Anthropology.net

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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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

Toba folks, I know this is not a very credible source, in fact some of the facts they present are inconsistent and confusing. Furthermore, I’ve never heard of the Malaysian National News Agency, Bernama. But either way there’s a news article they are running that may interest you.

“Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago…

…has uncovered what it calls ‘Pompeii-like excavations’ beneath the Toba ash… Though we are still searching for human fossils to definitively prove the case, we are encouraged by the technological similarities…

The fact that the Middle Palaeolithic tools of similar styles are found right before and after the Toba super-eruption, suggests that the people who survived the eruption were the same populations, using the same kinds of tools…

The research agrees with evidence that other human ancestors, such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the small brained Hobbits in Southeastern Asia, continued to survive well after Toba.”

This work is a continuous of Michael Petraglia‘s research. I really don’t know what is meant by Pompeii-life excavations. Calling it such is clearly a misnomer when there aren’t any human remains found. At the least, it seems like some more definitive stone tools have been unearthed, cores and flakes from the Middle Palaeolithic — similar to those made by modern humans in Africa.

Just caught news of this temple from Newsweek and thought I’d share. I don’t know much about it, in fact this is the first time I read about it. But I am asking my friend and colleague in Turkey about it… so I’ll fill you in with any additional details as they come. The Newsweek article portrays this as a newly discovered finding but in fact research and excavations started in 1994.

Bottom line, it is 11,500 years old. g  That’s 7,000 years before the Pyramids of Giza and 6,000 years before Stonehenge. I’ve posted before how some of the first evidence of animal domestication and pottery occurred in Turkey, but these sophisticated pillars were assembled before those prehistorical landmarks… in fact they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture.

Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt comments on the significance of the site,

“definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island…

…Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city….

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion.”

Check out the site on Google Maps if you wanna poke around and do some exploring on your own. Have you ever heard of the site before? If so tell me what you know, I’m curious to find out more…

See also: Is Homo floresiensis really that strange? – Zinjanthropus@ A Primate of Modern Aspect

A new, detailed and freely accessible paper, Reconstructing the Ups and Downs of Primate Brain Evolution: Implications for Adaptive Hypotheses and Homo floresiensis (provisional PDF) has just come online at BMC Biology, in which Stephen H. Montgomery et al discuss the reduced brain-size of Homo floresiensis, and suggest she is unlikely to have descended from Homo erectus, for which this is the abstract:

Background

Brain size is a key adaptive trait. It is often assumed that increasing brain size was a general evolutionary trend in primates, yet recent fossil discoveries have documented brain size decreases in some lineages, raising the question of how general a trend there was for brains to increase in mass over evolutionary time. We present the first systematic phylogenetic analysis designed to answer this question.

Results

We performed ancestral state reconstructions of three traits (absolute brain mass, absolute body mass, relative brain mass) using 37 extant and 23 extinct primate species and three approaches to ancestral state reconstruction: parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian Markov-chain Monte Carlo. Both absolute and relative brain mass generally increased over evolutionary time, but body mass did not. Nevertheless both absolute and relative brain mass decreased along several branches. Applying these results to the contentious case of Homo floresiensis, we find a number of scenarios under which the proposed evolution of the Homo floresiensis brain appears to be plausible, dependent on body mass and phylogenetic position.

Conclusions

Our results confirm that brain expansion began early in primate evolution and show that increases occurred in all major clades. Only in terms of an increase in absolute mass does the human lineage appear particularly striking, with both the rate of proportional change in mass and relative brain size having episodes of greater expansion elsewhere on the primate phylogeny. However, decreases in brain mass also occurred along branches in all major clades, and we conclude that, while selection has acted to enlarge primate brains, in some lineages this trend has been reversed.

Further analyses of the phylogenetic position of Homo floresiensis and better body mass estimates are required to confirm the plausibility of the evolution of its small brain mass. We find that for our dataset the Bayesian analysis for ancestral state reconstruction is least affected by inclusion of fossil data suggesting that this approach might be preferable for future studies on other taxa with a poor fossil record.

There’s a pretty good write-up over at A Primate of Modern Aspect, from which this is excerpted:

It’s extremely important for most of your organs to increase with body size.  For example, a bigger animal needs to pump more blood, so it needs a bigger heart.  A bigger animal eats more food and needs a bigger liver.  There are certain areas of the brain that increase allometrically with body size- usually areas that are in charge of motor skills.  If you’ve got bigger legs, you’ve got bigger muscles, and you need more neural projections in order to control them.  But does a larger animal need to think more?  Will it benefit from an extra few cubic centimeters of neocortex?  Probably not, so it’s not worth the extra time and energy it takes to develop that neocortex.

And that sort of brings us to an important question in evolutionary neurobiology: Does absolute brain size matter, or is it solely brain size relative to body size?  Brains that are absolutely larger have more neurons, which could have important cognitive implications.  But how many of those extra neurons are just being used to control the physiological functions of the body?

Does size even tell us anything at all?  Any way you look at it, brain size is a crude measurement of cognitive ability.  In an ideal world, we would know the proportion of each of the different regions of the brain in each species and go from there.  But, those kinds of measurements are hard to obtain in living species, and impossible in fossils.  Ralph Holloway has been saying since 1967 that there has got to be a better way than just plain ol’ cranial capacity… but other than noting the relative position of different sulci and gyri on endocasts, there isn’t too much else to be done.

The diminished brain size of LB1 has been remarked upon ever since the initial discovery, at is generally supposed that the stone tools found in context would have required a hominid with a larger brain in order to deploy the cognitive capacity needed for such behaviours, leading some to suggest that they were copies of others made by unknown AMH others present on the island of Flores. This in turn raised the question of from what or whom Liang Bua 1 had descended – according to the interpretation by zinjanthropus, if LB1 is descended from either H.georgicus found at Dmanisi, or H.habilis, the size of her brain is much more in accordance than had the descent been from the H.erectus from Ngangdong. Here’s a related note from the paper, which I’m sure will be the subject of extended discussion in the near future:

From our analyses  of evolution of H. floresiensis brain size under different phylogenetic  hypotheses, we conclude that the evolution of H. floresiensis is consistent with  our results across the primate phylogeny if it either evolved from populations  of H. habilis or Dmanisi hominin by insular dwarfism, or under Argue et al.’s  [43] proposed phylogenetic scenarios, and if H. floresiensis had a body mass  towards the lower end of the range of estimates obtained from skeletal  remains. In this respect we note that Brown et al. [26] suggested the lower  body mass estimates are probably most appropriate, assuming H. floresiensis  shared the lean body shape typical of Old World tropical modern humans.

If  this were true we estimate the evolution of H. floresiensis involved a  reasonable decrease in absolute brain mass, but an increase in relative brain  size.  Our analysis, together with studies of brain size in island populations of living primates[41, 42], therefore suggests we should perhaps not be  surprised by the evolution of a small brained, small bodied hominin, although  further clarification of the relationships between H. floresiensis and other  hominins are required to confirm this observation. Finally, our analyses add to  the growing number of studies that conclude that the evolution of the human  brain size has not been anomalous when compared to general primate brain  evolution [59, 61 91-94].

Reference:

Reconstructing the Ups and Downs of Primate Brain Evolution: Implications for Adaptive Hypotheses and Homo floresiensis

Abstract – Provisional PDF

Stephen H Montgomery , Isabella Capellini , Robert A Barton and Nicholas I Mundy

BMC Biology 2010, 8:9doi:10.1186/1741-7007-8-9

Such is the frequency these days of research into Neanderthals published by Professor João Zilhão, I’m beginning to wonder whether he hasn’t created multiple copies of himself, rather in the manner of a kinder, more constructive Dr. Manhattan, in a bid to leave no cave unexplored, no Neanderthal left behind etc. Anyway, today he appears courtesy of a freely accessible paper at PLoS ONE, in which we hear news from a cave in Portugal, Pego do Diabo (The Devil’s Cave).

The gist of his latest paper, as reported at Science Daily and Physorg is that Neanderthals in west and southern Iberia survived no later that 37,000 calendar years ago, (as opposed to much later estimates indicating they could have survived up until the Last Glacial Maximum), which in the opinion of the authors means that AMH and Neanderthals co-existed in Europe for no more than 5,000 years, and furthermore, that the case for Lagar Velho I being an AMH/Neanderthal artefacts of admixture, is thus strengthened. Moreover, the authors conclude that climate change caused disruption to interactive networks, and brought AMH and Neanderthals into direct contact south of the so-called Ebro Frontier system, ultimately causing the demise of the latter.

Here’s the abstract from the paper itself:

Background

Neandertals and the Middle Paleolithic persisted in the Iberian Peninsula south of the Ebro drainage system for several millennia beyond their assimilation/replacement elsewhere in Europe. As only modern humans are associated with the later stages of the Aurignacian, the duration of this persistence pattern can be assessed via the dating of diagnostic occurrences of such stages.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Using AMS radiocarbon and advanced pretreatment techniques, we dated a set of stratigraphically associated faunal samples from an Aurignacian III–IV context excavated at the Portuguese cave site of Pego do Diabo. Our results establish a secure terminus ante quem of ca.34,500 calendar years ago for the assimilation/replacement process in westernmost Eurasia. Combined with the chronology of the regional Late Mousterian and with less precise dating evidence for the Aurignacian II, they place the denouement of that process in the 37th millennium before present.

Conclusions/Significance

These findings have implications for the understanding of the emergence of anatomical modernity in the Old World as a whole, support explanations of the archaic features of the Lagar Velho child’s anatomy that invoke evolutionarily significant Neandertal/modern admixture at the time of contact, and counter suggestions that Neandertals could have survived in southwest Iberia until as late as the Last Glacial Maximum.

The Ebro Frontier is mentioned at Physorg:

Although the reality of this ‘Ebro Frontier’ pattern has gained wide acceptance since it was first proposed by Professor Zilhão some twenty years ago, two important aspects of the model have remained the object of unresolved controversy: the exact duration of the frontier; and the causes underlying the eventual disappearance of those refugial Neanderthal populations (ecology and climate, or competition with modern human immigrants)…

…Professor Zilhão said: “I believe the ‘Ebro frontier’ pattern was generated by both climatic and demographic factors, as it coincides with a period of globally milder climate during which oak and pine woodlands expanded significantly along the west façade of Iberia.

“Population decrease and a break-up of interaction networks probably occurred as a result of the expansion of such tree-covered landscapes, favouring the creation and persistence of population refugia.

“Then, as environments opened up again for large herbivore herds and their hunters as a result of the return to colder conditions, interaction and movement across the previous boundary must have ensued, and the last of the Neanderthals underwent the same processes of assimilation or replacement that underpin their demise elsewhere in Europe five millennia earlier.”

Clearly this will come as disconcerting news to those who contend that in fact Neanderthals survived a good few millennia later than 37 cal kya, and might well argue that a single cave – or data point – can’t be construed to represent the latest appearance date of Neanderthals across the entire Iberian peninsular, and it remains to be seen whether other sites in southern and northern Iberia, such as Carihuela and Esquilleu will refute the conclusions of this paper.

Much of content of the paper itself is given over to an exhaustive description of how the cave was re-examined and some of the contents re-dated, along with brief reference to an Aurignacian lithic assemblage, the Dufour bladelets, as described here:

Bearing in mind the palimpsest nature of cave deposits, the dating of layer 2 to the time range of the Aurignacian III–IV does not completely reject the possibility that the artifacts contained therein entered the site at some point in time during the hiatus between the deposition of layers 2 and 3, i.e., in the ca.35–43 ka cal BP interval. Confirmation that the Pego do Diabo Dufour bladelets are indeed Aurignacian III–IV therefore requires assessment of whether their metrical and formal attributes are consistent with alternative assignments to earlier stages of the technocomplex.

A persistent source of confusion in the study of the Aurignacian is the vague, catch-all original definition of the “Dufour bladelet” type: “bladelet with a curved profile, presenting a fine, marginal, semi-abrupt retouch, along one of the edges only (in which case it can be either ventral or dorsal) or along both edges (in which case it is always alternate)” [57]. As a result, over the years, practitioners have subsumed under this category an extremely varied range of microliths with very little in common in terms of blank technology, mode of retouch, and overall shape.

A case in point is the putative presence of Dufour bladelets in Châtelperronian level X of the Grotte du Renne, at Arcy-sur-Cure [77], which some have used to support the twin notions that the site is heavily disturbed and that the numerous ornaments found in level X originated in Aurignacian level VII, where Dufour bladelets are abundant [78]–[79]. In fact, the few level X items in question represent one end of the variation of the “retouched blade” tool type. They are not bladelets but blades (their average width is 13.5 mm), and they display a technology of blank production that is distinctively Châtelperronian [80].

The authors note that very little is known about the Aurigncian/Gravettian transition in Europe, and that this research tallies with other sites regarding the onset of the Gravettian in Europe:

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Science/AAAS

Updated – please see end of this post.

The archaeological site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov has been in the news again recently, following the publication of a paper in Science, namely Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, authored by Nira Alperson-Afil et al, in which they reflect upon the organisational abilities of archaic humans in the Lower Palaeolithic of the Middle Pleistocene, who at GBY, represent the oldest known fisher-hunter-gatherers so far discovered in the archaeological record. It’s fair to say this paper has made something of an impact, with the general consensus being that archaic humans of this era were capable of organisational behaviours similar to that of anatomically modern humans, with one or two voices arguing that the evidence at Gesher Benot Ya’akov (GBY) is suggestive rather than conclusive.

This site of GBY offers us what appears to be a marked contrast to another site of around the same age, c. 780 kya, in the Aurora stratum, also known as the TD6 level at Gran Dolina, Atpauerca in modern-day central north Spain – I’ll add a brief word on that site later in this post, because apart from anything else, the fossils of 6 humans (suggested to have been cannibalised) have been found there, whereas there are no fossil remains of humans described at GBY. Labelled as H. antecessor, it may be that similar people dwelt by the shores of Lake Hula at GBY.

Apart from organisational behaviours, this site also documents a very early use and control of fire, which at c.800 kya, again appears to bridge a cognitive gap, while at the same time posing the question of why there appears to be a cognitive, or at least technological stasis from that point almost to the present day.

Briefly, the site in question GBY Level 2 was found to have been split into two main areas about 25 ft apart, one for the preparation of food such as fish, whilst the other was a hearth around which other activities such as stone tool manufacture, smashing nuts and eating are thought to have taken place. Moreover, because the site was sealed rapidly and very well preserved, numerous faunal and floral remains indicate that a wide range of foods and resources were regularly exploited by these people, from which it seems clear that they had long mastered the art of survival beyond the raw essentials.

Abstract:

The spatial designation of discrete areas for different activities reflects formalized conceptualization of a living space. The results of spatial analyses of a Middle Pleistocene Acheulean archaeological horizon (about 750,000 years ago) at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, indicate that hominins differentiated their activities (stone knapping, tool use, floral and faunal processing and consumption) across space. These were organized in two main areas, including multiple activities around a hearth. The diversity of human activities and the distinctive patterning with which they are organized implies advanced organizational skills of the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov hominins.

Although the authors concern themselves primarily with implying that archaic humans at the site were showing organisational abilities on a par with modern hunter-gatherers, or foragers, the sheer range of foodstuffs and other materials found there also indicate a fairly complex diet – as opposed to one that mostly involved hurling spears at large mammals as a means of obtaining food – was not only available but fully exploited, with the possibility that certain sites were visited in line with their seasonal resources. There are differing opinions regarding the exact implications for the cognitive and organisational abilities of these early humans, with Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks supportive of the authors, whereas John Hawks was less impressed.

Moreover, as has been mentioned in previous papers, there is clear evidence of the use of controlled fire on a continual basis, and what might be most surprising, is not that fish were also consumed, but that the lakeside dwellers were able to catch carp and other fish in the first place. It has often been stated that an advantageous trait of early modern humans in the Upper Palaeolithic was their more diverse diet which included fish, giving them a putative survival advantage over the Neanderthals (who are in fact documented as having eaten dolphin, seal and mussels on Gibraltar) – plus of course the cognitive ability to manufacture equipment such as barbed bone and ivory points, with which to acquire their prey.

I’m very grateful to have been sent a copy of a paper that would otherwise be inaccessible to me, on this occasion by Professor Naama Goren-Inbar, one of the authors, so as ever, I’ll add some detail from the text as well as adding some comment of my own. First up, a look at the site itself, its geologic past and the way in which it has fortuitously been preserved over such a vast expanse of time.

Gesher Benot Ya’aqov is located on the shores of the paleo–Lake Hula in the northern Jordan Valley in the Dead Sea Rift (7). The Early to Middle Pleistocene sediments document an oscillating freshwater lake and represent some 100,000 years of hominin occupation (Oxygen Isotope Stages 18–20) dating to 790,000 years ago (8, 9). Fourteen archaeological horizons indicate that Acheulian hominins repeatedly occupied the lake margins, where they skilfully produced stone tools, systematically butchered and exploited animals, gathered plant food, and controlled fire.

We focus on a hearth area and the lithic, botanical, and paleontological assemblages of Layer II-6 Level 2 (henceforth Level 2), one of eight superimposed occupational levels in Layer II-6. This sedimentary sequence was rapidly sealed, preserving the original location of different artifacts (evidenced by the fresh preservation state of the lithics, the preservation of mollusk embryos, the presence of conjoinable bones, and a lack of winnowing) (8, 10, 15, 16). Level 2 is 0.12 m thick, and we excavated across an area of 25.6m2 (3 m3). It yielded numerous stone artifacts made of different raw materials; a large assemblage of wood, bark, fruits, seeds, and nuts; and highly diverse lacustrine and terrestrial animal remains.

The immediate impression given is the sheer variety of activities and behaviours exhibited by an as yet unidentified species of archaic human, as they went about their daily lives. Although these were temporary occupations, it’s clear that a great deal of time and effort was needed to keep the camp supplied with resources required for the diverse food items to be sourced, acquired and prepared for eating. The presence of many species of wood remains offer further clues to an invisible part of the archaeology, with the likelihood that specific wood types were selected for various purposes – fire-wood, spears and fishing equipment come to mind, but before getting to those details, a quick word about how Level 2 at GBY was originally configured.

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I recently posted a brief article regarding the latest themed edition of Current Anthropology, but at the time of writing I hadn’t noticed another paper in the same issue, namely Sleeping Activity Area within the Site Structure of Archaic Human Groups – Evidence from Abric Romaní Level N Combustion Activity Areas, which begins with this:

Abstract:

The identification of different prehistoric activity areas and Neanderthal behavior is one of the main research goals at the Abric Romaní site, which is a well‐preserved and microstratified Mousterian archaeological site. A conspicuous occupation surface excavated in level N yielded a remarkably preserved set of aligned combustion activity areas in the inner zone of the living surface.

This set of combustion activity areas suggests analogy with sleeping‐and‐resting activity areas of modern foragers. Multidisciplinary analyses suggest (1) diachronic occupation and (2) similar use of the inner zone of the living floor. The sleeping area comprises five combustion activity areas, spaced at approximately 1 m distance from each other.

A large wood imprint of travertine was found near the inner zone, suggesting an architectural remain of a prehistoric dwelling. Descriptions of archaic human sleeping activity areas are very few in Paleolithic archaeology. This identification is a proxy for estimating the number of individuals of Mousterian groups that occupied the Abric Romaní rock shelter around 55 kyr BP.

There’s an excellent review of the paper by Julien Riel-Salvatore over at his blog; I’d intended to write the paper up here, especially as it makes for a nice contextual introduction to another paper I’ve (still) yet to finish covering, on spatial organisation in archaic humans at Gesher Benot, going back 790, 000 years. Spatial organisation is yet another behavioural facet that offers the potential for clearer insights into the past than merely interpreting human evolution through lithic assemblages, morphological analyses and the remains of ancient meals around extinguished hearths.

As his report on Abric Romaní is online already and covers all the salient points with great clarity, I’d suggest heading over Julien’s blog, for a rare insight into how Neanderthals organised themselves for sleep, some 50kya. I’ll refer to this further in another post, but moving slightly further forward in time to around 47,600 kya, comes more news of Neanderthal activities in Europe before the arrival of AMH.

At Common Sense Atheism there’s podcast #14, ‘Prehistoric Religion’ featuring archaeologist Brian Hayden – rather than review the entire interview just now, I’d like to point readers to an especially interesting section about 40 minutes in, where we hear Hayden describe his explorations within Bruniquel Cave.

Here’s a quote from an essay ‘Palaeolithic Art and Religion’ by Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, from within a post I wrote back in 2007:

“In the depths of the Bruniquel Cave, in the Tarn-et-Garonne, broken stalactites and stalagmites were piled and arranged in a kind of oval roughly 5 metres by 4 metres, with a much smaller round structure next to it. The structures themselves cannot, of course, be directly dated, but a fire was made nearby, and a burnt bone from it was dated to more than 47,600 bp.

If this date also applies to the arrangement of stalagmites, it, puts the structures well within the Mousterian, the local Neanderthal cultural period (Rouzard et al. 1996). No practical purpose can be suggested for these constructions: the people who made them did not live that far inside the cave, as the absence of the kind of remains so common on habitation sites testifies. The only hypothesis that makes sense is the delimitation of a symbolic or ritual space well inside the subterranean world.”

Again, fascinating stuff, and once I’ve had a chance to address the remainder of the hour-long podcast, I’ll try and add a few thoughts on that as well.

Abric Romaní – site description.

Image: Abric Romaní from cited paper: Figure 2.  a, Imprint of the wooden trunk of the Abric Romaní level N. b, Detailed view of the travertinic wood imprint. c, General view of the archaeological level N with the travertinic wood imprint, hearths, and the travertine dripping dome (down to the right). © 2010 by The Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.

Reference:

Sleeping Activity Area within the Site Structure of Archaic Human Groups  – Evidence from Abric Romaní Level N Combustion Activity Areas (Abstract)

Josep Vallverdú,  Manuel Vaquero,  Isabel Cáceres,  Ethel Allué,  Jordi Rosell,  Palmira Saladié,  Gema Chacón,  Andreu Ollé,  Antoni Canals,  Robert Sala,  M. A. Courty, and  Eudald Carbonell  IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social), Plaça Imperial Tarraco, 1, 43005 Tarragona, Spain (josep@prehistoria.urv.cat). 5 II 09

Current Anthropology Volume 51, Number 1, February 2010 © 2010 by The Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2010/5101-0021$10.00 DOI: 10.1086/649499

This is a quick note to point readers in the direction of several posts that have appeared online in recent days, on the origins and spread of agriculture, and the part language may have played in the process,  in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Although I’ve recently concentrated on writing about our Palaeolithic origins, if there’s one behavioural trait that separates modern humanity from its archaic counterpart, the widespread adoption of agriculture over the past ten millennia has set us far apart from all that went before, and is more directly responsible for our urbanised civilisation and attendant corporate woes than anything else that presently comes to mind. Moreover, and beyond our city walls, the devastating impact of agriculture on rural landscapes worldwide is a problem that concerns us all, with for example, the clearance of the Amazon rain-forest for cattle a particular thorn in our side, whilst our growing appetite for bio-fuels looks set to have no less a deadly impact as we turn even more land over to the growing of necessary crops.

First up is this post at Gene Expression, European man perhaps a Middle Eastern farmer, in which Razib Khan discusses the findings of a recent paper at PLoS Biology, A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages – for which this is the abstract:

The relative contributions to modern European populations of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers from the Near East have been intensely debated. Haplogroup R1b1b2 (R-M269) is the commonest European Y-chromosomal lineage, increasing in frequency from east to west, and carried by 110 million European men. Previous studies suggested a Paleolithic origin, but here we show that the geographical distribution of its microsatellite diversity is best explained by spread from a single source in the Near East via Anatolia during the Neolithic.

Taken with evidence on the origins of other haplogroups, this indicates that most European Y chromosomes originate in the Neolithic expansion. This reinterpretation makes Europe a prime example of how technological and cultural change is linked with the expansion of a Y-chromosomal lineage, and the contrast of this pattern with that shown by maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA suggests a unique role for males in the transition.

Razib offers some background to the ongoing debate…

For the past few decades there has been a long standing debate as to the origins of modern Europeans. The two alternative hypotheses are:

* Europeans are descended from Middle Eastern farmers, who brought their Neolithic cultural toolkit less than 10,000 years ago.

* Europeans are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who acculturated to the farming way of life through diffusion of ideas.

…and further notes:

In this unsettled landscape comes a new paper which turns some assumptions about Y chromosomal variation in Europe on its head. The focus is on a subclade of the R1b haplogroup, which has its highest frequencies in Western Europe, in particular along the Atlantic fringe. The pattern of variation has led many to infer that this lineage, in particular the R1b1b2 haplgroup, is a marker of the Paleolithic populations of Western Europe. The high frequency of this marker among the Basques in particular is seen as evidence of this, because this group speaks a language which is a pre-Indo-European isolate (the Basques are used as a Paleolithic reference group in many papers). But perhaps not…

…One issue to note is that it seems likely that if the model presented here is true, that R1b1b2 is newcomer from the Middle East which rapidly expanded in frequency across Western Europe, it’s going to be hard to getting the clarity you need from molecular clock based methods because the demographic processes occurred rather rapidly. We know from archaeology that agricultural societies could sprout up almost instantaneously, as if they simply transplanted their culture to new locales. Some of this likely occurred via sea, using the Mediterranean and the Atlantic fringe…

…The authors point out that in places like Japan and India there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence for agriculture resulting in the expansion of particular lineages, so the preponderance of acculturation in Europe as the mode of transmission seems atypical…

…One analog might be the emergence of mestizos in the New World, who have predominantly European male lineages and native female lineages. Finally, one question a friend brought up: if the higher frequency of R1b1b2 is a function of the wave of advance, why is it the same haplogroup all along the wave front? Standard population genetic theory tells us that fragmented small groups will tend to lose genetic diversity and fix particular alleles, but those alleles are not going to be the same. It seems that it is more plausible that there were serial bottlenecks through coastal migrations, and eventually these expanded inland once they stumbled onto the northwest European plain. But that’s just speculation.

For further discussion, please see Dieneke’s whileYann Klimentidis mentions both this paper and another, namely Genetic discontinuity between local hunter-gatherers and central Europe’s first farmers.

Next it’s over to Gambler’s House, and an article titled The Supposed Linguistic Evidence for the Spread of Agriculture, whose introductory notes state the following:

The prehistoric peoples of the American Southwest were agriculturalists.  Different societies may have calibrated their mix of farming, hunting, and gathering differently, but they all seem to have done all three eventually, and for most it’s quite apparent in the archaeological record that farming was the predominant method of subsistence.  The crops they grew were corn, beans, and squash, the classic triad of North American agriculture.  These plants are not native to the Southwest, however, so they must have been introduced at some point from Mesoamerica, where they originated.  The introduction of corn, in particular, must have also involved the introduction of agricultural techniques, since it can’t grow without help from humans.  All this is pretty uncontroversial among Southwestern archaeologists.

The nature of the introduction of agriculture, however, has been a point of more dispute.  The main arguments have to do with how long it took after the introduction of maize for the societies growing it to become totally dependent on it and thus become primarily agriculturalists rather than hunter-gatherers.  One view, espoused by Chip Wills at UNM, sees the introduction of corn as being gradual, perhaps filtering up from one hunter-gatherer group to another, and increasing dependence on it as taking place in the context of hunter-gatherer subsistence decisions and environmental fluctuations, with the total switch to a fully agricultural lifestyle not taking place until maybe as late as the Pueblo II period.  The other view, associated most strongly with R. G. Matson of the University of British Columbia, sees the introduction of maize as having been rapid and involving a totally different lifestyle from Archaic hunter-gatherers from the get-go.

There follows an in-depth discussion of the theories of Australian Professor of Archaeology, Peter Bellwood, who contends that…

… the enormous geographical extent of some language families by associating them with the spread of particular agricultural traditions.  This has been somewhat controversial, particularly in regard to Indo-European, as it produces a very specific answer (given Bellwood’s specific assumptions) to the vexing question of where a given language family originated, often called its Urheimat.  Since Bellwood argues that hunter-gatherers are unlikely to adopt agriculture, whether on their own or when exposed to it by contact with farming groups, his model predicts that the Urheimat of a given language family must be somewhere in the region where its agricultural tradition originated.  For Indo-European this means the Fertile Crescent rather than the Eurasian Steppe, which has been the preferred answer for many Indo-Europeanists on various grounds.  This has led to much controversy.

And continuing the language thread, we return to Gene Expression, where another article, Complex societies = simple languages, goes on to discuss a paper at PLoS ONE, Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure, for which this is the introduction:

Although the largest languages are spoken by millions of people spread over vast geographic areas, most languages are spoken by relatively few individuals over comparatively small areas. The median number of speakers for the 6,912 languages catalogued by the Ethnologue is only 7,000, compared to the mean of over 828,000 [1]. Similarly, for the 2,236 languages in our sample (Figure 1), the median area over which a language is spoken is about the size of Luxembourg or San Diego, California (948 km²). The mean area is about the size of Austria or the US state of Maryland (33,795 km²).

Languages also differ dramatically in the proportion of individuals who speak the language natively (L1 speakers) to those who learned it later in life (L2 speakers) (Table S1). Although there are numerous counter-examples (Text S1), languages spoken by millions of people have a greater likelihood of coming into contact with other languages and of having numerous nonnative speakers compared to languages spoken by only a few thousand people.

This is not surprising: a language spoken by more people is more likely to encompass a larger and more diverse area and include speakers from varying ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Conversely, languages spoken by a thousand or even fewer individuals tend to be spoken in highly circumscribed locales (Text S2). Overall, languages with smaller speaker populations are more likely to be spoken by more socially cohesive groups [2] than languages that have millions of speakers.

And by a curious coincidence, news comes to today of the Evolang 2010 Conference due to take place in Utrecht, Netherlands, between this coming April, 14-17th.

To finish up, there’s a nice post over at PaleoFuture, The Victory of Chemistry over Agriculture, which begins by noting:

To many people of the year 2010 the 1953 book, The Road to Abundance, is a heretical, nightmarish vision of the future. Chemicals and factory farming are seen as the logical next step in the evolution of food production for mankind.  Jacob Rosin, co-writing with Max Eastman, describes the eventual “victory of chemistry over agriculture,” and mankind’s “bondage to the planet.”

The ultimate goal of Rosin’s ambition was to be “more efficient than nature.” In his advocacy of a completely synthetic diet Rosin called into question both the definition and the benefit of “natural foods.”

See also: Telegraph – Giant Cattle to be Bred back from Extinction – via John Hawks

This post in turn links to another, “Factory” Farms of the Future (1961) from which the image at top is taken.

References:

Balaresque P, Bowden GR, Adams SM, Leung H-Y, King TE, et al. (2010) A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages. PLoS Biol 8(1): e1000285. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000285

Genetic discontinuity between local hunter-gatherers and central Europe’s first farmers.
Bramanti B, Thomas MG, Haak W, Unterlaender M, Jores P, Tambets K, Antanaitis-Jacobs I, Haidle MN, Jankauskas R, Kind CJ, Lueth F, Terberger T, Hiller J, Matsumura S, Forster P, Burger J.
Science 2009 Oct 2;326(5949):137-40.

Lupyan G, Dale R (2010) Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure. PLoS ONE 5(1): e8559. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008559

I’ve recently commented on the PBS documentary series opener of The Human Spark – Becoming Us, the majority of which struck me as being out of date and out of touch, with far too much emphasis being placed on looking for specious differences between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals co-habiting in Late Middle – Early Upper Palaeolithic Europe, as Alan Alda and his chosen guests set out to reinforce most of the worn-out, stereotypical views that pitted the supposedly ingenious AMH against their allegedly half-witted Neanderthal cousins.

However, even in the worst documentaries there’s usually the odd gem secreted within, and Becoming Us proved no exception, as in Chapter 4, the focus turned from Europe to Africa, where we met up with Professor Alison Brooks (see also) and her team of researchers at three sites – one of which was Olorgesailie, located near Lake Magadi in the Eastern Rift Valley of Kenya. Over many years of excavations, they have uncovered strong evidence to suggest that much of what is credited to AMH behavioural modernity in UP Europe, actually began tens if not hundreds of thousands of years earlier in Africa  – as noted amongst others by Bednarik, whose prodigious output over the years has suggested exactly the same sorts of ideas. I for one had somehow completely missed out on, forgotten about, or just overlooked this particular story, so a big hat-tip to the documentary for this alone. Although I think it would have been better had this section of the film been placed much nearer the beginning, the fact it was included at all came as a welcome relief to what had gone before.

To watch this excerpt, click the link and move the video-player slider to around the 11-minutes-remaining mark.

Next up,  here’s  the abstract of a paper which Brooks co-authored in 1999 with Sally Mcbrearty – for full access you can opt for the $53 plus tax version (53 bucks and more – for a paper – seriously?), the $19.95 version here, or if money’s not your thing, there’s a free (PDF) reproduction right here.

Abstract:

Proponents of the model known as the “human revolution” claim that modern human behaviors arose suddenly, and nearly simultaneously, throughout the Old World ca. 40–50 ka. This fundamental behavioral shift is purported to signal a cognitive advance, a possible reorganization of the brain, and the origin of language. Because the earliest modern human fossils, Homo sapiens sensu stricto, are found in Africa and the adjacent region of the Levant at >100 ka, the “human revolution” model creates a time lag between the appearance of anatomical modernity and perceived behavioral modernity, and creates the impression that the earliest modern Africans were behaviorally primitive.

This view of events stems from a profound Eurocentric bias and a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African archaeological record. In fact, many of the components of the “human revolution” claimed to appear at 40–50 ka are found in the African Middle Stone Age tens of thousands of years earlier. These features include blade and microlithic technology, bone tools, increased geographic range, specialized hunting, the use of aquatic resources, long distance trade, systematic processing and use of pigment, and art and decoration.

These items do not occur suddenly together as predicted by the “human revolution” model, but at sites that are widely separated in space and time. This suggests a gradual assembling of the package of modern human behaviors in Africa, and its later export to other regions of the Old World. The African Middle and early Late Pleistocene hominid fossil record is fairly continuous and in it can be recognized a number of probably distinct species that provide plausible ancestors for H. sapiens.

The appearance of Middle Stone Age technology and the first signs of modern behavior coincide with the appearance of fossils that have been attributed to H. helmei, suggesting the behavior of H. helmei is distinct from that of earlier hominid species and quite similar to that of modern people. If on anatomical and behavioral grounds H. helmei is sunk into H. sapiens, the origin of our species is linked with the appearance of Middle Stone Age technology at 250–300 ka.

This is a pretty long paper, with much of the data presented in tables that you need to tilt your head sideways to read at a right angle, (unless you print it out), and for the time being I’ll refrain from commenting further till I’ve had time to read it properly through – I don’t know for how long the free PDF version will remain online, so my advice would be to grab it now. Suffice it to say though, it’s packed with information, and there’s a very well written and thoughtful conclusion that at one point goes so far as to exhort Africanist researchers to consider that these early innovative behaviours dating back over 200,000 years may themselves have directly prompted morphological changes to early humans as they evolved into what we refer to as anatomically modern.

See also: Center For the Study of Human Origins, New York University

Reference:

The Revolution that Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior – by Sally Mcbrearty and Alison S. Brooks, Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 39, Number 5, November 2000 , pp. 453-563(111) doi:10.1006/jhev.2000.0435