Anthropology.net

Here’s the abstract of a paper which is freely available from the Royal Society, in which deceptive communication facilitated by tool use in Bornean orang-utans comes under the spotlight. The kiss-squeak may not be familiar to all, so here’s a link to a page at the University of Zurich where different types can be heard, whilst elsewhere on the same page, an entire repertoire of orang-utan calls is described. of Moreover, not only is this paper free, but according to the Royal Society’s Facebook page, by way of celebrating 350 years of publication, their entire digital archive of 65,000 papers is free to access until February 2010, details of which will appear later in this post.

Abstract

Culture has long been assumed to be uniquely human but recent studies, in particular on great apes, have suggested that cultures also occur in non-human primates. The most apparent cultural behaviours in great apes involve tools in the subsistence context where they are clearly functional to obtain valued food. On the other hand, tool-use to modify acoustic communication has been reported only once and its function has not been investigated.

Thus, the question whether this is an adaptive behaviour remains open, even though evidence indicates that it is socially transmitted (i.e. cultural). Here we report on wild orang-utans using tools to modulate the maximum frequency of one of their sounds, the kiss squeak, emitted in distress. In this variant, orang-utans strip leaves off a twig and hold them to their mouth while producing a kiss squeak. Using leaves as a tool lowers the frequency of the call compared to a kiss squeak without leaves or with only a hand to the mouth. If the lowering of the maximum frequency functions in orang-utans as it does in other animals, two predictions follow: (i) kiss squeak frequency is related to body size and (ii) the use of leaves will occur in situations of most acute danger. Supporting these predictions, kiss squeaks without tools decreased with body size and kiss squeaks with leaves were only emitted by highly distressed individuals. Moreover, we found indications that the calls were under volitional control.

This finding is significant for at least two reasons. First, although few animal species are known to deceptively lower the maximum frequency of their calls to exaggerate their perceived size to the listener (e.g. vocal tract elongation in male deer) it has never been reported that animals may use tools to achieve this, or that they are primates. Second, it shows that the orang-utan culture extends into the communicative domain, thus challenging the traditional assumption that primate calling behaviour is overall purely emotional.

The theory holds that by making their voices sound deeper, orang-utan seek to deceive predators into thinking their intended prey is larger than is actually the case, and thus the predator faces greater risk of injury or mission failure in any ensuing encounter. The authors comment on the way in which temporarily increased body size is a common tactic deployed throughout the animal kingdom as a deterrent towards predators, but that only the orang-utan observed in the study use tools as a means of doing this. There’s an interesting note on the environment in which this behaviour occurs:

This pattern indicates that kiss squeaks with the hand and on leaves, i.e. with lower frequencies, were emitted in circumstances assumed to be more dangerous. This functional use is plausible because orang-utans are arboreal apes living in dense forests, where visibility is usually poor and rarely sufficient to make accurate visual assessments of body size, particularly in disturbing encounters when orang-utans use displays and missiles towards potential predators. This way, the visual salience hypothesis (Peters 2001) for the function of the kiss-squeak forms also seems unlikely owing to poor visibility and because the dropping of leaves is not executed in isolation, but in combination with branch-shaking, breaking and throwing for example.

Although one might argue that individuals of bigger body size classes (e.g. flanged males) would not deploy kiss squeaks with the hand and on leaves for the purpose of functional deception, this interpretation ignores that all individuals may benefit from appearing larger in highly disturbing contexts. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that kiss-squeak forms function to deceptively convey to the predator a larger body size.

Indeed, as expected, orang-utans were never observed or reported to emit kiss squeaks with the hand and on leaves towards other orang-utans, since producer and receiver will generally be familiar with one another and/or with the deceptive technique. At the same time, low-sound frequencies travel farther than high-sound frequencies (Lameira & Wich 2008), and thus the use of hands and leaves during the production of kiss squeaks could be meant for the purpose of conspecifics’ recruitment. However, this is unlikely since recruitment of conspecifics via the emission of kiss-squeak forms, while not uncommon, usually takes much longer than the duration of an encounter (Van Noordwijk & Van Schaik 2009).

The recent articles on Ardipithecus ramidus explained how the species lived in a wooded environment, and it would be interesting to know whether similar deceptions were used in that context as well, and/or whether their bipedalism evolved in part as a deterrent to the predatory instincts of those animals that hunted them.

As mentioned at the top of this article, Royal Society Publishing have an announcement regarding free access on their Fb page, the gist of which is this:

Between November 2009 and November 2010, the Royal Society will be celebrating its 350th anniversary, promoting a spirit of enquiry, excitement and engagement with science.  To mark this special occasion, all our digital content, greater than 65000 articles including our entire archive dating back to 1665, is now FREE …TO ACCESS for three months, until 28 Feb 2010.  Read articles by Newton, Hook, Boyle, Darwin, Watson and Crick, Stephen Hawking, Dorothy Hodgkin, Dirac, G. I. Taylor, Flemming, Captain James Cook and many many other eminent scientists.  Enjoy all this via http://royalsocietypublishing.org – you lucky things!

The Royal Society is planning further events to commemorate its founding in 1660, as can be seen from their dedicated web-page.

image: A Bornean orangutan. Courtesy of Flickr user Graham Racher (via Smithsonian.com)

Reference:

Tool use in wild orang-utans modifies sound production: a functionally deceptive innovation? by Madeleine E. Hardus, Adriano R. Lameira, Carel P. Van Schaik and Serge A. Wich.

Proc. R. Soc. B October 22, 2009 276:3689-3694;  published online before print August 5, 2009, doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.1027

A new paper by Martin A.J. Williams et al, on the Mount Toba eruption 73,000 years ago, proposes that the destructive aftermath of the event caused widespread de-forestation in India, some 3,000 miles distant from Sumatra, the island on which the volcano was located. Here’s the abstract of that paper which is behind a paywall, but commented upon in Science Daily, to which I’ll refer shortly:

Abstract

The cooling effects of historic volcanic eruptions on world climate are well known but the impacts of even bigger prehistoric eruptions are still shrouded in mystery. The eruption of Toba volcano in northern Sumatra some 73,000 years ago was the largest explosive eruption of the past two million years, with a Volcanic Explosivity Index of magnitude 8, but its impact on climate has been controversial. In order to resolve this issue, we have analysed pollen from a marine core in the Bay of Bengal with stratified Toba ash, and the carbon isotopic composition of soil carbonates directly above and below the ash in three sites on a 400 km transect across central India.

Pollen evidence shows that the eruption was followed by initial cooling and prolonged desiccation, reflected in a decline in tree cover in India and the adjacent region. Carbon isotopes show that C3 forest was replaced by wooded to open C4 grassland in central India. Our results demonstrate that the Toba eruption caused climatic cooling and prolonged deforestation in South Asia, and challenge claims of minimal impact on tropical ecosystems and human populations.

The story is taken up by Science Daily,  in Supervolcano Eruption In Sumatra Deforested India 73,000 Years Ago, where the sheer scale of the event is reflected in this description of the eruption and the site itself:

The volcano ejected an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, leaving a crater (now the world’s largest volcanic lake) that is 100 kilometers long and 35 kilometers wide. Ash from the event has been found in India, the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea.

The bright ash reflected sunlight off the landscape, and volcanic sulfur aerosols impeded solar radiation for six years, initiating an “Instant Ice Age” that — according to evidence in ice cores taken in Greenland — lasted about 1,800 years.

During this instant ice age, temperatures dropped by as much as 16 degrees centigrade (28 degrees Fahrenheit), said University of Illinois anthropology professor Stanley Ambrose, a principal investigator on the new study with professor Martin A.J. Williams, of the University of Adelaide. Williams, who discovered a layer of Toba ash in central India in 1980, led the research.

The report then goes on to comment on the debate that has sprung up surrounding the idea that this event nearly wiped humanity off the face of the planet, causing a putative genetic ‘bottleneck’ event, whereby the diversity of the human gene pool was dramatically reduced, prompting some researchers to contend that the anatomically modern human population immediately after Mount Toba may have numbered only about 15,000 individuals. This idea has however been contested, most notably in a 2007 paper by Michael Petraglia et al, in which it is suggested that Middle Palaeolithic technology appears to have continued across the region without significant interruption, following investigations at the site of Jwalapuram.

The Science Daily report also gives details of how Williams and his team were able to deduce the climatic impact of the eruption, as we see from this:

To address the limited evidence of the terrestrial effects of Toba, Ambrose and his colleagues pursued two lines of research: They analyzed pollen from a marine core in the Bay of Bengal that included a layer of ash from the Toba eruption, and they looked at carbon isotope ratios in fossil soil carbonates taken from directly above and below the Toba ash in three locations in central India.

Carbon isotopes reflect the type of vegetation that existed at a given locale and time. Heavily forested regions leave carbon isotope fingerprints that are distinct from those of grasses or grassy woodlands.

Both lines of evidence revealed a distinct change in the type of vegetation in India immediately after the Toba eruption, the researchers report. The pollen analysis indicated a shift to a “more open vegetation cover and reduced representation of ferns, particularly in the first 5 to 7 centimeters above the Toba ash,” they wrote in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The change in vegetation and the loss of ferns, which grow best in humid conditions, they wrote, “would suggest significantly drier conditions in this region for at least one thousand years after the Toba eruption.”

The dryness probably also indicates a drop in temperature, Ambrose said, “because when you turn down the temperature you also turn down the rainfall.”

The carbon isotope analysis showed that forests covered central India when the eruption occurred, but wooded to open grassland predominated for at least 1,000 years after the eruption.

“This is unambiguous evidence that Toba caused deforestation in the tropics for a long time,” Ambrose said.

This disaster may have forced the ancestors of modern humans to adopt new cooperative strategies for survival that eventually permitted them to replace Neandertals and other archaic human species, he said.

That last sentence regarding Neanderthal extinction seems to me to be stretching a point, especially when we bear in mind that Neanderthals survived Mount Toba by around 50,000 years, and there is nothing specific in the archaeological record that points to sudden innovations by AMH at this time. Even if we take into account the findings at Blombos for example, where it was originally proposed that the first modern human attempts at creating art were made, around 77,000 years bp, and subsequently at several even earlier sites in North Africa, it is clear that the path, or at least a side-road of that path to so-called modernity had been embarked upon prior to the eruption. It is notable howeverthat this particular mode of behaviour seems to disappear until modern humans made their mark in Upper Palaeolithic Europe around 42,000 bp.

To demonstrate that AMH would have changed the way in which they made a living to the extent that it gave them some sort of killer advantage would require a more exhaustive analysis on floral and faunal populations as well – obviously prey species would have been affected by the eruption, but whether entire species were wiped out causing AMH to adopt different food hunting and gathering methods is an open question. It seems parsimonious to suggest that a reduced human population would have been able to survive on a reduced (but not extinct) prey population, meaning that supply would still have roughly matched demand, and that no large changes in material culture would have been necessary.

What we don’t know of course is the impact the Toba eruption might have had on the mindsets of both AMH and Neanderthals who may have occupied the region,  and maybe late-surviving H. erectus, all of whom would no doubt have been awed by the sheer magnitude and extent of the destruction visited upon their world; titanic explosions that rained down debris from the sky, causing rapid deterioration of climate and associated habitats could well have spawned thoughts that the world was coming to an end, though whether such disasters were routinely ascribed to the natural world or some kind of divine or hellish intervention, is again, an unknown.

However, there is one location in Africa, and dated to 70,000 bp, that might offer an intriguing hint that some kind of behaviour linked to abstract belief through use of ritualistic symbolism in the guise of destruction, was present at this early date. The 2006 report, again from Science Daily, World’s Oldest Ritual Discovered Worshipped The Python 70,000 Years Ago documents a discovery by Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the University of Oslo, which describes what might be the earliest known example of the ritual destruction of humanly crafted objects, in this case, red spear-points, that were fashioned from stones sourced from hundreds of kilometres away from the Tsodilo Hills, site of the cave, described in part here:

“Stone age people took these colourful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there. Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site. Our find means that humans were more organised and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much earlier point in history than we have previously assumed. All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as a very special place in the pre-historic landscape.” says Sheila Coulson.

Sheila Coulson also noticed a secret chamber behind the python stone. Some areas of the entrance to this small chamber were worn smooth, indicating that many people had passed through it over the years.

Ostensibly there’s nothing to suggest that the human activities in this cave of the python were directly or even indirectly influenced by the Mount Toba eruption thousands of miles away, and indeed the dates for both the eruption and ritual activity in the African cave aren’t exact, but assuming Toba was the preceding event, it would be interesting to know if, when and to what extent news of Toba reached ancient African ears, and exactly how the eruption and ensuing catastrophic decline in environment and climate may have been reported and interpreted.

via Gene Expression

image: Landsat satellite photo of Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia. (Credit: Image courtesy of NASA / via Wikimedia Commons)

References:

Environmental Impact of the 73 ka Toba super-eruption in South Asia, Article in Press, Corrected Proof , by Martin A.J. Williams , Stanley H. Ambrose, Sander van der Kaars, Carsten Ruehlemann, Umesh Chattopadhyaya, Jagannath Pal and Parth R. Chauhan, doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2009.10.009

Middle Paleolithic Assemblages from the Indian Subcontinent Before and After the Toba Super-Eruption, by Michael Petraglia et al, Science 6 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5834, pp. 114 – 116 DOI: 10.1126/science.1141564

This via Mind Hacks – Seed Magazine have published a piece by Joe Kloc, in which he looks at the relationship between humans and life-like robots, with regard to the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ effect, described here at Wikipedia:

(Masahiro) Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.^[5]

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction

Readers will doubtless be familiar with such films as Blade Runner and AI – Artificial Intelligence, both of which address the hypothesized relationships between organic humans and their android equivalents in a technological future as yet only imagined – in both cases, the lines of identity become blurred; in Blade Runner, we have two androids, Deckard and Rachael who at first don’t even realise they aren’t human (although this isn’t clear in the narrated version as far as Deckard is concerned), in part due to the sophistication of the memories inserted into their circuitry, whilst AI , in a rework of Pinocchio, examines whether a human can emotionally bond with a robot that has been programmed to bond with them.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the linked article, which explains that it isn’t just humans who can spot a fake:

New findings published in PNAS this September are putting some long-overdue experimental rigor behind the uncanny valley. Last spring at Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute, Asif Ghazanfar developed a computer model of a macaque monkey designed to interact with real macaques. But the monkeys weren’t fooled. Further testing revealed that, much to Ghazanfar’s surprise, his model was eliciting an uncanny valley response from the monkeys. It was the first time scientists had ever observed such a response in a non-human species.

“By showing that monkeys can do it, several things become plausible,” Ghazanfar says. “One is that there is an evolutionary explanation for the uncanny valley and the other is that it is not something specific to our human, cultural experience.” These findings may for the first time allow scientists to go back through a century’s worth of peculiar ideas about the origins of the uncanny valley and begin putting them to the test.

Which begs the question as to whether a human would intuitively know that a robotic macaque wasn’t real, or a macaque that an android wasn’t really a human either, or whether one species is better at spotting  the fake than the other, and why that would be the case.

Reference is made to an essay, ‘The Uncanny’ by Sigmund Freud, with this commentary from the linked essay:

According to Freud, the phenomenon that would later be called the uncanny valley stems from a primitive attempt of humans to skirt death and secure our own immortality by creating copies of ourselves—such as wax figures and, later, life-like robots. He quotes his colleague Otto Rank in saying that this “doubling” behavior is “an energetic denial of the power of death” and suggests the idea of the immortal soul was the first double of the body.

Our uncanny response follows from the fact that most of us no longer believe we can secure our own immortality by making copies of ourselves, but we haven’t yet shaken the primitive habit of trying to do so. The sad consequence of this is that, in Freud’s words, “The double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” The copies we feel compelled to make only serve to remind us why we began making them in the first place: We are, inevitably, going to die.

About the earliest example of large size models of humans which evoke (in me) a sense of the uncanny in this regard would be the strange lime-plaster anthropomorphic statues from the Neolithic site of ‘Ain Ghazal, near Amman in modern-day Jordan, dated to around 8,500 years ago, whose exact function and meaning have been lost to us. An odd aspect of these is the way in which some statues are of two beings emerging from the same base, whilst others merely represent a lone individual. Although they were found cached in specifically prepared pits, they had been made with the intention of standing them up, though whether they were on public or private display is unknown, as is whether they were used on special ceremonial occasions or rituals, with regard for instance to mortuary practice, or merely formed a backdrop to daily life, is again, an open question.Obviously there’s a huge difference between the Neolithic statues and the human-like robots that technology allows to be made in the present,

Back to the linked article:

In the West, there is often a Frankensteinian stigma attached to artificial intelligence, but Mori offered Japan a much different perspective. In The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion, published in 1974, he wrote, “I believe robots have the Buddha-nature within them—that is, the potential for attaining Buddhahood.”

His ideas about religion and the uncanny valley have had a substantial influence on the development of Japanese robotics. “In Japan, there is a great sensitivity in the government for having people who are accepting of robotics and robots in general. Mori’s interpretation of the uncanny valley became a kind of dogma,” says Karl MacDorman, a roboticist at Indiana University. As a result, Japan spent the next few decades avoiding human-like robot designs.

It looks like being a good few decades or even centuries before technological advances allow humans to create robots that are sentient, and there are persistent doubts as to whether an analogue brain and consciousness can ever be replicated into binary code, or whether this is even a desirable or prudent goal to pursue.

The Uncanny Valley Masahiro Mori, 1970

Following on from a recent post which linked to the Neuroanthropology website, I want to give brief mention to a neuroscientist by the name of David Eagleman, his research into synaesthesia and an excellent book he published earlier this year, ‘Sum – Forty Tales from the Afterlives’, a pocket-sized tome bristling with a glittering array of thoughts, ideas and speculations about what gods, afterlives and ourselves might or could never be, how we know we even exist or are merely re-living a seamlessly reconstructed version of one or more past life-times.

I first came across Eagleman on this podcast from ABC Radio’s ‘All in the Mind’, hosted by Natasha Mitchell, and which is available, complete with transcript here, and from which this is the introduction:

Imagine if I gave you a glass of milk and it tasted blue to you, or if your partner’s voice just felt like a wonderful golden brown, the colour of buttery toast? What if the number two and letter J conjured up the shade of letterbox red, or the name Derek tasted like earwax? Or whenever you heard music, a kaleidoscope of colours exploded inside your head; different tones and textures for different notes. Vladimir Nabokov was one, so is artist David Hockney, in fact one in a hundred of us could be a person with synesthesia, the surprising cross-wiring of the senses in the brain.

My guest today heads up one of the top centres in synesthesia research based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. By day he’s a leading neuroscientist but by night he writes novels, and he’s just been in Australia to perform with Brian Eno at the Sydney Opera House a piece based on his totally intriguing new novel called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. So meet the energetic David Eagleman.

From later in the show, we hear a few more words on the extraordinary phenomena known as synaesthesia, which we learn is surprisingly prevalent in modern human populations:

…synesthesia is a condition that about one per cent of the population has, and some researchers have estimated that there are maybe 152 reported forms of synesthesia. They have a mixture of the senses, so for example if you have synesthesia you might hear music and it causes you to physically see colours, or more common versions are things like the numbers and letters of the alphabet having colours, or textures or shapes, or genders or personalities. You might taste something and it makes you feel like you’re feeling something on your fingertips, or you might hear something and that puts a taste in your mouth.

For one synesthete, for example, whenever he hears the name Derek it tastes like earwax to him, it puts the taste of that in his mouth. And for other people, you know for different words, it puts the taste of cinnamon in their mouth, or some metallic taste in their mouth and so on. It’s not just that they’re being silly or metaphorical or artistic, it’s actually that there’s cross-wiring in their brains so that from the parts of their brain that care about hearing, and the parts or their brain that care about taste, there’s a little bit of cross-talk going on, so particular auditory experiences will trigger gustatory experiences.

There are many different forms of synesthesia but what they all have in common is that they represent a blending of the senses. And it used to be thought that this was very rare but we now know that it’s really quite common, it’s at least one per cent of the population. So to come back around to your question, because of this increased cross-talk in the brain it has been suggested that maybe synesthesia is related to creativity and metaphor, because essentially that’s what it is for somebody to be very creative or to speak in metaphor, is to find parallels across different domains in the brain.

I’m not sure to what extent this a trait that applies only to our modern selves, or whether synaesthesia is something we’ve inherited from our archaic past – did Neanderthals or H. heidelbergensis or even H. erectus experience these weird fluctuations in their neural circuitry, and if so, to what extent if any has this impacted on speech, language, numeracy or even seemingly irrational belief systems which incorporate divine and omniscient beings living in abstract realms to which our souls are said to migrate shortly after our mortal demise? Do other primates share this with us, or are our own brains unique in that only our particular neural configurations are capable of fusing disparate functions into unexpected reconstructions of what seems real to us?

On that subject, here’s a quick look at some of the content in the book ‘Sum‘, which receives a fair amount of coverage elsewhere in the show – for example, this on consciousness, and by default, the concept of creation:

Questions like how consciousness comes about, how do you ever string together tens of billions of pieces and parts and get something out of it that has private subjective experience.  So if I were to hand you billions of Tinkertoys, you know those little toys you put together, and you start hooking them up so that when you touched this, that happens and so on. At what point would you add one more Tinkertoy and say ah, now this is having conscious experience?

We don’t even know what the theory would look like on that. I mean here’s another way of looking at it. When I was a child I absolutely expected that by the time I was this age we would have robots, that we would have C3PO serving our dinner and cleaning my room and so on. The best we have is the Roomba vacuum cleaner, and it turns out that things like intelligence is really, really hard to figure out. and even things like computer vision is very, very difficult.

Without our specific brand of consciousness it seems improbable that any complex living creature like our selves would be able to even conceive of a grand Creator, Architect, Programmer or Technician, but there is no doubt that such ideas are by now almost indelibly imprinted on our mind-set. However when it comes to describing the type of god or afterlife that many people believe in, their depictions tend to be somewhat workaday, and to a great extent moulded by models that have been portrayed by our families, religious educators and the clergy:

So when I sit next to people on aeroplanes and I ask them what their opinion is on whether there’s a God, or what they would look like, or what an afterlife would look like, it turns out there’s such a lack of creativity, everybody just says whatever their parents have told them. So this book is all about really mentally stretching on spatial scales and ideas of gender and number and all sorts of things.

And mentally stretching such ideas is exactly what this book does – whether you’re a confirmed atheist, a devout agnostic or fully subscribed believer, all the short stories in this book should give you pause for thought and more than a moment or two of inner reflection – indeed we’re told that the book has been equally well received from many quarters of the religious divide, no mean feat for such a book, especially in these days of entrenched fundamentalism that everywhere abound. Here’s a quick look at some of the ideas Eagleman offers up for consideration:

If you stopped someone on the street and said, ‘Hey, what do you think the afterlife is about?’ Of course everybody just has in their mind whatever their parents or their community has told them, and when you really start putting those ideas under the spotlight, what you discover is they’re ridiculous. So for example the one where God is getting frustrated in having to do this binary categorisation into good and evil. it’s a perfect example of how goofy the story is because people are much more multi-dimensional than that, they are much more complex than that.

And so in that story God decides to sort of revolt against that structure that she had set up and she instead invites everybody to come into Heaven and to be a part of Heaven. And what ends up happening actually if I can just read the last line here: ‘So she brings everyone to Heaven and everyone’s achieved true equality and the communists are baffled and irritated because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only with the help of a God in whom they didn’t want to believe.

The meritocats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage, the liberals have no downtrodden to promote, so God sits on the edge of her bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they are all in Hell.

Eagleman is also featured in a May 2009 edition of another podcast, ‘Little Atoms’, hosted by Neil Denny, and if you want to grab a copy of the book, for yourself or deserving other(s), there are two main options – you can for example order it online from places like Amazon and numerous other digital outlets.

If however, to paraphrase Matt Haynes, editor of, and writing in the latest print edition of ‘Smoke – A London Peculiar’ you believe “electricity is nothing but a demented cavalcade of charged particles over which no human could ever hold dominion”, just visit your local book-store instead, and they’ll take things from there.

Here’s a link to a post at Neuroanthropology which should really have been included in the recent and 79th edition of Four Stone Hearth, which was somehow overlooked by me at the time. The linked essay was constructed by Greg Downey, in which he considers amongst much else, traditional structuralism, its origins and cycle of acknowledgement in academia, and how modern research into the brain and and its complex behind-the-scenes activities would seem to fly in the face of much structuralist thought.

As we see from this extract:

This is perhaps one of the first and simplest distinctions between structuralism, together with some forms of cognitive anthropology, and neuroanthropology. The belief that, underlying human expression is a simpler structure of thought, one that can be described as an oppositional framework of categories, is, in my opinion, not consistent with current neurosciences. Structuralist analysis assumes that, underlying surface complexity in myth, ritual, and even conscious thought, there must be a simpler generative matrix (this is also one of my issues with Pierre Bourdieu, and the reason that I think his thought is overly structuralist). Increasingly, neurosciences are leading us to the opposite conclusion, that conscious thought and overt expression are the thin surface of much more complex processes, a staggeringly Byzantine thinking organ embedded within a baroque organism upon which it depends for sensation, experience, subsistence, and even motivation to exist. Even the theorists of mental modularity, with which I disagree on many things, come into direct conflict with the stupendous simplification of mental processes required by structuralist analysis (for more, see Andy Clark & Michael Wheeler: Embodied cognition and cultural evolution).

If like me, you only have a vague acquaintance with the workings of the mind of Lévi-Strauss himself, be sure to check the rest of this most informative essay, as it provides a succinct introduction to what the man was about, his thoughts on the function of myth, plus a whole lot more, including plenty of outgoing links to further reading.

Current Anthropology, December 2009, Volume 50 number 6 is now out, which as will be apparent from the headline, marks no less than 50 years in the field, and there are a number of essays contained therein which reflect on the past, present and future of this publication. Here’s part of editor Mark Aldenderfer’s introduction to the proceedings:

In this issue we celebrate 50 years of Current Anthropology. By no means the most long‐lived anthropology journal (that honor must go to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which technically began its run in 1872 but whose origins can be traced to 1863), it is certainly unique. The six celebratory essays explore the history of this remarkable journal from the perspectives of past editors, beginning with Cyril Belshaw, who took over from Sol Tax, the journal’s founder, and then Adam Kuper, Richard Fox, and Ben Orlove, as well as two past presidents of the Wenner‐Gren Foundation, Sydel Silverman and Richard Fox. Barbara Metzger, who joined the journal as a copy editor in 1964 at Tax’s behest and became arguably the central figure of the journal through the terms of five editors, provides another perspective on CA’s evolution. These very personal reflections offer us insights into not only the history of the journal but also the changing nature of scholarly publishing and the ways in which CA shaped, and was shaped by, the contours of these changes.

Although Sol Tax first saw CA as a venue for reviews and news, the realities of scholarly publishing even then moved him toward a broader conception of the idea of “current” research. Over the decades, as our editors have stressed, current meant just that—publishing not just the new for the sake of newness and currency but also the best of that research. Here the journal over the decades has been tremendously successful. Although I am aware of dissatisfaction with and rejection of quantitative measures of journal impact, such measures are nevertheless one way to document the quality of a journal and its influence on a field. Using the Institute for Scientific Information’s impact factor formula as reported in their annual Journal Citation Reports (see http://tinyurl.com/ygvxffq for definitions and caveats), since 1997, CA has ranged from the first to the seventh position of all indexed anthropology journals (lower numbers are better). This is a remarkable achievement for a four‐field journal in an era of increasing specialization, and the past editors must be heartily congratulated for keeping CA timely, relevant, and important to the field across these five decades. For the sake of modesty, I will forgo comparisons with the other two major four‐field journals!

As ever, the contents are behind a paywall, albeit one which in my opinion is very good value for money – as I’ve mentioned before, the cost of a digital annual subscription isn’t much different from what some journals charge for access to a single paper, and moreover the papers published in CA this year have been especially wide-ranging, informative and thought-provoking, a trend which I imagine will continue long into the future.

To access the Table of Contents, just click this link.

Claude Lévi-Strauss died two days ago. He was 100 years old.

I shouldn’t have to write about his impact to the field of anthropology, in summary it was profound. He authored many texts. He set forth structuralism, a mode of thought by which we can compare relationships between social systems. His contributions to studying cultures and anthropology were deep and he will be missed.

Back in August of this year, two words I frequently encountered when trying to visit sites of interest in Andalucía, southern Spain, were“Cerrado” (closed) and “No”, which as a tourist you take in your stride, leg it to the nearest hostelry and reconsider the rest of the day from the perspective of its slightly less interesting alternatives. As an eminent archaeologist working on what is potentially one of the more important sites in Spanish archaeology, with the prospect of confirming the latest known Neanderthals to have lived anywhere in the world, you might hope for more positive words from those tasked with permitting your work to go ahead unhindered. But as we see from the sorry tale unfolding below, this is not always the case, especially where the cave of La Carihuela is concerned.

Martin Cagliani at Mundo Neandertal points us towards this story, in which Spanish archaeologists are complaining that the local Junta (legislative assembly) of Andalucía will not allow the re-excavation of the Mousterian layers in the cave which it closed in 1996, (although work seems to have been conducted at least as late as 1998 by Carrión, linked PDF, Fig.2) where it is claimed there are Neanderthal remains dating to around 21,500 years bp, located within the cave of La Carihuela, about 45 km from Granada. If confirmed, this would make these Neanderthals far younger even than those whose artefactual traces have been found at Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar dating to around 24,500 bp, at the same time perhaps taking the species’ existence right up to the Last Glacial Maximum.

The news article referred to is in Spanish, and is reported at Público.es, from which I’ll roughly translate some of the more pertinent points, while there’s also a freely accessible paper (PDF) on the subject of pollen sequences in the cave, as well as a description of its layout, the stratigraphic sequences within the galleries,  published in 2006, to which I’ll briefly refer throughout.

The report begins by describing how the cave might be the site of the very last Neanderthals tthat once walked this planet, because following the discovery of a male (Neanderthal) skull back in the 1950s, in the vicinity of Mousterian stone tools, it was realised shortly thereafter that according to pollen analyses, the layer from which the fossil had been retrieved might date to as late as 21,500 years bp.

Excavations began in earnest during the late 1970s, and by the early 1990s, a team of 30 researchers were working there, putting it on a par with Atapuerca, near Burgos in the north,  for the amount of effort invested in the site. But in 1996, following what is described as an arbitrary decision by local authorities, this work came to a sudden halt, and despite repeated requests from the archaeological community to reopen the cave, the Junta has remained obstinately silent on the case, allegedly not even picking up the phone to engage in the debate, according to D. Gerardo Vega Toscano. Profesor Titular, Dpto. de Prehistoria. UCM, Madrid.

He remarks that the scientists in this case are effectively at the mercy of the politicians, who basically don’t give two hoots whether the cave is the last refuge of the Neanderthals, or simply a hole in the ground.

One wonders from reading this whether the Junta is a fit and appropriate body to hold sway over such affairs, and moreover where the Spanish Ministry of Culture stands in this – surely it should be they who decide the scientific importance and appropriate funding levels required by such sites, and I find it hard to believe that no-one from the Ministry has seen fit to intervene.

Vega Toscano is for his part unconvinced of the very late date of 21,500 bp proposed for the remains, which he cites as absurd, opining instead that a date of 28,000 years bp is a more realistic proposition – it should be noted here that the estimate based on the pollen samples uses 28,440 bp and 21,430 bp as its parameters, with the real date presumably falling somewhere in between the two. The oldest known actual remains of Neanderthals are from Zafarraya, occupied between 31,000-27,000 bp, and the remains at La Carihuela should provide secure dates assuming that the specimens are in good enough condition.

Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar is also known as a late Neanderthal refuge, with a most recent date of 24,500 bp ascribed there to Mousterian artefacts, while in Portugal at Lagar Velho, what appear to be the remains of a hybrid Neanderthal child are also put at 24,500 bp, so there seems no reason why a similar date shouldn’t apply at La Carihuela, and maybe 21,500 years bp, or a millennium or two beforehand, in the overall context isn’t completely out of the question. The fact that Mousterian technologies appear to have continued to be employed right up to the very end is interesting in itself, suggesting a lack of contact between archaic and anatomically modern populations – whether further investigations within Carihuela will reveal late-surviving Neanderthals were using bone or antler implements in addition to their own Mousterian tool-kits remains to be seen, but seems doubtful.

Contrary to the opinions of Vega Toscano, there is however support for the much later Neanderthal survival dates, as the article goes on to report the opinions of José Carrión, Professor of Botany at the University of Murcia, who remarks that 21,000 years bp marks the start of the Glacial Maximum, when temperatures plunged ever deeper for the following 3,000 years, a situation he believes could have tipped Neanderthals over the edge, coinciding with the extinction of fauna such as the mastodon and sabre-toothed tiger. (Although Neanderthals had previously survived through at least 2 previous ice ages, they had done so in the absence of competition from AMH, and as far as I’m aware, no major faunal extinctions had taken place in the earlier glaciations either, or at least not to the extent that Neanderthal prey animals disappeared from the menu).

Carrión further makes the point that apart from pollen dating, the bones from La Carihuela can be dated, and so might yet reveal themselves to be younger than the Gorham’s Cave presence – whether the fossil skull mentioned earlier has been dated isn’t stated here, and whether it continues to languish unexamined in a Granada museum, isn’t clear. Other researchers have dismissed the idea that climate alone could have accounted for the demise of the Neanderthals, preferring instead to cite a multitude of inter-related factors.

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As this paper is freely accessible for the next 7 days, I’m posting it here in the hope that as many readers as possible will have time to read it through. Molly Fox et al turn their thoughts to the question of why women are able to live for many years after they able to conceive offspring, a phenomenon seemingly at odds with the idea that members of a species tend to die off once their reproductive days are over.

The ‘Grandmother Hypothesis’ is described and expanded upon thus in the linked paper:

With menopause occurring around age 50, women survive several decades longer than their gametes (Dorland et al. 1998; Hawkes 2003). Why should women have such conservative life histories that they save up enough energy for 25 years of reproductive retirement? Human females represent a particular conundrum in evolutionary studies: after menopause they are unable to reproduce and have no obvious way to increase their genetic contribution to future generations. As this is the basis for natural selection, many researchers have sought to explain how post-menopausal longevity is adaptive in women.

Among evolutionary biologists, the ‘grandmother hypothesis’ is the most widely recognized explanation for human female post-reproductive longevity. It suggests that vigorous, skilled, elderly women are able to contribute to their grandchildren’s survivorship through nutritional provisioning (Hawkes et al. 1998; Hawkes 2003). According to Hamilton’s relatedness coefficients (Hamilton 1966), grandmothers share a quarter of their DNA with grandchildren, and so a woman can increase her genetic contribution to subsequent generations by keeping her grandchildren alive and healthy. Supporters of this model often refer to the Hadza, a modern foraging society in Tanzania, where grandmothers are more effective than children at extracting tubers from the dry ground. While a mother is breastfeeding an infant, and thus unable to forage enough to provide for weaned children, the grandmother provides food for the older siblings (Hawkes 2003; Hawkes & Jones 2005).

The authors further suggest that this may be a behavioural and survival trait that can trace its roots back to the early Pleistocene, 1.7m-1.9m years bp (described in the paper as the Plio-Pleistocence boundary, recently re-dated to 2.6m years bp), when global cooling caused the expansion of African tuber-friendly grasslands, prompting ancient hominids to include a great many more tubers in their diet. From these origins, where grandmothers are suggested to have been important contributors of nutrition to two generations of descendants, researchers such as Soffer and Adovasio have taken the theory further, suggesting that grandmothers contributed a much greater role in child-rearing than simply providing nutritional foodstuffs.

The interesting aspect of this paper is how the authors suggest simply having a grandmother isn’t equally beneficial to grandchildren of either gender, with clear differences suggesting that in some instances having a maternal grandmother can be better for boys than a paternal grandmother, whilst a grand-daughter with a maternal grandmother appears to benefit most of all, as indicated here:

Tests of the grandmother hypothesis have been carried out on modern and historical populations. Most of the data correlate grandchild survivorship with grandmother survival and/or proximity, and it is often reported that only maternal grandmothers (MGMs) are found to have a positive effect on grandchild survivorship (Sear et al. 2002; Voland & Beise 2002). Studies that have not distinguished between MGMs and paternal grandmothers (PGMs) have found no correlation between grandmother’s presence and grandchild survivorship (Hill & Hurtado 1991; Lahdenperä et al. 2004). To date, only two previous studies known to the authors have distinguished between boys and girls when investigating the effect of both grandmothers.

A study of a Japanese population found that the presence of a PGM had a negative effect on boys and a positive effect on girls, while the presence of an MGM had a positive effect on children of both sexes, especially on boys (Jamison et al. 2002). They point to cultural features of the society as a possible mechanism for these findings. A study of an Ethiopian population reported the sex-specific information, but it was not analysed in the paper (Gibson & Mace 2005). More tests of the grandmother hypothesis are summarized in Sear & Mace (2007).

The authors continue by proposing the following:

The grandmother hypothesis is based on the fact that women are genetically related to their grandchildren, and we should not overlook the nature of that genetic relatedness. Grandsons and granddaughters differ in the proportion of their X-chromosomes shared with MGMs and PGMs (figure 1). According to our proposed X-linked grandmother hypothesis, if grandmothers invest in grandchildren because of their genetic relatedness with them, then their adaptive incentive to invest may vary in a way that mirrors this variation in genetic relatedness. As a consequence, grandmothers’ differential investment in grandchildren could cause differential survivorship of those grandchildren…

…Although the X-chromosome contains only about 4.4 per cent of our DNA, with its estimated 1529 genes, it contains perhaps approximately 8 per cent of all human genes (Pennisi 2003; NIH 2007; Parang et al. 2008; NCBI 2009a). The dramatic differences in X-relatedness between grandmothers and grandchildren confound the Hamiltonian concept that grandchildren are 25 per cent genetically related to each grandparent. If approximately 92 per cent of our genes are autosomes, then a grandmother shares one-quarter of that, or approximately 23 per cent of her total genes with a grandchild, plus X-relatedness.¹

If a grandmother shares no X-chromosome with a grandchild, then their overall genetic relatedness is approximately 23 per cent, and if they share an entire X-chromosome, then it would be approximately 31 per cent. Therefore, MGMs and grandchildren are likely to share 25 per cent of their genomes, while PGM and granddaughter may share a total of approximately 31 per cent of their genes, with a likelihood of 27 per cent inheritance, while a PGM and grandson may share only approximately 23 per cent.

We can only wonder whether these conclusions were borne out in ancient communities and whether it was realised that there was closer bonding and greater survival amongst children with certain alloparental configurations, or whether child-care was undertaken on a more ad hoc basis, whereby other surrogate mothers who were still of reproductive age were also co-opted into rearing off-spring when the need arose. Moreover, infant mortality was probably high and seemingly arbitrary, especially where actions of predators, illness and infections were concerned, in which case the grandmother effect would have been diminished, except in those cases where an older person such as a grandmother would have had greater experience in recognising symptoms and knowing of potential remedies, something which presumably could also have applied also to grandfathers.

I’m not sure at what age humans living in the early and later stages of the Pleistocene would have become grandparents, but my guess would be quite young, possibly by age 30-35, though whether females would also have become unable to conceive by that age I don’t know; but it seems there could have been some overlap, during which time a grandmother could herself have still given birth to children, unless a menopausal clock kicked in soon after their own off-spring had given birth, which seems unlikely. If we still assume an age of 50 for menopause however, by the time she reached 50, a Pleistocene woman could easily find herself in the role of great-grandmother, though whether humans in significant numbers reached that ripe old age back then, again seems unlikely.

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Science Daily report on a paper published back in June which I appear to have missed, and as it’s freely accessible at PNAS, I’m pleased to be able to link to it here. This is the abstract:

Food storage is a vital component in the economic and social package that comprises the Neolithic, contributing to plant domestication, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and new social organizations. Recent excavations at Dhra’ near the Dead Sea in Jordan provide strong evidence for sophisticated, purpose-built granaries in a predomestication context
11,300–11,175 cal B.P., which support recent arguments for the deliberate cultivation of wild cereals at this time. Designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, they are located between residential structures that contain plant-processing instillations. The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years.

One of the authors is Ian Kuijt, who in the current edition of Current Anthropology authored a paper addressing the same subject, namely ‘What Do We Really Know about Food Storage, Surplus, and Feasting in Preagricultural Communities?’ which is behind a subscription paywall, so here’s a brief extract from that:

Food production, social inequality, and storage are interrelated. Despite the general acceptance of this proposition, the roles of storage in emerging social inequality and the development of food production remain poorly understood. Food storage is an awkward topic for researchers as it is not always manifested in ways that are visible or material (see Forbes and Foxhall 1995; Ingold 1983; Stopp 2002; Testart 1982). The reconstruction and definition of what is storage is highly complex, and centers on practices and materials that are not always well preserved.

The identification of storage features, as well as the scale of storage, is undermined by several constraints. First, due to differential preservation, not all food storage can be identified in the archaeological record. While not random, direct preservation of foods through burning or other agents of conservation is inconsistent and unlikely to be representative of the entire range of foods used and stored in a prehistoric economy.

Second, ethnographic accounts of hunter‐gatherers and farmers provide evidence for a wide range of storage practices, some of which occur off site (Stopp 2002). Third, while we can use ethnography to help us understand the past use of architectural features, it is possible that Neolithic storage practices differed from our comparative cases. The archaeological understanding of past storage practices is based largely on preserved features and structures that are empty, and burned paleobotantical remains are rarely recovered. Researchers are often left with no alternative but to develop circumstantial arguments that specific features were used for food storage.

Some researchers (e.g., Hayden 2009, in this issue) argue that the pre‐agricultural Near Eastern Early (14,500–12,800 cal BP) and Late Natufian periods (12,800–11,500 cal BP) were characterized by sufficient food storage and surplus to allow for individuals to gain social power over others. The Natufian periods, which are distinctly different from each other, were characterized by significant seasonal residential sedentism and the extensive harvesting of wild plants (Bar‐Yosef 1998). As with earlier peoples, the Early and Late Natufians were focused on intensive and extensive harvesting of wild cereals (Bar‐Yosef 1998). Natufian people utilized a remarkably wide range of wild plants and animals and probably had a detailed knowledge of the seasonality and availability of these resources. Certainly the increased degree of sedentism in the Early Natufian period suggests that people were able to reduce seasonal food risks to the point where they could live in the same areas for one or more season of the year.

References: Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley, by Ian Kuijt and Bill Finlayson, Published online before print June 22, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0812764106

Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture: What Do We Really Know about Food Storage, Surplus, and Feasting in Preagricultural Communities? by Ian Kuijt, Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 5, October 2009 © 2009 by The Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2009/5005-0009$10.00 DOI: 10.1086/605082