the marrow from the bones. We hammered the afternoon away.

Part of our assignment was to use different techniques and tools. We could cut, saw, abrade, chisel, etc. After the mess was done we compared our extractions from prehistoric samples. This comparative approach allowed use to systematically compare how we modified the bone to how possibly prehistoric individuals modified bone.

The authors of the current PNAS paper did something similar. The hypothesized that trampling could have created similar modifications as seen on the 3.39 million year old Dikika bones. And what did they do? Well they got some bone and experimentally setup some trampling experiments. As one would expect, cut marks would have a \/ shaped incision. Incidentally, the bones from Dikika show a \_/ flat bottom morphology. The authors write,

“Ninety-six percent of experimental trampling grooves display a broad-based, open cross-section with the aforementioned shape, versus just 4% of experimental grooves inflicted by simple (i.e., unmodified) stone flakes used to cut meat from bones. In addition, curvy and sinuous groove trajectories characterize nearly 70% of experimental trampling marks,compared with just 10% of experimental cut marks created with simple flakes (11). Together, these experimental results provide a robust actualistic context to evaluate illustrated marks F, G, H2,and I on DK-55–3 as high-probability trampling damage and not stone tool cut or percussion marks…”

I wonder what happened to good science?

What happened to the scientific method?

Did we not learn how to set up experiments and carry out analysis?

How can a paper make all the way into Nature and not exhaust all the possibilities?

These are not rhetorical questions. I am seriously asking it. I honestly feel that there is something rife in paleoanthropological studies lately. I must sound like a broken record to say yet again, too often are papers published in haste and for fortune and glory… All which compromise the validity & ethical responsibility of the science.

Domínguez-Rodrigo M, Pickering TR, & Bunn HT (2010). Configurational approach to identifying the earliest hominin butchers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 21078985

Several views of a human jawbone and molars found in a Chinese cave.

National Geographic is running news that Erik Trinkhaus and others have published the findings of the oldest modern human outside of Africa, specifically in China. Not much is given on the locality and specifics of the fossil, but the article does state that the fossil mandible fragment and teeth are 60,000 years older than any other modern human fossil. That leads to some curious questions of interbreeding with other Homo species and curiosities about the presence of modern humans that did not ‘act’ modern… In other words, the archaeological record isn’t quite on the same page.

Hawks hasn’t posted on the paper and find yet, but he is quoted in the National Geographic article saying the mandible dimensions are within range of both Neandertals and modern human. Unsurprisingly, the Out of Africa theory is challenged. I still don’t know what to think of it all, the chin does look very robust.

The PNAS article is not yet published at the time of the National Geographic writing and me blogging this post. Seems like people are still jumping publication embargoes. I shouldn’t have to call out what a cheap shot it is to have sensationalist news getting out before the first hand reports do. I guess things will never change. So until I get my hands on the real paper, I’m just calling it as others are reporting it.

Both Razib and Dienekes have reviewed a paper on the population genetics of Central Asian peoples. To make sense of Central Asian ancestry has been challenging, to say the least. In particular, the problem is compounded by nomadic peoples without much written history nor uncovered archaeological record.

Ethnicities of Central Asia

What we do have are the linguistic, physical features, and now because of this paper some of the allelic traits of the different populations. Razib has pointed out some strange phrases from the paper that make me wonder about how much background on Central Asian cultures, migrations and phenotypes the authors really knew before publishing. There is really no confusion that more western Central Asian people look more western while more eastern Central Asian people look eastern, with some but little, shared traits.  But I don’t put total blame on them for not doing their research, it’s hard to make sense of the ancestry of Central Asia.

Razib has done a nice job explaining some of the previous cultures. Do check his post out. But a quick introduction for those who want to know, the steppes of Central Asia during the pre-Islamic periods, were predominated by sedentary Iranian peoples like the Sogdians, Chorasmians, Scythians, and Alans. Between the 5th-10th century, Turkic peoples moved from the east through the west. Turkic is a name given to a group of people who share a linguistic ancestry, Altaic. Some of these groups you may know are the Uyghur and Tatars. The Hun are possibly Turkic. Another major Altaic, but not Turkic, migration occurred with the Mongols during the 13th century.

There has been some confusion regarding the folklore and historical record compared to the phenotypic and linguistic differences on just how impactful the Turkic replacement been. The western historical record indicates that the invading Hun of the 5th centuries and Mongols later made a significant impact, wiping out large portions of ancient ethnic Iranian populations. This understanding is both true and false. There is evidence of entire cities being destroyed. At the same time, in texts like Ghenghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, you read statements on how the Altaic invasions was much less of a violent horde and was demonized because of their comparative weakness in written language. In other words, the captors of the Mongolian Empire wrote their account of their overlords.

To this day, this has lead to “nationalistic” and ethnic conflicts and confusion, as evidenced by the June massacres of the Uzbeks by Kyrgyz groups regarding ancestry and heritage. The general consensus is the Tajik and Uzbeks were once a majority Indo-European-speaking population that were assimilated by migrating Turkic-speaking groups. The divergence from Middle Iranian to Turkic and New Persian was predominantly the result of an elite dominance process, as Razib points out.

So, just to which ancestry do Tajiks and Uzbeks, who share a Indo-Iranian language family and the Karakalpaks, Kazaks, and Turkmen, who share a Turkic language family belong to? With a 1,500 year shared regional history but linguistic separation, is it possible to flesh out if Turkic people invaded the West and replaced populations, or was there a back flow of Westerners who moved east?

Geographic-Linguistic-Genetic location of 26 Central Asian populations

The results from the paper out in The European Journal of Human Genetics, indicate that,

“The analysis of genetic variation reveals that Central Asian diversity is mainly shaped by linguistic affiliation, with Turkic-speaking populations forming a cluster more closely related to East-Asian populations and Indo-Iranian speakers forming a cluster closer to Western Eurasians. “

STRUCTURE plot on Central Asian Populations

Dieneke points out how the STRUCTURE plot (above) lets us see the that eastern Hazaras and Uyghurs have remained relatively separate from the more western peoples. Furthermore, supplemented by Razib’s comment,

“The eastern Turkic groups seem the least impacted by the Iranian substrate which was dominant before the arrival of Turks, while the Turcoman group sampled from western Uzbekistan seems to have been the most genetically “Iranized.”

…the correspondence analysis shows the Turkic groups exhibited a linear distribution toward East Asia, while the Iranian ones were placed where you’d expect them geographically.”

The data from this paper indicates that Turkic people did in fact move west, especially the men, since there’s high degree of  genetic homogeneity on the Y chromosomal lineage. They remained more genetic and linguistically unified and did not assimilate into Iranian genetics and languages. Additionally, contrary to popular belief, they did not absorb large populations of Iranians as their genetics and languages remained more separate than integrate.

A disclaimer, this is but one paper, with limitations on the number allelic markers that would make fine population differences more noticeable. But we can still see large trends regarding the ancestry of Central Asian people.

Martínez-Cruz B, Vitalis R, Ségurel L, Austerlitz F, Georges M, Théry S, Quintana-Murci L, Hegay T, Aldashev A, Nasyrova F, & Heyer E (2010). In the heartland of Eurasia: the multilocus genetic landscape of Central Asian populations. European journal of human genetics : EJHG PMID: 20823912

Related Articles

• Major study of Central Asian populations (Martinez-Cruz et al. 2010) (dienekes.blogspot.com)

A colleague of mine has developed a new online human fossil record, in the likes of my own database of fossils. The project is Fossilized.org and although it is in beta, it has some remarkable features already. I am particularly impressed with the phylogeny plot view, which offers a chronological color coded map of many important hominin fossils. What’s unique about this view how it helps visualize localities different hominin species lived and spread throughout the world. Here’s a sneak peak….

Fossilized Phylogeny View

Furthermore there is an interesting history of prehistory section the database, which I have never seen be done before, as well as a geochronological timescale. The latter view offers a way to visualized oxygen levels throughout prehistory. Be sure to check out Fossilized.org and poke around. If you are an educator, let your students and colleagues know about this resource.

Personally, I’ve constantly advocated for more online resources like this. To my knowledge, there isn’t one as focused on localities. So, I’m glad to see there’s another database of the human fossil record out there, especially one that offers up some new features and more complete dataset than some currently out there.

I don’t know who this is worse for, the editors & reviewers over at Nature or the authors of the article who can’t tell the difference between crocodile teeth markings and stone tool modification, nor raise the possibility. The paper, “Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia,” very confidently proclaims unambiguous evidence for,

“stone-tool-inflicted marks on bones found during recent survey work in Dikika, Ethiopia, a research area close to Gona and Bouri. On the basis of low-power microscopic and environmental scanning electron microscope observations, these bones show unambiguous stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access.”

Butchered by early humans or eaten by crocodiles? Image: David DeGusta

Given that the said rib fragment, DIK-55-2, came from a prehistoric lacustrine site. These markings could have been produced by crocodiles. Crocs, if you aren’t aware of (ahem editors and publishing group) are very abundant in the Rift Valley — both currently and prehistorically. On top of that, crocs like to eat meat and scavenge. Yes its true, they are carnivores. Australopithecines were at most ominivores, with wide based teeth useful in grinding tubers and nuts. Crocs have more meat shearing, bone crushing teeth than 3.39 million year old stone tools, which there are none of at the moment.

Given that there really isn’t an archaeological record for Australopithecine tools, I’ll take a gander and say crocs like to eat meat and scavenge more effectively than A. afarensis could make and use said tools to butcher a large ungulate. They have been on this Earth for roughly 197 million years more than hominins have and they are really good at what they do… Again, probably better than a species of hominins who did not live in the Stone Age. It is just as likely (if not more) that the markings were produced by crocodiles just given the ecological context.

Now just how different at cut marks from crocodile teeth marks? David DeGusta, from Stanford University, compared and contrasted the two different markings using images from Njau and Blumenchine (2006) paper titled, “A diagnosis of crocodile feeding traces on larger mammal bone, with fossil examples from the Plio-Pleistocene Olduvai Basin, Tanzania,” to those published in the current Nature article. I’ve inserted DeGusta’s image into this post on right for your own inspection. DeGusta was also on Science Friday, discussing this possibility, with one of the article’s authors, Zeresenay Alemseged. What do you think? Do they look completely different or similar? Seriously, I am asking you to comment. I’d like to know what you see.

Personally I don’t see much of a difference. I agree that stone tools marks are more V shaped, while croc teeth are more pitted/rounded. But take this into light: tool use, especially butchery, is a very human behavioral trait. In their search to attribute this human behavior to a primitive hominin species who roamed 800,000 years earlier, to the era of Australopithecus afarensis, without considering another possible explanation, the authors and editors of Nature were somewhat foolish.

Many paleoanthropologists are in this mad rush to claim their precious find is the most human of hominins, so as to etch their name into the textbooks in rewriting human evolution, that they sometimes forget about doing thorough comparative science. And many publications are in this mad rush to publish the most human of findings, that they sometimes forget about thoroughly editing scientific works. Think that could be the case? I sure do… Why should we settle on secondary evidence for Australopithecine stone tools when none have been found yet, and when another possibility hasn’t been extensively exhausted?

McPherron, S., Alemseged, Z., Marean, C., Wynn, J., Reed, D., Geraads, D., Bobe, R., & Béarat, H. (2010). Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia Nature, 466 (7308), 857-860 DOI: 10.1038/nature09248

Earlier this week, I saw a friend reading this article, and considering SciAm has proven to be a bastion of intellectual stimulation and unbiased discussion, I decided to share it with you. Since the publication of the Neandertal draft genome in May, the concept of reorganizing the human family tree to include Neandertals as a subspecies is not particularly new in the world of paleoanthropology. I wonder why, though, did SciAm decide to publish this discussion now?

Anyways, if you want a synopsis of the thesis of the article, read this excerpt:

“Thus it is—revealing the identity of my example—that we must reclassify Homo neanderthalensis as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of Homo sapiens. A comprehensive and technically sophisticated study published in the May 7 issue of Science, “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” by Max Planck Institute evolutionary anthropologists Richard E. Green, Svante Pääbo and 54 of their colleagues, demonstrates that “between 1 and 4% of the ge nomes of people in Eurasia are derived from Neandertals” and that “Neandertals are on average closer to individuals in Eurasia than to individuals in Africa.” In fact, the authors note, “a striking observation is that Neandertals are as closely related to a Chinese and Papuan individual as to a French individual…. Thus, the gene flow between Neandertals and modern humans that we detect most likely occurred before the divergence of Europeans, East Asians, and Papuans.” In other words, our anatomically hirsute cousins are actually our genetic brothers.”

I did a real life facepalm when I came upon Shermer’s argument for including them as a subspecies,

“I always suspected that Neandertals and anatomically modern humans interbred, based on a simple observation: humans are the most sexual of all the primates, willing and able to do it just about anywhere, anytime, with anyone (and even with other species…).”

You have to be a paid subscriber to read the rest of article, so I can’t really know if he’s totally serious about his argument or not. Considering he goes on supporting his argument citing the book of human sexual behavior, the Kinsey Reports, I’m afraid that he actually is pretty confident his argument is legit. Sigh.

If this is true, this is a sad state of affairs for scientific publications; when reporters decide to serve up asinine explanations to scientific phenomenon. I am of the opinion that Shermer, nor any reporter, has the position to give reasons to why evolution occurred a certain way. Shermer could have spent his article discussing the differences between anatomy and material culture between the Neandertals and humans, and how the genetic lines of evidence, both mtDNA and nuclear DNA intersect and diverge from those.

He could have synthesized many different schools of thought on Neandertal ancestry and modern human evolution, but he chose to focus on something taboo. Sex certainly sells, I guess even for SciAm… But the thought that modern-ish humans reproduced with Neandertals is certainly not something unthinkable. So why focus on it?

A team of paleoanthropologists report in PLoS One analyzed the skulls of several dozen 11,000 year old Paleoamericans and compared them to the skulls of more than 300 1,000 year old Amerindians. They concluded that based on the morphology, there were two distinct waves of colonizers from Asia.

11,000 Year Old Lagoa Santa Brazil Paleoamerican Skull

While we know from a couple genetic studies there are at least two, if not 3 or more waves of colonizers, the morphological evidence is now beginning to make a lot more sense along with the genetic evidence. There’s some concern why the authors didn’t have more North American and Asian samples for comparison, but that’s almost always a critique in any anatomical study.

Two comments in the Science Now news article are particularly entertaining regarding this topic:

“Very interesting–don’t tell some of the tribes in california–they won’t be able to handle real information like this.”

“Exactly. It sounds like the Amerindians stole the land from the Paleoindians? I guess they should pay restitution, right?”

Hubbe, M., Neves, W., & Harvati, K. (2010). Testing Evolutionary and Dispersion Scenarios for the Settlement of the New World PLoS ONE, 5 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011105