Anthropology.net

Several views of a human jawbone and molars found in a Chinese cave.

National Geographic is running news that Erik Trinkhaus and others have published the findings of the oldest modern human outside of Africa, specifically in China. Not much is given on the locality and specifics of the fossil, but the article does state that the fossil mandible fragment and teeth are 60,000 years older than any other modern human fossil. That leads to some curious questions of interbreeding with other Homo species and curiosities about the presence of modern humans that did not ‘act’ modern… In other words, the archaeological record isn’t quite on the same page.

Hawks hasn’t posted on the paper and find yet, but he is quoted in the National Geographic article saying the mandible dimensions are within range of both Neandertals and modern human. Unsurprisingly, the Out of Africa theory is challenged. I still don’t know what to think of it all, the chin does look very robust.

The PNAS article is not yet published at the time of the National Geographic writing and me blogging this post. Seems like people are still jumping publication embargoes. I shouldn’t have to call out what a cheap shot it is to have sensationalist news getting out before the first hand reports do. I guess things will never change. So until I get my hands on the real paper, I’m just calling it as others are reporting it.

I haven’t bothered to translate this page, but I’ve stumbled across a collection of 56 family portraits from East Asia that I wanted to share with you. The images give us a quick glimpse of all the different cultures and ethnicities that make up the far East, along with the lat/long of where these people are found. Check it out.

Ethnic Mongol

Yuchanyan Cave

I’ve admitted that cultural anthropology rarely gets its fair share on this blog, but I must also confess I don’t spread the love with archaeological news. Hopefully you’ll forgive me a bit today, because thanks to Luis, there’s news of the discovery of the oldest known pottery  — 17,500-18,300 years old from the Yuchanyan Cave in the Hunan province of China that I wanna share with you.

Let me remind you that the Yuchanyan cave also yielded the oldest kernels of rice in 2005 so it’s not too surprising to find old vessels to store the rice. The big shake up here is that previously, the Jōmon of Japan were considered to be the inventors of ancient pot making, with vessels dated to an age between 16,000 and 17,000 years ago.

Yuchanyan Pot

One thing that isn’t properly clarified in news media buzz is that that act of firing clay and making figurines has twice as long as vessel making. In fact, ceramic objects, such as Gravettian figurines likes the Venus of Dolní Věstonice those from Dolni Vestonice, Czech Republic, a clay statuette of a female figure, is dated to 29,000–25,000 BCE. The distinction here is that the Yuchanyan pot is oldest known clay vessel.

You can read the full text of the study, published as an open access paper in the journal PNAS.

Boaretto, E., Wu, X., Yuan, J., Bar-Yosef, O., Chu, V., Pan, Y., Liu, K., Cohen, D., Jiao, T., Li, S., Gu, H., Goldberg, P., & Weiner, S. (2009). Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and bone collagen associated with early pottery at Yuchanyan Cave, Hunan Province, China Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900539106

We know that during the Sui dynasty, the Chinese empire had European residents. But what can be said about the diversity of China during a preceding dynasty, such as Qin Shi Huang’s empire — the Qin dynasty of China? A team of Chinese academics have analyzed the mtDNA of 19 individuals excavated from a nearby tomb at the Terra Cotta Army site. They have published their study in the open access journal PLoS One under the title, “Mitochondrial DNA Evidence for a Diversified Origin of Workers Building Mausoleum for First Emperor of China.”

The Terra Cotta Army Site in China

The remains date to 2,200 years ago, right around the time that Qin Shi Huang or Yíng Zhèng, was undertaking his massive project like building the Great Wall and the giant Terra Cotta warrior mausoleum. Yíng Zhèng is known for doing some great things for China. For example, he built an intricate road system which connected the twenty-two million inhabitants at the time and allowed him to control and unify such a vast territory. However, with such power came some questionable political measures. Zhèng buried alive many Confucian scholars and burned their books. And his large projects came at the expense of many people’s lives.

Although 121 skeletons were excavated from the Terra Cotta Army site, only 50 were genetically analyzed for this study, 19 of which yielded results. But based on morphological observations, all of them were robust and had signs of arthritis. Some had broken bones or signs of extensive muscular stress. All of this suggests that these people were engaged in heavy work before death… most likely slaves of the Emperor, forced to work on building such a massive mausoleum.

Razib raised issue that such ancient DNA analysis is subject to contamination, especially when trying to assess the genetic diversity of an ancient populations. But the authors seemed to have done the same ancient DNA song and dance that we’ve seen in the last year. They removed the outer layer of bone which was presumably handled under non sterile conditions. The bone was subject to UV radiation and chemical treatment to further nuke any exogenous DNA.

The extracted DNA was amplified via PCR with overlapping primers and TA sub-cloned. The samples were sequenced via the standard dideoxy-chain terminated method. Another independent lab preformed the same steps to replicate results and ensure contamination wasn’t much of an issue.

The ancient sequences were compared to 2,164 mtDNA profiles from 32 different Chinese populations. That was done to establish the geographic locations and ethnic affiliation of these ancient peoples to their modern contemporaries. Using the same primers, the mitochondrial genomes of all staff members that handled the remains, were also sequenced and compared. Because of the high amount of genetic diversity present in the results of the ancient DNA, and the high amount of homogeneity of the modern staff members’ mtDNA, the authors ruled out contamination from handling as a major issue.

Specifically, the 19 individuals came from 15 distinct east-Eurasia haplogroups. Overall, 4 of them were of Han origin. While 7 of them came from southern China. Three others came from minority groups in the south. Interestingly, one of these ancient workers carried the same variation in the haplogroup M7a seen in Ryukyuan and Japanese people.

Of course, as Razib mentioned, this sample size is small — only 19 of the assumed 720,000 workers it took to construct the mausoleum but this shows us that Yíng Zhèng recruited people from all over to work on his project. Is this surprising? No! It isn’t. We’re talking about an empire. Empires are huge, some span entire continents and are made up of many different elasticities. Other contemporaneous empires, such as the Romans and Persians, even the Egyptians, were hardly homogeneous. Why would the Qin Empire be otherwise? Especially under the control of the unifier, Yíng Zhèng, who pushed for the infastructure that connected China at the time.

Zhi Xu, Fan Zhang, Bosong Xu, Jingze Tan, Shilin Li, Chunxiang Li, Hui Zhou, Hong Zhu, Jun Zhang, Qingbo Duan, Li Jin, Vincent Macaulay (2008). Mitochondrial DNA Evidence for a Diversified Origin of Workers Building Mausoleum for First Emperor of China PLoS ONE, 3 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003275

A couple days ago, press release agencies like EurekAlert! and ScienceDaily ran some anthropology blips that was not picked up by major news sources. So if you don’t follow them you would have missed out on this news.

In a nutshell, Wu Xiujie, from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has completed a 3D computed tomography scan of the Liujiang cranium. The Liujiang cranium was discovered in the Tongtianyan Cave of the Guangxi Zhuang region in 1958 by some farmers. It looks remarkably modern, actually very similar to 20,000 year old skulls from Japan, but no quantifiable dating technique was ever preformed on the samples until many years later.

A group of Chinese researchers collaborated with Phillip Tobias in 2002 and dated the probable sediments via uranium-series dating. They figured the sediments dated to 111,000 to 139,000 years ago. But since the actual stratigraphic layer where the fossil came out of is unknown, they extended the age range to 68,000 years to 153,000 years old. The citation is provided below.

If Liujiang, a modern looking cranium, is truly 153,000 years old — then it directly competes with the modern looking crania from Bouri and Omo, Ethiopia, dating to similar time period and challenges the out of Africa model of human dispersal. Given the uncertainty of the exact stratigraphic layer the fossil came from, people have simply considered it the most complete human fossil from late Pleistocene China, (130,000 to 10,000 years ago).

Why they didn’t date the calcite embedded to the surface and interior of the skull is beyond me. All I know is that the Chinese have consistently and ungracefully tried to prove their version of a multiregional evolution of Homo sapiens, where the deme that originated in China is the oldest and had the most modern set of features before any other deme.

Along with the uncertainty of dates is the uncertainty of the exact phyletic relationship of Liujiang to other crania. Sure it looks modern looking on the outside, but what about the interior morphology? The scan has allowed researchers to virtually reconstruct a representation of the structure and shape of the brain and they conclude that the,

“morphological features of the Liujiang brain are in common with modern humans, including a round brain shape, bulged and wide frontal lobes, an enlarged brain height, a full orbital margin and long parietal lobes.

There are a few differences between Liujiang and the modern Chinese in our sample, including a strong posterior projection of the occipital lobes, and a reduced cerebellar lobe. The measurement of the virtual endocast shows that the endocranial capacity of Liujiang is 1567 cc, which is in the range of Late Homo sapiens and much beyond the mean of modern humans. The brain morphology of Liujiang is assigned to Late Homo sapiens.”

Shen, G. (2002). U-Series dating of Liujiang hominid site in Guangxi, Southern China. Journal of Human Evolution, 43(6), 817-829. DOI: 10.1006/jhev.2002.0601

Erik Trinkhaus published a study, along with Hong Shang, in the July issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science on what they consider the earliest evidence of footwear of modern humans. The paper is titled, “Anatomical evidence for the antiquity of human footwear: Tianyuan and Sunghir.” They compared and contrasted the morphology of a couple foot bones of humans to human ancestors to see if they can find the effects of shoe wearing on foot bone anatomy.

Before we get into this, I want you to be aware of a couple things. First, the earliest direct evidence of footwear, and by direct I mean actual artifacts of shoes, that I know of are mostly complete sandals from California that date to 9,000 years ago. Other evidence comes from fossilized footprints. Looking at the effects of footwear on foot bones is indirect.

Second, this is not Trinkhaus’ first attempt at establishing the earliest record of footwear. In 2005, he published, “Anatomical evidence for the antiquity of human footwear use,” in the same journal as this current paper. In that paper he sampled foot bones from humans as old as 100,000 years to 10,000 years. He specifically looked for changes in human foot anatomy.

This earlier paper relied on an assumption that shoe wearing causes phalanges or toe bones to become more delicate, or gracile. In other words, the four smaller toes on each foot of people that walk barefoot, flex to allow better traction. This torsional flexion promotes robusticity and sturdy phalanges. In contrast contrast, supportive footwear, like sandals and tennis shoes, lessen the load and force on the four small toes, thus ‘weakening’ them. I’ve seen it myself, in people from the Caribbean and Africa. Often times these people do not wear shoes, or they wear poor shoes. Their feet are much wider than mine and other shoe wearing people, so are their toes.

In the 2005 paper, Trinkaus looked at the toes of western Eurasian human skeletons from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. He saw that the anatomy of the foot began to change around as early as 30,000 years ago, becoming more gracile than robust Neandertals and early Homo sapiens.

As you can tell from the title of the current study, the two subjects are Tianyuan and Sungir. The specimen from Tianyuan, Tianyuan 1, was actually published by Hong Shang as well as other authors (link is dead, I know). The Tianyuan 1 specimen is represented by a partial mandible and dentition, limited axial remains, portions of all long bones as well as some hand and foot bones. It was discovered in the Tianyuandong, a.k.a. Tianyuan Cave near Zhoukoudian, China. Radiocarbon dating of faunal remains from the same stratigraphic level indicate the Tianyuan 1 remains are at most 39,000 years old.

Sunghir 1 is also a partial skeleton, but it is not from China. In fact, Sunghir was found in a site on the outskirts of a Russian city called Vladimir. It has also been radiocarbon dated. It is roughly 23,000 years old. The interesting thing about Sunghir 1 is that it was excavated with an arrangements of beads sewn onto clothing that was wrapped around the feet — which is interpreted as evidence of footwear.

Trinkhaus and Shang compared Tianyuan 1 and Sunghir 1 foot phalanges to phalanges of archaic humans: Neandertals, humans from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. They also compared them to foot bones from modern humans: Pueblo Indians, Inuits, and European Americans. The comparison involved the measurement of the cross-sectional area of the phalanges, and looked for the amount of torsion caused by the force of not wearing shoes. This value was coined the polar moment.

The results of the polar moments of area versus the natural log of phalangeal length times body mass is represented to your right. As you can see Tianyuan 1 and Sunghir 1 fall within the range of Inuit and European Americans. But, some European Americans and Inuits also exhibit the same polar moment as Neandertals and archaic humans from the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. Those that do have robust toes could have been non-shoe wearers, they still exist — believe it or not!

If the graph is making your mind spin, check out this photographic array of the Tianyuan 1 and Sunghir 1 phalanges compared to robust, presumably non-shoe wearing human ancestors, Qafzeh 8 and Kiik-Koba 1, a Neandertal. You don’t need fancy pants charts to see how narrow and delicate the Tianyuan 1 and Sunghir 1 bones are compared to Qafzeh 8 and Kiik-Koba 1. But note that bones are not resized to the same scale. Why not?

It is really hard to infer a behavior from one measurement, but I’m pretty convinced. So people were wearing shoes 10,000 years earlier than previously assumed from indirect evidence — definately plausible. People were living in extreme environments for hundreds of thousands of years and needed to protect their feet from the elements!

My most pressing issue is why the bones weren’t adjust to scale in this photo. If they were, we would have a better comparative framework to make the visual assessment ourselves. What if the two TY1 phalanges are longer than the KK1 phalanges? They sure appear to be. If they scaled them down to the length of KK1 phalanges, and the TY1 phalanges appeared to be just as wide as KK1, then Trinkhaus and Shang have a problem. It’s really simple to do. A couple minutes on Photoshop would do the trick. So long as Trinkhaus and Shang  provided the normal photo alongside the scaled photo, there would be no worries of manipulation.

TRINKAUS, E., SHANG, H. (2008). Anatomical evidence for the antiquity of human footwear: Tianyuan and Sunghir. Journal of Archaeological Science, 35(7), 1928-1933. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2007.12.002

TRINKAUS, E. (2005). Anatomical evidence for the antiquity of human footwear use. Journal of Archaeological Science, 32(10), 1515-1526. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.04.006

If you’re reached your saturation coefficient with my coverage of population genetics, news of a 100,000 year old Homo from Henan, China should be welcoming. All I have so far is this press release, which is confusing. A quote from Li Zhanyang, an lead excavator with the Henan cultural relics and archaeology research institute, brings up some questions,

“The fossil consisted of 16 pieces of the skull with protruding eyebrows and a small forehead. More astonishing than the completeness of the skull is that it still has a fossilized membrane on the inner side, so scientists can track the nerves of the Paleolithic ancestors.”

I’m thinking somethings were lost in translation. First, fossils do not have eyebrows. Maybe a protruding brow ridge? That could be what they are trying to get at. Also, the article doesn’t say what membrane was fossilized within the brain case. My best guess is that it is the dura mater, the tough outer layer of the meninges that surrounds the brain. Even with the dura mater, it is hard to trace nerves from a Paleolithic fossil. One can probably trace the sulci and gyri and overall gyrification pattern imprinted from the brain, that will be useful in comparing the variation in the amount of fissures of archaic Homo brain.

Anyways, I’m super excited about this fossil find. No word on whether or not this fossils is Homo erectus or Homo sapiens. During this time period, two fossils come to mind that complicate assigning the taxonomy. First is, Jinniushan man, a 300k to 200k year old specimen that shows features of H. erectus, but with a endocranial volume similar to H. sapiens, as well as a overall thin cranial vault, expansion and rounding of the occipital and parietal region, the position of maximum cranial breadth, and overall facial morphology have resulted in Jinniushan being allotted to archaic Homo sapiens. Contending Jinniushan, are the Homo erectus looking Peking man fossils, which were lost in transit during World War II. These fossils are also from a similar time period.

This new Henan specimen is around 100,000 years old. Because of this date, I will very surprised if it is assigned as Homo erectus. Trinkaus’ 40k year old Tianyuan human also from Zhoukoudian, where the Peking fossils were found, would be awesome to compare. But the Tianyuan fossils can’t be used to compare these new Henan fossils, because the Henan collection is only of cranial bones. The closest things we have to cranial bones with the Tianyuan human is a mandible.

All hope is not lost, the endocranial volume from these new fossils can probably be calculated, which will give very good data on how to annotate this specimen. If the specimen is estimated to be an adult with a brain volume of around 1100cc or less, that would be really interesting!

Tim Jones, of Remote Central, is on top of the ball. He’s been nailing down some awesome anthropology news lately. This is one of the ones that caught my eye recently. You know of Wushan Man? Wushan Man is the name given to a lower jawbone fragment and an incisor as well as more than 230 pieces of stone tools excavated from Wushan county in the Chongqing municipality.

Excavations started in 1985, and in the last 10 years or so, Huang Banbo of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his team have been redating the site. Their preliminary reports have made the news. So far the evidences corroborates the geological layer containing the Wushan Man fossils to be as old as 2 million to 2.04 million years,

“They found more stone tools and animal fossils dating back 2 million years in the same stratigraphic interval in which Wushan Man fossils were found before, and also in the upper layers.”

If this is true, that means Wushan is currently the oldest hominin in Asia. The new date puts it 300,000 years older than Yuanmou Man.

A new Nature study will report on the earliest known evidence of rice paddies in China. We’re talking almost 8,000 years ago.

Cheng Zong of Durham University lead the excavation at the Kuahuqiao site in the Zhejiang province. After analyzing sediments of ancient swamp beds at the site the team found signs that the dirt was managed for rice growing. Specifically, the sediments showed that fire was used to clear scrub and modifications to the earth were made to prevent brackish water flooding. By about 7,550 years ago the sea level rose and broke the levies that held back water.

Here’s the kicker for anyone into rice domestication and the origins of agriculture, the team also unearthed unusually large rice pollen grains which indicates people at Kuahuqiao were beginning to domesticate a variety of rice. It is kinda uncertain whether or not the rice was really cultivated. But since these pollen grains have been found out of the normal range where seen wild rice grows, and found in areas where salt water damages fields and preventative measures had to be taken… then it’s pretty conclusive. If this is really the case, then it pushes back the date of rice domestication in Stone Age China almost 2,000 years!

Dorian Fuller of University College London has researched rice domestication before, specifically genetic diversity of rice. She commented on a National Geographic News article covering the new study on how,

“…the genetics of modern rice [show that it] has multiple origins from the wild gene pool right across southern China and northern and eastern India.”

Perhaps one of the centers of rice domestication was at Kuahuqiao?

In other China related archaeology news, the Fars News Agency reported on unearthing more of an ancient wall in the Golestan Province of Iran that stands second to the Great Wall of China in size. It is a 124-mile-long wall, the second longest such structure in Asia and was made in the 5th and 6th centuries to prevent the Ephthalites from pressing into Persia. It is call the Gorgan Wall.

I wish I had really nice photos or a scholarly article to point you too, but I’ll I got is this rather sparse press release and this really dated set of photos. I guess I could fire up Google Earth and scour the Golestan area for a large wall but I don’t have time right now. Maybe some other time?

P.S. Anyone else see Nature‘s new homepage? Very web 2.0!