Anthropology.net

As readers here may be aware, recent reports from the world of neuroscience with an anthropological slant are assembled every Wednesday over at Neuroanthropology, and this week’s edition includes, amongst many others:

Chris Kelty et al., Outlaw Biology? Public Participation in the Age of Big Bio
Looks like a fascinating symposium this coming Friday and Saturday (Jan 20th & 30th) at UCLA. Plus just a fun site to explore.

Mary Hrovat, Civilization Founded on Beer?
“Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist who studies human exploration of fermented beverages, believes that it might have been the desire for reliable access to alcohol, not food, that spurred the farming revolution that swept Neolithic culture…”

Eugene Raikhel, More on Exporting American Madness
Somatosphere rounds up the latest reactions to Ethan Watters’ book on the globalization of American models of mental illness, including a useful summary of Watters’ latest piece in New Scientist.

To read the rest of the linked stories, just head over to Neuroanthropology, where you’ll also be able to catch this:

Bill Yates, The Uniqueness of Humans: TED Talk by Robert Sapolsky
What makes humans unique. Includes a video with the neuroendocrinologist who’s really an anthropologist in disguise.

I’ll add some comment on that last one in due course, but also of note is a spate of posts towards the end, featuring video-gaming and its mooted effects on the brain, as well as a look inside some of those cyber-scapes. Build Me A World is definitely worth checking, for example.

image: Belly of the Beast by  Ben Mauro via  Fan Made Bioshock 2 Artwork

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

The latest edition of Current Anthropology has just been published, and included within is a special section referred to in the headline above – I haven’t had time to read it yet, so for now here’s a table of contents and a snippet from the introduction by editor Mark Aldenderfer, commenting on the themed papers, which reads thus:

Deng Xiaopeng has been reported to have said, “To get rich is glorious.” He is also reported to have said, “Let some people get rich first.” The papers in this special issue of Current Anthropology can be said to focus on the consequences of Deng’s aphorism—how some people get rich and how they manage to transfer that wealth, variously defined, to subsequent generations.

As the papers in this issue argue, wealth comes in various forms, and there are different modalities by which these forms are transferred to offspring and kin. What I found particularly compelling, however, was the simplicity of the model Smith and his cast of characters developed: two parameters do the heavy lifting—shocks, which are windfalls or losses, and the degree to which those shocks are transferred to offspring.

As both the authors and the commentators note, these models do not explain all that we want to know about wealth transfer; nevertheless, they offer a firm empirical basis for exploring this topic in greater depth and breadth. One outstanding question I would like to see explored is how wealth disparities are eventually transformed into persistent political inequalities that are maintained over the generations. Smith and his coauthors have outlined some of the directions this research may take, and I look forward to seeing it, perhaps in the pages of CA.

This looks like a pretty interesting issue, as we can see from the listed papers:

Special Section: Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies

The Emergence and Persistence of Inequality in Premodern Societies: Introduction to the Special Section

Samuel Bowles, Eric Alden Smith, and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (225 kB)

Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter‐Gatherers

Eric Alden Smith, Kim Hill, Frank W. Marlowe, David Nolin, Polly Wiessner, Michael Gurven, Samuel Bowles, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Tom Hertz, and Adrian Bell

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (330 kB)

Pastoralism and Wealth Inequality: Revisiting an Old Question

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Ila Fazzio, William Irons, Richard L. McElreath, Samuel Bowles, Adrian Bell, Tom Hertz, and Leela Hazzah

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (317 kB)

Domestication Alone Does Not Lead to Inequality: Intergenerational Wealth Transmission among Horticulturalists

Michael Gurven, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Paul L. Hooper, Hillard Kaplan, Robert Quinlan, Rebecca Sear, Eric Schniter, Christopher von Rueden, Samuel Bowles, Tom Hertz, and Adrian Bell

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (386 kB)

Intergenerational Wealth Transmission among Agriculturalists: Foundations of Agrarian Inequality

Mary K. Shenk, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Jan Beise, Gregory Clark, William Irons, Donna Leonetti, Bobbi S. Low, Samuel Bowles, Tom Hertz, Adrian Bell, and Patrizio Piraino

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (379 kB)

Production Systems, Inheritance, and Inequality in Premodern Societies: Conclusions

Eric Alden Smith, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Samuel Bowles, Michael Gurven, Tom Hertz, and Mary K. Shenk

Abstract-Full Text with Enhancements-PDF Version (356 kB)

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

The latest offering from the Archaeology Channel is now online, and in this 22 minute video produced by Timothy Knowlton, which in brief is described thus:

An association of Tz’utujil Maya people from Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, struggle to establish a cultural center and archaeological site museum at the nearby lakeside site of Chuitinamit, once home to the Pre-Hispanic Maya King Tepepul and now badly looted.  Including a tour of the museum, this film documents their accomplishments thus far and current endeavors in the face of artifact looting and natural catastrophe in the form of Hurricane Stan, which struck in 2005.

We get a pretty interesting tour of the museum in which traditional clothing and associated artefacts are shown and described, but it’s a much starker experience as we are shown around nearby sites that have been looted – this time the culprits don’t appear to be avaricious collectors with an eye for the illegal antiquities trade, rather local people who see items such as stelae, altars and sacrificial stones as ideal material for local construction projects. According to the film, such people contend that these ancient artefacts have no cultural relevance to them, and considering that many people struggle to earn anything approaching a decent wage, it’s hardly surprising they exploit free building materials when opportunity arises.

Those artefacts have now disappeared and can never be replaced, and whether there are plans to educate people in order that they understand and protect their own heritage is uncertain, although it could of course be argued that even those people who do come to realise the value of similar artefacts will still be poor over the coming years, and understandably will likely view heritage they can recover from local sites as an income stream – just as has been the case in recent years in places like Iraq, Cambodia and so on.

Obviously we hope that the efforts of those appearing in the video as our guides will fare better in the coming years, and be able to stem the flow of losses currently afflicting this site and many others in a similar predicament.

There are several outgoing links from the video page, and the image of Chuitinamit, also known as Chiyá, is from one of them, Authentic Maya.

This  seems a good opportunity to mention a news item that appeared last week from the University of California, Santa Barbara, which features archaeologist Anabel Ford, who is also a director of the university’s MesoAmerican Research Center. It is her contention that contrary to the idea that the Maya brought about their own downfall about 1,000 years ago by imprudent slash-and-burn treatment of their lands, they were in fact highly sophisticated in their land management. In a recent paper, Origins of the Maya Forest Garden: Maya Resource Management, Ford begs to differ with previously held views, as we see from the abstract:

There is growing interest in the ecology of the Maya Forest past, present, and future, as well as in the role of humans in the transformation of this ecosystem. In this paper, we bring together and re-evaluate paleoenvironmental, ethnobiological, and archaeological data to reconstruct the related effects of climatic shifts and human adaptations to and alterations of the lowland Maya Forest. In particular, we consider the paleoenvironmental data from the Maya Forest area in light of interpretations of the precipitation record from the Cariaco Basin.

During the Archaic period, a time of stable climatic conditions 8,000–4,000 years ago, we propose that the ancestral Maya established an intimate relationship with an expanding tropical forest, modifying the landscape to meet their subsistence needs. We propose that the succeeding period of climatic chaos during the Preclassic period, 4,000–1,750 years ago, provoked the adaptation to settled agrarian life. This new adaptation, we suggest, was based on a resource management strategy that grew out of earlier landscape modification practices.

Eventually, this resulted in a highly managed landscape that we call the Maya Forest Garden. This highly productive and sustainable system of resource management formed the foundation for the development of the Maya civilization, from 3,000 to 1,000 years ago, and was intensified during the latter millennia of a stable climatic regime as population grew and the civilization developed. These strategies of living in the forest evolved into the milpa cycle—the axis of the Maya Forest garden resource management system that created the extraordinary economic value recognized in the Maya Forest today.

Reference: Origins of the Maya Forest Garden: Maya Resource Management – Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh, Journal of Ethnobiology 29(2):213-236. 2009 doi: 10.2993/0278-0771-29.2.213

The most recent edition of the anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth has been published over at SpiderMonkeyTales, with two main themes accounting for the entries – human evolution and primatology, both of which are inextricably linked, particularly in recent years as the latter field of enquiry continually forces us to reassess exactly what it means to be human. Points of discussion in 4SH 81 include debate as to what extent the chin may or may not define a modern human, recent assessment of the entire skeleton of H.floresiensis which firmly indicates that the hobbits of Flores are indeed a separate species in their own right, as well as a few thoughts on the future of human evolution with regard to the nebulous concept of species fixation.

The second half of 4SH 81 delves into primatology, where drills and macaques come under scrutiny, as does the intriguing idea that water can perhaps be thought of indirectly as a tool, the latter of which comes courtesy of the author herself – this is a fairly new blog which might not be familiar to some readers, so be sure to check out current and previous entries as well.

The next and 82nd edition of Four Stone Hearth will take place on Wednesda, December 16th over at Anthropology in Practice, when Krystal D’Costa will host, and details of how to submit content are available at the host site. As yet there is no-one booked for the end-of-year finale, due on Wednesday December 30th, or indeed any of the slots for 2010, so if you’ve hosted before and would like to do so again, or would like to try your hand at hosting for the first time, just head to the 4SH page where details of how to do so can be found.

Many thanks to Michelle for hosting, and in case you’re wondering where in the New World you might encounter a spider monkey living in its natural habitat, this Wikipedia entry provides some relevant information.

image of spider monkey from Innovation Gone Wrong

Thanksgiving is now well and truly over, as are the lives of numerous birds, in this case turkeys, that were consumed as part of the tradition, whilst even larger quantities of this particular bird are slated for slaughter and consumption as Christmas once more raises its ominous spectre on the festive horizon. I’m not sure for how long the consumption of birds has been a main feature of human feasting occasions, but as we see from the linked paper, humans have been eating various species of bird for hundreds of thousands of years, which is surprising in the context of how difficult it must have been for our ancestors to acquire this food item with what we might consider to be comparatively limited technological prowess. Two aspects of this study particularly interested me, the first that archaic humans were able to acquire avian prey, and second that on many occasions, it appears that the acquired meat may have been eaten in its raw state. Whether it was eaten by humans or given to other animals such as tamed hunting birds is something I’ll address in due course.

As we have seen in previous posts, there are numerous caves and rock-shelters across Spain which offer a wealth of finds and associated data, affording us invaluable insights into the life-styles of ancient humans, particularly when it comes to trying to ascertain which prey animals were hunted and consumed in the Middle Pleistocene.

As the authors Blasco and Fernández Peris note in their paper, much attention on this subject is paid to larger prey animals and the ways in which they were hunted, butchered and consumed, whilst the data from smaller prey comes under less scrutiny. In this paper they show how that around 150k years ago, archaic humans such as Homo heidelbergensis or possibly Homo neanderthalensis consumed, Aythya sp. a type of marsh-dwelling duck, although the birds themselves may on occasion have been eaten raw. How these birds were actually caught remains for now an open question, but we can be fairly sure that advanced hunting skills would have been necessary in order for this prey to have been a regular feature on the menu, assuming the birds weren’t opportunistically scavenged.

Here’s the abstract of the paper that’s behind a paywall, but because author Ruth Blasco has very kindly forwarded me a copy, I’m pleased to be able to offer more comment than might otherwise have been the case:

Abstract:

The consumption of small prey dates back to the Plio-Pleistocene chronologies in some African sites. However, the systematic acquisition and consumption of small prey in the pre-Upper Palaeolithic times is still a highly debated topic in Europe. Although the utilization of leporids has been recorded in several pre-Late Pleistocene European sites, the evidence of bird consumption is not as common for these periods. Nevertheless, Level XI (MIS 6) of Bolomor Cave has clear diagnostic elements to document the acquisition and use of birds (Aythya sp.) for food in the form of: (1) cutmarks on bones of both the front and hind limb; (2) presence of burning patterns on the extremities of the bones (areas of the skeleton with less meat); and (3) human toothmarks on limb bones.

The capture of birds is classified as quick-flying game in the archaeological sites. The acquiring of fast-running (mostly lagomorphs) and quick-flying small prey requires a sophisticated technology and involves obtaining and processing ways different from those used for large- and medium-sized animals. From this perspective, the aim of this paper is to examine possible patterns in the processing sequence of birds from Level XI of Bolomor Cave and to improve the data on their butchery and human consumption in the Middle Pleistocene of Iberian Peninsula.

The introduction goes on to discuss how avian prey may have been overlooked as a contributory factor to ancient humans as the amount of energy derived from their consumption is obviously much less than sources of meat on the hoof. Moreover, because the processing and consumption of smaller prey require little or no use of stone tools, as hands and teeth can be effectively deployed, less evidence of lithic activity appears on the bones of those birds that were eaten. However, as the authors note, other evidence in the guise of tooth-marks, breakages and alteration by fire of bird bones can serve equally well as clues that such remains found at ancient sites were there as a result of human activity rather than from the activities of other scavenging animals, birds of prey, or death by natural causes at the site in question.

Details of previous research at other sites is given here:

So far, the older evidences on avian remains were identified in the Early Pleistocene of Sima del Elefante (Spain) (Huguet, 2007) and of Dursunlu (Turkey) (Gu¨ leç et al., 2009). At the Sima del Elefante site, one cutmark on a proximal metaphysis of a large sized-bird radius was observed at Level TE9a. In Dursunlu, several incisions on distal metatarsus of a large bird were also documented. In more recent chronologies, an anthropogenic use on Pyrrhocorax graculus bones was suggested in the ‘‘acheulean cabin’’ of the Lazaret in France (Bouchud, 1969).

This study was based on the spatial distribution of the bird remains, which are more abundant inside the cabin. Nevertheless, this distribution has been the subject of debate. According to Villa (1983), this phenomenon is due to the natural formation process at Level V of the site. Some species, such as crows and pigeons, are known to nest on the wall of the caves and their bones are frequently found in karstic contexts. It is possible that some of these birds died from natural causes and others may have been brought by birds of prey (Bubo bubo) in form of pellet or by carnivores (Vulpes vulpes, Felis silvestris or Lynx spelaea) that occasionally inhabited the cavity (Lumley et al., 2004).

However, cutmarks on one Columba livia right humerus have been identified at UA 25 of Lazaret cave (Lumley et al., 2004; Roger, 2004). On the other hand, the bird accumulations in the Middle Pleistocene of the A´ ridos site (Spain) were interpreted by Mourer-Chauvire´ (1980) as the result of human hunting. However, the avian skeletal representation of this site is not biased (Mourer-Chauvire´ , 1980) and therefore, the interpretation of bird accumulation by hominids could be problematic. In these cases, the identification of other diagnostic elements of anthropogenic processing on skeletal remains should be considered….

…In Bolomor Cave, the consumption of small prey is common throughout the entire stratigraphic sequence. At this site, cutmarks on leporid bones (Oryctolagus cuniculus) are documented repeatedly from MIS 9 to MIS 5e (Blasco, 2006; Sanchis Serra and Ferna´ndez Peris, 2008). Anthropogenic processing marks are also observed on tortoise remains (Testudo hermanni) at Level IV (Blasco, 2008) and on one swan humerus (Cygnus olor) at Level XII (Blasco, 2006). This paper aims to add available data on the consumption and butchery of birds at Level XI in Bolomor Cave. Level XI is one of the levels, within the stratigraphic sequence of the site, which presents the highest percentage of very small sized animals in relation to ungulates and allows us to examine possible patterns of bird consumption.

As Cova de Bolomor might not be familiar to all, a brief word on its location and archaeological history is in order. The cave itself is faces north east, and is located on Monduver Mountain in the Valldigna Valley, near the town of Tavernes, Valencia in eastern Spain. Described as a karstic rock shelter, the site opened up around 500k years ago, and thus far, 17 archaeological levels have been identified, indicating numerous human occupations, where fossil remains, stone tools and hearths testify to activities that took place there.

As we see from an article in El Pais back in 2007, Neanderthal remains dating to 130k years ago have been found in the levels above XI, and comprise a milk tooth, an adult tooth and a partial skull, whilst other faunal remains indicate that animals such as macaque monkeys, rhinoceros and hippopotamus shared the immediate neighbourhood. The Neanderthal remains had been in the local museum since 1982, encased in a chunk of rock. As far as I can tell,  Bolomor was known to be of archaeological interest since the 19th century, but nevertheless the site suffered considerable damage in the 1930s, when explosions from nearby quarrying activities caused lumps of rock from the shelter to be scattered in the vicinity, which in turn were collected and taken to the museum for study and research.

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