Anthropology.net

I don’t know who this is worse for, the editors & reviewers over at Nature or the authors of the article who can’t tell the difference between crocodile teeth markings and stone tool modification, nor raise the possibility. The paper, “Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia,” very confidently proclaims unambiguous evidence for,

“stone-tool-inflicted marks on bones found during recent survey work in Dikika, Ethiopia, a research area close to Gona and Bouri. On the basis of low-power microscopic and environmental scanning electron microscope observations, these bones show unambiguous stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access.”

Butchered by early humans or eaten by crocodiles? Image: David DeGusta

Given that the said rib fragment, DIK-55-2, came from a prehistoric lacustrine site. These markings could have been produced by crocodiles. Crocs, if you aren’t aware of (ahem editors and publishing group) are very abundant in the Rift Valley — both currently and prehistorically. On top of that, crocs like to eat meat and scavenge. Yes its true, they are carnivores. Australopithecines were at most ominivores, with wide based teeth useful in grinding tubers and nuts. Crocs have more meat shearing, bone crushing teeth than 3.39 million year old stone tools, which there are none of at the moment.

Given that there really isn’t an archaeological record for Australopithecine tools, I’ll take a gander and say crocs like to eat meat and scavenge more effectively than A. afarensis could make and use said tools to butcher a large ungulate. They have been on this Earth for roughly 197 million years more than hominins have and they are really good at what they do… Again, probably better than a species of hominins who did not live in the Stone Age. It is just as likely (if not more) that the markings were produced by crocodiles just given the ecological context.

Now just how different at cut marks from crocodile teeth marks? David DeGusta, from Stanford University, compared and contrasted the two different markings using images from Njau and Blumenchine (2006) paper titled, “A diagnosis of crocodile feeding traces on larger mammal bone, with fossil examples from the Plio-Pleistocene Olduvai Basin, Tanzania,” to those published in the current Nature article. I’ve inserted DeGusta’s image into this post on right for your own inspection. DeGusta was also on Science Friday, discussing this possibility, with one of the article’s authors, Zeresenay Alemseged. What do you think? Do they look completely different or similar? Seriously, I am asking you to comment. I’d like to know what you see.

Personally I don’t see much of a difference. I agree that stone tools marks are more V shaped, while croc teeth are more pitted/rounded. But take this into light: tool use, especially butchery, is a very human behavioral trait. In their search to attribute this human behavior to a primitive hominin species who roamed 800,000 years earlier, to the era of Australopithecus afarensis, without considering another possible explanation, the authors and editors of Nature were somewhat foolish.

Many paleoanthropologists are in this mad rush to claim their precious find is the most human of hominins, so as to etch their name into the textbooks in rewriting human evolution, that they sometimes forget about doing thorough comparative science. And many publications are in this mad rush to publish the most human of findings, that they sometimes forget about thoroughly editing scientific works. Think that could be the case? I sure do… Why should we settle on secondary evidence for Australopithecine stone tools when none have been found yet, and when another possibility hasn’t been extensively exhausted?

McPherron, S., Alemseged, Z., Marean, C., Wynn, J., Reed, D., Geraads, D., Bobe, R., & Béarat, H. (2010). Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia Nature, 466 (7308), 857-860 DOI: 10.1038/nature09248

Remember when I brought up the news that Stanford’s anthropology departments were merging back? It wasn’t too long ago, maybe two weeks or so? I bring this up because The Stanford Daily is running a juicy column on the tensions the merger has caused. Most of the complaints are coming from the bio-arch side, such as John Rick and James Fox. Here’s a rather scathing comment from John Rick,

“The administration has shown itself to be idiotic in the way they’ve approached the whole thing…”

The piece mentions how the faculty is still struggling to understand the motivation behind the merger of the two departments, and if you read the comments, so are some of the students. What’s really curious is how James Ferguson was chosen as the new chair of the Anthropology Department. Ever so outspoken Rick comments on it,

“In this case, there were no faculty consulted, and the chair was appointed for five years, which is an unusually long time.”

Well, I wish Stanford the best of luck. It seems like some people gotta just suck it up and deal with all the shuffling. I must say, I also don’t understand why there was such urgency to merge the two back together either. They were working great as separate entities.

Have you caught Kate Riley’s piece in the opinions column of the Seattle Times? It is dramatically titled, Anthropology: the great divide as if there’s some big dilemma happening within anthropology.

If you haven’t yet read it you may want to hold off on clicking to link.

Kate discusses the events and anthropologists behind the Kennewick Man issue. The Kennewick Man issue has become a classic of sorts. In the last 11 years or so, the remains of this prehistoric man found on a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington have increased the bureaucracy with archeology and Native American tribes, with scientists and the law. But not to the point that Kate’s making it out to be.

See it all started with Richard Jantz a plea of help via email. Julie Stein did not like what she read because she felt the excavation and analysis of the Kennewick remains were done with ulterior motives. And so began the “great divide.”

What I’m not too clear about is Kate Riley’s quote on how Stanford’s Anthropology Department split apart, which is now being merged back, was because of the Kennewick controversy. Riley writes,

“At Stanford University, the chasm was so insurmountable the anthropology department split into two.”

Correct me if I’m wrong but Stanford’s Anthropological Sciences department split from the department of Cultural and Social Anthropology in 1998 because of resource issues and major intellectual differences.

I’m not privy to the exact intellectual differences, I’ll disclaim that. Alls I know was that on one side were the socio-cultural anthropologists, who deal with understanding human behaviors, cultures, etc. and on the other side were the more bio-physical ones who study human evolution, bodies, population genetics form and function, etc. And they couldn’t get along. That’s fine… it happens in many departments. Nothing new. And these sorts of divisions have some tangents to the Kennwick Man feud, but I highly doubt that Kennewick was the cause of the division.

Again, I might be wrong, and please let me know if I am… but I think Riley is a bit misleading with her association of Stanford’s Anthropology department and Kennewick. It is one thing to describe an academic debate but another to tie what happened at an institution to what seems like a unrelated debate.