Anthropology.net

A quick bit of linguistic anthropology to round off your Wednesday afternoon. Greek linguist, Ioanna Sitaridou, located a population of people in Northeastern Turkish villages, near the Black Sea (or Pontus), speaking the Romeyka dialect of ancient Greek. Ancient Greek has not been in use for thousands of years, so a finding like this can give us a bit of insight into how the language sounded. The reason the language has survived is a bit confusing to me, she explains it is due to religion,

The Romeyka speakers are devout Muslims and were therefore exempt from the large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey that took place in 1923, she said.

She’s been mapping the grammatical structures and variations in use as well as recording audio and video of the villagers telling stories. The ultimate aim of the research is to explain how Pontic Greek evolved. According to this source, she gave a talk last year about here research. Did anyone attend? What was it like? Like most of the world’s dialects, they are at risk of extinction especially due to emigration from Trabzon and the Turkish majority.

Hat tip to Stephen Chrisomalis, who blogged about this on Glossographia. You can read more about this language re-discovery at the Independent…

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 don’t regularly make announcements about my life, but I wanted to let you that blogging here will be sparse because I’m leaving to Turkey to do some fieldwork. I should return in two weeks time, unless we find something that needs a bit more time or if the PKK and Turkish government have another flare up like they did earlier this year. Hopefully, the former rather than the latter will happen.

I’ll be doing paleoanthropology research, but unlike my field season last year in Ethiopia, I’ll be hitting much older localities — we’re talking about the Miocene not the Plio-Pleistocene. This means I’ll be looking for hominoids, not necessarily hominins. But I’ll be elated to find either, in fact I’ve been dreaming about finding something like last year’s Ouranopithecus turkae! I wouldn’t be disappointed to find a really old H. erectus, Neandertal.

I imagine I’ll be stumbling upon a lot of archaeological material too. I’ll try to document as much as I’m allowed to and put it up on my Flickr account when I can. I also imagine that internet connectivity will be limited in the field, as will my time and energy to loiter around online. That being said, I’ll see y’all later!

Two papers have come out this week that refine our understanding of the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic Near East. The first is actually an advance copy, “Population Based Re-sequencing Reveals that the Flowering Time Adaptation of Cultivated Barley Originated East of the Fertile Crescent,” published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, in which the researchers sequenced 184 samples of the Ppd-H1 gene of barley.

Barley

Ppd-H1 is a circadian clock gene, one that affects variation in flowering time. The authors identified a unique haplotype due to a SNP called SNP48, which causes early flowering in long days. Specifically a cytosine at SNP48 is associated with early flowering in long days, whereas a thyamine at SNP48 is not associated with early flowering in long days. Effectively this SNP allows for the plant to grow where the growing season is short and with a dry summer. Early domesticators of barley would have selected for this SNP to create a more versatile, flexible barley crop.

They next sought to identify where this SNP originated from. So they did a phylogenetic analysis of the Ppd-H1 gene and traced down the origins of domesticated barley to Iran. Here’s the unrooted tree:

A Phylogenetic Tree of the Barley Ppd-H1 Gene

Is this surprising? No, it is not. 8,000 year old sites in Iran like Ali Kosh have yielded evidence of domesticated barley. And if you’ve ever had ash-e jo, an Iranian barely soup — you’d know the Iranians and barley have had a very intimate history. But, this finding is extremely fascinating because it correlates a phenotype with artificial selection that can be traced to the region of the world where it originated from.

While we’re discussing domestication cultures in the Middle East, a new paper has come out in the journal Nature which extends the domestication of cattle by 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. I must disclaim that I haven’t read the full paper, because my VPN access to my institution’s library seems to be broken, so I’m running this summary off this National Geographic news article. The paper, for those with access, is “Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding.”

This paper is based upon a chemical analysis of 2,200 milk jugs from sites across Turkey, southeastern Europe, and the Middle East. 8,500 year old vessels from northwestern Turkey have high levels of milk fat embedded in the walls. Lead author, Richard Evershed, thinks that cow herders in northwest Turkey were the first milk users, but not necessarily drinkers, because the jugs indicate that they were used to store butter, yogurt, or cheese. Furthermore, the lactose tolerance genotype didn’t appear until 7,000 years ago — 1,500 years after these jugs were being used. Ultimately the significance of this is that people were herding cattle for their milk and using it indirectly — processing milk way before for lactose intolerance problems were resolved.

Jones, H., Leigh, F.J., Mackay, I., Bower, M.A., Smith, L.M., Charles, M.P., Jones, G., Jones, M.K., Brown, T.A., Powell, W. (2008). Population Based Re-sequencing Reveals that the Flowering Time Adaptation of Cultivated Barley Originated East of the Fertile Crescent. Molecular Biology and Evolution DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msn167

Historians have for a long time thought ancient women of Greece were treated as property. That’s because most of the written Grecian record came from Athens and wrote of women as inferior creatures, scarcely more intelligent than children. The little bit we know about the other Greek states was more often than not written by an Athenian.

Since much of the Western modern culture has been based off of Greek culture and social structure, it is with little doubt that some influence of modern gender roles has been inherited from Athenian lifestyle. Other cultures of the time had much different gender roles. Recent research, coming from the University of Manchester, on the founders of Mycenae, Europe’s first great city-state and capital of King Agamemnon’s domains now indicates that Ancient Grecian women were, in fact, major power brokers.

Research has continued the work of Heinrich Schliemann, the man who claimed he found the graves of Agamemnon, Eurymedon, and their companions, all killed by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthos at modern day Hisarlik, Turkey…. just like the myth says. You may recognize this artifact, which Schliemann said was the death mask of Agamemnon. We now know the graves are much older than when the myth says Agamemnon alive, but they are opulent graves, clearly that of important people.

Recently, Terry Brown has gotten his hands on some of the remains. He was able to extract mtDNA from 22 of the 35 bodies found in the grave circle. Only four samples produced enough mtDNA to fully analyze. Since mtDNA is inherited from the mother, it is possible to associate some rudimentary ancestry, i.e. who is related to who. Two of the males in the sample were unrelated. But the remaining pair, the remains of a male and female, revealed they were siblings.

The two were thought to have been married. And it was also thought, by archaeologists, that the only reason this woman was buried in a richly endowed grave was because she was the wife of a powerful man. That was in keeping with previous ideas about Ancient Greece – that women had little power and could only exert influence through their husbands. Brown interprets this finding as an example of women in Ancient Greece holding positions of power by right of birth. Brown comments,

“The problem has been that up until recently our interpretation of life in Ancient Greece has been the work of a previous generations of archaeologists, then a male-oriented profession and who interpreted their findings in a male-oriented way. That is changing now and women in Ancient Greece are being seen in a new light.”

Remember in 2005-06 when there was a whole lot of buzz about the quadrupedal siblings in Turkey? There first was this paper, “Cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans as a recessive trait mapping to chromosome 17p,” and then there was this paper, “A new syndrome with quadrupedal gait, primitive speech, and severe mental retardation as a live model for human evolution,” which made a big splash… enough of a splash that a NOVA special was made.

John Hawks criticized this all, especially on the merit if this ‘behavior’ is due to genetic mutations, but he also had beef with how the press was handling the implications of these people. I too didn’t like how everyone was calling these modern humans with a syndrome as primitive cavemen, but what can you do?

Of course, as physical anthropologists, we can’t ignore these quadrupeds because they walk on all fours, and some of our closest evolutionary cousins (chimpanzees and gorillas) also walk on all fours. But you can’t say these people reverted back to a more ancestral primate locomotion technique. Chimps and gorillas walk on their knuckles, whereas these people walk plantigrade. Also, they look more strained walking on fours than do our more furry primate brethren, and that makes sense because limb proportions and overall body size of these people still are bipedal in pattern.

Well, it has been pretty quiet since then. We haven’t heard much from the two families in Turkey who walk on all fours, have speech deficiencies, and exhibit hypoplasia of the brain. I think that will all change with this new awesome PNAS paper that just came out recently. The paper, “Mutations in the very low-density lipoprotein receptor VLDLR cause cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans,” identifies two mutations in the VLDLR gene from members of the family who have this syndrome.

The last author of this new paper, Uner Tan, was actually the guy who published that 2006 paper which got Hawks to say Tan is incorrect in thinking that the language and locomotion disabilities of these quadrupeds in Turkey are genetically linked. Hawks said,

“Human bipedality and human cognition are both highly complex traits involving anatomical, developmental, and behavioral specializations. Each of them involved hundreds, and for cognition I would say thousands, of different genetic changes. There was no small set of macromutations that caused these traits to arise…

….I think it’s really unlikely that a gene that causes cerebellar ataxia was a critical bipedality gene. It may be necessary to walking normally, but it probably (indeed, evidently from the nature of the disorder) is very important to a lot of other things as well. A gene that breaks early brain development is no more likely than other genes to have a specific function role in the development or practice of bipedalism in humans…

…The main point is this: the fact that a gene breaks something doesn’t mean that it was the key gene necessary to create something. Suppose that you want to figure out how a car works. So you look at cars that aren’t working right, and you see what is broken. Now, you will notice that cars run sort of poorly with flat tires, they run with depleted batteries but won’t start, they will run for a bit without motor oil, but then seize up, and so on.

Cerebellar ataxia breaks a whole lot of things. It’s like breaking the crankshaft — the engine might run, but it is going to make a whole lot of noise, and the car isn’t going to move. We may conclude that the crankshaft is necessary for the wheels to move. But does that mean that the crankshaft is the key component of the wheel? Clearly not.

The analogy between cars and organismal development is useful because both systems depend on hierarchical functions. Early things must all work right for later things to develop. When an upstream gene (or part) breaks, it doesn’t mean that downstream things affected by the broken gene were caused by the broken gene.”

Now it seems like Tan et al. have found a gene that affects the development of bipedality and language, as well as a lot of other things. Actually the authors used genome-wide analytic tools to genetically map regions on three different chromosomes that are shared and are responsible for the condition seen in the two different families. Most the most interesting genetic similarity is a homozygoitic 1.3 megabase region of chromosome 9. Within this region, lies the gene VLDLR.

VLDLR is a gene that encodes a low density lipoprotein receptor. Its widely found in heart, skeletal muscle, and adipose tissue and thought to function in fatty acid metabolism, bringing in different molecules like enzymes and transporters into the cell. VLDLR has been actually identified as a critical component of the reelin signaling pathway, a cascade of events that develop the central nervous system. So it is not exclusively expressed in heart, muscle, and fat. Any deleterious mutation in VLDLR would ultimately effect how the nervous system is made and how it functions. Since locomotion and language are controlled by the central nervous system, you can begin to see how important VLDLR is. Aside from neural development, the authors hypothesize that VLDLR functions in positioning cells in the brain, and maturing the cerebellum so that bipedalism can function.

The authors decided to hone in on VLDLR. They made a pedigree chart that shows the affected individuals, and sequenced the VLDLR gene from affected individuals in both families. They were able to identify two mutant alleles, specific to each family, that deviated with the wild type VLDLR gene. Affected individuals in the first family carried a swap of a cytosine to a thymine in position 769 of the gene. This is a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) that caused a nonsense mutation, resulting in a premature stop codon. The second family actually had a deletion of a thymine in position 2339. This is also a single nucleotide SNP. Had this deletion been in 3 bases, carriers of this allele may have had a functioning VLDLR receptor, but since it involved a single base, a frame shift occurred and basically messed up everything downstream. I’ve taken out the chormatogram from the sequencing to show you what the mutations look like:

The authors confirmed the extent of these mutations using qPCR. They were able to show how the early stop and frameshift mutations are both in the part of resultant protein that binds reelin, and ultimately are not able to begin the reelin signal transduction.

This paper is really elegant! It is very simple and powerful. They were able to correlate a phenotype to a mutation in a important gene that affects how the nervous system is developed, and how it functions. Since these people affected by Unertan syndrome have serious neurological disorders, it is a pretty clear genotype-phenotype association. I feel Tan and crew are vindicated from Hawks criticisms.

Ozcelik, T., Akarsu, N., Uz, E., Caglayan, S., Gulsuner, S., Onat, O.E., Tan, M., Tan, U. (2008). Mutations in the very low-density lipoprotein receptor VLDLR cause cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710010105

TAN, U. (2006). A NEW SYNDROME WITH QUADRUPEDAL GAIT, PRIMITIVE SPEECH, AND SEVERE MENTAL RETARDATION AS A LIVE MODEL FOR HUMAN EVOLUTION. International Journal of Neuroscience, 116(3), 361-369. DOI: 10.1080/00207450500455330

Turkmen, S. (2005). Cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans as a recessive trait mapping to chromosome 17p. Journal of Medical Genetics, 43(5), 461-464. DOI: 10.1136/jmg.2005.040030

EurekAlert is running a very interesting press release on the discovery of a 500,000 year old Homo erectus fossil recovered from Turkey. Apparently the fossil, a fragment of skull bone, shows lesions that the individual had tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis is a deadly infectious disease caused by multiple strains of mycobacteria. Because the mycobacteria have lost numerous coding and non-coding regions in its genome, it is hard to retrace the genetic differences that would tell us of the origins, relationships, and movement of the disease causing pathogen. But through analyzing relatively modern human skeletal remains (I’m talking thousands of years modern) from Egypt and Peru, we know that tuberculosis was taking a big toll on humans relatively recently in our evolutionary history.

If this Homo erectus really did have tuberculosis, then that means he probably, and other hominids, got sick because his body produced less vitamin D due to darker skin and had a less vigilant immune system, hundreds of thousands of years ago. From what’s reported in the press release, I don’t buy it. And neither does John Hawks. I think it is over analyzed and sensationalized science to make big headlines.

I really don’t understand why a Homo erectus from Turkey isn’t enough of a killer headline. To my knowledge this is the first hominid found in Turkey and it fills a big spatial gap in understanding human evolution. Of course, I really don’t know enough about the tuberculosis evidence in this individual to make a solid judgment… we’ll have to wait until we get the paper…

Speaking of which, paper should be out anytime soon in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, so the entire details of the fossil aren’t known to us until the AJPA decides to give the green light and publish the paper. I have, however, discussed this press release with several colleagues and they are all skeptical.

The first thing they are curious about is the date. We speculate that dating was established using faunal evidence. The problem with that is the faunal composition of Turkey during the Pleistocene isn’t well known. Sure, the late Miocene is, and that’s cause there are a lot of Miocene sites… but at 500,000 years ago it is hard to correlate a date to what organisms were around at the time.

I also got word that John Kappelman, and his team damaged the fossil. I don’t know if it was during excavation, transportation, or curation/research, but having rumors run around that your team damaged the first ever Turkish hominid isn’t something the bolsters ones reputation in the field. But again, take this with a grain of salt… it is a rumor. There aren’t any official reports that his team actually broke the fossil, and if Kappelman’s not really liked, I can see how people will start up these things. Physical anthropologists are a catty bunch. But to be really honest, I can’t help but think the tuberculosis is a smokescreen to distract attention from this broken specimen.

Anyways, just reporting on this new paleoanthropology paper… be sure to keep checking the AJPA for the paper, and check out Razib’s post as well.

Considering there’s somewhat of a wildfire of discussion on the group of siblings from Turkey, who walk on all fours both on this site and around the entire blogosphere… I thought I’d share with you John Hawks’ critical view on it. He calls it a “publicity blitz ” and states that we are all being played.

I personally have beef with people calling it backwards evolution, or the evidence of ape-like men. If you don’t believe me, I’m serious! Check out the headlines from this Google News search query! There’s titles like “evolutionary throwback” and “missing link ” which all exemplify how misunderstood evolution, locomotion, and genetics all really are.

Going back to John Hawks, he clarifies this all. He questions the science of it, wondering about is this behavior due to genetic mutations, and about “true quadrupedalism ” He also wonders about the scientific merit of this paper, since the lead author published in his own journal! Hawks says,

“Tan’s paper has but a single reference in its bibliography — to himself. And he’s an editor of the journal, International Journal of Neuroscience. It happens every year or so that some paleoanthropology story breaks about a paper in some non-anthropological journal. These don’t benefit from peer review by paleoanthropologists. “

If you know me, you know I like being critical — so I really suggest you take the news of Turkish quadrupeds with a grain of salt and read what John Hawks has gotta say about it.