Monday, March 31, 2008

Stonehenge To Be Excavated For First Time In Over 40 Years


BBC NEWS Science/Nature Excavation starts at Stonehenge

For the next couple of weeks, the megalithic monument of Stonehenge will echo to the sound of trowels, as two eminent professors undertake an investigation to try and pin down exactly when construction took place, as well as studying the enigmatic bluestones that were brought onsite from so far away. This from the linked article...

Researchers believe these rocks, brought all the way from Wales, hold the secret to the real purpose of Stonehenge as a place of healing.

The excavation at the 4,500-year-old UK landmark is being funded by the BBC. The work will be filmed for a special Timewatch programme to be broadcast in the autumn.

The researchers leading the project are two of the UK's leading Stonehenge experts - Professor Tim Darvill, of the University of Bournemouth, and Professor Geoff Wainwright, of the Society of Antiquaries.

They are convinced that the dominating feature on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire was akin to a "Neolithic Lourdes" - a place where people went on a pilgrimage to get cured.

Some of the evidence supporting this theory comes from the dead, they say.

A significant proportion of the newly discovered Neolithic remains show clear signs of skeletal trauma. Some had undergone operations to the skull, or had walked with a limp, or had broken bones.

Modern techniques have established that many of these people had clearly travelled huge distances to get to south-west England, suggesting they were seeking supernatural help for their ills.

But Darvill and Wainwright have also traced the bluestones - the stones in the centre of Stonehenge - to the exact spot they came from in the Preseli hills, 250km away in the far west of Wales.

Neolithic inscriptions found at this location indicate the ancient people there believed the stones to be magical and for the local waters to have healing properties.


Although it's certainly remarkable that so many ancient skeletons bearing traces of trauma and infirmity have been found at Stonehenge, it's difficult to see an exact match with Lourdes, not least because most people visit on a temporary basis, rather than dying there.

If people were heading to Stonehenge in search of cures for their ailments, then it would have been clear from the amount of dead people whose injuries hadn't healed, that the magic wasn't working very efficiently.

The fact that people were staying to die there is odd - maybe once at Stonehenge, they had no means of returning whence they had come, and settled in the area until they died. Alternatively, it may have been the case that people were going to Stonehenge specifically to die there, in the hope that some aspect of its perceived magic would grant them access to a better afterlife, reincarnation or some other reward that could only be conferred once the sufferer had passed on.

More from the linked story...

Darvill and Wainwright hope the dig will demonstrate such beliefs also lay behind the creation of Stonehenge, by showing that the make-up of the original floor of the sacred circle at the monument is dominated by bluestone chippings that were purposely placed there.

The dig will also provide a more precise dating of the Double Bluestone Circle, the first stone circle that was erected at Stonehenge.
The original setting for this circle is no longer visible. The bluestones seen by visitors today are later re-erections. Archaeologists tried to date the first circle in the 1990s and estimated that it was put up at around 2,550BC; but a more precise dating has not been possible.

Principally, this is because materials removed in earlier excavations were poorly recorded and cannot be attributed with any certainty to specific features and deposits.

The 3.5m by 2.5m trench that will be excavated in the new effort will aim to retrieve fragments of the original bluestone pillars that can be properly dated.


Here's a final word from Professor Wainwright...

"This small excavation of a bluestone is the culmination of six years of research which Tim and I have conducted in the Preseli Hills of North Pembrokeshire and which has shed new light on the eternal question as to why Stonehenge was built.

"The excavation will date the arrival of the bluestones following their 250km journey from Preseli to Salisbury Plain and contribute to our definition of the society which undertook such an ambitious project. We will be able to say not only why but when the first stone monument was built."


And an even more final word from Dr. Simon Thurley...


"Very occasionally, we have the opportunity to find out something new archeologically - we are at that moment now.

"We believe that this dig has a chance of genuinely unlocking part of the mystery of Stonehenge."


That's a lot of hype to live up to, and some might question the wisdom of embarking on such an excavation with such a tightly configured set of expectations - and as we have seen from excavations done by the Stonehenge Riverside Project, many surprises have come to light over the past years that could never have been predicted, so it will be interesting to see what this current dig will yield.

Good to see that the BBC Timewatch site is running a nice feature, and moreover promises regular updates and videos from the site over the next fortnight, some of which will be reported here.

There's even the faint hope that the publicity generated by this excavation - and subsequent discoveries - will encourage a series of solutions to be found regarding the upkeep and preservation of Stonehenge, which so far have been notable by their extremely elusive nature.

N.B. 02/04/08

Although I can't as yet log onto the pages as yet, Paull Young sent along a comment in which he advises the following -

'You might be interested to know that the Smithsonian Channel is also covering the excavation (in a joint venture with the BBC).There is a bunch of videos and other information at this link:

http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/videos

You can also interact with David Royle, the Executive Producer of the Smithsonian Channel - he is live blogging from Stonehenge at...

http://community.smithsonianchannelcommunity.com/droyle

When I get back to my normal machine I'll check these out, but in the meantime these are probably well worth logging on to, and many thanks to Paull for sending them along.

image from Eternal Idol

Anthropology Today, Vol 24, February 2008 - Virtual Issue :: War on Terror

Blackwell Synergy - Anthropology Today, Vol 24, Issue v1: Table of Contents

Published on behalf of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Message from the Editor, Gustaaf Houtman:

At Anthropology Today we are initiating 'virtual' issues that draw contributions from the past into conveniently accessible themed threads across issues. Papers are selected from the period 2000-present, based on the content available in Blackwell Synergy. The virtual issues will hopefully help our readers navigate more easily.

What better first virtual issue than one grappling with the event that has changed the world most in recent years, namely the implications of 'the war on terror' in the wake of 11 September 2001.

This issue contains a selection of past contributions - articles, editorials, narratives, letters, news items - that, taken together, reveal some of the dilemmas anthropologists face in navigating today's world, ranging across: the Pentagon Human Terrain initiative, the FM 3-24 Counter-Insurgency manual, MK-ULTRA and the issue of unwitting input by anthropologists into interrogation manuals (and hence torture), the issue of spying and ESRC-funded research into Counter-Radicalization programme, invention of terrorists in Algeria, Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), spying, Islamophobia, lessons we may learn from WW II, and, generally, reactions to the wars that have been unleashed in the aftermath.

Click here to see the virtual issue.

Highlights:

Riots in France and Silent Anthropologists
Didier Fassin

Katrina: The Disaster and Its Doubles
Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Why Medical Anthropology Matters
Cecil Helman

Reconsidering Stereotypes: Anthropological Reflections on the Jilbab Controversy
Emma Tarlo

America the Ambivalent: Quietly Selling Anthropology to the CIA
David H Price

Assuming you have a subscription, there's enough reading to last for a good few weeks, and it seems like a very good idea to have a themed issue, especially one that in part addresses whether anthropologists should play any part in assisting the military in the various theatres of war that are currently proving so troublesome, especially to the civilian populations in places like Iraq, where it seems, an almost unmitigated slaughter has been in progress these past five years.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Carnival of Space #47 @ The Martian Chronicles


Carnival of Space #47 @ The Martian Chronicles

This week's Carnival of Space is up, and as might be apparent, has a distinct focus on matters Martian, although there are also many other posts discussing all sorts of interesting topics from the Fermi paradox, what people - and telescopes - have been observing, including one pst with the intriguing title, 'How To Build A Laser With A Black Hole'. All in all, it looks like something of a bumper edition - I wonder if astronauts or those aboard the ISS get time to check blog carnivals - or even host them.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Fossil Find From Atapuerca Is Oldest European Yet At 1.2mya

Fossil find is oldest European yet : Nature News

Following on from the news that came out of Atapuerca at the end of the last year's excavations, comes confirmation that a mandible found in Sima del Elefante has been dated to between 1.1 and 1.2 million years - with the intriguing suggestion that that these ancient Europeans may have arrived from Asia, rather than directly from Africa. Here's the opening paragraph of The First Hominin of Europe, in Nature Letters...

The earliest hominin occupation of Europe is one of the most debated topics in palaeoanthropology. However, the purportedly oldest of the Early Pleistocene sites in Eurasia lack precise age control and contain stone tools rather than human fossil remains1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Here we report the discovery of a human mandible associated with an assemblage of Mode 1 lithic tools and faunal remains bearing traces of hominin processing, in stratigraphic level TE9 at the site of the Sima del Elefante, Atapuerca, Spain6, 7, 8.

Level TE9 has been dated to the Early Pleistocene (approximately 1.2–1.1 Myr), based on a combination of palaeomagnetism, cosmogenic nuclides and biostratigraphy. The Sima del Elefante site thus emerges as the oldest, most accurately dated record of human occupation in Europe, to our knowledge. The study of the human mandible suggests that the first settlement of Western Europe could be related to an early demographic expansion out of Africa.

The new evidence, with previous findings in other Atapuerca sites (level TD6 from Gran Dolina
9, 10, 11, 12, 13), also suggests that a speciation event occurred in this extreme area of the Eurasian continent during the Early Pleistocene, initiating the hominin lineage represented by the TE9 and TD6 hominins.


By way of further clarification and comment, we have this from Nature news...

Spanish palaeontologists have dug up the remains of a 1.2-million-year-old humanlike inhabitant of Western Europe. The fossil find shows that members of our genus, Homo , colonized this region far earlier than many experts had thought.

The primitive hominin — represented by just a fragment of jawbone bearing a handful of wobbly-looking teeth — lived in what is now the Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain, an area already known as a treasure trove of early human remains.

The new fossil, uncovered by an experienced team of palaeoanthropologists led by Eudald Carbonell of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, is by far the oldest human bone ever found in the region. The previous oldest fossils have been perhaps 800,000 years old, leading some anthropologists to believe that primitive humans did not reach Western Europe until around half a million years ago.

Atapuerca has proven to be a key site, giving palaeoanthropologists unexpected insights into the very early occupation of Western Europe by archaic species of Homo - and it is now proposed that the 1.7mya fossils from Dmanisi represent a point from where archaic people may have headed west into Europe, there to speciate into the more modern forms such as antecessor, heidelbergensis and neanderthalensis, culminating eventually with the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens. More from Nature news...

Stone tools of about the same age or older — about 1.5 million years old — have been previously found in France, Italy and Spain, says Chris Stringer, who studies human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London. This is the first verifiable human material of this vintage, backing up claims that the nearby tools were made by primitive humans.

"When combined with the emerging archaeological evidence, it suggests that southern Europe began to be colonised from western Asia not long after humans had emerged from Africa — something which many of us would have doubted even 5 years ago," Stringer says.

"There has been controversy over hominids in Western Europe before 1 million years ago, and this should lay that to rest," says Tim White, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. But he says he is still unsure whether that population descended from west Asians or not. "There's a lot of time and distance between [the Dmanisi] collection and this one mandible in Western Europe," he says.

It has been suggested elsewhere that archaic Homo may even have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar at a very early date in order to make their first landfall in Europe, rather than heading the long way round from Asia, but as yet there is no conclusive evidence to confirm or refute this - although Tim White for one seems optimistic...

And our picture of human migration could change again. Perhaps fossil-hunters will one day find the remains of yet-hardier pioneers who managed to find a way through northern Africa directly into Europe, White suggests. "A single discovery can change the picture. We just don't know."

There's even a word or two from the researchers via the latest Nature podcast.


References:

Nature 452, 465-469 (27 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature06815; Received 15 October 2007; Accepted 4 February 2008

The First Hominin Of Europe

Eudald Carbonell1, José M. Bermúdez de Castro2, Josep M. Parés2,3, Alfredo Pérez-González2,4, Gloria Cuenca-Bescós5, Andreu Ollé1, Marina Mosquera1, Rosa Huguet1, Jan van der Made6, Antonio Rosas6, Robert Sala1, Josep Vallverdú1, Nuria García7,8, Darryl E. Granger9, María Martinón-Torres2, Xosé P. Rodríguez1, Greg M. Stock3,10, Josep M. Vergès1, Ethel Allué1, Francesc Burjachs1,11, Isabel Cáceres1, Antoni Canals1, Alfonso Benito4, Carlos Díez12, Marina Lozano1, Ana Mateos2, Marta Navazo12, Jesús Rodríguez2, Jordi Rosell1 & Juan L. Arsuaga7,8

image from IPHES

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Four Stone Hearth #37 - The Pulp SciFi Edition @ Hot Cup of Joe

If you're parked in near-Earth orbit or thereabouts, waiting for permission to land, and enjoy reading anthropology blog carnivals themed with visual reminders of how sci-fi artists portrayed the future some 40 or 50 years ago, head on over to the Moon of Megaliths, where Carl at Hot Cup of Joe, has once again given us an outstanding production of 4SH.

The next edition of Four Stone Hearth will be on April 9th, hosted by Julien Riel-Salvatore at A Very Remote Period Indeed.

image from
'The Sentinel' from here

Monday, March 24, 2008

Stimulus Respond: New Issue :: 'Utopia'


Stimulus Respond

The latest edition is now available, and here's a brief look at the contents...

Christian Astuguevielle - Imaginary Civilisations

Poetry from Peter Campbell, Kate Smith-Bingham and Olivier Marie Garbay, amongst others

Fashion - TwoTom, Rendering Intents, Klaxons Silenced

Art - Charles Long, Anne Hardy

Music - Lydia Lunch, Dead Kids

Setha Low - The New Dystopia: Fear and Insecurity in Residential Communities

James Burton - Utopia in Ruins

John Hutnyk and Laura King - A Comet for Utopia

Andy Johnson - This is best spoken by a naked muddied man with an axe.

William Robertson - The Ineffable Nature of Dreams

Plus much more...

Download Setha's article here

The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades by Dr. Angeliki Avgitidou


Stimulus Respond @ Facebook


image : The Hidden Buddhist Temple of Borobudur at Sunrise from here

Human Evolution On Trial - 'Culture' - by Terry Toohill

Human Evolution on Trial - 'Culture'



Although chimpanzees can be trained to do so to a limited extent (Swartz and Jordan 1980) humans probably uniquely have the ability to use a symbol to represent something else. For example most humans can identify that a drawing of a dog represents a dog. This ability has to be learned and is a product of human culture. To most other creatures any drawing is simply a shape or a doodle on a piece of paper, if they even notice the doodle. Writing uses symbols to represent language. Language uses sounds as symbols to represent ideas. As the defence said way back in “Change” [Variation Through Time] language is the major part of our culture. And of course language was necessary before we could have history.


Although I don’t believe there is any evidence to suggest Neanderthals were any less intelligent than Cro-Magnons many people believe Neanderthals may have been incapable of speech. But the development of language is almost certain to have been a gradual process, as is most cultural change, i.e. evolution. Homo erectus may originally only have had the word “uurgh” but, as a friend has pointed out, there are many ways to give different meanings to that. Language may go back a long way. Anyway language would hardly have sprung up fully formed overnight in a single group of people. This means debate over whether Neanderthals and Homo erectus had the power of speech are largely irrelevant.


Languages


The Australian Aborigines have language; they even have myths about “The Dreamtime”. On the other hand they didn’t have a true Upper Palaeolithic culture when Europeans first arrived in Australia. Therefore languages (and obviously myths) were not simply spread with the Upper Palaeolithic. The development of the physical and instinct changes necessary for speech obviously involved a whole series of much earlier genetic mutations. The wave theory of evolution suggests these genes would have obeyed the normal rules of selection and evolution as they spread through the human species, probably by the formation of hybrid zones.


And of course languages themselves evolve. Way back in “Indo-Europeans” [Mingling] the defence pointed out that, like genes, languages become extinct. They tend to be replaced regularly. Therefore we can presume the only surviving language families that may have developed and diversified by the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, about 40,000 years ago, are the ones spoken by the Aborigines in Australia and perhaps some African languages (Indo-Pacific and Pama-Nyungan, see “Into Australia” and Niger-Kordofanian and Khoisan, see “The Human Star” [A Map]). We must remember that even these languages may have replaced still older languages. Other language families have developed and spread much more recently, probably no earlier than the late Upper Palaeolithic. In fact most may be a great deal more recent than that.


We can use the evidence from language distribution to construct a language family tree. The defence has touched on parts of it already. For example the jury saw diagrams of the Indo-European and Austric language families in Part II when we looked at the origin of New Zealanders. The defence will offer evidence supporting the other parts during the remainder of the trial. First up is the human star with the present distribution of language families in place. The numbers represent languages that are probably remnant survivals of languages previously more widely spread. Most of them are difficult to place into any language family. Number 1 can represent both Ainu and Gilyak, 2 is Ket, 3 is Burushaski, 4 is Basque/Euskara and 5 is Georgian or Caucasian. We’ll leave the Mediterranean Islands, “The Last Point”, blank for now.





I admit the relationship of the first few branches (especially the Australian and African languages) to the main line is totally hypothetical. But as we follow the remainder of this story of Human Evolution from the Upper Palaeolithic until history the jury will see the evidence does support the main stream. There would be many areas of minor disagreement though, even between members of the defence.


Families


It is usually suggested a sudden increase in brainpower from about 40,000 years ago made us human and led to the Upper Palaeolithic. But, like everything else, complex human culture probably evolved gradually. Complex culture may have started with mtEve’s family as long as 150,000 years ago. But, as the defence said in “Technology” [Progress], the eventual change to the Upper Palaeolithic is almost certainly associated with a whole series of improvements in technology and culture. These probably came about through the exchange of ideas from several different families allowing more efficient exploitation of resources.


Family groups within chimpanzee and gorilla society rarely have intimate contact with other family groups and we can probably assume humans were much the same early in our evolution. Loss of hybrid vigour can be a problem for chimpanzees and gorillas even in the wild. Their pattern of social organisation limits gene flow because the family groups tend to remain isolated when population numbers fall. This was probably a problem for ancient humans in isolated regions as well. A cultural development around mtEve’s time may have helped offset inbreeding.


We saw in “Polynesian Origins[Societies] that children inherit their culture from their parents, especially their mother. In “MtEve” the defence suggested that any slight advantage her descendants had might have been cultural in the form of social behaviour or organisation. At one extreme it may have been mtEve’s group that invented language. But her descendants’ success may be due to no more than the invention of a word for, or at least the concept of, a “Father-in-law”. The establishment of wider contact between different family groups through the evolution of complex social connections would be able to offset any tendency towards inbreeding. This would mean they could maintain hybrid vigour and survive even when numbers fell below what would have been dangerously low levels for other species. They could also exchange ideas and resources between groups. There is evidence population numbers became much greater in the Upper Paleolithic than in the Mousterian or Middle Palaeolithic (Cunliffe 1994). There is also evidence for much more cultural interchange than previously. Amber, shells and stone were transported for hundreds of kilometres. Therefore there must have been wider social connections than just that between local family groups.


The Upper Palaeolithic is actually the first Stone Age that shows rapid changes in stone technology through both time and space. Before then stone technology changed very slowly and the same culture was found over wide areas. The implication of this increased variety is that the tools took on the function of art as well as usefulness (Cunliffe 1994).


A major flowering of culture in the form of symbolism occurred in the Upper Palaeolithic. Art, clothing, body decorations with beads, animal teeth etc, and possibly music and religion all developed. These may all have been developing or present to a lesser extent in the Middle Palaeolithic (Cunliffe 1994) but there was a major change at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. This change is usually presumed to be associated with the expansion of mtEve’s descendants but its suddenness is exaggerated and it was not continuous. In any particular region there are periodic returns to earlier technologies and cultures (Stringer and Gamble 1993).


Human use of symbols had reached an amazing level in Southern France by the Upper Palaeolithic Gravettian although, because dates of 30,000 years are claimed for some cave paintings, those ones may go back to Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian times. Drawings of animals in the caves are absolutely stunning. The drawings were presumably made from memory, as it would have been difficult to get a mammoth to pose in the cave (of course the artists may have been practising on perishable material for generations).


Although the Upper Palaeolithic culture may not have actually begun in Europe it is better studied there than elsewhere. So we’ll turn next to the Upper Palaeolithic expansion into the human star’s Northwest European point.


Europe


The first Upper Palaeolithic era in Europe, the Aurignacian, was almost certainly intrusive. In “Neanderthals et al” [Aurignacian and Mousterian] the defence mentioned that a mixture of the modern human Aurignacian and Neanderthal Mousterian gave rise to at least three hybrid cultures in Europe. Janusz K. Kozlowski (quoted in Mellars 1990) suggests the first regional differences in Europe developed from these Châtelperronian, Uluzzian and Szeletian technologies, although he feels this variation may be simply due to ecological differences. But the Aurignacian itself may have already been the product of mixing between Neanderthal technology and culture with that of modern humans. In “Neanderthals et al” [Superiority] the defence suggested that the next European culture, the Gravettian, almost certainly also owed a lot to Neanderthals. There is, in particular, continuity in Eastern Europe from the Neanderthal Mousterian through Szeletian to the modern human Gravettian.


Cavalli-Sforza’s (1995) map of the second principal component of modern gene distribution in Europe shows one genetic extreme in Spain and the other in the far north (map 18). Because it represents just the second principal component it accounts for quite a large proportion of the genetic difference within Europe, 22% in fact.



Interestingly there is a bulge southward along a line in Cavalli-Sforza’s map. It may indicate where northern populations through history have been able to move south between the Carpathian and Sudetan Mountains but I’ve cheated a little. The boundary between the genetic extremes is actually north of the line offered as evidence. Therefore although genes have seeped each way across the boundary by now, the movement has been especially towards the north. The bulge actualy occurrs where the Szeletian culture survived through the Aurignacian (see map 14). The line also makes an interesting twist in Scandinavia. It looks as though the boundary was formed at a time when there was continuous land in the area, i.e. during an ice age.


Another interesting fact is that there are two little areas isolated within the southern region connected genetically to the northern type. They coincide roughly with where parts of both the Châtelperronian and the Uluzzian cultures survived. Is it possible the line represents a boundary between Gravettian and Aurignacian genes? I can think of no other explanation for the pattern although many people believe northern Europe was uninhabited at the height of the ice age. On the other hand if humans could survive in Alaska and Siberia, as the defence will show next (“North to Alaska” [The Gravettian]), some could presumably survive in northern Europe. The distribution of the so-called “Venus figurines” shows that the Gravettian culture eventually expanded southwest through France as far as Northern Spain and into Northern Italy but perhaps the genes didn’t. Culture and technology can travel beyond genes (“Change” [European Migration]). The tools at the upper left in map 18 are Gravettian, as are those at the bottom right. It is interesting to compare them to the Neanderthal Châtelperronian tools in map 14. Aurignacian tools are at bottom left (Roe 1971).


Nicholas Rolland (Mellars 1990) has suggested improvements in technology during the Upper Palaeolithic were a result of increased population. Increased population allows more cultural and technological interaction between groups, which allows more rapid interchange of ideas, which allows greater population etc. But the increase in population is not obvious until the development of the Gravettian. Marcel Otte (quoted in Mellars 1990) suggests the Gravettian actually absorbed the Neanderthal cultures rather than exterminating them. Once again the increased utilisation of resources that followed the introduction of a new technology may led to times of plenty and have caused the boundaries to become porous for a time. This would also account for the patchy survival of genes from the north in the southern areas.


Religion


The cultural diversification that took place during the Upper Paleolithic suggests cultural differences between groups became important and had to be exaggerated: tribalism. There was obviously an evolutionary advantage in the development of ever more complex forms of culture or it wouldn’t have happened. As the defence said way back in “Change” [Galapagos Finches] specialisation and separation are greatest at times of environmental stress. You saw in Part III (“Extinctions”) that, probably because of the increasing number of humans, many animals became extinct in the modern humans’ expanding geographic margins. We can therefore assume survival for the people left behind became more difficult.


Increasing population + Diminishing resources = Strife + Selection.


Increasing population meant fewer resources in many regions. But changes in culture and technology meant it had become an advantage to sustain larger units than simply family groups. Methods had to be developed to provide cohesion within these groups. Personal ornamentation as an artistic expression may have developed in order to identify as part of a particular tribe (Cunliffe 1994). It certainly serves that purpose for many of us today. Tribes’ myths also provide cohesion (“Mythconceptions” [Oral History]).


It may, in fact, be simply the evolution of culture that has led to the shallow time depth of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome lines in the human genes. In other words culture, as well as technology, has played a role in Human Evolution. Groups with more complex cultures may have been more effective at surviving. It has even been suggested that, because of this, humans have evolved an instinctive desire to have a religion (Ridley 2000) and of course humans love ritual.


Religion is part of culture and serves to promote cohesion within large groups or tribes. Dare I suggest it might occasionally have been used cynically by those with most to gain? K. R. Howe (1984) suggests this was certainly the case in some Pacific Islands with the acceptance of Christianity.


Perhaps we could define religion as a belief in a god or gods. It is virtually impossible to agree as to what kind of god or gods we are actually talking about at any time though. We can only conceive of a god in relation to how we are brought up and what we already believe. We like to believe we are special, both as individuals and as a species. But I’m sure that all animals, if they were capable of thinking about it, would regard themselves as being just as special. The Chinese drover’s clever dog’s conception of a god would look a lot like a dog and have doggy qualities. In fact anthropologists have discovered that the characteristics attributed to the god or gods in any culture are related to those that children in that culture attribute to their parents (Swartz and Jordan 1980). Gods reflect the particular culture. Certainly religions change with time and space and display all the characteristics of evolution, including diversification, crossbreeding and hybrid vigour. Religious ideas move around. We could even argue that, like culture, God evolves.


All religions as they exist today are the result of much “interbreeding” of beliefs and “selection” or “survival of the fittest”. In fact religions usually rapidly break up into “subspecies”. Christianity for example has formed such subspecies as Orthodox, Catholic, Episcopalian, Jehovah’s Witness, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, etc. Several subspecies such as the Gnostics, Arians, Albigenses, etc. have even become extinct.


Evolution of a Religion


Many members of the prosecution use arguments from the Christian religion as part of their case against the defendant. Through an accident of history I happen to know more about Christianity than about other religions. Besides, it has had such a huge influence on our collective Chinese drover’s clever dog syndrome that it is worthwhile taking a look at it. Its evolution is also useful evidence in support of the wave theory of genetic, cultural and technological evolution.


Christianity’s history extends way back beyond its founder’s life. Many people claim it evolved from the ancient Hebrews’ beliefs. In fact in the first few years of its existence Christianity was usually simply regarded as one of the many Jewish sects around at the time (Golb 1995 and Coogan 1998). This has led to a long history of strife between Christian and Jew. But recently both seem to have found a common enemy in yet another closely related religion, Islam. As the defence said in Part II (“Indo-Europeans” [Slavic]) the bitterest arguments are those between family members.


Evidence shows that the collection of writings that make up the Old Testament of the Bible were spliced together from various orally transmitted stories. These were collected and edited over a period of time to make a single coherent story with a particular political perspective (Coogan 1998). Of course the written word is often used to justify various political perspectives.


The early Hebrew religion as revealed in the Old Testament books preserved many elements of both Mesopotamian and Egyptian religion. The religion developed as a hybrid. Samaria and the northern part of what is the modern state of Israel, especially the Yizre’el (Jezreel) Valley, were on a main trade route between the two major valley civilisations.


This idea of a hybrid religion may disturb some members of the prosecution. But the defence claims that the legends associated with the two heroes, Abraham and Moses, basically reveal the separate history of the two main strands, Abraham the Mesopotamian side and Moses the Egyptian. Of course a great deal of crossbreeding between the stories occurred. We don’t know when their biographies were first written down but various evidence indicates it was almost certainly no earlier than about 1000 BC if not more recently (Campbell 1976). The defence would remind the jury that oral tradition is unreliable for periods longer than 200 to 250 years (“Mythconceptions” [Ancient Myths]).


We’ll come back to the Egyptian strand, Moses, migration, history and the development of writing in “The Last Point” [Gene Flow]. But there is no way the stories in Genesis refer literally to a single Abraham from around 2000 BC. Abraham is recorded as meeting Aramaeans, Hittites and Philistines and it is stated very specifically that he came from Ur of the Chaldees. This indicates either he is a much more recent figure than he is usually portrayed as being or, like the heroes mentioned in “Eastern Polynesia” [Polynesian Languages], he is a combination of several people. These Abrahams could have lived at any time between when the first three groups had all developed (at least more recently than about 1600 BC) to when Ur became Chaldaean (around 700 BC). The end of this period was about the time refugees from Samaria swelled Jerusalem’s population (Coogan 1998) and King Hezekiah made the city temple the religious centre of Judah. A huge amount of evidence shows most of the editing and even rewriting of books of the Bible was done during and after the rule of Hezekiah’s great-grandson Josiah with another major touchup about 400 to 600 BC during and after the Babylonian exile (Sturgis 2001).


In fact by then Egypt had provided the greatest influence on the hybrid religion. The influence of Mesopotamia seems to be mainly confined to individual creation and origin stories in the very early books of the Bible rather than many actual religious beliefs. For example the Mesopotamian King Sargon was hidden in the rushes in a waterproof basket when he was a baby in much the same way as Moses is said to have been (Campbell 1976). On the other hand elements of Egyptian religion are carried right through, or are reintroduced, to the Christian religion. They include the prominence given to a trio of Gods in the form of father, son and mother, the dying and reborn God, a belief in the eventual return of a soul to the body and a judgement of the dead. But the idea that “good” (light and the truth) and “evil” (dark and the lie) are separate gods and that there will be a final battle between them probably comes from ancient Persian Zoroastrian beliefs (Campbell 1976). The Indo-European Hittite religion introduced along with the chariot had also influenced the Hebrews. In further support of the wave theory it seems from Egyptian records that one Old Testament name for God, “Yaweh”, may have been introduced from the Midianites of northern Arabia (Coogan 1998). The name El, and the plural Elohim, also used in the Old Testament, are simply the Canaanite names for God and gods.


In spite of Old Testament stories archaeology, along with genetic and other evidence (especially linguistic), shows that the Hebrews were actually Canaanites (Sturgis 2001). Canaanite and Hebrew were the same language until about 1000 BC. In fact genetically Palestinians, Lebanese, Jews and Syrians are all the same people (Hammer et al 2000). As in the Balkans (“Indo-Europeans” [Slavic]) strife in the region has always been tribal. Way back in “Mythconceptions” [Modern Myths] the defence suggested any idea that any group can be regarded as a genetically “pure” race is completely ridiculous. Apart from the arrival of people from the Mediterranean Islands (“The Last Point” [Phoenician Friends]), there is actually no evidence the Hebrews descended from a migration of people who had entered the region from anywhere outside it, let alone specifically from Egypt (Clark 1969 and Sturgis 2001). Members of the prosecution often rely on the theory of negativity to account for this fact and use the expression “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. The defence has declined the prosecution’s generous offer to let us selectively use this expression ourselves.


The near simultaneous arrival of writing along with the Late Bronze / Early Iron Age “Sea People” from around Greece (some of whom became the Philistines, see “The Last Point”) has left us with the particular synthesis of various strands of belief that make up the Old Testament we have today.


More recent influences on Christianity included Mithraism and even Buddhism by the time of Christ. The ancient Greeks had probably already influenced both these religions. And Greek thought has always had a huge influence on Jewish and Christian beliefs (Golb 1995). Interestingly both Buddha and the Greek Pythagoras lived around 530 BC. By this time the Zoroastrian Persian King Cyrus had conquered Babylon and released the Jews from exile. Buddha and Pythagoras, basically from opposite ends of the Persian Empire, had similar religious ideas to each other. Both believed in reincarnation of the soul for example. Pythagoras even believed new mathematical or scientific discoveries would occur because of him even after his death. In a sense, of course, he was correct.


The final selection of the writings that form the basis of both the Jewish and various Christian beliefs was not completed until a little more than 1600 years ago (Golb 1995).


Modern Christianity has more recently absorbed influences from the Muslim world (Gohau 1991) and Northwestern Europe, both of which had been already influenced by Christianity. More recently still Christianity has taken in many elements of the African religions that had been retained by African slaves taken to America. But the cultural idea that individuals are “possessed” by gods or spirits is actually widespread throughout the world (Swartz and Jordan 1980). Influences bounce around.


All our culture, our knowledge, our beliefs and our skills are the result of a similar mixing, or “interbreeding”, followed by selection or culling. The development of beliefs about geology over the last two hundred years demonstrates this phenomenon perfectly (Gohau 1991 and see Long Ago” [Geology]).


Religion and science can even interbreed. Newton’s third law of motion states every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Is this a religious statement? It was used by many religions before he included the law in his book “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” in 1687. “Karma”, “hubris”, “utu”, “yin and yang”, “as you sow so shall you reap”, “What is hateful to you, do not do to others”, “consciousness and energy creates reality”, “what goes round comes round”. Rules basic to existence, really.


People of a religious persuasion often claim ethics can only be based on their religion. This is ridiculous because even people in so-called primitive cultures are brought up to behave ethically. Our ethical beliefs are the product of our childhood socialisation into tribes. True, inadequately socialised children may consider they belong to a tribe of one and grow up to become psychopaths.


We are all products of the culture we are brought up in and the mythconceptions we inherit. As the defence said at the beginning of the case in “Conception” [The Chinese Drover’s Clever Dog] we usually assume the culture we grow up with is superior to others. It is the one we know best. But most of us have very little idea of the origin of our culture. Because of this we usually assume our own one has invented everything useful to us.


Many cultures, ancient and modern, from many different parts of the world will continue to contribute to modern society. Some individuals may be better at fishing, farming or hunting, may be better at making things, nuclear physics, fighting or playing the violin but no one individual is best at all these and certainly no one group, race or religion is.


Wave Theory of Knowledge


It looks to me as though our greatest advances in culture, technology, knowledge and probably genetic ones as well, have usually come from mixing and sharing. Hybrid vigour.


There are many examples. The Indo-European culture that developed in Southern Russia [Indo-European Languages] was probably a combination of three separate strands of northward cultural movement into the region: from west of the Black Sea, east of the Caspian Sea and direct north through the Caucasus Mountains (Mallory 1989). The later innovation of the chariot probably resulted from a combination of these separate branches of Indo-European people with the Mesopotamian culture when they all met up again south of the Caucasus Mountains. Closer to home, it was certainly a blend of people, technologies and cultures that sent the Polynesians on their way into the Pacific (“Pacific Population” [Mixing]).


The defence will show next (“North to Alaska” [The Ice Age]) that the incredible explosion of technology during the Upper Palaeolithic that enabled humans to expand around the Northern Hemisphere probably developed from the blending of three cultures in Eastern Europe; Mousterian, Aurignacian and Gravettian. Three heads are better than two. If the interpretation of the original movement onto the Central Asian steppes offered in “Out of Africa” [Genes Again] is correct it was the blending of several cultures that had given rise to the Gravettian in the first place.


A moistened Sahara Desert has several times led to the mixing of three cultures. In times of aridity populations are split into three: Sub-Saharan Africa, Morocco and possibly the Nile Valley or at least the Middle East. During times of moister climates the three cultures meet somewhere, perhaps usually in Africa. The development of the Middle Palaeolithic Levallois can almost certainly be interpreted in this way (“Species or Not” [East Asian Point]). It’s possible that the earlier development of the Acheulean hand-axe also happened the same way (“The First Point” [Caucasus population]). Perhaps even the beginning of modern human culture (“MtEve” [Interpretation]).


On the other hand culture can divide groups. The defence suggests to the jury that perhaps we should regard religious groups as being simply tribes. Specialisation, tribaliam and separation are greatest at times of environmental stress (“Change” [Galapagos Finches]) and so, in the future as population increases and resources diminish, we can expect expanding religious extremism and growing strife. The easiest way to achieve cultural cohesion is by accentuating exclusiveness and division, using a “them and us” philosophy with “them” being inferior in every way (“Change” [Variation Through Time]). Of course this system is not confined just to humans. Jane Goodall (1990) has written, “Chimpanzees also show differential behaviour towards group and non-group members”. Packs of wolves and rats also show “them and us” behaviour.


The system is certainly not confined just to “primitive” human societies either. Many politicians in modern states use the method very cynically to get votes or support within their country, and unfortunately many of us fall for it. John Ralston Saul (2006) calls this “false populism” or “the technique of fear”. The defence suggests opposition to the general acceptance of the evidence in support of the defendant, Human Evolution, comes from those who have a political, emotional or financial advantage in promoting a “them and us” system. In “Conception” we called them the prosecution.


Forms of cultural cohesion that don’t use this system would obviously be much better for practical purposes today. Unfortunately I can’t think of any examples. Although we can now control our environment to a large extent perhaps we should just be content with the survival of the fittest, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But maybe we should do our best to ensure that the mass culture that is evolving will be a free and fair one combining the best elements of all. For this to happen it will pay us to remember that in spite of any propaganda money doesn’t trickle down from the wealthy. The evidence shows it defies gravity and gushes up, as though into a black hole.


Perhaps we could follow Giordano Bruno. During his lifetime his followers called themselves “Giordanistas”. Unfortunately for him he was tortured for many years and finally executed for his beliefs in 1600 AD. Bruno had published some books in England in the 1580s where he suggested the earth is just one of many planets circling the sun, an extremely radical idea at the time. He went on to suggest the universe consists of many suns and many planets although his idea of this was probably different to the modern one. Also that the universe is of infinite size, that the whole universe is interconnected and has one soul and that space and time can only be conceived of in relation to defined points, the theory of relativity (Fyrth and Goldsmith 1965).


With this in mind we are now ready to catch up with the final two sub-points of the human star. We’ll start with America.


See next :: North To Alaska


Witnesses Called



Campbell, Joseph (1976) Occidental Mythology. Penguin Books, New York.

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca and Cavalli-Sforza, Francesco (1995) The Great Human Diasporas. Addison- Wesley

Clark, Grahame (1969) World Prehistory. Cambridge University Press, UK.

Coogan, Michael D. ed. (1998) The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Cunliffe, Barry ed. (1994) The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe. Oxford

University Press, Oxford.

Fyrth, H. J. and Goldsmith, M. (1965) Science History and Technology Book 1. Cassell, London.

Gohau, Gabriel (1991) A History of Geology. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, USA.

Golb, Norman (1995) Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Michael O’Mara Books, Great Britain.

Goodall, Jane (1990) Through a Window. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

Hammer et al (2000) Jewish and Middle Eastern Non-Jewish Populations Share a Pool of Y-chromosome Haplotypes. (pdf)Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Vol.97 pp. 6769-6774.

Howe, K. R. (1984) Where the Waves Fall. George Allen and Unwin, Australia.

Mallory, J. P. (1989) In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Thames and Hudson, New York.

Mellars, Paul ed. (1990) The Emergence of Modern Humans. Edinburgh University

Press, Great Britain.

Ridley, Matt (2000) Genome. Harper Collins, New York.

Roe, Derek (1971) Prehistory. Paladin (Macmillan and Co. Ltd.), London.

Saul, John Ralston (2006) The Collapse of Globalism. Penguin Books, England.

Stringer, Christopher and Gamble, Clive (1993) In Search of the Neanderthals. Thames

and Hudson, Great Britain.

Sturgis, Matthew (2001) It Ain’t Necessarily So. Headline Book Publishing, London.

Swartz, Marc J. and Jordan, David K. (1980) Culture - The Anthropological Perspective. John Wiley and Sons, Canada.



Four Stone Hearth 37 Wed. March 26th - Call for Submissions

The next edition of the anthropology blog carnival, Four Stone Hearth will be at Hot Cup of Joe this coming Wednesday, March 26th, so please send your submissions either to Carl at cfeagans AT gmail DOT com, (FSH in the subject line), or to submit@fourstonehearth.net.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Huge Gamma Ray Burst, Visible From 7.5 Billion Light Years Away



On March 19th, 2008, the day that marked the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, the Swift telescope picked up no less than four gamma ray bursts, the most ever detected in a single day. But the one that really stood out was GRB 080319B, which was so bright as to be visible in the night sky, even without a telescope. This from NASA...


"No other known object or type of explosion could be seen by the naked eye at such an immense distance," says Swift science team member Stephen Holland of Goddard. "If someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time, they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid." Most gamma ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel.

Their cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars, releasing an intense burst of high-energy gamma rays and ejecting particle jets that rip through space at nearly the speed of light. When the jets plow into surrounding interstellar clouds, they heat the gas to incandescent visibility. It is this gaseous "afterglow" which was visible to the human eye on March 19th.

GRB 080319B's afterglow was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The most distant previous object that could have been seen by the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light-years from Earth.

Curious to think that we are seeing something so vast and powerful from a time before even our solar system, let alone ourselves, was even conceived - the Universe was then only about half its present size - and even odder to think that such a luminous event was so perfectly timed to be detected by a human race that had that very day, said a final farewell to one of its brightest visionaries of the modern era.

image from here

'Clovis First' - The End



The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas

Here's the abstract of the paper mentioned above...

When did humans colonize the Americas? From where did they come and what routes did they take? These questions have gripped scientists for decades, but until recently answers have proven difficult to find.

Current genetic evidence implies dispersal
from a single Siberian population toward the Bering Land Bridge no earlier than about 30,000 years ago (and possibly after 22,000 years ago), then migration from Beringia to the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago. The archaeological records of Siberia and Beringia generally support these findings, as do archaeological sites in North and South America dating to as early as 15,000 years ago. If this is the time of colonization, geological data from western Canada suggest that humans dispersed along the recently deglaciated Pacific coastline.

The paper itself is behind a paywall, but has nevertheless been reported on elsewhere, as we see from Kris Hirst...

I'm not going to argue too strenuously against this--I've thought that was true since the Monte Verde discovery, but the summary in Science is well worth noting, and it will be really interesting to see what the fallout is. Basically, Goebel, Waters and O'Rourke summarize the archaeological and genetic (mtDNA) evidence and conclude that somebody else got here first.

Clovis has been recently redated to 12.0-12.8 kya (kya is archaeo-tech speak for 'thousand years ago'), making it centuries younger than the late-glacial complexes of Alaska.


Fairly secure sites predating Clovis have been found in Chile (
Monte Verde, 14.6), Wisconsin (Schaefer and Hebior, 14.8-14.2), Pennsyvlania (Meadowcroft Rockshelter, 15.2-13.4 ka), Florida (Page-Ladson, 14.4 ka), and Oregon (Paisley Cave, 14.1 ka). (The most commonly accepted dates are listed for Monte Verde and Meadowcroft, both of which have older dates associated with them).

Skeletal analysis indicates uncontroversially that fully modern humans populated the Americas, and fully modern humans arrived in Asia no earlier than 40,000 years ago.


Molecular evidence implies a single population left Siberia and headed into the Americas between 30 and 13 ka.
Based on these standing assumptions in the record, Goebel and colleagues argue that colonization of the Americas occurred first about 15,000 years ago, immediately after the Pacific coast became deglaciated.

The first Americans were
diversified hunter-fishers and used boats, dispersing along the coasts for at least 1,000 years. Clovis, the big-game hunters of mammoths and mastodons, and may be descended from these original Americans, or may represent a second disperal from Beringia.

Although this does indeed appear to sound the death knell for Clovis-first, the date of 15 kya might turn out to be a little conservative - some upper estimates for the earliest peopling of the Americas hover between 40kya, at Valsequillo, and 50kya at the Topper site, but in both cases the jury is still out. Carbon dating at Topper is problematic in that 50,000 years is at the very limit of carbon dating capabilities, and there is an ongoing debate regarding the finds made in the lower levels, whilst at Valsequillo, there doesn't appear to have been much in the way of developments since the initial announcement back in 2005, but as far as I know, neither proposal has yet been disproved. I think both sites open up the possibility of confirming minor settlement events tens of thousands of years ago, with the prospect that other corroborative data will be discovered in the coming years - the site at Walker Hill, in Minnesota also looks promising, and recent reports from Vancouver Island and nearby Orcas Island indicate a possible pre-Clovis presence there also.

The most intriguing site of all is Lake Chapala, which like Valsequillo, is in Mexico, but unlike any other site in the New World, hints at a possible archaic human presence, assuming of course that the material found really is a human brow-ridge. But until further finds are made there, the idea that only Homo sapiens made the journey to the New World will continue to be the accepted paradigm.

In North America, about the first site to really convince archaeologists that pre-Clovis must be a reality was at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, where James Adovasio laboured for many years to convince the sceptical outside world that he and his co-workers had evidence of occupation dating back at least 15kya, and maybe as far back 19kya.

In recognition of his work there, as well as at numerous sites right across the world, the Archaeological Institute of America recently ran an interview with Adovasio, who currently works as Director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, - here's a brief snippet or two from that interview...


I never anticipated that Meadowcroft would become the epicenter of a three-decade long debate. Because of the extensive amount of funding and support available for this enterprise as well as the high degree of competence of the collaborating scientists, there never really were any insurmountable challenges for excavating and documenting cultural or ecological remains at the site.

Obviously, there was also no problem in publishing the results, particularly since the excavations there were considered, even by critics of the early dates, to represent then, and for that matter now, the state-of-the-art in cave and rock-shelter excavation.


I believe the acceptance of the antiquity of the site is a function not only of the extreme precision used in recovering and contextualizing material from that location but also by the existence now of more than a few other localities which predate the Clovis horizon. The bulk of the evidence now clearly supports an earlier-than-Clovis human presence in the Americas.

Over the years he has worked at a number of sites, addressing many different aspects of life in the Upper Palaeolithic, as we see...

Despite the fact that we have worked off and on at Meadowcroft and the Cross Creek drainage for the past 37 years, I have also been involved in excavations in a wide array of other areas, specifically including 27 of the United States and a series of foreign countries, including Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Israel, and others.

In Ukraine I was involved in the excavation of mammoth bone houses at Mezhirich and in the Czech Republic in the analysis of materials recovered from Pavlovian sites like Dolni Vestonice and Pavlov.

In Israel, I was involved in archaeological and geological data recovery in Ceasarea. At various times I have worked on the analysis of perishable materials from Central and South America as well as Europe and Asia..


...When one is involved in the analysis of basketry and textile materials, objects which are normally associated with the labor of women, it is only natural to have a different perspective of the past than one which is derived from the analysis of stone tools.

I really never decided to re-examine perishable materials specifically from an idea of ascertaining women's roles, since the perishable materials themselves were direct indicators of those roles.
I think one of the benefits of examining nondurable technology is the insights that this type of technology provides you not only into the gender roles of the past but also into issues of subsistence and adaptation which are rather radically different than those derived from what one might call an andro-litho-centric view of the past.

And although I don't have access to the paper at top, here's a link to another, published recently at PloSONE, namely...

The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies


see also : Archaeology Magazine : Pre-Clovis Breakthrough by Andrew Curry (April 3rd, 2008)

References to linked paper at top:

The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas - Ted Goebel,1* Michael R. Waters,2 Dennis H. O'Rourke3 1 Center for the Study of the First Americans, Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, 4352 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843–4352, USA.
2 Center for the Study of the First Americans, Departments of Anthropology and Geography, Texas A&M University, 4352 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843–4352, USA.
3 Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84122–0060, USA.

image from here

Friday, March 21, 2008

Carnival of Space 46 @ Riding With Robots


Carnival of Space 46

The weekly Carnival of Space is up and running over at
Riding With Robots, so if you want to read up on what's been catching the eyes of various space bloggers over the past week, check it out.

What I like most about this edition is the variety of excellent speculative essays and the subjects they address - could we survive on Mars by living in structures made of glass and liquid water, as a means of protecting ourselves from harmful cosmic rays; why is we still haven't from ET - could it be that no-one out there is up for a meet-and-greet event? There's another very good piece asking that familiarly vexed question - is the Universe we think we inhabit, actually real?

So, open up those pod bay doors, and take a quick excursion to check it all out.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

The Archaeology Channel - Saving the Cradle of Maya Civilization: Mirador Basin, Guatemala - Video


The Archaeology Channel - Saving the Cradle of Maya Civilization: Mirador Basin, Guatemala

This latest offering from TAC looks at the vast early Maya Mirador complex in the diminishing jungles and rainforest of Guatemala, as fires and human activities such as logging are beginning to encroach on what had previously been an area of wilderness since the city was abandoned by the Maya. In a somewhat ironic observation, it is noted by archaeologist Richard Hansen, that the Maya had to flee their own metropolis 2,000 years ago as a result of de-forestation, and that their archaeological legacy is now being threatened by a second wave of exactly the same type of environmental crisis.

It is the aim of the Global Heritage Fund to preserve the site, along similar lines to the way in which the site of Tikal National Park has been managed as a money-making enterprise - otherwise it is believed that within a decade, Mirador will be unable to be saved.

image of La Danta pyramid from here

Saving Antiquities for Everyone - Candlelight Vigil for the Iraq Museum




I recently posted a review of the short film 'Stuff Happens - The Looting of the Iraq Museum' and on a related note, below is the text of an email alert I received yesterday, advising of a worldwide event taking place from April 10th-12th, 2008...


New York—March 10, 2008—The nonprofit organization SAFE/Saving Antiquities for Everyone, Inc., today announced its plans to organize, promote and help facilitate a three-day Global Candlelight Vigil on April 10-12, 2008 to mark the fifth anniversary of the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The Vigil, endorsed by the Iraq Museum’s former Director General Dr. Donny George, aims to draw attention to the thousands of priceless artifacts still missing from the Museum and the ongoing looting and destruction of Iraq’s more than 10,000 registered archaeological sites.

SAFE is promoting the Global Candlelight Vigil at http://www.savingantiquities.org/candlelightvigils.php. SAFE is also supplying schools, universities, museums, and organizations with a downloadable Vigil tools including announcement flyers, videos and a brochure prepared in cooperation with The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

During the three-day Vigil period—April 10, 11 and 12—groups from California to Baghdad will gather, light a candle, pause for a moment of silence and discuss the serious issues of museum security, the looting of ancient sites and global trade in illicit antiquities.

As Dr. George has said: “On the 13th of April, when I went back to the Museum, it was as if a hurricane had hit. What they could not take, they smashed… But the main problem was the looting of the archaeological sites” because whenever objects are looted from the ground, the cultural and historical information that proper excavation would have yielded is lost forever. “It is not something we are losing and tomorrow we can buy again. It is the memory of the Iraqi people, the memories of mankind.”

Last year, SAFE President Cindy Ho conceived of the Global Candlelight Vigil for the Iraq Museum as a way to call attention to an ongoing cultural heritage crisis. “Heightened public awareness does increase pressure on governments to enforce existing laws and treaties, which can help to curb the trade in illicit antiquities from Iraq and looted archaeological sites around the world,” says Ms. Ho.

“By working with Dr. George and groups around the world, SAFE hopes to again focus the world’s attention on these issues.”

After the Global Candlelight Vigil concludes, SAFE plans to compile photographs and videos from the various gatherings in a video memorial.

As Vigil events are confirmed, information for those who wish to attend an event in their vicinity will be available at http://www.savingantiquities.org/attendvigil.php.

About SAFE

SAFE/Saving Antiquities for Everyone, a not-for-profit 501( c )(3) organization, creates educational programs and media campaigns to raise public awareness regarding the importance of preserving cultural heritage worldwide. SAFE is a coalition of professionals in communications, media, and advertising working alongside experts in the academic, legal and law enforcement communities. SAFE has no political affiliations.

Contact: Rebecca Rushfield
Telephone: 718-575-2702

see also :
Cuneiform Inscriptions in the Looted Iraq Museum

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Sir Arthur C. Clarke - 1917 - 2008


BBC News link

By one of those odd coincidences, I was flicking through the archives of the BBC Radio 4 website yesterday, in search of something else, when I came across this interview, recorded in 2005, with the author, little thinking that this would be the last time I'd hear it while he was still alive.

I saw the news of his demise online, rather than learning of it over a satellite link through the TV, or, as he might once have imagined, in a news update broadcast from Earth, whilst I was pottering about on Mars or the Moon. Suffice it to say, the death of Arthur C. Clarke marks the passing of one of the most popular visionaries of the 20th Century, and one who will be most famously remembered as the the man who, along with Stanley Kubrick, gave us the cinematic epic,
'2001 - A Space Odyssey'.

Clarke actually had a solid background in science, spending part of WWII working on what was the most advanced radar system in the world; moreover, he is credited with being the first person to suggest satellites orbiting above Earth as a useful means of transmitting radio signals between remote global locations - an idea that was later taken up by the TV industry, so that due to Clarke's immortal legacy, humankind is now able to watch live cricket at all hours of the day and night in England, whilst it is being played in Australia, India, New Zealand Pakistan, South Africa, and even Clarke's chosen domicile, Sri Lanka.


His prodigious output saw him write numerous short stories, novels and assorted books on our rather mysterious world, some of which he presented in his own TV series. His writing career spanned more than five decades, and I'm going to look quickly at a couple of his short stories, each describing scenarios depicting the end of this world as we know it - they might not be rated among his best tales, but all three have nevertheless stayed with me over the years. In no particular order, they are, '
No Morning After' and 'Nemesis'.

The first, '
No Morning After', relates the attempts of a concerned race of extraterrestrial beings - the Thaarn - who attempt to contact Earth in order to warn us of an impending disaster, in this case the imminent explosion of the Sun - unfortunately the only individual with whom they can establish contact - via a type of mind-link - is a disillusioned missile designer, Dr. William Cross, sitting morosely alone in his office, getting trashed on whisky.

Whilst lost in shallow thoughts of pointless despair, and staring blankly at a wall, the Thaarn home in on his (semi-)conscious mind, and the wall before him appears to dissolve. Thus he now finds himself looking down a long tunnel, and begins to hear what he mistakenly assumes to be voices in his head, as described here...


"Bill," the voice began, "listen carefully. We have had great difficulty in contacting you, and this is extremely important."

Bill doubted this on general principles. Nothing was important any more.

"We are speaking to you from a very distant planet'" continued the voice in a tone of urgent friendliness. "You are the only human being we have been able to contact, so you must understand what we are saying."


Bill felt mildly worried, though in an impersonal sort of way, since it was now rather hard to focus on his own problems. How serious was it, he wondered, when you started to hear voices? Well, it was best not to get excited. You can take it or leave it, Dr. Cross, he told himself. Let's take it until it gets to be a nuisance.


"OK," he answered with bored indifference. "Go right ahead and talk to me. I won't mind as long as it's interesting."


There was a pause. Then the voice continued in a slightly worried fashion.


"We don't quite understand. Our message isn't merely interesting. It's vital to your entire race, and you must notify your government immediately.

"I'm waiting," said Bill. "It helps to pass the time."


Five hundred light years away, the Thaarn conferred hastily among themselves. Something seemed to be wrong, but they could not decide precisely what. There was no doubt they had established contact, yet this was not the sort of reaction they had expected. Well, they could only proceed and hope for the best.


They then tell him how he can save himself and everyone else on the planet simply by walking into wormhole-like tunnels they will replicate across the globe, enabling the humans to traverse space and walk straight onto another habitable planet, upon which they will be able to reconstruct their civilisation.

For his part Dr.Cross muses on the ingenuity of the human mind to create such vivid and realistic hallucinations. Following more dialogue with what he believes to be his 'ingenious hallucination', he opines that after all it might not be such a bad thing if the world was to be consumed in a gigantic ball of incandescent plasma, surmising that the human race was fed up worrying about the Cold War, the high cost of living, and so on - after which he thanks them for the message, and tells the Thaarn not to bother - which elicits the following reaction...

There was consternation on Thaar. The Supreme Scientist's brain, floating like a great mass of coral in its tank of nutrient solution, turned slightly yellow about the edges - something it had not done since the Xantil invasion five thousand years ago. At least fifteen psychologists had nervous breakdowns and were never the same again. The main computer in the College of Cosmophysics started dividing every number in its memory by zero, and promptly blew all its fuses."

Although a light-hearted tale in itself, it does nevertheless remind us that whilst we have no idea what sort of reaction we might elicit in ourselves from sentient beings elsewhere in space, there is no telling what their first - or last - impressions of us might be.

Although we have people making worthy efforts to contact intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, such as those in the METI project, the recent news that someone is planning to beam a Doritos ad 42 light-years out to a nearby star, 47 UMa, isn't heartening - I imagine that one way of incurring the wrath of potentially unfriendly aliens would be by spamming them with junk food ads - or even worse, asking them for help with
complicated Ikea assembly manuals.

Nemesis joins two stories into one, propelling two very different protagonists from their own troubled times far into the future of a dying Earth, long after human civilisation has ceased to exist there - one a mad dictator, the Master, intent on reigniting the reign of terror he had instigated in his own time, the other a philosopher named Trevindor who had become persona non gratis, in a future era of humanity through which the Master had unwittingly overslept. This from Nemesis...

'The Master's dreamless sleep was more than half ended when Trevindor the Philosopher was born, between the fall of the Ninety-seventh Dynasty and the rise of the Fifth Galactic Empire. He was born on a world very far from Earth, for few were the men who ever set foot on the ancient home of their race, now so distant from the throbbing heart of the Universe. They brought Trevindor to Earth when his brief clash with the Empire had come to its inevitable end.

Here he was tried by the men whose ideals he had challenged, and here it was they pondered long over the manner of his fate. The case was unique. The gentle philosophic nature that now ruled the Galaxy had never before met with opposition, even on the level of pure intellect, and the polite but implacable conflict of wills had left it severely shaken. It was typical of the Council's members that, when a decision had proved impossible, they appealed to Trevindor himself for help.


The philosopher duly comes up with a few suggestions for the nature of his own punishment, the last of which is the one chosen...

"It is agreed. We will send you to an age when the Sun is still warm enough for life to exist on Earth, but so remote that any trace of our civilisation is unlikely to survive. We will also provide you with everything necessary for your safety and reasonable comfort..."

In fact they send him a metallic building in this very spirit, with the attached note...

To Trevindor, the greetings of the Council,
This building which we have sent after you through the time-field will supply all your needs for an indefinite period.
We do not know if civilisation will still exist in the age in which you find yourself. Man may now be extinct, since the chromosome K Star K will have become dominant, and the race may have mutated into something no longer human. That is for you to discover. You are now in the twilight of the Earth, and it is our hope that you are not alone. But if it is your destiny to be the last living creature on this once lovely world, remember that the choice was yours. Farewell.


As luck, or otherwise, would have it, he's not the only living creature left on Earth, as he discovers upon encountering the Master - and peering into the latter's mind, Trevindor comes face to face with reality from which the Master had come...

"The Master was beginning to stir once more, and into Trevindor's mind crept broken fragments of thought. Pictures of the world the Master had known began to form in the watcher's brain. At first Trevindor could make no sense of them then, suddenly, the jumbled shards fell into place and all was clear.

A wave of horror swept over him at the appalling vista of nation battling against nation, of cities flaming to destruction and men dying in agony. What kind of world was this? Could men have sunk so low from the peaceful age Trevindor had known? There had been legends, from times incredibly remote, of such things in the early dawn of Earth's history, but man had left them with his childhood. Surely they could never have returned!
The broken thoughts were more vivid now, and even more horrible. It was truly a nightmare age from which this other exile had come - no wonder that he had fled from it!


Trevindor then realises that far from fleeing the carnage, the Master was trying to carry on what he had started in his own past, prompting the philosopher to kill the madman through sheer mind power, so that he indeed becomes the very last human alive on the desert planet Earth.

Ever the optimist, at least as far as mankind was concerned, Clarke imagines a future in which humans have civilised themselves away from the violence and warfare so prevalent in the present day - and one where natural evolution is still the primary influence that decides what humankind will be like in that distant future.

But with recent advances in the study and application of genetics, it seems ever more likely that humans in the future will be bio-genetically engineered rather than having evolved organically as we have done over millions of years.

Indeed, if humans are ever
to live in galactic space, it won't be organic and short-lived humans that make the initial space-ship journeys out there. Perhaps we will need to send in our place, (sentient) robotic entities, along with samples of our own genetic material - once at journeys' end, hundreds or thousands of years later, the organic human material will be unfrozen and fertilised back into life, giving birth to humans whose first generations will probably have to be brought up by robot parents and assorted sibling software.

Whether those humans will be of the same bellicose persuasions as their ancestors is something that might need to be addressed - there's probably not much point in scattering humanity across the galaxy if everyone's going to wipe each other out sooner rather than later - conversely, it might be argued that human conflict has also given birth to some of our greatest inventions, from a cultural as well as technical perspective.

However, despite Clarke's prophetic thoughts on the future of humankind, it would appear that for the foreseeable future, we will continue to dwell on Earth - writing back in the 1960s, it must have seemed to many that it was almost inevitable that by this first decade of the 21st century, there would be a constant - if limited - human presence on the Moon, and probably Mars as well. Instead, our manned missions are limited to the Shuttle and the Space Station, whilst robotic missions zip here and there throughout the solar system - NASA spending on Mars projects is set to be drastically cut, with the date and details of any future manned mission to the Moon still the subject of little more than occasional debate.

Which means that for the time being, we will have to carry on where Arthur C. Clarke left us - imagining our future in a sea of stars, whilst still marooned on Island Earth - but thanks to great writers such as Clarke, at least we have plenty of good books and stories to read as we while away the waiting time.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke Foundation


Human Evolution On Trial - 'Pedigrees' - by Terry Toohill




Human Evolution on Trial - Pedigrees



Comparing the breeding of domestic animals to evolution has been criticized since Darwin’s time but sanity tells us there must be similarities. In fact Steve Jones (2000) says “the best place to see evolution is on the farm”. The characteristics selected for may be different but the resulting drift in population genetics and reduction of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome lines are very much the same. Both processes rely on “selection”, that is the culling or extinction of individuals in a population.


Individuals of a species vary. Animal breeders select the individuals they wish to breed from: the ones that exhibit the characteristics they would like to have in their herd for example. In evolution the same process is sometimes called “survival of the fittest” although this expression seems to have been first used to justify a particular economic theory.


In both evolution and breeding the most important process is in fact culling, the elimination of unwanted individuals. The antelope that fails to get away from the lion is more important for evolution than the many that manage to escape. Selection has to work on a population as a whole. The defence will show in “Hybrid Vigour and Inbreeding” [Inbreeding] that, apart from cloning, it is useless to simply breed from the best individuals.


Ancestry


As part of their breeding program farmers usually keep a record of each animal’s ancestry, its pedigree. I now present a very important illustration of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA and the Y-chromosome. This is an important illustration because it starts with my pedigree. We’ll look at yours next. Here is my “whakapapa” or ancestry, as it would be set out in a studbook: - By convention the male from each pair is written on top.



Of course my pedigree doesn’t just stop here but I don’t know all sixteen names of my great great-grandparents even in just the next column. I have one great-grandfather’s surname and his NRY or non-recombining portion of the Y-chromosome (remember the Y-chromosome passes from father to son). But all eight ancestors in the right-hand column provide my genetic or nuclear DNA. Probably roughly in equal portions but I happen to look superficially most like John Putt.

My mitochondrial DNA comes totally from Jeanie Wright who got it from her mother etc. Of course my brothers and sister all have exactly the same pedigree but their name replaces mine. The selection of genes is still 50% from each of our parents even though it is a different assortment of 50% for each of us. We all have the same mtDNA though and my brothers have the same NRY.


You can now construct as much of your own pedigree as you are able to. Remember to put the male of each pair on top: -



You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great great-grandparents, etc. The number of ancestors doubles each generation. By ten generations there are over a thousand places for names in the right hand column of your pedigree. Therefore if we assume one generation is 25 years your genetic makeup is the product of the contribution of one thousand people living about 250 years ago. Expanding it back only 500 years, or 20 generations, would give a huge list of over a million names in the column at the right; this at a time when the total population of England, for example, was only about three million. Expanding it back 5000 or 50,000 years gives an unimaginably large number of ancestors but we’ll confine it to a more manageable 500 years for now.


In this column of over a million ancestors from 500 years ago your mtDNA comes only from the individual at the bottom of the right hand column. Remember that, although the mitochondrial DNA is passed to all of a particular woman’s children, it is only her daughters who will pass it on to the next generation. If you are a male the main branch of your Y-chromosome will come only from the individual at the top of the column. If your surname goes back that far, and nothing has interrupted the sequence, your surname may also go back to this individual but that is a big ask. Any children you may have will automatically have the million ancestors in your partner’s pedigree added in. Your sons will all have their father’s Y-chromosome but all your children will have their mother’s mtDNA.


The jury can see that genealogies that concentrate only on one line grossly distort reality. I suppose it is theoretically possible half your genes could come from just a single one of these million ancestors and the other half from another one but this is very unlikely. Anyway even if you have as many as 100,000 genes more than 90% of these ancestors from just 500 years ago have no genes surviving in you. Many of those genes could come to you from other ancestors who shared those genes though. Some of those genes lost in your pedigree may survive in other people alive today. Other genes may be extinct.


If you could actually list the million names in your pedigree from five hundred years ago the same pattern of names would appear more than once in that column. Any repeated names on the list represent the level of inbreeding. In fact to guard against inbreeding animal breeders look for common ancestors only four or five generations back in a pedigree, but any population not infinitely large will have some level of inbreeding, i.e. all populations of all species (Falconer 1964). That’s why their members look similar to each other.


If you have been observant you may have noticed the surname Wright appears twice in one column of my pedigree. I actually have no idea how closely related Elizabeth and Jeanie were but let’s say they were sisters. This would mean they had the same mother and father. These two names would therefore appear twice in the next column to the right. Numbers 11 and 15 and numbers 12 and 16 would each be the same name. Of the thirty-two names that would be in my pedigree the next column back, the list from 21 to 24 is repeated as numbers 29 to 32. And so on. So in the column of 1,048,576 names from 500 years ago numbers 655,360 to 720,896 are exactly the same as numbers 917,504 to 983,040. Got that? In the column of over a million names in my pedigree there would be a repeated section of over sixty-five thousand names. Even within these 65,000 names there will be repeated sections and there would be other repeated sections elsewhere in the column. We will return to “Hybrid Vigour and Inbreeding” and how the wave theory of evolution works in Part II.


Populations


So far we have been considering pedigrees only from the perspective of the individual on the left, you or me. If we move one step to the right, to your parents, we realise you may not be their only child and they may not be single children. You could now attempt to do a family tree of one pair of your grandparents. They probably had several children and these will be your aunts and uncles. They will share many of their genes with one of your parents and fewer with you. Your aunts and uncles would have married people with completely different pedigrees to yours and their children will be your cousins. They will share even fewer genes with you. In other words if you combine your pedigree with the family trees of each of your million ancestors you can see the population becomes a huge network of genes. If you have ever been to a family reunion you may be able to imagine just how complex that network can be.


This brings us back to the subject of population genetics. Knowledge of what can cause reduction in Y-chromosome and mitochondrial and nuclear DNA lines in a population will be able to help us interpret the evidence for the evolution and distribution of our species.


As an illustration the defence will use the list of your one million different ancestors from 500 years ago and assume population numbers have stayed the same over the generations since that time. This is probably what happens on average for most species although in practice the numbers fluctuate, sometimes wildly, between the generations. For example Steve Jones (2000) gives a brief account of the complex interactions and fluctuations in numbers of snow grouse, lynx, snowshoe hares, willow and birch trees, and squirrels, coyotes and ravens within a small region. The so-called balance of nature is very complex and constantly changing. The more recent steady population explosion in humans has not been our normal state. It is impossible to decide from the evidence exactly how many humans there have been at various times during our history though. The total human population may have been as low as ten million (the size of London today) or even lower (Jones 2000) for much of our past. Anyway we can be sure numbers have fluctuated wildly.


To maintain population numbers of a species each couple, on average, must produce two offspring that survive to breed, that in turn produce two offspring, etc. Let us assume the average number of offspring per pair is four. This is not a large number, even for a human, as many families contain more than this number of children. Four offspring allows a selection rate of 50% but first let’s look at the male / female ratio. Each birth has a 50:50 chance of being a male (or female if you prefer), and so we get the following possibilities:





Just sixteen combinations are possible and Couple No. 1 leaves no female offspring and Couple No.16 leaves no male offspring. Therefore on average one female in sixteen would leave no mtDNA in the next generation and one male in sixteen would leave no Y-chromosome. Of course any close relatives would have the same mtDNA or Y-chromosome in practice but we’ll assume for this illustration that all the couples are unrelated.


At a 50% selection rate the diagram looks the same but what the letters stand for changes to “M” for mate and produce the next generation of offspring and “F” for fail for some reason or other to produce offspring that survive and breed. Once again one in sixteen couples fail to leave any mtDNA or Y-chromosome but this time through lack of any descendants. The combined loss of mtDNA lines (for example) is not simply two out of sixteen each generation. One occasion in sixteen multiplied by sixteen will be the elimination of an all-male family. In the next generation there will also be some families that already have several lines. Because they are less likely to be eliminated the rate of elimination slows. I have read that in a population of a fixed size mtDNA lines will reduce by one each generation (Lewin 1999). But I haven’t seen the maths and probably wouldn’t understand it if I had. If we accept it to be correct in sixteen generations, or four hundred years, the thirty-two survivors from the above small example would all have mtDNA from just one of the original females. And all the males would probably have just one of the original Y-chromosome lines.


Jobling et al (2004) mention that the first studies of the mtDNA of the American Indians showed they basically trace back to only four lines (“MtEve” [Interpretation]). Further studies have shown there are actually a few others although they are rare. But examination of ancient human remains in America show these rare ones were much more common originally (Martin Jones 2001). There has in fact been a reduction in mtDNA lines.


Selection


Starting with a closed population any woman who doesn’t produce a female child who survives to reproduce represents the loss of a line of mtDNA. Similarly, any male who doesn’t produce a male child represents the loss of a line of Y-chromosome. It is extremely unlikely all your 500,000 female ancestors from 500 years ago still have mtDNA lines today. Likewise for the 500,000 male ancestors and their Y-chromosomes. In theory, as it is twenty generations ago, twenty lines of each will have been lost. But I would be very surprised if any one of us actually know how many repeated names there are on our list of ancestors from twenty generations ago. Our individual pedigrees would each have far fewer than a million different names from that time.


It is quite easy to see that in time any population of limited size could be reduced to just one line of mtDNA but this may not necessarily descend from a female who had any genetic advantage at the time. Survival could be the result of almost random events. Genes from other members of the original population would still survive and so mitochondrial DNA lines don’t necessarily give a sure indication of nuclear DNA.


Many dairy farmers, for their breeding program, keep track of cow families, usually from the cows in the herd when they take over it or cows they have brought in more recently. They have to have a defined beginning or point of origin. Over time the number of their cow families reduces as they keep more offspring from the better cows, some cows die or are culled, or some cows have mostly bull calves, or dead ones. This leads to extinction of mitochondrial DNA lines in the herd. The way to maintain the line of a good cow in the herd who has had mostly bull calves is to actually keep bulls from that cow. Thus the mtDNA line may be lost but the nuclear DNA is maintained and even usually spread very widely.


Daniel Bradley and his colleagues (Bradley et. al. 1996) have researched mtDNA of Indian, African and European cattle breeds with interesting results. The mtDNA lines readily cluster into the three regions but African cattle have traditionally been divided into two types: humped and humpless breeds. Although it is known the humped, or zebu, cattle were introduced from India centuries ago Bradley’s DNA research indicates mtDNA lines cannot distinguish the humped and humpless breeds in Africa. Their conclusion was that the humped cattle are descended from local humpless cows crossed with humped bull imports. More recent studies of the Y-chromosome have shown this original view to be correct (Martin Jones 2001). The nuclear DNA of these humped breeds is now mostly from humped cattle although the mitochondrial DNA comes from humpless cattle. The defence will present other interesting examples of the independence of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA in “Species”.


Now, if we go back to these hypothetical million people from 500 years ago and imagine their one million hypothetical descendants today it is easy to see that the various genes present in the original population will not be present in the modern population in the same proportions. There will be more of some; less of others, some will have been totally eliminated and new mutations may have appeared. This is called “genetic drift”. For example blood groups other than O are rare in American Indians but A, B and AB were more common in prehistoric America. The ratios have changed, presumably by the elimination of blood groups other than O (Cavalli-Sforza 1995). Genetic drift would happen even if survival was totally random but, of course, genes are usually selected for or against. The greatest selection is usually against undesirable genes but selection doesn’t operate on the genes themselves. Selection can operate only on the individuals that express the genes.


Before we begin to follow this idea back through our collective family history though we should first examine our present ideas about that history.


See next :: Human Evolution on Trial - 'Mythconceptions'




Witnesses Called





Bradley et al (1996) Mitochondrial Diversity and the Origins of African and European Cattle. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Vol. 93 pp. 5131-5135.

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca and Cavalli-Sforza, Francesco (1995) The Great Human Diasporas. Addison- Wesley

Falconer, D. S. (1964) Quantitative Genetics. Oliver and Boyd Ltd., Great Britain.

Jobling et al (2004) Human Evolutionary Genetics. Garland Science, New York.

Jones, Martin (2001) The Molecule Hunt. The Penguin Press, London.

Jones, Steve (2000) Almost Like a Whale. Anchor, London.

Lewin, Roger (1999) Patterns in Evolution. Scientific American Library, New York.


Sunday, March 16, 2008

Those Conversational Neanderthals - Evolang 2008



Babel's Dawn: Neanderthals Had Language

This is a link to a brief report from the Evolang 2008 conference which took place in Barcelona this week, and in particular at a paper,“The Archaeology Of Language Origin” given by Francisco d'Errico, in which he claims that is more or less certain that Neanderthals had spoken language. He bases his proposals on archaeological evidence that has been accumulating these past years, as described here at Babel's Dawn...

D’Errico based his claim on what he called material “proxies” for symbolic communication, in essence pigments used for body painting and carved materials used for body ornamentation (beads and other decorative wear). His argument that these proxies can be taken as persuasive evidence of language on the basis that

they are symbolic, i.e., used to represent something rather than merely be something. A tool like a hand axe is useful and shaped, but is what it is. A body marking redefines something about the body, changing the brute fact of the body to something else, if you share the understanding of the person who has marked her or his body.

their conventions and manufacture are transmitted, i.e., to understand the symbolism and make the materials, the society has to be able to instruct newcomers (children) into the meanings and methods of the artifacts.

He makes a further “uniformitarian” argument that similar symbolic abilities reflect similar communicative abilities. Thus, if we can find proxies that are symbolic and dependent upon transmission, we have evidence of the a language-using species.

Before expanding on the above, it's worth looking at the entire package of evidence supporting Neanderthals' linguistic capabilities, neatly summarised by John Hawks...

If you have been reading here, you have seen many of the new perspectives D'Errico is talking about, but together they make a very compelling package. Consider:

1. We now know that australopithecines had ape-like vocal tracts, complete with pharyngeal air sacs.

2. We now know that Middle Pleistocene humans (Atapuerca) had humanlike hyoids, unlike australopithecines, so modern human vocal tract anatomy was plausibly a derived feature of Homo, including Neandertals.

3. We have good evidence of pigment use from MSA Africa and Mousterian Europe. The Neandertals in particular appear to have been coloring skin with manganese crayons.

4. Decorative/ornamental artifacts were manufactured both by MSA Africans and Neandertals.

5. Neandertals shared the modern human-derived FoxP2 variant.

I have some notes on D'Errico's work (with Maria Soressi) on Neandertal pigment use that I'll post later. Given the confluence of the recent evidence from genetics, archaeology, and anatomy, I do not see how anyone can maintain the hypothesis that Neandertals (and presumably, other Late Pleistocene humans) did not have language.

I mentioned in a recent post that the revelation from 2001 that
Homo erectus people in Tanzania are now thought to have used hand-axes for processing the timber of acacia trees might be evidence for use of spoken language at least as far back as 1.5 million years ago, so in that context it seems almost inevitable that Neanderthals living over a million years later would have had spoken language as well.

And as we have seen from other Lower Palaeolithic sites at Lake Fezzan, and the 400,000 year-old Tan-Tan figurine from Morocco, described by Bednarik, there is every indication that Homo erectus was also using pigments, and manufacturing body ornamentation with pierced shells; and of course that discovery on Flores of a Homo erectus presence there at 840,000 years ago, with the very strong implication that the open seas had been navigated in the process of arriving there, we can see that the broad picture contains many clues supporting the likely use of spoken language far earlier than the 40,000 years commonly ascribed to Homo sapiens and the so-called human revolution.

Although it is clear that there was a huge increase in innovation, invention and application of materials around the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition, as evidenced by the sheer number and variety of artefacts recovered, (and notably the era of cave painting), this surge was borne on a wave of accomplishment and invention that had been gradually swelling for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years.

Here's some related comment back at Babel's Dawn...

D’Errico provided extensive evidence of very old use of pigments, going back perhaps almost 300 thousand years in Africa. Body ornaments came later, but still over 100 thousand years ago. Evidence from Israel, for example, may date as far back as 125 thousand years ago.

Body ornaments like beads require more work than pigmentation, and an examination of them indicates the existence of tools for putting holes in the beads, strings for wearing the beads (insides of the bead holes show evidence of having been well eroded, suggesting long use), and the need for trade to get pigments used in coloring the beads (the bead material and the pigment material came from different locations). This abundant evidence has killed the idea that language began with some kind of explosive symbolic activity about 40,000 years ago, although the idea continues to be taken for granted in much of the popular press.

The evidence for Neanderthal language is based on their use of pigments and body ornaments. Some have argued that this usage may have reflected contact with Homo sapiens. D’Errico said that even if that were the case, the ability of Neanderthal to recognize and make use of an idea would be evidence of their symbolic capacity, but then he rendered the objection mute by reporting Neanderthal body ornaments dating to about 65 thousand years ago, well before any contact with Homo sapiens.

Neanderthal body pigment was black, unlike the most popular red ochre in the sapiens line. Mitochondrial evidence suggests Neanderthals were red headed with pale skin, and therefore had different ornamental needs than black-skinned red ochre users in Africa.

The existence of modern language capacities in Neanderthals implies that all the biological capacities required to support language production pre-date the split between the Neanderthal and sapiens lineages. D’Errico (and a number of other presenters at this conference) mentioned recent findings that the Neanderthal FoxP2 gene associated with language matched that of H sapiens. His claim was also supported by research indicating the human lineage at lost its air sacs at least 800 thousand years ago (see: Fossil Evidence of Speech?)

The red-headed and pale-skinned Neanderthal theory is contentious - I'm not sure if it can be asserted with certainty that all, or even the majority of Neanderthals shared these traits, especially given the vast geographical area they are known to have inhabited - and in any case we know that red ochre was also important to Neanderthals, as they often stained the bones of their dead with this very pigment - which of course adds another layer of complexity to their behaviour, and thus strengthens the case for their having had spoken language.

Additionally, we don't know for sure that Neanderthals were (only) applying pigment to their bodies - perishable materials and environments such as wood, animal hides or open-air rock faces could have been used as surfaces upon which they could have made their mark.

Back to John Hawks for some linguistic considerations...

Now, that is not to say that they (or any Late Pleistocene humans) were identical in their linguistic adaptations to living or recent people. I still think that communication is the most likely focus of evolutionary change in the Late Pleistocene -- but a change based within a pre-existing community of language users, not a newly-sprung linguistic skill. In fact, I think the next constructive step should be to characterize the variation in linguistic adaptations in recent people, who are surely not identical to each other. That verges on the subject of my presentation, which -- if you attend the AAPA meetings this spring, you will still get a chance to hear. That is, if you stick around until Saturday!

The point about Early Modern Humans following on in a long usage of spoken language is important, especially when it concerns dispelling the myth that speech emerged, almost
ex nihilo, in modern populations a few tens of thousands of years ago. A final word from Babels' Dawn...

If the full biological package was that old, there is no cultural reason to stand with the Out-of-Africa theory. A hundred thousand years ago, pigments and orientation were scattered at sites outside of Africa, indicating the existence of a variety of symbolic traditions and biologically competent speakers.

The primary objection raised in discussing this matter with linguists at the conference was the doubt that the presence of one kind of symbolic activity necessarily implies the existence of another kind, language. The argument based on uniformitarianism was questioned as being outside of the spirit of evolution, as evolution is by its nature contrary to uniformitarianism over time.

--------Postscript----

As the conference ended I spoke to social anthropologist Chris Knight to ask his response to the D'Errico presentation. In particular I wondered whether he believed that a society with symbolism advanced enough to produce pigmentation and body ornamentation had to have language, or, as some linguists had said to me, one could still be skeptical. He was of the opinion that it is absolutely established now that Neanderthals spoke.

However, even if it is now firmly established that archaic humans possessed language, or two intriguing questions now present themselves - one of which would be whether there was some type of universal language, which emerged at the beginning, and that was subsequently passed down through hundreds or even thousands of generations of archaic humans, or whether language sprang up independently in small pockets here and there, across both time and geographical space, so that different archaic humans were speaking languages that may have been incomprehensible to others - and whether those archaic humans would have been capable of learning other languages, and had capacity for bi-lingualism, for example.

If we accept that early populations were essentially mobile, rather than sedentary, it seems likely that different groups of people would have encountered one another on their travels - and therefore conversations must have taken place. Whether there were common words to describe everyday aspects of their world - such as plant and animal species, basic verbs to describe actions etc, or words to describe numbers and quantities, down to basic exchanges such as
"Hello, my name is..." and "We're off, maybe see you next summer", cannot at present be discerned, and the chances are we'll never know, as there probably isn't a scientific framework that can adequately address such questions.

But it's good to see that a broad spectrum of data culled from a wide variety of sources means that real progress appears to have been made in granting our archaic ancestors a great deal more intelligence and capability than has been the case at any time since prehistory began to be studied, and dispels the idea that modern
Homo sapiens is in some way superior to archaic humans - we might be vastly different to our ancestors, but it was they who paved the way for us - whether that turns out to be a short slippery slope down which we will slide into oblivion, or a road of progress that takes us from a more civilised Earth, out across the stars into a distant future, is at the moment, very much in the balance.

With regard to the poster image included at top, the depiction of a stooped archaic human seems a little retro, and not entirely in keeping with the spirit of the paper discussed here.



(via palanthsci)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Afarensis: Four Stone Hearth: Volume XXXVI

Afarensis: Four Stone Hearth: Volume 36

The bi-weekly anthropology blog carnival named above is back on the road again, and this time round it's hosted by Afarensis, who has put together a most interesting and varied set of entries, so feel free to head on over and check them out.

The next edition will appear on March 26th, over at Hot Cup of Joe.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia - PLoSONE

News from two caves in the western Pacific, detailing the discovery of the remains of diminutive human beings that comprised various cave burials, and which in the opinion of the researchers, "suggests they align with modern humans but exhibit similarities to Homo floresiensis, the so-called hobbit found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003".

Here's the link to the paper, edited by no less a figure than John Hawks, and by way of an introduction, here's what National Geographic

have to say...Thousands of human bones belonging to numerous individuals have been discovered in the Pacific island nation of Palau. Some of the bones are ancient and indicate inhabitants of particularly small size, scientists announced today. The remains are between 900 and 2,900 years old and align with Homo sapiens, according to a paper on the discovery. However, the older bones are tiny and exhibit several traits considered primitive, or archaic, for the human lineage. "They weren't very typical, very small in fact," said Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Berger was on vacation in 2006, kayaking around rocky islands about 370 miles (600 kilometers) east of the Philippines, when he found the bones in a pair of caves.

The caves were littered with bones that had been dislodged by waves and piled like driftwood. Others had remained buried deep in the sandy floor, and more, including several skulls, were cemented to the cave walls.

Berger returned later that year with colleagues to excavate some of the remains with funding from the National Geographic Society.

As we can see, the initial find wasn't made as the result of a specific archaeological search-and-recover operation, which makes the bones' discovery all the more fortuitous, and will certainly add more debate to the ongoing
Homo floresiensis arguments, the latest twist of which featured a suggestion that the fossils of Flores were victims of cretinism, a view that was given short shrift by amongst others, the academic editor of this linked paper. More details from National Geographic...

Two sets of human bones were found in the Palauan caves. The most recent remains were found near the entrance to one of the caves and appear normal in size. Older bones found deeper in the caves are stranger and much smaller.

The smaller, older bones represent people who were 3 to 4 feet (94 to 120 centimeters) tall and weighed between 70 and 90 pounds (32 and 41 kilograms), according to the paper.

The diminutive people were similar in size to the so-called hobbit discovered in National Geographic Society-supported excavations on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003.

Whilst from the paper itself, we see this under the Principle Findings section at the beginning...

Preliminary analysis indicates that this material is important for two reasons. First, individuals from the older time horizons are small in body size even relative to “pygmoid” populations from Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and thus may represent a marked case of human insular dwarfism.


Second, while possessing a number of derived features that align them with
Homo sapiens, the human remains from Palau also exhibit several skeletal traits that are considered to be primitive for the genus Homo. These features may be previously unrecognized developmental correlates of small body size and, if so, they may have important implications for interpreting the taxonomic affinities of fossil specimens of Homo.

The paper gives an exhaustive analysis of the finds from the Ucheliungs and Omedokel caves, with a specific look at the early burials at around 2,900 years ago, whose specimens were a great deal smaller than their presumed descendants who died around 900 years ago. Here's an excerpt...

Orbital dimensions are small even relative to female pygmies from the Andaman Islands (Figure 7), and average orbital and nasal breadth values in the Palauans fall below mean values for a comparative sample of small-bodied modern humans (San bushmen from the Kalahari) and fall close to reported values for LB1 (see Table 1).

A similar pattern is seen in mandibular dimensions (Table 2 & 3). While facial dimensions in the Palauan sample are absolutely smaller than those of the San (at the time of preparation of the manuscript, comparative data collection was still underway, thus comparison is made here only to the African San sample), their faces were larger relative to body size. Associated craniofacial and postcranial elements are lacking in the Palauan sample, making it difficult to evaluate facial-to-body size proportions.

As a heuristic measure, we created facial size ratios by pairing the smallest value for a given facial variable with the smallest value for a given postcranial variable, and by pairing the largest facial dimension with the largest postcranial dimension for each variable (see Supplementary Data S4).

We will no doubt be criticized for constructing what might be considered unreasonable chimeras from unassociated cranial and postcranial remains, but we reiterate that, given the lack of associated material in the assemblage, we engage in this exercise simply as a means of exploring facial size in the assemblage vis a vis the size of postcranial remains in the assemblage, following the logic developed by [23] for unassociated upper and lower limb remains of Australopithecus africanus. In every case the resulting facial size/body size ratios are larger than the mean ratio of the same variables in the San.

And a few notes on cranial capacity...

The only crania complete enough to allow determination of endocranial volume are heavily encased in flowstone, which has deterred our best efforts to estimate brain size in the Palauan sample (see Supplementary Data S5). Nevertheless, it is clear from these specimens that the brain size is small, possibly at the very low end or below that typically observed in modern small-bodied humans.

Other recovered cranial remains are fragmentary, and accurate endocranial volumes have not yet been established for this sample. We have however, attempted (with varying degrees of success) to estimate cranial capacity through correlating three facial measurements with endocranial capacities in a large sample of modern humans (see Supplementary
Data S6, S7, S8).

Our results show clearly that the average endocranial volume of the Palauan sample recovered to date will almost certainly fall below the low end of the range (1000 cc) of our sample of 147 modern humans (which includes small bodied modern humans). Based upon these results and the size and morphology of other recovered neurocranial elements, brain sizes – while not ape-like as seen in LB1 – are likely at or below the low end of small bodied modern human variation, but within that of
H. erectus.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to skip to the end, where the researchers offer the following conclusions...

We have described here a new sample of small-bodied H. sapiens from Micronesia. The Palauan sample also has individuals that exhibit a number of characters normally associated with more primitive species of the genus Homo. The modern human skeletal remains from Palau, in conjunction with pygmoid populations across Australasia, exemplify the regularity with which small body size – physiological dwarfing - emerges in island contexts (and at times in mainland populations), and the Palauen sample contributes to our understanding of human size and morphological variation in island populations.

Apprehending the full nature of regional variation in Austromelanesian and Pacific Island populations is essential to interpreting the taxonomic status and phylogenetic history of H. floresiensis. A number of the individual traits observed in the Palauan sample are seen also in specimens from Flores (although the form of these traits may differ in the Palauan sample), some of which have been argued to support the unique taxonomic status of H. floresiensis: small body size, reduction of the absolute size of the face, pronounced supraorbital tori, non-projecting chins, relative megadontia, expansion of the occlusal surface of the premolars, rotation of teeth within the maxilla and mandible, and dental agenesis.

These last two features are not argued to be taxonomic markers, but their occurance in specimens from both Palau and Flores is notable, as they may be parallel results of founder effects, genetic isolation and a high inbreeding coefficient, or may simply be a factor of evolutionarily rapid reduction in body and craniofacial size [26].

While we have not seen in the Palauan sample the extremely small brain size documented for one individual from Flores, current indications place the cranial capacity of the Palauan sample at the lower end (and possibly below) the range of variation presently considered “normal” in modern H. sapiens, and within the range of H. erectus

In the sample recovered to date, we have not observed all of the features used to originally define H. floresiensis (such as ape-like endocranial volumes and pronounced canine juga), nor would we expect to - particularly if these features were the manifestation of a genetic anomaly, such as microcephalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism, manifest in the type specimen LB1 [see 4], [27][29 vs. 1,30,31].

We have not yet recovered adequate material to compare features of the cranial base considered taxonomically important in Flores, nor do the two Palauan ossa coxae exhibit the extreme lateral flaring of the ilium as observed in LB1 [14].

Our findings do suggest, however, that a number of the morphological features considered either primitive for the genus Homo (e.g., small brain size, enlarged supraorbital tori, and absence of chins) or unique to H. floresiensis within the genus Homo (e.g., relative megadontia) may emerge as developmental correlates of small body size in pygmoid populations. This finding would be consistent with the argument that Flores LB1 may represent a congenitally abnormal individual drawn from a small-bodied island population of H. sapiens.

These results also suggest that the simple presence of additional small-bodied specimens with reduced chins (that cannot be shown to share all of the traits considered taxonomically significant in the Holotype Flores LB1) is insufficient to confirm the taxonomic validity of H. floresiensis.

Based on the evidence from Palau, we hypothesize that reduction in the size of the face and chin, large dental size and other features noted here may in some cases be correlates of extreme body size reduction in H. sapiens. These features when seen in Flores may be best explained as correlates of small body size in an island adaptation, regardless of taxonomic affinity. Under any circumstances the Palauan sample supports at least the possibility that the Flores hominins are simply an island adapted population of H. sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.

However, as we see from Page 2 of the National Geographic article, there is still strong support for Homo floresiensis being a new species of human in its own right...

William Jungers, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York and a former National Geographic grantee, stands by his conclusion that the hobbit is a unique species.

He notes that the small bones, large teeth, lack of a chin, and other features that characterize the early Palauans as well as the hobbits can be found in other small-bodied human populations around the world.

But "the smallest-bodied people on Earth do not converge on the proportions and various aspects of morphology of the hobbits," Jungers said.

Jungers points out that the hobbit is distinguished from modern humans by jaw structures called transverse tori, which are seen in human ancestors, such as australopithecines and some Homo erectus fossils, he noted.

Chris Stringer, lead researcher in the human-origins program at London's Natural History Museum, points to other defining characteristics in the hobbits' feet, teeth, and shoulder and wrist bones.

Based on this evidence, he says, "I still believe that the Flores material is something distinct and primitive."

Berger says his team has yet to analyze the shoulder, feet, and wrist bones in their Palauan sample and thus cannot comment on how they compare to the hobbit bones.

This one looks set to run and run, albeit on feet of a somewhat reduced size.

Update : I just saw this article over at Anthropology.net, which reports on the controversy surrounding the discovery of the bones and the subsequent making of a film by National Geographic, which it transpires, incurred the wrath of local people, concerned that burial sites had been disturbed for unscientific reasons; this from Kambiz, who references a report from Rex Dalton at Nature, part of which reads...

In Palau, some officials and traditional leaders are concerned that sacred burial sites were exploited for movie-making rather than scientific purposes. Adalbert Eledui, the state resource manager who oversees the region, describes the movie as “unscientific” and says he should have had notice before it was broadcast to protect the sites from an expected influx of visitors. Now, he says, resource managers may need to build cages to restrict access to the caves.

...which drew this repsonse...

I can only speculate that the story behind the Palau findings went something like this… Berger was kayaking around these Micronesian islands and stumbled upon these findings. He saw an opportunity, and he sought out a big institution with big money to fund his work. The National Geographic Society of course, didn’t hesitate to fund Berger. They would love to make some sensational headlines, especially if these 25 or so individuals were hobbits like Flores. The Society mobilized to make a documentary out of this and all along the people of Palau were left out of the loop.

This isn’t the first time that the National Geographic Society has been entangled in a mess like this. I can think of the drama surrounding the hasty excavation of Selam as one of the more prominent examples of when external interests pushed aside doing good science. Also, the questionable dating of Omo I and II, funded also by the Society is ill-received by many. In this situation, as outlined by the quotes from chieftains and Palauan government officials, critical information wasn’t passed down to the people who these bones belong too.

Tim White shared a comment about this problem in Dalton’s writeup,

“This looks like a classic example of what can go wrong when science and the review process are driven by popular media.”

To which Berger defended,

“he didn’t know the movie was scheduled to premiere before the journal report came out.”

"Bollocks. I don’t buy it. It is no secret that Berger was bed fellows with the National Geographic Society in getting these bones out of the ground, so why didn’t he nor the Society tell Palauans about this? It seems awfully hegemonic and disrespectful to not give the people of Palau a bit of a heads up! Don’t you think?"

Hmm, strong criticisms indeed, and ostensibly it sounds as though they're pretty well justified - further developments will doubtless manifest themselves in due course, as various parties scramble to clarify their side of the debate.


image from here - modern human at left, the middle skull is from Palaua, H.floresiensis is to the right,

Multi-analytical Study Of Palaeolithic Reindeer Antler. DiscoveryOf AntlerTraces In Lascaux Pigments By TEM


News from Lascaux, the Magdalenian painted caves in France, and although only the abstract to this paper is free to access, hopefully this story will be reported elsewhere by someone who has access to the whole text; in the meantime, here's that abstract (in full)...

Palaeolithic and modern reindeer antler were analysed using complementary techniques to evaluate the conservation state of bone material. X-ray diffraction, FT-IR spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM–EDX) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM–EDX) as well as proton induced X-ray and γ-ray emission (PIXE–PIGE) at the particle accelerator AGLAE, C2RMF were applied.

This study enabled us to define the chemical and structural features of ancient antler at the micro- and nanometre scale and compare them to those of other bone materials such as bone and ivory. Antler is richer in its organic fraction compared to bone and ivory. Its mineral fraction, carbonated hydroxylapatite, shows very specific crystal shapes at the nanometre scale.

This specific property allowed us to recognize antler traces in pigment samples originating from rock art paintings in the Lascaux cave, Dordogne, southwestern France, Magdalenian period. Therefore, TEM–EDX is the technique of choice for characterizing antler traces in complex mixtures.

In the paint material of Lascaux, antler seems most likely to be a pollutant introduced either by stirring the pigments in water with a piece of antler or by carving antler artefacts next to the preparation of paint material. However, it could eventually be used as a marker of paintings that were created contemporaneously.


My guess would be that the inclusion of antler was part of the ritual of creating and administering the paint itself - by doing so, the Lascaux painters were perhaps imbuing their work with part of an animal which they may have held in very great reverence, and by including material from it, they may have believed that they were giving extra power or significance, symbolic or otherwise, to the images they were creating.

Antlers are frequently depicted adorning the heads of shamans, as well as other figures in Palaeolithic art, such as this image, dubbed The Sorcerer, from Trois-Frères, and although it's not clear from this abstract exactly which paintings at Lascaux were subject to this analysis, it would be interesting to know if the 'wounded bison' in the Shaft of the Dead Man, and accompanying images contained some of these antler traces.

References:

  • 1Laboratoire du Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (LC2RMF) UMR 171 CNRS, GdR 2114 ChimArt 2, Palais du Louvre, 14 quai François Mitterrand, 75001 Paris, France

*Received 17 November; accepted 23 May 2007

†Corresponding author: ina.reiche@culture.gouv.fr

image from here


(via Palanthsci and Anthrosite)


High Court Action Halts Quarrying At Thornborough Henges


In common with Stonehenge, and the Dinedor Serpent, the massive, 5,000 year-old henges at Thornborough, in North Yorkshire, have been subjected to ongoing disturbance and damage caused by a combination of local politics and big business - in this case the culprits appear to be North Yorkshire County Council, and building materials supplier Tarmac, who between them had apparently decided that visiting increased destruction on one of Britain's most significant ancient monuments was entirely justified, if enough money could be made in the process. This from North Allerton Today...

Quarrying of land close to an ancient site near Ripon has been halted following a legal challenge in the High Court.

It is the latest twist in a long running saga over proposals by Tarmac Northern Ltd to quarry 1.1 million tonnes of sand and gravel near the Thornborough Henges, described by archaeologists as 'the Stonehenge of the North'.

After a series of objections and a revised application, North Yorkshire County Council granted permission more than a year ago for an extension of quarrying operations covering 76 acres of land at Ladybridge Farm, Nosterfield.


The decision notice allowing quarrying to begin was issued last October, but after a legal challenge in the High Court by the
Friends of Thornborough Henges, the council has agreed to quash its decision and reconsider it at a meeting in Masham on April 22.

A spokesman for the Friends said: "A number of legal faults were identified in the way North Yorkshire had made their decision. North Yorkshire agreed that they had got it wrong on three accounts."


So as we can see, the reprieve may only be temporary, but it might occur to some people that there is no lack of sand and gravel available in vast quantities at numerous locations across the UK, and that as such there is no justification whatsoever in vandalising valuable heritage sites such as Thornborough Henges; more from the linked article...


The council's Director of Business and Environmental Services, Gordon Gresty, said: "This development has had a contentious history and the legal challenge needs to be seen against the background of the wide range of issues the Planning and Regulations Functions Committee took into account when it arrived at its decision to grant consent.

"These issues were properly and comprehensively considered by the committee. However, in order to avoid further legal proceedings we have agreed to the quashing of the present planning approval and it would be our intention to take the issue back to the Planning and Regulatory Functions Committee."


A Tarmac spokesman said: "We understand that following legal submissions, the planning consent which we received last October to commence production of sand and gravel at Ladybridge Farm, is no longer in effect.
"We hope that a corrected report will be placed before the county council's Planning and Regulatory Functions Committee at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, we have stopped work at the
Ladybridge Farm site."


The rest of us will be hoping that the corrected report convinces the committee members that any further expansion of this ruinous project should be discontinued forthwith, and that Tarmac will find somewhere more suitable to conduct their sand and gravel extractions - one look at the image at top makes it abundantly clear that irreparable damage has already been done to the Cursus, and that's what left of the site should not fall prey to further predations upon its dignity.

So for now, it's fingers crossed for April 22nd, and it's to be hoped that common sense prevails, whereupon this and any future applications to inflict more damage at Thornborough Henges, are unceremoniously dumped into the nearest ditch.

see also : 24 Hour Museum : Rollright Stones Under Threat From Chipping Norton Traffic Proposal

Update: Here's the latest Press release from TimeWatch.org...


Urgent action called over Thornborough

Heritage campaign group TimeWatch have called for urgent action over Thornborough Henges.

Following the recent news that planning permission to quarry Ladybridge Farm has been overturned following a legal challenge by campaign group Friends of Thornborough.

TimeWatch believe that recent archaeological discoveries within the application area mean it would be impossible for the council to grant the planning application when it is reviewed at a council meeting in Masham on April 22nd, so long as significant numbers of the public show they value the archaeology and wish to see it protected.

“The original application was thrown out because it threatened nationally important archaeology. The second application was only granted because the planning committee believed the revised site plan avoided any of the archaeology” said TimeWatch Chairman George Chaplin. “But since the application was granted, Tarmac have found Neolithic archaeology within the site, meaning that the original ruling must stand, but only if the public show they value their heritage”.

“A great many of us were shocked that the second application was passed, the lack of significant objections was one factor, we need to make sure that everyone who objected to the first application knows they can object on exactly the same grounds again”.

TimeWatch are advising all concerned to write to NYCC planning department to express their concern before the end of March: The Planning officer, Ladybridge Application, Environmental Services, Planning & Countryside Unit, County Hall, Northallerton DL7 8AH. Quoting Application number C2/29/500/53 Ladybridge Farm.


Contacts

TimeWatch – info@timewatch.org
www.timewatch.org


And to add to that, here's some contextual detail...


Background

Thornborough Henges is the location of some of Britain’s largest prehistoric structures, the site, which is comparable to the Stonehenge complex contains numerous henges, ritual causeways, burial and settlement sites from the far reaches of history. The site has been called the most important between Stonehenge and The Orkneys by English Heritage.

The complex covers several square miles and was Yorkshires largest ritual location in the Neolithic period. Unfortunately for a number of years the gravel bed that Thornborough sits upon has been subject to quarrying and significant quarrying within the monument complex continues to this day; although the major monuments are scheduled, the landscape archaeology surrounding them are not.

In 2002 Tarmac, the quarry company in question announced plans to quarry Ladybridge Farm and Thornborough Moor, both locations are known to contain
nationally important archaeology from the Neolithic period.

Following that announcement, several archaeological organisations voiced concerns and ultimately a number of campaign groups became involved in the cause of saving as much of the Thornborough Henges monument complex as
possible. These campaign groups include Friends of Thornborough, TimeWatch and Heritage Action. In addition, many notable archaeologists, including Richard Bradley, Richard Prior and Mark Horton have spoken out against the new proposals.

In the run up to the planning application being determined, a petition numbering some 10,000 signatures, and 1,500 letters of objection were received by North Yorkshire County Council.

As a result of the significant lobbying and support, that initial planning application to quarry Ladybridge Farm was refused due to the potential damage to nationally important archaeology located within the application site.

The issue hit national headlines and most pundits agreed that the correct decision had been arrived at. After all a very significant ancient site of national importance would have been seriously damaged by the quarry diggers; recording of archaeology prior to destruction is a poor alternative to complete preservation and not normally an option for such important remains.

But this good news was short, a modified application was quickly seen by the council before many campaigners knew it had been presented. The seeming lack of public outcry to the revised application making it easy for the council planners to believe that the cause for objection no longer existed.

The primary reason the new application was granted, was because Tarmac claimed that it avoided any areas that contained nationally important archaeology. A claim vehemently denied by heritage campaigners, but seemingly accepted by English Heritage and Council Archaeologists.

However, Tarmac’s road to quarrying Ladybridge still has along way to run. Behind the scenes, lobby group Friends of Thornborough put together a legal challenge to the application that has caused the council to revoke the planning permission previously granted in order to avoid a judicial review of the judgement.

North Yorkshire County Council have decided to re-judge the planning application on April 22nd at a special public meeting at Masham Town Hall.


Monday, March 10, 2008

North Sea Neanderthals From 100,000 Years Ago


For people who became extinct some 25,000 years ago, those Neanderthals have an uncanny knack of grabbing the headlines of today, and this account of a recent find from the depths of the North Sea bears testament to how much there is still to be found out about their occupation of northern Europe, as well as the importance of realising how much of the Pleistocene landscape has since disappeared beneath the waves, a situation that has in some ways greatly distorted our view of who was living where and what they were up to, back in the last Ice Age and beyond - this from Wessex Archaeology...

An amazing haul of 28 flint hand-axes, dated by archaeologists to be around 100,000 years-old, have been unearthed in gravel from a licensed marine aggregate dredging area 13km off Great Yarmouth.

The find was made by a Dutch amateur archaeologist, Jan Meulmeester, who regularly searches for mammoth bones and fossils in marine sand and gravel delivered by British construction materials supplier Hanson to a Dutch wharf at Flushing, south west Netherlands.

The axes show that deep in the Ice Age, mammoth hunters roamed across land that is now submerged beneath the sea. These are the finest hand-axes that experts are certain come from English waters, although there have been several finds on beaches, for example at Pakefield in Suffolk.


Of course Neanderthals hunted other fauna than mammoth, most notably reindeer, of which they appeared to be inordinately fond, and 100,000 years ago, there was an interglacial period, so it's possible they were hunting and eating a variety of other animals as well. More from the article...


Phil Harding of Wessex Archaeology and Channel 4’s Time Team programme is an expert on the Ice Age. He said: “These finds are massively important. In the Ice Age the cold conditions meant that water was locked up in the ice caps. The sea level was lower then, so in some places what is now the seabed was dry land. The hand-axes would have been used by hunters in butchering the carcasses of animals like mammoths.”

He added: “Although we don’t yet know their precise date, we can say that these hand-axes are the single most important find of Ice Age material from below the North Sea.”


I remember watching Channel 4's presentation, 'Britain's Drowned World', which looked at, or rather under the North Sea, at the landscape which had existed up until the Mesolithic, before a catastrophic rise in sea levels caused a vast swathe of land from eastern Britain to Denmark and the more southerly Lowland countries of today, to disappear beneath the waves - during the programme, I seem to recall mention of a few private collectors in the Netherlands, who had come into possession of Neanderthal fossils that had been accidentally dredged up from the bottom of the eastern North Sea - which would make them the most important finds from under the North Sea, but until there is confirmation and analysis of those putative finds, this find of 28 hand-axes is currently the most significant of its kind.

English Heritage, the Government heritage agency, is co-operating with Dutch counterparts, the National Service for Archaeology, Cultural Landscape and Built Heritage to evaluate the finds. The hand-axes date to the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age) but exactly when in that 750,000-year time span is yet to be determined. While the hand-axes were discovered in Holland, the gravel came from a licensed marine dredging area in English waters known as Area 240 – some 13km off Great Yarmouth lying in water depths of about 25m. Bones and teeth, some of which may be from mammoths, were also recovered along with the axes.

Ian Oxley, Head of Maritime Archaeology at English Heritage, said: “These are exciting finds which help us gain a greater understanding of The North Sea at a time when it was land. We know people were living out there before Britain became an island, but sites actually proving this are rare.”


Whilst the finding of such sites is rare, it's the difficulty of conducting underwater archaeology at such depths which proves the greatest obstacle to discovering their actual whereabouts, and subsequently excavating them - indeed, archaeologists will probably have to wait for sea levels to drop during the next Ice Age before being able to properly explore the entire sea-bed.


Ian Selby, Hanson’s Marine Operations and Resources Director, added: “The hand-axes were collected over a three-month period and this remarkable discovery only came to light in February when Mr Meulmeester, realising their importance, informed the wharf owners. As we manage our dredging very carefully, we were quickly able to identify the area where the finds came from. As part of our industry’s protocol with English Heritage, we have now moved dredging to another part of the seabed.”

The reporting of the hand-axes demonstrates the level of co-operation that exists between the dredging industry, through its trade association, The British Marine Aggregate Producers Association, and English Heritage. The protocol, signed in 2005, aims to protect archaeological remains discovered in English waters as a result of marine sand and gravel extraction.

The reporting protocol for archaeological finds was an industry led initiative to prevent finds such as these going unreported. The potential for discovering finds has always been known to exist within dredging areas. The industry with consultants Wessex Archaeology and English Heritage established a mechanism through which any finds could be reported and assessed. The Guidance notes produced on behalf of English Heritage and BMAPA, can be viewed at:


http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/projects/marine/bmapa/index.html


There is also a very good page, Palaeolithic Handaxes from the North Sea, which goes into a little more detail concerning the context of this revelation from a drowned landscape, and why the finding of 28 hand-axes is itself such an important discovery, as it indicates that there was probably a great deal of activity at the site, as well as the possibility that other discoveries may yet come to the surface - and as suggested, these artefacts may yet to turn out to be a great deal older than 100,000 years.

see also : 24 Hour Museum

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Human Evolution on Trial : 'Change' : by Terry Toohill


Human Evolution on Trial - 'Change'



The only thing constant is change. Change may be rapid but is more usually gradual. It can also be large or small. Change leads to variety through both time and space. Changes in the rate and size of change have given rise to the phenomenon known in evolution as “punctuated equilibrium”, periods of large and rapid change separated by periods of very little change.


New Zealand


New Zealand is a young country both geologically speaking and in relation to human history. It also occupies a small space on planet earth. This combination of factors makes it a convenient place to start any examination of the past.


The jury will find the patterns we discover there have a much wider relevance than just for New Zealand or even just for modern humans though. All the patterns and ideas the defence presents here will pop up regularly during the rest of this case in favour of the defendant.


New Zealand consists of two main islands, and several smaller ones, which stretch from latitude 48° south to latitude 34° south with some small islands beyond these latitudes. Most of the country’s underlying rock, or skeleton, consists of material laid down on the sea floor between the beginning of the Permian geological period (260 million years ago) and, halfway between then and now, the end of the Jurassic (130 million years ago). Over time the material was compressed, heated and hardened by the weight of the sea, chemical reactions and heat from the earth’s core. Earth movements eventually pushed up this material and made New Zealand’s skeleton. The skeleton was then overlain with younger rock eroded off this skeleton as well as with some volcanic material.


That all this change is still going on is shown by the fact New Zealand suffers many earthquakes and has several active volcanoes. In fact Australians often call us “The Shaky Isles”. The defence will provide the jury with a short history of the earth and return to this side of things in Part III (“Time” and “Long Ago”).


New Zealand has been isolated in the southwest Pacific Ocean since the southern continent of Gondwanaland started breaking up during the Cretaceous more than 65 million years ago. The nearest continent is Australia, 2000 kilometres to the west, and much of New Zealand’s plant and animal, and especially bird, life has arrived across the ocean from there. Several bird and insect species have arrived through their own efforts even in the two hundred years since Europeans got here. But there is biological evidence of ancient island connections to the northwest, via both Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands, to New Caledonia and probably even further north (Stevens 1985).


Actually some of our birds and especially plants have been here since the ancient continent broke up. For example we share, or used to share, large flightless birds with Australia, New Guinea, Africa, Madagascar and South America. The New Zealand representatives of this group have been called “moa”. They died out as recently as five hundred years ago. Several small members of this group, the kiwis, still survive in New Zealand but they too seem to be rapidly dying out.


Destruction


The arrival of humans caused a major change in the New Zealand environment. In “Extinctions” the defence will show that this has been the pattern throughout the world. Elliot, Manighetti and Carter (2003) have produced a pollen profile that shows a permanent drop in the amount of forest tree pollen from between about 1000 and 1200 AD, the generally accepted time of Polynesian arrival. The profile does show human induced fires first occurred on the east coast of the North Island about 1500 years ago. Other evidence suggests the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans) may have also been present in New Zealand by then. The pollen profile shows the forest then soon recovered quite significantly although not quite to its previous level.


The evidence for the presence of humans in New Zealand before a thousand years ago may indicate the arrival of all-male fishing parties lost in storms or small groups of migrants who failed to leave descendants. You will later see that the source of these migrants was presumably Western Polynesia (Fiji or Tonga) but there is actually no evidence for this other than possibly some rat nuclear DNA (King 2003). In fact mitochondrial DNA evidence from Polynesian rats now living on offshore islands around New Zealand shows they are genetically closest to those from Eastern Polynesia; the Cook and Society Islands (Lisa Matisoo-Smith quoted in Howe 2003). This suggests the evidence for their early arrival may have been misinterpreted but you saw in “Pedigrees” [Populations] that mtDNA lines can die out for one reason or another.


Although some inhabitants of New Zealand claim more ancient ancestry within the country overall the evidence doesn’t support the presence earlier than about 1200 AD of any people who left descendants. Some members of the prosecution might claim any earlier settlers in New Zealand were able to live completely in harmony with their environment and that is why we can find so little evidence for their existence. The defence will offer more evidence on the subject in “Extinctions” and show this is most unlikely. If it were so they would be the only humans in the whole history of the earth to have achieved this harmony. Of course it is possible very small numbers of earlier inhabitants survived in New Zealand but they were on their way to extinction by the time the later people arrived (possibly through inbreeding and we’ll look at this next). An increase in fire, extinction of birds, carbon dating of human artifacts and the earliest stone tool types all date to more recently than 1200 AD (McGlone et al in Sutton 1994 and King 2003).


But let’s not get carried away with how special humans are. The environment usually changes, sometimes in an extreme manner, with the arrival of any new species.


The permanent settlers who arrived in New Zealand about one thousand years ago probably maintained contacts over the whole country (Sutton 1994 and King 2003). James Belich (1996) provides a good argument that a sizeable migration reached New Zealand and it spread virtually instantly around the desirable parts of the coast. He suggests that for a people who had just travelled over the Pacific Ocean a few trips around the coast of New Zealand was nothing (and see also Bellwood 1978). The relatively sheltered East Coast provided the main trade routes, seals and moa provided abundant food and everyone was happy…


Until the most easily exploitable resources ran out.


Increasing Population + Diminishing Resources = Strife + Selection


Studies of both prehistoric and modern hunter-gatherer groups show that life is short and women have only three or four children each (see for example Houghton 1980). But these studies are not done on populations moving into previously uninhabited regions.


The population numbers of any species usually grows to the maximum possible for the resources available. As James Burke (1978) says, in relation to humans in Medieval Europe, “When times are good the population rises, and sooner or later, it rises too far”. The population growth in New Zealand could have been very rapid with adequate food, no overcrowding and no predators. Allowing a generous 25 years per generation and women having as many as ten children, half of whom would be female, the population potentially could have reached epidemic proportions in 200 years (over three quarters of a million starting with even just one couple). Rosalind Murray-McIntosh’s research on mitochondrial DNA (quoted in Howe 2003) indicates at least seventy women arrived in New Zealand, i.e. at least 200 people.


Evidence from the teeth of skeletons shows that by about 1500 AD life in New Zealand had become more difficult. Moa, along with seal colonies on easily accessible parts of the coast, had dissappeared. The diet of prehistoric Maori changed from seal and moa meat to an increase of fern root (Houghton 1980). The culture then changed and we get fortified settlements (Howe 2003) and division into separate groups, tribes.


Tribes


The word tribalism can mean different things to different people but I suggest we say it is the grouping of humans into larger units than simply families. A tribe is therefore the largest group that any particular individual considers him or her self as belonging to. It can vary from less than two hundred up to the size of a nation. Tribes are held together by shared culture. The defence showed earlier (“Mythconceptions”) that our beliefs are part of our culture. We will return to this side of things in Part V (“Culture”). In modern society, especially cities, the tribal groups we identify with can change almost from hour to hour but until recently tribes were a more stable concept. Humans, especially infant humans, survive best, or even only, as members of a cultural group or tribe. Children accept the culture and mythconceptions of the tribe they grow up with as normal. This is just as well. Life would otherwise be too complicated for most of us to cope with. It also means culture usually changes quite slowly. But elements of it can change quite rapidly when children associate mainly with their own age group during their schooling.


Tribalism is therefore part of culture and seems often to be strengthened in response to limited resources. Tim Flannery (2001) has suggested cultural diversification and tribalism developed in North America also as a result of the depletion of resources after the initial colonisation by the ancestors of the American Indians.


We might regard tribalism as the first step on the road to speciation, the evolution of life into the reasonably discreet units we call “Species”. Many animals such as dogs, rats and especially birds display tribalism and it is a learned behaviour even there. Young birds are imprinted soon after hatching with the form, colour and song of their parents. This means they usually mate with the members of their species similar to them even though they may be quite capable of mating with others. Frank Gill (1998) has stated...

“Projected to its full conclusion, this line of thinking suggests that speciation in birds is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a genetic phenomenon”. Behaviours that lead to speciation (or tribalism) are called “isolating mechanisms” and many behavioural characteristics are genetically inherited (Jones 2000). The whole phenomenon is much more widely spread than just among birds but they do provide interesting evidence.


Galapagos Finches


The defence suggested in “Conception” [The Chinese Drover’s Clever Dog] we should assume there is one set of biological rules for the whole of nature including humans unless it can be proved otherwise.


Throughout nature during times of plenty and when numbers are expanding the boundaries become porous. Everyone parties on. Tribalism decreases and even what have been recognised as being different species may breed together. For example two kinds of Geospiza, or ground finch, from a single island in the Galapagos sometimes breed together in times of plenty (Weiner 1995). Normally the different kinds specialise in exploiting different elements of the environment. Some have a large beak and others have a small beak depending on what food they specialise in. The finches, taken together, form a double bell curve for this characteristic. Breeding is usually confined within each of the two types, big beaks breeding only with big beaks for example. Hybrids are at a disadvantage compared to the specialists. This has led to the development of two apparently separate kinds or species. But when the environment changes dramatically, such as during El Niños when rainfall increases, population numbers increase rapidly and the two separate species of finch often breed together. Hybrid individuals with middle-sized, unspecialised beaks are able to survive and breed. The two bell curves tend to merge. Genes swap between the two kinds. With the return of difficult conditions the types separate again each specialising in their particular ecological extreme. It seems that in general specialisation, tribalism and separation are greatest at times of environmental stress.


Interestingly, a similar thing has been shown to happen with human society. As long ago as 1915 John Dewey (1966) claimed different classes and social groups mix with each other more during expansive economic periods. Presumably he agreed they tend to become isolated when times are difficult. And in his book “Mapping Human History” Steve Olson (2002) claims immigrants to France over the last fifty years have been assimilated into French society more effectively during times of better economic performance. The balance of nature is very complex and constantly changing. The defence will return to this idea many times during this case in favour of Human Evolution.


It is possible that at times during human existence we have not been tribal. The numbers able to survive the worst of times determines the numbers of any particular species in any region. The human population may have been kept in check by seasonal or periodic food shortages, predators, environmental disasters such as floods, droughts etc. and even genetic diseases. It might have been a major and happy occasion when one family group met another during times of plenty. It is probably fair to say much gene flow would have occurred. The evidence indicates that throughout history the introduction of new technology has led to times of plenty. Times of plenty promote population expansion and (at least to some extent) the breaking down of tribal barriers.


But during the last few thousand years for most of us our greatest enemy has usually been each other. As resources become fewer creatures divide into closed groups. With hard times the Maori of New Zealand eventually grouped into tribes (King 2003). These tribes may have developed from divisions going back to the arrival of different canoes during the original migration to New Zealand, as oral tradition states, but to consider different tribes or “Iwi” were discrete, genetically isolated, populations is wrong. Maori myth is full of stories about people moving to live somewhere else. Much inter-Iwi marriage (pdf) occurred, especially in the upper classes. Regional differences did develop, though, and some people may be referred to as looking typically Tainui or Ngapuhi etc, though these differences are little more than family resemblances. It is also possible to tell where a native speaker of Maori comes from by their dialect and most of us are aware of the regional dialects of Britain and Ireland.


Variation Through Space


Different tribes or Iwi are actually the result of geography.


Of course throughout the world families living close to each other have always bred together and formed alliances based on common ancestry, sometimes mythical. Geographic boundaries isolate groups. Mountain ranges, especially heavily forested ones, or large swamps, isolated the various populations within New Zealand. They provided boundaries for the various tribal districts or “rohe”. For example Ngati Wai are from Northland’s East Coast. The heavily forested Puhipuhi hills and the Hikurangi Swamp separate them from Ngati Hine. The Tutamoe Range and Waipoua Forest separate Ngapuhi from Ngati Whatua (if Te Roroa are considered to be part of Ngati Whatua) though they come into contact around the south head of the Hokianga Harbour. Ngati Kahungunu are isolated by the Ruahine and Tararua Ranges and so on. You will later see the boundaries between many species are also geographic.


Variety, or difference, is a product of change through time and space and is not just confined to biology. It is even demonstrated by basic economics. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This used to be justified by the expression “survival of the fittest”; a term first used in 1852 by Herbert Spencer while he was sub-editor of the paper “The Economist”. In economics the concept obviously leads automatically to monopolies but most economists still prefer to keep quiet about that (Saul 2006).


The passing of time leads to greater change and so to greater variety. But Maori may not have lived in New Zealand long enough, or the country may not have been large enough for them to develop into tribes of the American Indian type. For example a single Maori language was spoken throughout New Zealand (King 2003) but the pre-European population of America shows a much greater level of variety. Apart from those of the far northwest, most languages of the American Indians are possibly related to each other and may have an ancient common origin (Greenberg and Ruhlen 1992). But subsequent internal migrations mean that individual tribes do not always understand their neighbours’ languages.


Africa provides an example of even greater variety of population. When I travelled in West Africa I could generally tell whether a person was Wolof or Mandinka by their features and the sound of the language even though I couldn’t actually understand either language. This is more than I can do for most national groups in Europe, but humans are presumed to have been in Africa longer than anywhere else and so differences have had longer to develop.


You will find throughout this case that languages, beliefs, species, and even individual genes, have all separated into regional varieties as they have spread around the world (for example “Pacific Population” [Mixing], “Culture” [Evolution of a Religion], “Species” [Difference], and “MtEve”[The Trees]).


Variation Through Time


Most Iwi or tribes in New Zealand trace their ancestry back to a particular individual. And so they are more like Scottish clans than they are like American Indian or African tribes. It is probably no accident groupings of Maori families or “Hapu” are referred to as Iwi. Iwi also means bones. Hapu (clan) means pregnant. While we’re on that subject whenua, land, also means placenta.


A claim to have descended from a particular ancestor usually gives an individual the right to live in a particular district or rohe. Sometimes it is suggested burial rituals in human culture may have first developed from a desire for descendents to stake a claim to a particular territory (Cunliffe 1994). As early as late “Middle Paleolithic” (paleao – old) Neanderthal times (about 40,000 years ago) there is controversial evidence for ritual burial (D’Errico 2003). But with the development of larger populations and the diversification of cultures during the “Upper Palaeolithic”, from about 35,000 years ago, the evidence is definite. Before this time human groups may have been more mobile.


But we can classify humans into a hierarchy of divisions or groups depending on the closeness of relationship, each level containing progressively more members. These groups make up a continuum. As in a pedigree numbers increase as you move to the right.





Individual / Family / Whanau / Hapu / Clan / Iwi / Tribe.





Membership of divisions further to the right indicates a more ancient common ancestry, progressively more likely to be based on mythconceptions.


Genetic similarities can be used to indicate close relationships at the left-hand end but beyond the right hand end, and often before then, genetic differences become regional rather than tribal. For example, as you saw in “The Human Star” [A Cline], the main genetic difference within the people of Europe shows up as a simple genetic gradient or cline from the northwest to the southeast despite the complicated distribution of different races and language groups (Cavalli-Sforza 1995). Even within North America and Australia the main gene variation of the pre-European inhabitants forms a cline and the various tribes cannot be distinguished genetically. Breeding is usually between near neighbours, or at least it was before the development of modern transport such as aircraft and even the bicycle.


The defence will now show the jury a diagram of these connections from the opposite point of view. It is like an individual’s family tree. The various lines all reach the bottom of the diagram but this would be very difficult to show.




Because languages change over time they too display degrees of separation. They evolve. The English language has actually changed considerably even in the short time since I was a child. It has taken on new words and expressions and many words have changed their meaning. The wave theory of genetic, cultural and technological evolution tells us that languages expand as waves. Although they usually mix with other languages they can also be arranged in the form of a family tree. We’ll later use this idea to help us follow human migration. The defence will even argue that genes spread in much the same way languages do, but by no means always together. The evolution of languages can also tell us about evolution in general. Regional or spatial language variations start to develop with dialect being the first, grading in time to differentiation into separate languages within a particular language family. It can be very difficult to define the boundary between languages within a group though. For example the people on different islands in Polynesia speak different dialects and speakers of some dialects cannot understand some other dialects. The relationship is not simple as Rarotongans can usually understand much of New Zealand Maori but changes in the languages make it very difficult for some speakers of Maori to understand Cook Islanders. The relationship between species is not simple either, as the defence will later show.


The language we speak is part of our culture. Culture, including language, myths, clothing, art, music, sport and religious beliefs can serve to unite groups (even different tribes or races) and can promote gene flow.


But culture can also divide groups and obstruct gene flow. It usually relies on accentuating exclusiveness and division, a “them and us” philosophy. (Gene flow usually occurs even in this situation though). In other words culture can lead to differences that are apparent rather than real.


Culture and technology can travel further and faster than genes and there are many examples of groups adopting at least some elements of a different culture and technology. In fact New Zealand provides a good example of the mixing of two languages, two cultures, two technologies and two gene pools.


European Migration


The arrival of Europeans and the various animals and plants they brought with them led to yet another major and rapid change in New Zealand’s environment. History records that in 1642 the Dutchman Abel Tasman was the first European to see New Zealand but it is fairly likely Portuguese or Spanish sailors had already done so. It was Captain Cook’s voyage in 1769 that brought New Zealand to the attention of Europeans though. Sealing and Whaling ships soon visited and bases were established around the coast. Traders, escaped or released convicts from Australia and general adventurers then arrived followed by European missionaries. European men were readily accepted into Maori society because they brought in new technology (King 2003). Missionaries’ wives were probably the first European women to live in New Zealand but European women didn’t arrive in the country in any numbers until after 1840. Until that time gene flow between the two human populations in New Zealand was almost entirely between European men and Maori women. In fact cultural factors meant Maori men didn’t contribute many genes to the European side of the population until long after that time. By then many Maori people already had some West European genes and spoke an imported language, English.


The English language itself is part of the German group and is a product of the Anglo-Saxon movements into England that started about 1600 years ago. This was not an instantaneous change either and it may have taken up to 300 years for English to replace any previous languages in England (Davies 2001). In fact there is a great deal of evidence to show much of the original population survived. This all goes to show that culture, including language, doesn’t necessarily coincide with chromosomes and DNA.


The defence will mention many migrations throughout this story and they should all be regarded as being similar to the movement of Europeans to New Zealand, Anglo-Saxons to England or the various groups into Egypt (“Mythconceptions” [Modern Myths]). A reasonably gradual process including mixing with the original population, usually at first by incoming males with resident females, a gradual mixing of genes and the eventual dominance of one language over the other, not always by the incoming one. Total population replacement is very rare. The movement of Europeans into New Zealand was fairly rapid because of modern transport. It was also complicated by the loss of a number of the indigenous population through internal wars, introduced diseases and the Victorian cultural attitudes of the immigrants.


New Zealand provides useful evidence for the defence case. We have at least two groups who can definitely be called different races with different cultures who are mixing genetically. One language is replacing the other, although words from the original language are being adopted by the more recent arrivals. International communications in one of these languages is hindering this exchange and during prehistoric times the whole process may have been more balanced. Languages too are able to form hybrids. Mixed languages are called “Creoles” but usually just one language dominates and it simply borrows words from the other (Jobling et al 2004). Any combined language always uses at least the basic elements of just one of the parent languages. Languages are classified by examining these basic elements because individual words can zoom around the world.


Today most New Zealanders have genes from a variety of ancestors; Ngapuhi, Ngati Wai, Wai Taha, Scottish, English, Chinese, Pacific Islanders etc. and what we can call Dalmatians or South Slav. In other words a mixed gene pool. The jury will eventually see it had been this way with their ancestors even before they left wherever it was they left to come here. But if somehow New Zealand became isolated for many generations, or several hundred years, the mix would eventually produce a new race with a new culture and language. Within that race people in the northern and eastern regions of the North Island would tend to have darker skin compared to those in the South Island. They will have a higher proportion of Polynesian genes. Some Y-chromosme and mitochondrlal DNA lines will have died out but the majority of surviving lines would probably descend from European ones. Remember that in just 250 years time each individual’s pedigree will contain a list of over one thousand people alive today.


It is often said “the more things change the more they stay the same”. The defence will argue races and cultures have always developed in exactly the way New Zealanders have. In fact the pattern stretches right back to at least as far as our origin as a species. Human groups in contact with each other have always produced hybrids (crossbreeds) through gene flow. Homo erectus (“man erect” and see “First Humans”) may have been well named.


The jury will eventually see population movements have been continuous during Human Evolution. But we will need to brush up on genes before the defence can use the Polynesians’ evolution to help explain the evidence in favour of the defendant.


See next :: Human Evolution On Trial - 'Hybrid Vigour And Inbreeding'




Witnesses Called



Belich, James (1996) Making People. Penguin Press, Auckland.

Bellwood, Peter (1978) Man’s Conquest of the Pacific. Collins, Auckland.

Burke, James (1978) Connections. Macmillan, London Ltd.

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca and Cavalli-Sforza, Francesco (1995) The Great Human Diasporas. Addison- Wesley

Cunliffe, Barry ed. (1994) The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe. Oxford

University Press, Oxford.

Davies, John (2001) The Celts. Cassell and Co., U.K.

D’Errico, F. (2003) The Invisible Frontier: a Multiple species Model for the Origin of Behavioral Modernity. (pdf) Evol. Anthrop.12, 188[-202.

Dewey, John (1966) Democracy and Education. The Free Press, New York.

Elliot, M., Manighetti, B. and Carter, L. (2003) Dating the Human Colonisation of New Zealand. Proceedings of the New Zealand Geographical Society.

Flannery, Tim (2001) The Eternal Frontier. Text Publishing, Australia.

Gill, Frank B. (1998) Hybridization in Birds. (pdf) The Auk, Vol. 115 No 2 April.

Greenberg, J. and Ruhlen, M (1992) Linguistic Origins of Native Americans. Scientific

American, 267 –94-99, Munn and Co., New York.

Houghton, Phillip (1980) The First New Zealanders. Hodder and Stroughton, Auckland.

Howe, K. R. (2003) The Quest for Origins. Penguin, New Zealand

Jobling et al (2004) Human Evolutionary Genetics. Garland Science, New York.

Jones, Steve (2000) Almost Like a Whale. Anchor, London.

King, Michael (2003) The Penguin History of New Zealand. Penguin Books, New Zealand.

Olson, Steve (2002) Mapping Human History. Houghton Mifflin Company, New York.

Saul, John Ralston (2006) The Collapse of Globalism. Penguin Books, England.

Stevens, Graeme (1985) Lands in Collision. Science Information Publishing Centre,

Wellington.

Sutton, Douglas G. ed. (1994) The Origins of the First New Zealanders. Auckland University Press, New Zealand.

Weiner, Jonathan (1995) The Beak of the Finch. Random House, London.

BBC Radio 4 - The Drawings on the Wall - Part 5 - 'The Architecture of Death' - Review


BBC Radio 4 - The Drawings on the Wall

Here's the fifth and final part of the series, brought to us this week from the island of Anglesey, North Wales, and specifically the site of Barclodiad y Gawres, a cruciform passage grave which bears a strong similarity to Fourknocks/Fuair Cnocs over in the Boyne Valley, Ireland, which was featured in Part 3 of this series. Here's this week's show description, from the BBC website...


George Nash, Cadw officer Mike Yates and rock art photographer Adam Stanford visit Barclodiady-Gawres Neolithic burial chamber in Anglesey, North Wales.

They record the etchings on acetate sheets, using sharp directional
light to pick out the finely decorated stones at the burial chamber.

The chevron, diamond and zigzags were accidentally discovered by students with a simple video camera in 2004.

The rock art at the Barclodiad y Gawres passage grave on Anglesey has
similar traits to that found in Ireland in the Boyne Valley, suggesting
that there was some form of contact and exchange across the Irish Sea
during the late Neolithic c.2500 BC.

There appears to be a generic language expressed through this alphabet
of symbols. They comprise an intriguing array of zigzags and concentric
circles. No one knows what they mean, but because of their association
with death and burial it is more than likely they represent an epitaph
to the dead.

This art appears to have been restricted from public view, available only to the elite.

Like the clergy of medieval times and the graffiti artist of today, ‘knowledge is power’. And, on a dark stormy night on the Welsh coast near Harlech, another ‘new’ prehistoric discovery is made!


Another very interesting presentation, even if some of the claims at the beginning are a little optimistic - it's claimed that the figurative rock art discussed at Valcamonica in the previous edition is easy to interpret, as humans and animals are clearly depicted, but in reality we have no clear idea what messages were being conveyed, if any, and therefore no real clue as to the motives of those who created the images. At the end of the show an opinion is expressed that we will in the future be able to decipher rock art, although how we can ever be absolutely sure what is represented at the estimated 72,000 sites worldwide, without recourse to the thoughts of the people who created rock art in all its myriad forms, isn't clear.

The point is also made that not all the designs that have been found engraved or pecked into the rock could have been seen by ancient and modern visitors to the site, as the designs were occasionally found in hidden or obscure locations, that could only be discovered if one deliberately sought them out, knew where to look, or if one was there at the right time of day or evening, when subtle changes in local lighting conditions revealed what would normally be all but invisible to the casual viewer.


We hear opinions expressing the belief that the passage graves and some of the rock art within them was not meant for the eyes of all who gathered there to bury the dead, as there were public and private areas within - church traditions in mediaeval times specifically excluded the congregation from full participation in aspects of the service - parts were carried out behind a rood screen, and the language used was Latin, which very few people outside the clergy would have understood.


Odd that that they omitted the passage grave of Gavrinis, in Brittany, from the discussion, as the engraved designs there look strikingly similar in design and execution, to the more northerly sites in Ireland and North Wales, especially as they do make a connection between Anglesey and Ireland - although the geographical distance to France is greater, the similarities of the sites seem to indicate a connection of some type, and might hint at a set of beliefs that were applied across an entire section of north-western Europe in Neolithic times.

An opinion is put forward that such rock art and associated structures were created as a response to a society under pressure, in a changing Neolithic world, where the past was being left behind, and the future was uncertain - although it could be argued that the same factors have been present in human societies for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, and yet this response only occurred at a very specific time in recent prehistory.

Personally, I'd much rather have listened to a discussion which sought to find out why the passage graves in Brittany and Britain bore such striking similarities, and what differences there were, rather than the vague and somewhat irrelevant chat regarding modern-day graffiti art. As I mentioned in a previous post, there's a huge difference between Neolithic people designing, constructing and adorning spectacular passage graves and other megalithic structures, and modern day people decorating pre-existing structures such as public transport facilities, street walls, road-bridges and even park benches with a canned set of colours bought from a shop round the corner, no matter how exotic and vibrant some of that art may be.

All in all, a fascinating set of shows, and too bad the 5 episodes aren't archived or podcast, as I imagine th
ey'd be of much interest to a great many people for some time to come. Whether any direct link between rock art creators of the past, and graffiti artists aspray in the inner-cities of today, will be up to the listener to decide for themselves, but I remain unconvinced that aside from a very generalised idea of people creating designs and images on durable surfaces, any clear connection between then and now can be shown to exist.

see also : The Anglesey Rock Art Project :
Barclodiad y Gawres - Giving up more secrets?

Stonepages : Bryn Celli Ddu

image from here

Two-month Reburial Scheme Angers UK Archaeologists


Anger as burial site digs are blocked | Science | The Observer

Following hot on the heels of the Portable Antiquities Scheme debacle, comes news that the Ministry of Justice in Britain has imposed strict guidelines concerning the discovery and excavation of ancient human remains discovered in Britain; in future, excavated remains will have to be re-buried within two months of their discovery, and in some cases, permission to excavate at some sites will be denied completely. This from The Observer...

Severe cutbacks in researchers' freedom to study bones and skeletons from ancient graves have been imposed without warning by the Ministry of Justice. The move has caused consternation among archaeologists, who say that the restrictions will badly damage their ability to study Britain's past.

The ruling means permission for digs at burial grounds and old churchyards will be denied in some cases, while in others excavated human remains will have to be reburied within two months of their discovery.

In the past, researchers have been allowed to analyse skulls and bones for long periods. At the Vineyard, Abingdon, in Oxfordshire, for example, archaeologists uncovered hundreds of bodies from Roman, medieval and Civil War graves in the Nineties and then stored them before using them as sources for the first DNA sampling of buried human remains.

Scientists have also been able to study the impact of TB, osteoporosis and syphilis on early Britons as well as infant mortality. 'DNA analysis, isotope measuring and other techniques have recently revealed all sorts of information about our ancestors and our relationships with them,' said David Miles, the chief archaeological adviser to English Heritage. 'Now we will be blocked from using them on new finds.'

An example of the power of new techniques for studying human remains was provided by scientists who extracted DNA from the 9,000-year-old Cheddar man, a skeleton first found in the Cheddar Gorge. That DNA was then shown to match samples taken from several residents of nearby Cheddar village.


This attack on archaeology, and science in general, by the British Government will come as little surprise to many - the PAS scandal, mentioned above, the wasted millions squandered on consultants paid to ruminate while Stonehenge slowly disintegrates, the ludicrous decision - and subsequent back-tracking- to cut UK astronomers' access to the Gemini North and South telescopes, are but a few recent examples of a shallow-minded Government steeped in ignorance, seemingly hell-bent on trampling certain scientific research fields into the ground. Some more detail from the linked article...

When preparing to carry out an excavation on burial grounds, archaeologists used to apply for permits under the Disused Burial Grounds (Amendment) Act. However, it emerged that the law might not apply to the exhumation of human remains at archaeological sites, said a ministry official.

'As a result, we have not issued exhumation licences in such circumstances. It also emerged that in cases to which burial ground legislation did apply, there may be less scope for excavated human remains to be retained for as long as archaeologists might wish.'

Negotiations have failed to resolve the issue and this failure is now causing serious worries for archaeologists. A similar two-month reburial limit for uncovered remains is set to be incorporated in the CrossRail bill. Researchers expect hordes of archaeological goodies to be revealed when the massive railway line is drilled below London.

'If archaeologists excavating sites affected by CrossRail find an important Roman or Saxon cemetery, they simply couldn't do an adequate job of excavation and research in two months,' said Sebastian Payne, chief scientist at English Heritage. 'On top of that, they would be deprived of the remains in future to apply new techniques.'

This point was backed by Miles. 'People think archaeologists go around digging up the dead wherever they want,' he said. 'We don't. Usually we are called in because a new railway, motorway, house, supermarket or church extension is being constructed. Buried humans are found and we are asked to deal with them. We then use these skulls and bones to learn about our ancestors. The Ministry of Justice is now stopping us from doing that any more.'


It isn't immediately clear why the Ministry of Justice has chosen to act in this way at this point in time - maybe someone is worried that archaeologists may discover so much material during the CrossRail project, that severe delays will occur, and that costs to the public will escalate sharply as a result - which some cynics might claim is pretty much the situation with the existing rail network, without any archaeology being involved at all.

Hopefully this situation will be addressed in such a way that as much of Britain's past as possible is brought to light during the CrossRail project - this should be a golden opportunity for archaeologists to get involved in a large number of digs at numerous sites as they are encountered in the course of the railway construction, as well as for the edification of a general public that has become increasingly interested in Britain's ancient past over recent years.

see also : Archaeologists’ fears over burial law

image from here

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Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Royal Society Publishing - Proc. R. Soc. B (1996-) - First Cite - Are The Small Human-like Fossils Found on Flores Human Endemic Cretins? Full Text

Royal Society Publishing - Proc. R. Soc. B (1996-) - First Cite - Are the small human-like fossils found on Flores human endemic cretins? - Journal Article

The entire paper is available for download as a pdf, the abstract for which runs thus...

Fossils from Liang Bua (LB) on Flores, Indonesia, including a nearly complete skeleton (LB1) dated to 18kyr BP, were assigned to a new species, Homo floresiensis. We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital hypothyroidism leads to severe dwarfism and reduced brain size, but less severe mental retardation and motor disability than neurological endemic cretins.

We show that the fossils display many signs of congenital hypothyroidism, including enlarged pituitary fossa, and that distinctive primitive features of LB1 such as the double rooted lower premolar and the primitive wrist morphology are consistent with the hypothesis. We find that the null hypothesis (that LB1 is not a cretin) is rejected by the pituitary fossa size of LB1, and by multivariate analyses of cranial measures.

We show that critical environmental factors were potentially present on Flores, how remains of cretins but not of unaffected individuals could be preserved in caves, and that extant oral traditions may provide a record of cretinism.

I haven't read fully through the paper yet, as this is just to alert anyone interested to read it - I get the impression that this isn't just another theory based on cranial considerations, as there is a whole section on post-cranial elements, so it will be interesting to see what sort of response this prompts from those who believe that H. floresiensis really is a new species of human.

Authors

1 School of Applied Sciences, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia
2 School of Anatomy and Human Biology, Centre for Forensic Science, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia


Update March 11th, 2008 - In the final analysis, it seems this paper did little other than incur a great deal of scornful scepticism from the academic community - as is mentioned in at least 2 posts on the subject, the original specimens weren't actually examined, which meant that the emphasis placed on the measurement of the pituitary fossa was irrelevant, simply because the measurements turned out to be too inaccurate, based as they were on a poorly rendered image. This from John Hawks...
They took the images of CT scans presented in the supplementary data to Falk and colleagues' 2005 paper on the LB1 endocast, blew them up, and attempted to measure the length of the pituitary that way. To understand where they went wrong, I did the same thing. Here's the picture, blown up:

An estimate of 12.9 mm is wrong on many levels. For one thing, how many significant digits do you think you could get out of that figure? The blown-up version is clearly very pixelated. That by itself might not be so bad -- after all, a medical CT begins with limited resolution anyway -- but in this case there is no clear way to identify the borders of the pituitary fossa.

We might well do better with the endocast itself, or with the ability to rotate and relight the CT image, because we could explore the contours more thoroughly. Here all we have is a computerized rendering of the surface in which our recognition of the detail depends entirely on the simulated lighting.

This is where they went wrong. No replicable estimate is possible from that rendering, but they went with one anyway.

see also this report, from Kambiz at Anthropology.net :

Were Homo floresiensis just a population of myxoedematous endemic cretin Homo sapiens?



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Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Did H. erectus Exploit Acacia Timber,1.5 Million Years Ago?


Early Humans Had Woodworking Technology: Scientific American

This follows on from the recent article which covered the findings by
The Olduvai Paleoanthropological and Paleoecological Project, in which we saw how they are disputing the commonly held notion that early Homo erectus was a passive scavenger, instead suggesting that these early humans may have had the ability to hunt as far back as 2 million years ago.

To add a little context to that story, here's an article from 2001, which reports on the excavations carried out at another site, to the west of Lake Natron in Tanzania, called Peninj, thought by the researchers to be a 1.5 million year-old hunting camp used by
Homo erectus, and where some of the stone tools found might bear traces of ancient woodwork carried out by the archaic humans; this from Scientific American...


Archaeologists have discovered the earliest evidence for woodworking yet. According to a report published in the April issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, 1.5-million-year-old stone tools belonging to Homo erectus sport telltale traces of acacia wood. The new finding predates the oldest known wooden implements by about a million years.
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo (right) of the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and his colleagues unearthed the ancient hand axes, which were made in the so-called Acheulean tradition, at a site called Peninj in Tanzania. Subsequent microanalyses of the matrix adhering to the tools revealed residues of wood indistinguishable from those known from acacia. Furthermore, the tools exhibit wear patterns indicative of heavy-duty activities, such as hardwood working.
"The importance of this study is that it shows that humans, at a very early stage of their evolution, were producing wooden implements that have not been preserved in the archaeological record," the researchers write in their report.

Although it has been suggested that such early hominids lacked the necessary technology for hunting, the new study opens up the possibility that they were making wooden spears. "This could have enhanced their adaptation as hunters to open environments," the team notes, "and gives us further insight into the complex intelligence of hominids at that time."



The same story is covered in more detail at Earthwatch.org, in an article, 'Spanish Archaeologists Discover Earliest Evidence of Woodworking'...


"This is the oldest evidence of woodworking in human evolution," said Dominguez-Rodrigo. "The remains belonging to Acacia trees are proof that early humans had wooden utensils, such as spears and digging sticks, which very likely enabled them to have the technology necessary to become successful hunters."

Other team members involved in the discovery include Prof. Jordi Juan-Treserres, a paleobotanist from University of Barcelona, Prof. Jordi Serrallonga, an archaeologist from University of Barcelona, Dr. Luis Alcala, paleontologist and vice-director of the Natural History Museum in Madrid, and Dr. Luis Luque, geologist from the Natural History Museum. Funding for the project has been through the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Complutense University, and Earthwatch Institute.

The emergence of complex stone tools around 1.5 million years ago, with the so-called Acheulian technology, shows that early humans were endowed with a sophisticated dexterity in crafting some tools. However, these large bifacial artifacts, among which handaxes are the most common, were inefficient hunting weapons. Archaeological remains in early sites show that these early humans used the stone tools to butcher animals. For most archaeologists the lack of other artifacts suggests the lack of the adequate technology for a hunting way of life, until now.

The area of Peninj contains some of the oldest archaeological sites in the world with Acheulian tools. Most of the fossil fauna discovered by the Spanish team belong to animals that suggest a very open and dry savanna environment. Equids (like modern zebras), antilopini (like modern gazelles) and alcelaphini (like modern wildebeest) constitute most of the animals discovered.

The fossil pollen discovered also indicates a very open landscape dominated by grasslands and a smaller number of trees among which Acacia is the best represented. Some plant residues discovered (called phytoliths) show that the type of grass most represented is a short grass that grows in very open and dry ecosystems.



The fact that people 1.5 million years ago were operating in such an open environment, that offered little in the way of shelter certainly seems to suggest that they must have been very well adapted to a life which would have kept them on their toes on a constant basis - the presence of grazing animals meant there was plenty of food available for hungry hominids, but of course it also meant there would have been a clear and ongoing threat from any number of predators, particularly big cats and doubtless the ubiquitous hyena, both of which would have represented formidable foes to vulnerable humans.

On that basis it seems reasonable to assume that these humans were able to take care of themselves, and that they were indeed equipped with weaponry of some sort, quite possibly in the form of wooden stakes or spears as indicated above. Not only would such implements have been useful when hunting direct, if that happened, or scaring away other scavengers from a kill site, but in the open grassland environment would have provided a useful means of defence from creatures with man-sized bites that would have seen humans as another - if tiresomely unpredictable - item on the menu.

As far as I can tell there is no indication from the sites that wood was used a fuel for fire 1.5 million years ago, with the current estimates as the earliest use of fire dating back to a 'mere' 790,000 years - and neither is there any direct evidence which suggests that wood was worked in sufficient quantity and with enough planning for wind-breaks or other crude shelters (the thorny acacia branches might have been an effective deterrent to inquisitive predators) to have been constructed out on the open grasslands, but maybe the possibility shouldn't be dismissed out of hand; however I'd stop short of suggesting that tables and chairs etc., were part of the
Homo erectus woodworking industry - life would have been no picnic, rather a grim struggle to survive on limited, or at least keenly contested, resources. More from the linked article...


Dominguez-Rodrigo suggests that Peninj provides a unique scenario to test some of the most relevant hypotheses on human evolution. His team is attempting to answer questions such as: How did early humans survive in such a harsh environment? Did they hunt or did they scavenge for survival? If these hominids hunted, making them the earliest hunters in human history, what did their technology consists of? By studying the technology of these early humans, the team hopes to get a glimpse on how intelligent they were.

On-going studies in Peninj show that a strong competition of carnivores in the area must have prevented early humans from obtaining animal protein resources through scavenging. On the contrary, the analyses of bones from the archaeological sites show that hominids were exploiting fully-fleshed animal carcasses. This is indicated by the amount of cut marks made with stone tools on anatomical sections where flesh is nonexistent if carnivores had consumed the animals before hominids did. This fact suggest that early humans were hunting these animals unearthed at Peninj. Domingues-Rodrigo's team is attempting to find out how.

One of the archaeological sites in Peninj has provided the team with a critical part of the answer. An assemblage of over 200 stone tools has been excavated in a nicely preserved context. This has allowed for the first time the discovery of well-preserved microscopic remains on the edges of the tools caused by their use for 1.5 million years ago.

The team has carefully analyzed the artifacts and the surrounding soil for plant residues. Plant residues belonging to grasses have been found in the soil, but the residues found on the artifacts are different. They appear only on the surface of the edges of the handaxes, which are worn by hard use. The microscopic plant remains found on the handaxes have been identified as belonging to Acacia trees, indicating that the hominids were chopping wood.



Apart from the fact that it seems almost incredible that after 1.5 million years, the researchers were even able to detect that the wood on the stone tools is believed to have been culled from Acacia trees, it's worth having a quick look at the large number of resources that are available from a tree I'd normally think of as street furniture adorning the pavements and gardens of suburban England. Not only is Acacia timber widely exploited, but the tree has a number of other properties that would have made it useful to people across the world throughout prehistory.

Here's a few snippets from Answers.com, detailing some of those Acacia extras...


Food uses
Acacia seeds are often used for food and a variety of other products.
In Burma, Laos and Thailand, the feathery shoots of Acacia pennata (common name cha-om, ชะอม and su pout ywet in Burmese) are used in soups, curries, omelettes, and stir-fries.
Honey made by bees using the acacia flower as forage is considered a delicacy, appreciated for its mild flowery taste, soft running texture and glass like appearance.
Gum
Various species of acacia yield gum. True gum arabic is the product of Acacia senegal, abundant in dry tropical West Africa from Senegal to northern Nigeria.
Acacia arabica is the gum-Arabic tree of India, but yields a gum inferior to the true gum-Arabic.
Medicinal uses
Many Acacia species have important uses in traditional medicine. Most all of the uses have been shown to have a scientific basis, since chemical compounds found in the various species have medicinal effects. In Ayurvedic medicine, Acacia nilotica is considered a remedy that is helpful for treating premature ejaculation. An astringent medicine, called catechu or cutch, is procured from several species, but more especially from Acacia catechu, by boiling down the wood and evaporating the solution so as to get an extract.[2]
Alkaloids

As mentioned previously, Acacias contain a number of organic compounds that defend them from pests and grazing animals.[1] Many of these compounds are psychoactive in humans. The alkaloids found in Acacias include Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and N-methyltryptamine (NMT). The plant leaves, stems and/or roots are sometimes made into a brew together with some MAOI-containing plant and consumed orally for healing, ceremonial or religious uses. Egyptian mythology has associated the acacia tree with characteristics of the tree of life (cf. article on the Legend of Osiris and Isis).


Honey would certainly have been an attractive food-stuff, and it's possible that people were exploiting the gum from a very early time - the Neanderthals are thought to have been early gum chewers, but there's no reason to suggest that other archaic humans wouldn't also have been chewing gum, possibly as a means for cleaning away food particles from their teeth, and thus helping prevent oral infections, and maybe just because humans liked chewing gum then as now.

Interesting to learn that DMT can also be present in the bark of Acacia - perhaps this is echoed in the biblical reference to the Tree of Knowledge, (and see this) but it's unlikely that early H. erectus populations would have had the skills to exploit the psychoactive substance. DMT is the active ingredient in ayahuasca, a preparation of two plant species popular with tribespeople of the Amazon, (and increasingly so with rich tourists in search of a certain type of spiritual enlightenment) which allows the DMT to cross the blood/brain barrier, causing the consumer to experience brief, but very vivid hallucinations and related experiences.

Of course, it's impossible to know what long-term effect, if any, the ingestion of such substances would have had on early humans - some would suggest that that the mind-altering properties could have triggered some sort of quantum consciousness event in humans, leading to the invention of speech and/or a perception of 'other', abstract realms that lay beyond the daily experience of the physical world.

In any event, whether DMT or other substances were experienced or not, the suggestion that early H. erectus people were using stone tools to modify timber, which may then have been weaponised in some way, might hint at the emergence of spoken language at or near this point in prehistory,

Time to head back in the direction of Peninj for some closing remarks...


The meaning of this discovery is very relevant for the study of human evolution: humans were involved in woodworking activities more than a million years before the oldest evidence that we had until now.

Early humans, at a very early stage of their evolution, were producing wooden implements that have not been preserved in the archaeological record. According to this discovery