The Wikipedia entry for Y-chromosome haplogroup T claims:

“The distribution of haplogroup T in most parts of Europe is spotty or regionalized”. As it is through much of the rest of the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_T_(Y-DNA)

However from the map at Wiki we can see that Y-hap T is largely distributed along coastlines and up major river systems.

I realise it’s risky to draw conclusions about ancient migrations from modern haplogroup distribution, but I believe that if we consider the possibility that Y-hap T was originally associated with some sort of a boating expansion we are easily able to explain the spotty distribution.

Perhaps we should start at the ‘beginning’ and examine the (doubtful) possibility that T, and boating, originated in Africa. So we’ll first visit the ‘easily crossed’ Bab al Mandab.

Y-hap T is well established to the south, on the African side. For some reason it was able to spread easily through the whole Horn, and even into the Ethiopian Highlands, probably by moving up the rivers flowing down from them. And perhaps then on down the Nile. Note that Y-hap T is not found through the Red Sea though. This suggests that the Bab al Mandab is not so easily crossed, or entered, after all. And T is virtually absent from the ‘inviting’ Yemeni coastline, for some reason or other. It’s not until we reach the actually much more benign Oman coast that we find T well established again. So T probably crossed the Gulf of Aden east of the Bab al Mandab. Is T, as well as Y-hap J, found on Socotra?

Y-hap T makes a substantial contribution to populations right around both the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. And way upstream through Mesopotamia, the region that later developed into a major urban culture. This later development was probably related to Eurologist’s comment at Dienekes blog about transporting commodities efficiently: “Another big problem with large-scale shepherding is the transport of final products and exchange for foodstuff like cereals”.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/01/migrants-introduced-farming-to-britain.html

Anyway the urban culture that developed in Mesopotamia was based on controlling the water that flowed through the region from the Anatolian highlands. So the place was wet. Ideal for boats.

In keeping with the boating connection there is, naturally, a hiatus between the Mesopotamian and Mediterranean Y-hap Ts. We would expect a boat-adapted population to find little of interest as they crossed what has become known as ‘the Fertile Crescent’. However the technology would be easily transported to the Mediterranean without necessarily transporting the actual boats. And Y-hap T and the technology could have entered the Mediterranean from the Nile. Or from both places. Technological hybrid vigour? A similar hiatus in Y-hap T’s distribution also occurs to the north, between Mesopotamia and the Caspian Sea. But a similar explanation suffices, as it does for the more distant T around lakes in Central Asia.

So Y-hap T entered the Mediterranean. It’s found in Crete and Greece, which makes sense. The islands through the Aegean would have been chickenfeed for any substantial boating technology. T also entered the Adriatic, but didn’t establish a foothold in the Dalmatian islands. Perhaps they were already occupied? T got a better reception across the Adriatic in Italy. Y-hap T and boating also set up home on the Tunisian coast, around the Ebro and on many Mediterranean islands, ultimately reaching the Atlantic coast of Spain/Portugal.

But did Y-hap T originate in Africa? I doubt it. It’s also found in India. As is its closest relation L. This particular haplogroup is spread along the Indus valley as well as south right along the west coast:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_L_(Y-DNA)

But we find another Y-hap T hiatus along the ‘easily navigated’ Makran coast. T reappears in the Indus Delta and a little way down the west coast of India from there. But T’s distribution in India looks much more likely to be the product of a first arrival on the east coast and subsequent movement up the rivers flowing into the Bay of Bengal.

What is the possibility that L and T originate even further east? Y-haps N/O and P have become so widespread it’s possible to come up with almost any theory concerning their place of origin. But among L and T’s other close relations are S and M. Found in New Guinea, Melanesia and Australia, a region we know people must have reached using boats of some sort a very long time ago.

So we have evidence for a southern coastal migration. But not from Africa. The migration is into that continent. The fact that Y-hap T, along with L to some extent, appears to have effortlessly established itself in all the desirable coastal and riverine ecosystems along the southern Eurasian margin suggests that this habitat was actually unoccupied until T’s expansion. And that argues against any other more ancient great southern coastal migration.

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

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

Background

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

Results

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference:

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

Abstract – Provisional PDF

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

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

Julien has posted the current edition of Four Stone Hearth over at his blog, marking the 85th occasion on which this anthropology blog carnival has appeared online. There’s a distinct archaeological feel to the opening section, including mention of the Silk Road, something I’ve been mulling over of late, but I certainly hadn’t heard of someone cutting themselves a pair of trousers from a tapestry – it’s good to know that people were ignoring basic rules of fashion back then as we do today.

Also mentioned is Second Life, and a consideration of how people may have dressed in the past, a look inside a Mediaeval museum in Stockholm, plus a number of contributions from the other fields of anthropology.

In keeping with the meteorological theme of this edition, I’m a little under the weather as I write this, so I’ll have to cut this post here and simply encourage readers to head over to A Very Remote Period Indeed, to check out these and other posts.

The Archaeology Channel – Timeless India

TAC have made available a 25-minute promotional film produced and directed by Zafar Hai on behalf of the Ministry of Tourism in India, and narrated by no less a luminary than Michael York.

Featuring many historic locations and exotic sights such as temples, this film is aimed more at the visitor to India keen on exploring her multi-faceted past, much of which has survived intact to the present day, and which can often be found resting gracefully amongst the modern cities that have sprung up in what has become one of the world’s largest and fastest growing economies. India has long been attracting traders and merchants from afar, from the Romans, the Chinese and Europeans and many more, bringing back a cornucopia of spices and luxury goods with them, further relating tales of the incredible lands and peoples that had greeted them.

Major religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, plus a host of others, have long roots in India, aspects of which are celebrated in one of the world’s richest traditions in architecture, statuary, sculpture and art, conceived and executed by some of the most skilled, innovative and adept craftsmen of their day.

The film itself presents India in a subtle and serene focus, rather than going for a glitzy all-singing-all-dancing shindig, which at once emphasises the spiritual character of its heritage from a meditative perspective, whilst allowing the eyes to feast on a sumptuous riot of colours, shapes and forms, accompanied to a soundtrack of the diverse music, dance and resplendent costumery we have come to associate with these oriental lands, boasting a civilisation going back over 5,000 years.

Of course, India’s past hasn’t always been bathed in peaceful solitude, riven like most major nations of the present day, by conflicts down through the ages, and in her case, more recently subject to the predations of British imperial rule, artifacts of which are still in evidence today, not the least of which is the influence of the English language on millions of people alive today, which indirectly has led to the birth of one of the greatest cricketing nations on Earth.

As we hear later in the presentation, the recent history of India might have been entirely different had Nelson not stopped Napoleon Bonaparte in his tracks in Egypt – we can only wonder for instance, how French cuisine would have coped with the influx of what has in effect become Britain’s national dish of late, the ubiquitous curry, or whether the French population today would be a nation of tea-drinkers. Perhaps too, Calcutta would have become a second Paris instead of a proxy London.

But even where conflict ruled in the past, as visited upon India by the Moguls, who conquered far and wide, ( at about 14 minutes in) a flowering of creativity mixed with a liberal mix of religions and cultures sprang up thereafter, and as we see from the film, some of the surviving architecture would alone make for a worthwhile trip. In any case, if you want a whistle-stop tour round scenic India, this is an ideal film to watch, but for the full experience of course, you’ll need to visit India in person, and preferably for an extended tour.

‘Timeless India’ is here brought to us by the Archaeology Channel, who have over the past 10 years provided we the online viewing public with a fantastic archive of footage from all over the world, delving here into the past, stopping too in the present as efforts to rescue and preserve crumbling and damaged sites are documented. All these films are freely accessible at the TAC website.

To continue their outstanding project, the Archaeology Channel relies heavily on the kindness of strangers – or more specifically, paid-up members  – for financial support, so if you’d like to help out you can do so either by becoming a member, or ensuring that you renew your membership on an annual basis. Details of how to participate in the Membership programme can be found here.

image of Varanasi from here.

Web links:

Archaeological Survey of India

Archaeology of India, Sources of History of India (Indianetzone.com)

History of India (Wikipedia)

Incredible India (India Ministry of Tourism)

Indian History (WebIndia123.com)

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:

The Aurignacian-to-Gravettian transition is one of the least known periods of European prehistory, explaining why the evidence from such a small site as Pego do Diabo can contribute to our understanding of this process. In particular, our results put the west European evidence in line with that from central Europe, where the earliest Gravettian is now dated to the ca.29–30 ka ¹⁴C BP interval [95].

This transition was therefore penecontemporaneous at the continental scale: the south German pattern is no instance of precocity, as in the Kulturpumpe model [95], nor is it necessarily a byproduct of post-depositional displacement of samples derived from underlying Aurignacian levels, as others have proposed [30]…

…Where the emergence of anatomical modernity is concerned, Pego do Diabo establishes a secure terminus ante quem of ca.34.5 ka cal BP for the process in central Portugal, where, on current evidence [19], [39], [41], the terminus ante quem for the demise of Neandertals is ca.35.5 ka cal BP (Table S7; Figure 12).

This has major implications for the interpretation of the archaic features in the anatomy of the Lagar Velho child. With the last of the region’s Neandertals dating to five millennia before the child was borne, crossbreeding between immediate ancestors (e.g., parents or grandparents) drawn from distinct “modern” and “Neandertal” gene pools is empirically untenable. Therefore, those features must represent evolutionarily significant admixture at the time of contact.

As ever, the paper bears worth reading in full, even if as remarked over at Gene Expression, some of the detail seems a little dense to those not fully apprised in archaeological research, lithic manufacture techniques, or a familiarity with industries thereof. I’m going to end this post though at Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar a site previously proposed to have witnessed the last known Neanderthals:

Given that no secure evidence exists elsewhere for peninsular Neandertals to have persisted beyond the 37th millennium cal BP, and that available archeological proxies place the emergence of anatomical modernity across southwest Iberia no later than the beginning of the 36th, the younger dates obtained for the Middle Paleolithic of Gorham’s Cave must be considered anomalous [50].

These dates are part of a large set of results, mostly within the expected range but widely scattered and with no correlation between age and stratigraphic depth. Combined with the microscopic size of the charcoal samples used, this pattern means that incomplete decontamination and post-depositional intrusion from the overlying Upper Paleolithic are viable explanations for the outliers.

Moreover, the samples come from a trench in the back part of the site where find densities are very low (five artifacts per cubic meter) and a non-diagnostic Upper Paleolithic stone tool component may well exist alongside the few clearly Middle Paleolithic items. Finally, Upper Paleolithic deposits of later Aurignacian affinities exist in the porch area of the site and are well dated by numerous samples to ca.34 ka cal BP (Table S7; Figure 12). This dating is in line with the evidence from Pego do Diabo, and precludes the possibility that the back area of Gorham’s continued to be used by Middle Paleolithic Neandertals beyond that point in time.

Some might wonder whether the case for Pego do Diabo is being overstated here, or that other data from Gorham’s Cave are being re-interpreted to fit with the latest data presented – either way, I somehow doubt that this will be the final word in the debate, or that the Neanderthal/AMH transition was as neat and tidy as suggested.

No contemporary human fossils were found in direct association with the artifacts at either site – but can we safely attribute all post-Mousterian lithic industries to AMH alone?

However, this figure of 5,000 years as a co-existence spell is especially interesting as it closely resembles a similar proposed 5,000 year interlude in Australia, whereby another round of re-analysis has suggested that there was an extinction of large mammals there at 40 kya, some 5,000 years after the proposed date for the arrival of humans on the continent. The story is reported in Stuff, a New Zealand news site, the details of which were sent to me by Terry T.

Giant marsupials, reptiles and flightless birds that once roamed Australia became extinct about 40,000 years ago, later than had been thought and some 5,000 years after humans arrived, a new study suggests.  Controversy has long surrounded when such creatures became extinct in Australia. New equipment that can date teeth and bones has solved the puzzle, Australian researchers said in the latest issue of the journal Science.

“For a long time, we couldn’t measure bone and teeth, or how old they (animals) were when they died, that is, when they went extinct,” paleontologist Barry Brook at the University of Adelaide in southern Australia told Reuters by telephone.

One of the new techniques used in the latest research was uranium thorium dating, which can gauge when uranium was taken up into the animal’s teeth when it was still alive.

The question as to when the last of these creatures died in Australia surfaced when other researchers began finding fossils, along with stone tools, in Cuddie Springs in New South Wales about 100 years ago and again over the past 30 years.  They analysed surrounding sediments and found that they dated back to 30,000 years ago, contradicting evidence elsewhere in Australia which showed that the animals became extinct far earlier, or at least 40,000 years ago.

Faunal remains that had previously been dated to 30,000 years by the sediments in which they were found have now been re-dated, through the use of uranium/thorium, with the new age placing them at 40,000 years old – taken in conjunction with a suggested first-appearance date 0f 47 kya for humans, the extinction event now appears to have been lightning quick, geologically speaking, with the clear implication that it was the arrival of humans that caused a continent-wide extinction event.

It seems – to me at least – extraordinary that what was probably an initially small population of humans could have had such a widespread and devastating impact on such a grand scale, and it will be interesting to see the response of others who claim to have found no evidence that the remains of extinct Pleistocene mammals there met their fate at the hands of humans. Moreover, a human presence in Australia has been proposed for as early as 50-60 kya, which would make the extinction at 40 kya a more drawn-out affair.

We return to Iberia, from where Zilhão give his team’s version of the sequence of events that led to the final days of Iberian Neanderthals:

Why, south of the Ebro drainage system, the replacement/assimilation process occurred much later than elsewhere in Western Europe, remains a “big issue.” Our hypothesis is that climatic and demographic factors are involved [13], [21]–[22]. North of the Pyrenees, the impact of a severely cold iceberg event (Heinrich Event 4), aggravated, in central and eastern Europe, by the effects of the Phlegraean Fields caldera explosion, must have caused a population crash.

At the same time, to the south, and especially so along the Atlantic façade, oak and pine woodlands expanded significantly during the period of the “Ebro Frontier,” which, globally, was one of generally milder climate (GIS8; Greenland Interstadial 8); by comparison with what happened in Iberia at the time of the Tardiglacial/Early Holocene transition, population decrease and a break-up of interaction networks probably occurred as a result of the expansion of such tree-covered landscapes.

The net result may have been one where, for modern human groups settling the foothills of the Cantabro-Pyrenean mountains, southward expansion (or networking) may have become neither possible nor desirable. Then, as population numbers recovered and the long GIS8 interval came to an end, with southwest Iberian environments opening up for large herbivore herds and their hunters as a result of the return to stadial conditions, interaction and movement across the previous boundary must have ensued, with inevitable consequences for the Neandertal refugia of westernmost Eurasia.

It’s important to note that a range of simultaneous contributing factors are proposed, though whether some of those Neanderthal refugia persisted in more isolated locations is something yet to be determined.

Reference:

Zilhão J, Davis SJM, Duarte C, Soares AMM, Steier P, et al. (2010) Pego do Diabo (Loures, Portugal): Dating the Emergence of Anatomical Modernity in Westernmost Eurasia. PLoS ONE 5(1): e8880. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008880

Editor: John Hawks, University of Wisconsin, United States of America

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.

Towards the south-eastern end of Level 2, comprising 25.6 sq.m.,  the remains of a hearth have been found, around which various activities such as the making of stone tools from basalt and limestone, and the cooking and consumption of fish and crab, the remains of which have been found in abundance. Moreover pitted anvils are thought to indicate work surfaces upon which the repeated smashing of edible nuts took place, which were than placed in the fire as a means of making the tough skins easier to peel away, whilst also reducing the tannin content of the acorns, making them tasteless bitter.

At the north-western end, flint tools predominate, 99% of which were unburned, it is believed that fish and crab preparation may have been carried out – gutting the fish, cracking the crab and turtle shells before being taken over to the hearth, where they too were likely cooked.

The supplementary material  gives a better idea of exactly how many and what types of tools were in use – a total of 300 flint flake and flake tools, 165 cores and core tools of basalt and limestone, 4 flint hand-axes and 18 of basalt, 10 basalt cleavers,22 percussors and 4 pitted anvils.

What caught my attention as much as the spatial organisational capabilities of Lower Palaeolithic people at GBY was the fact that they caught fish at all, when we can see from the faunal and floral remains at the site, there were plentiful supplies of meat from mammals, as well as the freshwater crabs and turtles, whilst the range of fruits and nuts added yet more calories and nutrition to the varied diet. Catching fish from a lake is a markedly different activity from hunting terrestrial prey, or picking up turtles and crabs from lake or river margins, which required minimal pursuit, or indeed the gathering of fruits, nuts and seeds.

As the spatial organisation at GBY has already been extensively covered elsewhere, I’d like instead to consider other aspects of organisational activities that are implied by the archaeology, and which also hint that our cultural evolution may have progressed further towards modernity than is commonly portrayed.

Although there is no indication in the archaeology as to how they went about catching carp, catfish and sardines, presumably without recourse to modern technologies such as rods, lines and baited hooks, it’s likely that in addition to the lay-out of Level II, careful planning and organisation was needed in order to work out how to catch an elusive prey that lived in the water.

1,602 of the 2,578 of the carp remains found at GBY belong to an extinct species, Large Barbus sp.nov. around a meter in length, and as will be apparent from this link in which a smaller species is depicted, would have provided a substantial amount of food from a single kill, and judging by their estimated size, I would hazard a guess that these fish were big enough targets for a stealthy someone, handy with a barbed wooden spear to hunt in what may have been thickly weeded areas of shallow water near the lake shore. Whether this could have involved an individual standing in the shallows, or someone floating on a raft constructed from many of the types of wood also found at the site cannot be determined at this point.

It would be even more interesting to know whether these fish were lured to specific areas by use of bait – possibly derived from the many seeds and plant materials also found at Level II – as this again could add another layer to our perception of the cognitive abilities in archaic humans.

As we see from this account of a fisherman, Larry Robbins catching grass carp at Bark Camp Lake in Virginia, using acorns as bait:

One autumn day while fishing on the lake Robbins finally had his Newtonian break through. He happened to be watching when an acorn from an overhanging oak branch plopped into the water.

As he followed its descent into the shallows, a massive grass carp swooped out and ate it.  Evidently, acorns are a tasty seasonal treat white amur favor so highly that the sound of an acorn hitting the water in autumn is like a dinner bell to them. If a big grass carp is in the vicinity when one hits, it’ll usually nab the nut before it touches bottom.

After considerable trial and error, Robbins determined which acorns the fish preferred (white oak) and figured out how to bait a hook with an acorn in such a manner that the hook remained unobtrusive to the fish while also allowing for a solid hook set once the bait was taken. He scouted the shoreline for the places where white oak acorns were most likely to fall directly or even indirectly in to the water. And he was in business…

…Carp are naturally suspicious, spooky fish. And they fight like the devil when hooked.

Note that  a few acorns were found at Level II, with the observation that they had been modified by fire to facilitate the removal of tough skins and make them less bitter to eat – whether acorns were also deployed in their raw or cooked state as bait for carp is again an open question, as would be the way in which they would have been introduced to the fish in the absence of a baited hook.

N.B. Please see the added note at the end of this post regarding how these carp may have been caught, courtesy of angler George Thwaites, also a journalist for Kingsport News, Virginia.

Alternative methods might have involved the use of nets, or submerged traps constructed from the abundant plant and tree resources on hand, and I wouldn’t discount the use of some sort of raft, set afloat with spear-wielding humans aboard in pursuit of their prey, but despite the large size of the carp, these fish would still have been a tricky target. This can only be speculation, but I think these suggestions are parsimonious enough to at least merit consideration. If by some chance the humans had learned to manufacture and deploy some sort of rod and line equipment with a baited hook – the latter of unknown construction material – I’d be surprised, but then again, distant prehistory is forever offering up unexpected insights from its muddied depths.

Learning to lure prey into an area of one’s choosing in order to maximise the chances of a successful strike requires pre-planning, timing, and of course spatial organisation, so perhaps it is no coincidence that we find evidence of the way in which other activities such as the preparation and consumption of food were also constructed by means of discussion and decision amongst the planners. Landing a carp, as described above sounds like a complex business indeed, and yet these early lake fishers managed to procure enough to eat them on a regular basis. Of course, humans are by no means the only members of the animal kingdom to lure prey into traps, but the wider range of active and passive pursuit tactics in evidence by Homo maybe sets our ancestors apart from their faunal peers.

Although much is made of the appearance of bone and ivory barbed points and harpoons in the latter stages of the Upper Palaeolithic, a supposed indication of the cognitive upgrade ascribed to AMH, little consideration seems to have been given to the fact that such points could just as easily have been carved into wooden implements, at far earlier stages in the Palaeolithic, by archaic humans. We have almost no wood or timber remains that have survived intact from the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, save for example, the Schöningen spears in Germany, dated to 400 kya, and more recently, the imprint of wood in the cave of Abric Romaní, dating to around 50kya, which hints strongly at built wooden structures used for shelter within caves – and which by implication suggests that such structures were assembled in the open air as well, as evidenced by other sites such as Terra Amata.

Another brief point to note is that GBY and Terra Amata may have been occupied on a seasonal basis, and although we can’t discern whether there was a strict order and timing to the visits of such sites, which meant that archaic humans basically lived in widespread but seasonally permanent set of locations, I think the people at GBY may well have had the cognitive wherewithal to organise themselves on an annual basis.

Atapuerca – Gran Dolina TD6, Aurora stratum, dated to 780 kya

For a look at how other humans alive at more or less the same time as those at GBY, it’s worth a quick look the contemporary levels at Atapuerca, specifically at the Aurora stratum, (click through to ‘Yacimienetos’) also known as the Gran Dolina TD6 layer, not only at which animals were being consumed, but also at what sort of humans may have been alive at GBY. Although Atapuerca is in north central Spain, a long way to the west of GBY, the remains of 6-10 individuals found at TD6 offer not only insights into human evolutionary traits like dental development at that time, but ask the intriguing question of whether humans were eating their fellows, as has been suggested by the way in which human remains replete with cut-marks have been found in association with other animal remains that show clear signs of butchery, and thus consumption. The humans at Gran Dolina have been labelled H. antecessor, but as no humans remains exist from GBY, we can only guess as to their exact identity.

The scene at Gran Dolina TD6 offers a very different view of life, perhaps one slightly skewed by the way in which the remains appear to have been tossed aside as rubbish, observations that the stone tools are rudimentary, and that cannibalism may have been practiced for gastronomic or other as yet unknown cultural reasons. As with GBY, there is every indication that a wide variety of mammals – mainly herbivores in this case – were available, so it’s unlikely – assuming the supply of food was consistently high – that humans would have been eaten of necessity.

Although there is no hint of laid-out camp-sites or longer term dwellings at Atapuerca, largely because the remains and artefacts there are found in the remains of caves, and anything left out in the open air would have had their traces obliterated by taphonomic processes. But I think it’s worth considering in the light of GBY that away from the caves, H. antecessor likely occupied sites nearby, in what was an abundantly rich and diverse bioscape. The long periods of occupation at Atapuerca indicate that it continued to attract humans, and I doubt they dwelt all that time without having some degree of spatial organisation as seen at GBY.

It has also been noted that all the faunal remains at TD6 are large mammals, that may have been hunted with spears, rather than smaller prey that would have required other methods of acquisition. Maybe we’re just seeing sites where certain types of animal were consumed in specific ways, whilst others were set near water, where different foods, perhaps similar to GBY, were processed and consumed – a possible hint at spatial organisation in itself.

It was only by sheer geologic serendipity that GBY survived at all, and provides an outlier to the general rules of what survives archaeologically over hundreds of thousands of years.

One of the first things I was taught (in the few evening classes I once attended) about the terminology of the Stone Age is that it could just as easily have been called the Timber Age – but because wood is organic, and except under very rare preservation circumstances, is completely invisible in the archaeological record, as over time it simply rots away. Thus our view of the past is greatly skewed by the stone remnants of points, axes, burins, scrapers, awls etc.,  that have survived all the way down from 2 million years ago, to the extent that all we see is stone, and judge our ancestors’ technological achievements accordingly. What they actually did with these stone tools is generally considered in the light of killing animals and processing the carcasses for food and other resources – but there is almost no indication as to how some stone tools could have been used to modify wood – were people simply felling timber for use as firewood, or lopping off suitable parts for use as spears, or attempting more ambitious ends – and more importantly, how far back in prehistory might such behaviours become part of everyday life?

Although at first glance there appear to be clear signs that early hominins at Gesher Benot Ya’akov possessed greater organisational and cognitive abilities than thought earlier, it’s worth making a notes on what isn’t in the archaeology, and how some of the activities bear comparison both with earlier hominins and primate relatives.

A quick look at what is absent from the site – there are no post-holes, or any indications from (sub)-circles, squares or rectangles of stones to indicate any kind of living or sheltering areas -of course, that doesn’t mean there weren’t any nearby that have since been lost, but there is no evidence for them.

Not much sign they tidied up after themselves either, and the fact they left some of the more massive flint axes behind is telling – they were seemingly cast aside, with no special symbolic significance attached to them as suggested elsewhere for hand axes of a later date, manufactured after 500 kya such as the rose lithic from Atapuerca some half a million years later – if indeed, that item wasn’t merely thrown away down a convenient hole.

As far as I can tell, there is no mention of whether the lithic assemblage has been analysed for phytoliths – given the number of wood samples found at the site, it would be interesting to know if certain tools, like the hand-axes had been used for cutting or modifying wood or grasses, or had only been used in a culinary context.

The fact that so many different food and plant types are present speaks more of forward and organised planning than maybe the demarcation zones of the site itself. Nuts and fruits are likely to have been brought in from afar, and some thought seems to have gone in to the idea that a central place should be sought and used in this way, on a regular basis, whether that was annual, or more or less frequently.

It’s difficult to imagine these people doing all this without some sort of language capabilities – the gathering of foods like fruits and nuts in anticipation of eating them at another location where other foods would also be brought, prepared, cooked and eaten indicates conscious forward planning. Carnivores also transport food, whole or in part to locations for consumption on a regular basis, but the range of foods tends to be prey fauna, and locations chosen for offering protection to the predator from other scavengers etc.

There is still a vogue amongst certain sets of esoteric writers of popular books to dub any ancient humans as ape-men, more often as not to prove some spurious point or other to promote modern humanity as the creation of aliens, gods or to have been subjected to some sort of cosmic ray emanating from outer space which altered their consciousness to some imagined and elevated state of awareness.

And whilst studies at GBY, Atapuerca Gran Dolina and Bilzingsleben and others clearly indicate that our predecessors were surprisingly sophisticated and even displayed traits of so-called ‘modernity’, we should be very careful when it comes to ascribing human uniqueness – time and again, we learn of some denizen of the animal kingdom displaying behaviours and cognitive ability we would hitherto have only applied to ourselves.

We can’t know at what point archaic humans used sites because they liked the location itself, rather than just for considerations of what food and other resources were to hand, and further, to what extent pleasure derived from visiting such palaeo-resorts may have contributed to archaic humans’ survivability and evolution.

One of the ongoing mysteries of humanity spending two million years sleeping outdoors every night is exactly how that was organised, if at all. Did everyone flop down wherever they happened to end up at the end of a given day, and if so, how did they go about protecting themselves? Contrary to popular opinion, there isn’t much evidence to suggest that early humans spent much time sleeping or even living in caves, still less that they built huts or other permanent shelters. Neither do we know at what point some people might have been assigned the task of keeping watch by night whilst their fellows were asleep, and to what extent rotas and duties were used to enforce such ideas, another activity that would require organisational skills.

The recent paper regarding Neanderthal sleeping arrangements, albeit a mere 50,000 years ago, along with other published material reminds us that it wasn’t only the daylight hours that affected our ancestors  – we’ve evolved to catch around 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep on a nightly basis, and a vital part of the Palaeolithic survival kit would have been the ability to ensure that those going to sleep for 8 hours stood a very good chance of waking up without having been maimed or even killed by opportunistic predators, or succumbing to the effects of exposure through inclement weather. This paper by Fank Hole, talking about Ohalo II c.23 kya, is also worth checking – Stone age bedding by the Sea of Galilee.

Bilzingsleben

The site would seem to bear some strong similarities with that of Bilzinglseben, dated to between 350kya and 400 kya, which although dates to considerably later, is also defined as a Middle Pleistocene site, with very similar artefacts, albeit 100,000 in total – and the floral and faunal remains indicate that these people also had a much more varied diet than simply that of big game hunters.

I’d intended to add much more about Bilzsinglsleben, but for the purposes of actually getting this post finished, I’ll have to leave that for later consideration – of particular interest there are the straight-line incised elephant bones and stones, which at c. 400 kya easily outstrip in age the incised ochre at Blombos, dated to c.77 kya, more of which another time. But that feature alone probably marks a significant step forward in behavioural terms, and offers intriguing contrasts to the older sites discussed above.

Ostensibly, very little seems to have changed in the way people went about their lives in the intervening half-million years or so, and that is puzzling, when we think how much has changed in the last 200k, 100k and 50kyr – the rate of cultural change has gradually accelerated,  and with the uptake of storage, horticulture and eventually agriculture, that rate of change has become faster still. David Deutsch giving a recent talk at TED, “A New Way to Explain Explanation” opined that it is only our modern ability, as witnessed by the so-called Scientific Revolution to perceive the unseen – geologic time, the atom and so on, that have allowed humans for the first time in evolutionary history to begin to find solutions and rational explanations for how the world actually works.

Although our perception of cultural evolution has probably been too closely tied to our physical evolution, and to a large extent this error persists, papers such as this conclusively demonstrate that seeking to define our modernity by concentrating solely on the Upper Palaeolithic are at best myopic and ultimately meaningless – everything deemed important in Palaeolithic evolution was in place well before 40 kya, an era commonly and wrongly attributed to the Human Revolution.

But we should also take care not to attribute tool use, basic understanding of fire, and planning to humans alone, especially when attempting to define human behavioural traits, so here’s cursory glance in the direction of our primate relatives – clearly the subject deserves far greater coverage, but for now a quick reference rather than long discourse will have to suffice for this post.

Tool Use and Fire Familiarity in Chimpanzees.

Attributing a predictive understanding of the properties of fire as being uniquely human has been called into question through the recent research by anthropologist Jill Pruetz, who made some interesting observations of the way in which Fongola chimpanzees of Senegal reacted quite calmly in the face of seasonal outbreaks of widespread burning. This doesn’t however imply that they know how to start a fire themselves, or would consider using it as a tool – for cooking food, clearing land or materials modification.

As mentioned earlier, a number of anvils and percussors found at the GBY site have been interpreted as having been used to process nuts, a behaviour also observed in chimpanzees – however, it is the combination of activities  – using fire to facilitate the removal of tough skins  – added to the realisation that heat processing also improved the flavour of acorns – along with using stone tools to crack open the nuts, which appear to set humans apart from their primate relatives.

I’ve set out to try and expand the debate about Gesher Benot Ya’akov by looking at the wider context while simultaneously drilling down to some of the detail about the site itself – and despite the rather rambling essay that has ensued, I hope that at least some value has been added to one of the most important archaeological sites of its kind at GBY. As far as I know, work there continues apace, and as time goes by and more data are published, I’m sure we’ll be returning for another look round at somewhere people once pleased to call home, if only on an ephemeral basis, 790, thousand years ago.

Due to a complete lack of good online images of the site itself, which is puzzling, I haven’t included any here – should that situation change, I’ll update this post accordingly.

Update 30 Jan. ‘10 - My sincere thanks go to George Thwaites, who in addition to writing the linked article, Zen and the Art of Carp Fishing very kindly responded to an email question I sent him regarding how carp might have been acquired by the fishers of Lake Hula, 790 kya, with the following being his reply:

The man who took me fishing for the white amur (grass carp) insisted that the fish were dialed in on the sound of the acorns plopping into the water. In fact, I caught my fish beneath an oak tree under which they were accustomed to feeding. I assume the fish was conditioned to believe my bait had dropped from the tree. There were probably several other white amur competing for the same acorn. The bait had no time to hit the bottom. It was taken on the fall.

It seems possible that a stone age angler could have noted the areas where carp fed on dropping acorns and, by experimentation, learned how lure fish toward a pre-set net or fish trap by tossing acorns into the water.   Perhaps ancient fishermen on Lake Hula had the patience to condition an entire school of these carp, much in the same way domestic koi can be conditioned to respond to feeding. Such a process could have taken quite a few days.  Of course,  after the day “the trap is sprung” any survivors would be highly unlikely to fall for that tactic again any time soon (if they’re anything like modern carp). On the other hand, this method could result in multiple  fish being caught at once. Given that it would be a seasonal tactic (corresponding to the time acorns naturally drop) any carp that returned to the fishing site the following year might have been susceptible to an entirely new round of operant conditioning.

On the Holston River in nearby Rogersville, Tennessee, during the winter one can see the outline of what was a stone fish trap that  had been used by Native Americans for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of Anglo-European settlers. From the bridge above,  the large “vee wake” of the structure is unmistakeable. Assorted methods of luring, herding and trapping large numbers of fish were vastly more efficient for feeding a village than catching one fish at a time. I often wonder how much labor it took for the aboriginal anglers to build that fish trap, stone-by-stone and then to mend and maintain it, year after year. It occurs to me that hooking or spearing fish one at a time would have had the same appeal for them as it does to me: excellent recreation.  Sustenance is a serious business.

Hope this was of some help.

Well, I for one learnt a couple of things I didn’t know about how carp behave now and may well have been exploited by similar behaviours back in the Lower Palaeolithic and by subsequent by Stone Age folk thereafter – the idea of luring, herding trapping numbers of freshwater fish to feed several people at once is something I wouldn’t have guessed, for example.

Gesher Benot Ya’aqov – site description.

Reference:

Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, Nira Alperson-Afil, Gonen Sharon, Mordechai Kislev,Yoel Melamed, Irit Zohar, Shosh Ashkenazi, Rivka Rabinovich,1, Rebecca Biton, Ella Werker, Gideon Hartman, Craig Feibel, Naama Goren-Inbar – Science 18 December 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5960, pp. 1677 – 1680 DOI: 10.1126/science.1180695

Continual fire-making by Hominins at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel – Nira Alperson-Afil, doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.06.009

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

A quick heads-up to anyone planning to be in vicinity of Santander, Cantabria this autumn, where a very interesting conference, MESO 2010, (programme) is due to be held this coming September 13th-17th, plus post-Conference excursions the following weekend, September 18th and 19th, in addition to the field trip slated for Wednesday 15th.

I would strongly recommend this event to anyone with an interest in the archaeology and palaeoanthropology pertaining both to the Mesolithic and Palaeolithic of the northern Iberian peninsular, and Europe in general; here’s a welcoming word from the organisers:

The Eighth International Conference on the Mesolithic in Europe will be held in Santander from 13th to 17th September 2010, organised by the Cantabrian International Institute for Prehistoric Research with the support of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport of the Cantabrian Government and the University of Cantabria.

This is the first time this prestigious series of conferences is held in southern Europe; furthermore, in a region with a long tradition in prehistoric studies, particularly on the Mesolithic. Santander is situated in the centre of the north coast of Spain and is one of the classic areas for the study of hunter-gatherers in southwest Europe, not only because of its famous Palaeolithic sites and its outstanding collections of cave art, but also because of its concentration of Mesolithic sites. The study of these sites has been decisive in shaping  current ideas about the Mesolithic in the south of Europe. Since 1910, when the Count of Vega del Sella began his exploration of shell middens in the east of Asturias, Cantabria’s Mesolithic remains have been the object of sustained research which, in recent years, has culminated in the intense activity of a young, dynamic community of researchers. We are sure that the Santander Conference will be an excellent opportunity for colleagues from other parts of Europe to get to know at first hand the research and sites of this corner of Atlantic Europe.

The Santander Conference will attempt to reconcile the challenge set by increasing research specialisation, with the tradition of this series of conferences. It will try, therefore, to maintain the ethos set by the previous seven successful conferences. The Santander Conference has, therefore, been deliberately designed to be open and non-specialised. The conference aims to act as a forum for delegates from many different places and at different stages in their careers to meet and discuss any topic related to the Mesolithic on our continent. Delegates will also have the chance to attend as many lectures and debates as possible. Parallel sessions will, therefore, be kept to a minimum and an effort will be made to ensure that timetables are respected as strictly as possible.

There is, however, a growing interest in using this type of meeting in the discussion of highly specialized topics. Consequently, the Santander programme includes a new aspect: two sessions set aside for workshops and round tables based on topics proposed by delegates.

An important aspect of these conferences is the direct contact with the archaeology of the host region and, of course, the possibility to meet colleagues in a more informal setting. The Santander Conference will try to maintain this tradition by including a day trip to Mesolithic sites in the region and a full social programme. Those who would like to get to know the archaeology of Cantabria even better can join the post-conference fieldtrip to be held the weekend after the conference.

The Organising Committee and supporting institutions are honoured to invite the community of researchers to the Eighth International Conference on the Mesolithic in Europe.

Not only are there presentations, posters and lectures, but field trips also comprise a significant part of MESO 2010 – the weekend following the conference features excursions to various sites, including the Altamira museum.

N.B. The weekend excursions aren’t included within the registration fees, whereas the field-trip on Wednesday the 15th is covered by those fees. I’m advised that further details, including sites to be visited,  will appear on the MESO 2010 website in the near future, so be sure to check back.

If you’re planning on submitting material or otherwise participating, please check the Call for Papers section.

Assuming I can muster the required registration fees and accommodation costs, I fully intend to be there and cover various aspects of the MESO 2010 conference on this blog – it might be a bit of a long (but doubtless rewarding) trek for readers outside Europe to attend, but should be easily accessible for residents within the EU. Santander itself is a pretty nice town, and Cantabria in general contains much in the way of spectacular scenery, plus of course, a plethora of outstanding sites to visit.

I’m informed that all the presentations will be given in English, and it sounds like an excellent opportunity for attendees to meet up in person with fellow researchers in their chosen fields of interest.

For full details, just visit the website and follow the various links, describing the venue, details of accommodation options and more.

image: Vistas Los Canes from MESO 2010

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)