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June 12^th is the 30^th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones remains the world’s most famous archaeologist.  How many real-life archaeologists are household names?  In honor of Indy‘s birthday, I’m posting a revised excerpt of an essay I wrote for the Society for American Archaeology’s Archaeology for the Public website several years ago (see  this link for the complete version):

In 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark set the tone for virtually every action blockbuster that has been produced since, and it is easily the most well-known fictional film with archaeological content.  Its sequels Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) were also very commercially successful.  Despite the differences I’ve outlined (and there are many more), a large segment of the general public associates archaeology with the now legendary character of Indiana Jones.  When people find out you’re an archaeologist, their first question is often “Is it really like Indiana Jones?”  As a result, Indy gets a lot of criticism from professionals who get tired of explaining that archaeology is rewarding, is often full of adventure and excitement, but it’s not very much like Indiana Jones.  But archaeologists and educators can use the popularity of the Indiana Jones movies to their advantage.  These films, by depicting what archaeology isn’t, provide an entertaining opportunity for teachers and students to make comparisons and discuss what archaeology is.

Many of us, especially children and adolescents, are first exposed to the field of archaeology by viewing fictional adventurers like Indiana Jones.  Personally, I first heard the word archaeology when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid.  While sitting in that darkened theater, I was so impressed by Indy’s intelligence and determination that I resolved to go to the school library and read more about this mysterious thing called archaeology.  Despite my initial disappointment that archaeologists didn’t carry bullwhips, I quickly became fascinated with real archaeology.  That was 30 years ago and I’m still fascinated.  The Indy movies don’t accurately reflect archaeology, but their popularity has the potential to spark public interest in finding out more about archaeology – the facts behind the fiction.  The archaeologists of tomorrow might very well be sitting at home or in class watching Raiders of the Lost Ark today.  In that sense, Indiana Jones is a hero to movie-goers, educators, and archaeologists alike.

So I argued then, and still believe, that Indiana Jones can help popularize real archaeology.  Evidently, the Archaeological Institute of America shares this belief since Harrison Ford is a member of their governing board.  What do you think?  Is Indiana Jones good for archaeology?  Please share your thoughts and memories of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the comments.

- Jay Fancher

Very rarely is an entire family group of hominins buried and fossilized at the same time. It is even rarer for paleoanthropologists to discover such an assemblage. Fortunately for science but unfortunately for the hominins, caves occasionally collapsed on entire social groups.

Map of El Sidrón

At a site known as El Sidrón in Spain, excavations have been ongoing since 2000. To date, 12 Neandertals have been discovered in a context that points to a single geological event, circa 49,000 years ago. A group of 12 Neandertals is consistent with previous estimates of around 10 individuals per group.  At least six adults, three adolescents and four younger individuals were buried at once, most likely during a storm. The cold conditions of the cave system and immediate burial of the remains not only preserved the bones well, but were also ideal for DNA.

The remains were sexed based on both morphology and DNA analysis. After sex was determined, anthropologists identified the different Neandertal lineages based on mitochondrial DNA. Several of the adults were found to be male, and the other three female. It was discovered that all three males belong to the same matrilineal group, while each respective female has a different haplotype. When compared to modern Europeans, the authors noted that there is significantly less genetic diversity within the mitochondrial genome.

These results strongly imply that Neandertals exhibited patrilocal mating behavior. Females were the ones who would have changed family groups, not males. This type of insight into an extinct species is unique, thanks to the quality of DNA preservation available at El Sidrón.

Another interesting point of discussion in the study relates to Neandertal interbirth interval. One of the females was linked by DNA to two of the younger individuals, approximately several years apart in age. If the anthropologists are correct about the relationship, this puts the interbirth interval for Homo neanderthalensis at a value similar to hunter-gatherer groups today. This data, if replicated with other Neandertal individuals, could eventually dispel differential reproduction as a potential cause for Neandertal disappearance.

Knowing about Neandertal group dynamics could provide crucial clues as to why they went extinct. Future analysis of the remains recovered at El Sidrón will no doubt give more insights into our closest extinct relatives, and perhaps even why Homo sapiens flourished and Neandertals declined.

By Matthew Magnani

Lalueza-Fox, C., et al. (2011). “Genetic evidence for patrilocal mating behavior among Neandertal groups.” PNAS . January 4, vol. 108 no. 1 250-253.

Do archaeologists care about the living? Yes, but like all people, we focus on those aspects of a story that are of greatest interest to us. That’s why I have tuned out much of the news coming out of Egypt over the last few weeks. I casually skimmed through articles about the protests, the motivations of the protesters, political ramifications for the region and for me as an American, and even the tragic loss of life. But when Egyptian antiquities were endangered, I began to pay close attention! As a kid, I was inspired by Indiana “It belongs in a museum” Jones. What happens when the museums themselves are threatened? Archaeological materials are one of the many casualties of war and civil unrest, as recently seen in Iraq.

During the Egyptian protests, the Cairo Museum, one of the most significant repositories of artifacts in the world, was raided by looters. Thankfully, it appears that none of the museum’s famed mummies were damaged and, in fact, some protesters defended the museum from looting. Dr. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Antiquities Department, even ridiculed some looters for stealing souvenirs from the museum gift shop while leaving priceless artifacts untouched. It could have been much worse, since the museum’s collections are truly irreplaceable, and their theft would’ve represented a great loss to humanity.

From the perspective of archaeological preservation, it was a relatively happy ending. Wait…was I really more outraged by the prospect of stolen artifacts and ransacked mummies than hundreds of deaths? Maybe 24-hour global news cycles have desensitized me to death tolls and modern human tragedy. Archaeologists, especially, have been accused of insensitivity toward living people (insert your own joke about archaeologists “preferring their informants dead” here). Sometimes this reputation is deserved – long hours poring over bones and stones in laboratories can dull a person’s sociability. But archaeologists are anthropologists and, as the anthropology.net motto says, we go “Beyond bones & stones.” Archaeologists are as focused on people as any other branch of anthropology. We reconstruct past human behavior from material remains, work with living and descendant communities to better understand the past, and do our best to share archaeology with everyone. Ideally, we go into anthropology because we are human beings who care about our fellow human beings, past and present. And, if our priorities sometimes need adjusting, world events remind us to pay attention to living people and dynamic political situations in addition to mummies.

What aspects of the Egyptian protests have been most meaningful to you?

- Jay Fancher

Image by Omar A. via Flickr

I stumbled upon this news piece in The Times regarding archaeology in Saudia Arabia. I wanted to share it with you all because of last week’s discussion of handaxes from the neighboring UAE. The article describes how archaeologists have been using Google Earth to survey for sites and have identified possibly 2,000 or so potential ones in Saudia Arabia. Now using Google Earth to do some armchair archaeology is nothing new really, there are examples from 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2010.

But we all know how strict Saudia Arabia is. One of their many impositions has traditionally been against archaeology — fearing that discoveries may disrupt the foundation of it being a cradle for Islam. From the article,

David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia, used Google Earth satellite maps to pinpoint 1,977 potential archaeological sites, including 1,082 teardrop shaped stone tombs…

…But few archaeologists have been given access to Saudi Arabia, which has long been hostile to the discipline. Hardline clerics in the kingdom fear that it might focus attention on the civilisations which flourished there before the rise of Islam – and thus, in the long term, undermine the state religion.

In 1994, a council of Saudi clerics was reported to have issued an edict asserting that preserving historical sites “could lead to polytheism and idolatry” – both punishable, under the Kingdom’s laws, by death.

This is not surprising to many. What is surprising was this tid bit:

Saudi Arabia’s rulers have, in recent years, allowed archaeologists to excavate some sites, including the spectacular but little-known ruins of Maidan Saleh (Correction its really Mada’in Saleh), a 2,000 old city which marked the southern limits of the powerful Nabataean civilisation.

For the most part, though, access to ancient sites has been severely restricted.

There are a lot of examples where traditions, governments, etc. get in the way of phenomenal discoveries. However, there are few where objection relaxed. I’m hopeful we’ll see more archaeology conducted on the Arabian peninsula, but I’ll think we’ll be seeing more from the more liberal areas like the Emirates.

Related Articles

• Archaeologists Find 1,082 Ancient Tombs in Google Earth [Science] (gawker.com)
• Archaeologists Find 1,082 Ancient Tombs in Google Earth [Science] (gawker.com)
• Google Earth finds Saudi Arabia’s forbidden archaeological secrets (telegraph.co.uk)

Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tubingen has lead a team excavating the Jebel Faya site in the United Arab Emirates, right near the Straits of Hormuz. They’ve found 125,000 year old stone tools that look like early modern human tools from East Africa around the same time. They’ve published their findings in today’s Science, under the title, “The Southern Route “Out of Africa”: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia.”

The current understanding is what we know as anatomically modern humans (AMH) originated in Africa about 250,000 years ago. The oldest Home sapiens, known as H. sapiens idaltu, was found to be 160,000 years old, found at the Middle Awash site in Ethiopia. Then between 80k-100k years ago, modern humans began appearing in the middle east, as remains from sites like the Qafzeh cave in Israel have yielded. Most agree that AMH stayed in Africa and about 140,000 years ago they began migrating out. There was an exception, a colonization remained or failed in Israel about 100,000 years ago.

One of the hand axes from Jebel Faya, UAE (Photograph courtesy Science/AAAS)

These hand axes, pictured above, show a pattern of flaking distinct from that made by Neandertals and also dissimilar to those by ~100,000 year old Israeli tools. They are two sided and very similar to stone tools seen only in early Africa.

What this means is early humans left Africa 20,000 years earlier than thought. Just how did they do it? 130,000 years ago, there was a window of climate change. They figured this out by using luminescence dating to determine the age of sand grains buried with the stone tools. Luminescence dating is a technique that measures naturally occurring radiation stored in the sand. The data showed that 130,000 years ago, the Arabian Peninsula was relatively more warm which caused more rainfall, turning it into a series of lush habitable land. During this period the southern Red Sea’s levels dropped and was only 2.5 miles or 4 km wide. This offered a brief window of time for humans to easily cross the sea and cross the Peninsula to opposing sites like Jebel Faya.

Does this study tell us that modern humans left Africa, into Arabia and out from there? It is most certainly a possibility. However, these axes could be of an abandoned migration like the site in Israel I’ve mentioned. I say that because no genetic clade, be it from mitochondrial, Y-chromosome, or somatic genome, shows an earlier divergence of modern humans from Africa earlier than 60,000 years ago. At the very minimum a find like this tells us humans left Africa a bit sooner than we thought, but does not really tell us that these were the humans that helped seed the Eurasia.

Armitage, S., Jasim, S., Marks, A., Parker, A., Usik, V., & Uerpmann, H. (2011). The Southern Route “Out of Africa”: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia Science, 331 (6016), 453-456 DOI: 10.1126/science.1199113

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt comments on the significance of the site,

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

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

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

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

I recently completed a medical parasitology course as part of my medical education. One of the diseases we discussed was leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis is a zoonotic disease that is transferred to humans from reservoir hosts via the sand fly vector. The sand fly injects the promastigote form of the parasite, and the parasite invades white blood cells and proliferates as amastigotes.

The amastigotes erupt out of white blood cells and the Leishmania parasite can cause three different types of symptomatology: visceral, cuteanous, or muscocutaneous. Leishmania donovani causes visceral problems, specifically Kala-azar, an irregular fever accompanied with an enlarged spleen and/or liver, anemia, diarrhea, etc. ultimately to death. L. donovani is found more or less globally. There are two other types of cutaenous causing Leishmania spp., Leishmania major and Leishmania tropica. Both of which cause lesions to the skin and are found in the Old World but the latter causes dry ulcers and the former, wet, serious ulcers.

Leishmania braziliensis (L. selvática) causes muscutaenous lesions, and as the name suggests is a New World disease. This is the parasite behind Espundia or Uta leishmaniasis, a horribly disfiguring and painful disease where very destructive oral/nasal lesions develop after 3-20 years of infection. Sloths and tropical rodents are the reservoir hosts for the L. braziliensis parasite.

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

As I mentioned, I just finished this parasitology class and so the information has been fresh in my head. This morning as I was reading my RSS feeds, I noticed a new open access PLoS One paper on the discovery of 4 cases of leishmaniasis in ancient remains recovered from the archaeological cemetery of Coyo Oriente, in the desert of San Pedro de Atacama, Northern Chile. The paper is titled, “Ancient Leishmaniasis in a Highland Desert of Northern Chile,” and authored by Chilean, Canadian and U.S. researchers. Upon reading the abstract, I was immediately drawn in because the discovery of leishmaniasis in this arid desert gives insight to ancient traditions. Even though the remains are relatively new, about 1,000 years old, these come from a time period when the Americas were not contacted by Europeans and not much is known about these people.

Four Individuals with Leishmaniasis from Coyo Oriente, Chile

The remains recovered yielded 4 individuals, all middle aged females (though sex determination was not made on pelvic bones), with massive bone destruction to the face. Other diseases such as osteocarinoma, leprosy, trepanosomiasis, Yaws disease, and tuberculosis can cause such lesions so the authors decided to screen the bone to find any genetic markers of the pathogen. Cloning and sequencing indicated that the researchers were looking at the handy work of the Leishmania parasite, but the sequence differs from Old World Leishmania spp. It could not be confirmed if it was modern Leishmania braziliensis (L. selvática), but looking from the osteological pathology… I’d guess it to be safe to assume these individuals were infected by L. braziliensis.

As indicated earlier this is a curious finding, because L. braziliensis needs tropical mammals, like the sloth, as a host. There have been no sloths in the 20 million year old rainless Atacama desert. This means that two situations could have happen,

“infected individuals could have been natives of San Pedro de Atacama who traveled to the endemic zone, were infected with Leishmaniasis and then returned to their native high altitude desert. Alternatively, they could have been natives of the distant endemic area who migrated to San Pedro de Atacama after they became infected. The long incubation period between infection and the development of destructive facial and boney lesions–up to 20 years —would have allowed plenty of time for infected travelers to complete their journey before they became debilitated.”

What we do know is the people of the Atacama desert, the Atacameños, and the people of the Yungas, in the Eastern Andes of Argentina exchanged of goods during this time period. The commerce presumably increased the amount of foreigners into the Atacama Desert leading to the possibility of patrilocality and intermarriage and kinship bonds between high altitude desert people and lowlanders from tropical areas. Considering that these 4 individuals are middle aged females it is very likely that they were foreigners who relocated, if not intermarried into Atacama culture, and were infected with leishmaniasis at an early age in their more tropical origins.

While there are a couple leaps of faith in this paper, the weak sexing of the individuals, and only one loci (LDR3) was sequenced to usable quality to diagnose a Leishmania infection, they no doubt had bony lesions — most likely leishmaniasis that did not originate in the Andean deserts but from tropical lowlands. At the very minimum this paper demonstrates people in pre-contact Chile had extensive trade networks, not only were they exchanging goods but also disease and possibly genes.

I really enjoy reading these sorts of papers when time permits, as they spark my interests both in medicine — in this case a form of ‘paleopathology’, anthropology and genetics. I suggest you have a read of this open access paper and let me know what you think of it… I’ve covered Andean archaelogical finds before but I am interested to know more about prehistoric Andean cultures. So if you got some to share about the Atacameños, Yungas, etc. please do.

Costa, M., Matheson, C., Iachetta, L., Llagostera, A., & Appenzeller, O. (2009). Ancient Leishmaniasis in a Highland Desert of Northern Chile PLoS ONE, 4 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006983

Speaking of the Johansons and fossils …

Earlier this year, I’ve blogged about the 2009 Human Evolution Leakey Symposium at Stony Brook that I went to. For more about that blog post, click here.

The symposium, entitled “Hobbit in the Haystack: Homo floresiensis and Human Evolution” can now be streamed live through the Stony Brook website. The website also includes previous Human Evolution Leakey symposia. Click here to watch.

Thanks to Afarensis: Anthropology, Evolution and Science for the heads up!

Originally posted on The Prancing Papio

New analysis by a team led by Australian National University doctoral student Debbie Argue showed that Homo floresiensis, nicknamed hobbits, were early hominin and walked out of Africa to Flores. Their findings supports the argument that Homo floresiensis had a unique wrist anatomy that originated from a lineage that lived long before the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

With Mike Moorwood from University of Wollongong and Thomas Sutikna from Indonesian Center for Archaeology, Debbie Argue compared 60 skulls and skeletal features from two individual hobbits to those of hominins, chimpanzees and gorillas using cladistic analysis. The result shows that Homo floresiensis “probably took one of two evolutionary paths from Africa to Flores. One began 1.66 million years ago, the other 1.9 million years ago”.

Read more here: Hobbits Walked Out of Africa

Originally posted on The Prancing Papio.