Saving the Temple of Banteay Chhmar, Cambodia - The Archaeology Channel - video

TAC - Saving the Temple of Banteay Chhmar, Cambodia

Although Angkor Wat is probably the best known of the Cambodian temple complexes, there are other sites considered just as important by archaeologists, especially when those sites are slowly succumbing to the toll exacted by years of neglect and and structural damage, which in some cases has been inflicted by humans.

Thus it is we join TAC as they highlight the Temple of Banteay Chhmar, a site which is currently subject to the close attentions of the Global Heritage Fund, an organisation concerned with raising funds to protect endangered archaeological sites across the known world, whilst actually engaging in work on-site as well - moreover, it was GHF who produced the linked movie, so without further ado, here are some details of it along with a look at the current research and rescue work being undertaken at Banteay Chhmar.

The initial shots aren't encouraging, as we see fallen pillars, broken masonry imparting a general sense of crumbling ruins ready to be covered by encroaching undergrowth from all around - yet the skill and artistry that comprises this temple complex is also immediately discernible. As see from the linked GHF page...

Lacking any conservation over the past 800 years, Banteay Chhmar has slowly collapsed and disintegrated - its proud towers and awesome temples disappearing into the overgrowth. Coupled with threats from trees and the jungle, structural failure and looting, Banteay Chhmar is in critical need for conservation, master planning and increased protection. Local communities must be an integral part of Banteay Chhmar’s protection and responsible development to ensure long-term success and proper management.

And as we see from the video, the site has been off-limits until 2007, when it was finally cleared of land-mines, a relic from the Khmer Rouge, who under Pol Pot devastated not only much of Cambodia's heritage, but visited untold pain and suffering on the civilian population - (while the West stood idly by, effectively doing little or nothing to prevent the genocide, bloodshed and torture of millions of citizens, back in the 1970s.)

Located in northern Cambodia, near the Thai border, Banteay Chhmar has for the time being been relatively secured against the ravages of looters, whom as we see from this account, have caused irreperable damage to the historic site...

Unfortunately these carvings have been an irresistible magnet for looters in the last few years and this pillage plumbed new depths recently with the boldest and best-organised temple robbery of all time. In all, just under half of the temple's wall carvings have now been removed but the latest theft was discovered by accident when Thai police stopped a truck carrying no less than 117 heavy stone pieces from a dismantled wall.

This has prompted a major crackdown on the plundering of artefacts from the 1,200 ancient temples scattered across the country by both Cambodian and Thai authorities. A visit by Thai Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn to Banteay Chhmar has helped to raise awareness of the plight facing these remote Khmer temples and the above picture shows her inspecting one of the bas-reliefs still in place.

The main task at hand is to stabilise the site, and to that end, GHF have taken a lead role, which in common with other of their projects, seeks to engage the native population - rather than acting as some sort of propietor to the site and excluding local people from having any say in the care and future of their own heritage. This appears to be in stark contrast to the way in which Angor Wat benefits outside agencies and companies, where the resident population hardly benefits at all and has little or no say in what is described as sustainable conservation.

The immediate result of this initiative is that an inventory of what remains is now being compiuled, after which a consolidation and presumably repair phase will be instigated. This will of necessity be a project conducted at both macro and micro levels; the sheer size of the temple complex and the vast amount of complete and damaged masonry requires a superhuman effort of muscle power on the one had, whilst on the other hand, fragments and undamaged stones will be examined in close detail to ensure that reassembly is carried out correctly.

Here are some further details from the linked GHF article regarding the proposed future of the site...

There are numerous monumental structures which will need to be scientifically preserved and stabilized as Banteay Chhmar is a massive temple complex. GHF’s vision is to conserve the site largely as a ruin with low-impact, safe visitor access via suspended cable platforms over the fallen structures, along with selective interventions for high-risk structures, bas-reliefs and towers. This unique vision of conserving Banteay Chhmar as a partial ruin will be a radical change from the standard concept of restoration favored in Angkor.

Visitors will instead experience a newly uncovered site previously hidden in the jungle for centuries and an accurate interpretation of a site with all its mystery intact and amidst natural features. Interpretations will be critical to the site’s success - Banteay Chhmar’s impressive bas-reliefs depicting the local Khmer history of the 12th Century is a doctoral thesis in itself. It is nevertheless planned for the entire site to be developed and for this information to be available through local guides, through the visitor center and in selected publications.

It's well worth reading through the exhaustively detailed article at GHF in order to gain a complete overview of the current woes and future hopes, whilst there are a few links provided by TAC for nore generalised research into the history of this site as well as Angkor Wat.

Four Stone Hearth 61 - Moore Groups Blog

Four Stone Hearth 61 @ Moore Groups blog

Having just read through much of the latest edition of the Four Stone Hearth anthropology blog carnival, it seems clear that the quality and extent of anthro-blogging continues to improve with every passing fortnight.

And although mention is made of the current crises affecting both science reporting and those working within the field of archaeology, there are nevertheless signs that the future may not be quite as blighted as we imagine.

Printed media in the guise of newspapers are undoubtedly on the way out - the February 6th podcast from Little Atoms, with Guardian journalist Nick Davies, gives a good illustration of this - but we can at least draw comfort that in the online world there is an unprecedented amount of science reporting available to millions of readers across the globe, far more than was ever available in the days when newspapers were the primary source of written material accessible to the public. We might moan and groan at the sight of looming paywalls, behind which much of the peer reviewed research is hidden, but Open Access is at least a step in the right direction, whilst the sheer volume of blogs written by those who actually work and study science has proliferated steadily over the past couple of years.

To get a good idea of what some of these bloggers are prompting us to do in the face of dire economic circumstances, how some of them conduct innovative research that furthers our understanding of the past in ways not previously considered, and how research in the future might pan out, just click over to the Moore Group blog to read yet another excellent compilation of thought-provoking and informative posts. From the partial re-opening of the Baghdad Museum to the ongoing debate about Neanderthal bones and the latest research into the Neanderthal genome, there's plenty of material to keep you thinking over the entire weekend.

The next Four Stone Hearth is as yet ghost-hosted, i.e. there are no living humans signed up for compiling edition number 62 on March 11th, 2009, or indeed for any editions thereafter, so if you want to fill a vacancy, just click the link and follow the instructions contained therein.

Ileret Fossil Footprints Indicate Anatomically Modern Foot at 1.5 Million Years Ago

Humans Walked On Modern Feet 1.5 Million Years Ago, Fossil Footprints Show

...And Why Didn't Those Feet In Ancient Times Wear Guggenheim Boots?

I was out walking the other day, along the concrete banks of a muddy Nervión, when my 12 y/o son remarked that a pair of Guggenheim boots would be pretty cool - I looked across at the titanium-clad meisterwerk, and after responding "It's about about boats, not boots.", I wondered how Frank Gehry would have reacted. After all, he'd gone to all that trouble of creating an architectural interpretation of ship-shapes and floating lines, reflecting the days when Bilbao had been a busy industrial port, and then someone else walks by the same creation, and interprets it as something entirely different, in this case a giant boot.

One of the reactions to the recent discovery of 1.5 million year-old fossil footprints at Ileret, Koobi Fora in Kenya, is a similar case in point, but before we get to Michael Cremo's recent appearance on Coast to Coast AM, here's some detail from the thoroughly modern Science Daily...

Ancient footprints found at Rutgers' Koobi Fora Field School show that some of the earliest humans walked like us and did so on anatomically modern feet 1.5 million years ago.

The footprints were discovered in two 1.5 million-year-old sedimentary layers near Ileret in northern Kenya. These rarest of impressions yielded information about soft tissue form and structure not normally accessible in fossilized bones. The Ileret footprints constitute the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human-like foot anatomy.

The authors of the Science paper reported that the upper sediment layer contained three footprint trails: two trails of two prints each, one of seven prints and a number of isolated prints. Five meters deeper, the other sediment surface preserved one trail of two prints and a single isolated smaller print, probably from a juvenile.

I'm not at all sure how two sedimentary layers 5 meters in depth apart can both be dated to 1.5 million years, unless the area was suddenly inundated with a huge layer of something like volcanic ash or a mud-slide, but as there are no further details to hand, I'll skip blithely over that point for the time being.

(update 03 Mar '09 - John Wilford Noble clarifies this in his article for the New York Times...

Dr. Harris of Rutgers said that excavations from 2005 through last year yielded scores of animal tracks as well as the erectus footprints. Geological evidence indicates that they were made on the muddy surface of a floodplain in a time of nearby volcanic eruptions. Layers of volcanic ash, mixed with silt deposits, were examined to date the finds.

The tracks were confined to two layers of sediment, vertically separated by 15 feet and about 10,000 years. The upper layer contained three footprint trails, two of two prints each and one of seven prints, as well as several isolated prints. The lower layer preserved one trail of two prints and a single isolated print.)

More details of the prints from Science Daily...

In these specimens, the big toe is parallel to the other toes, unlike that of apes where it is separated in a grasping configuration useful in the trees. The footprints show a pronounced human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with an upright bipedal stance. The size, spacing and depth of the impressions were the basis of estimates of weight, stride and gait, all found to be within the range of modern humans.

Based on size of the footprints and their modern anatomical characteristics, the authors attribute the prints to the hominid Homo ergaster, or early Homo erectus as it is more generally known. This was the first hominid to have had the same body proportions (longer legs and shorter arms) as modern Homo sapiens. Various H. ergaster or H. erectus remains have been found in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa, with dates consistent with the Ileret footprints.

As I haven't been checking much in the way of anthro news recently, the first I heard of this was on the Thursday edition of Coast to Coast, when George Noory made mention of the story, warning that Michael Cremo was on his way. In my mind's ear there then followed the sound of a creaking door, followed by squeaking wheels, similar to that of an ancient dessert trolley laden with various bits and pieces, labouring its way across the dining-room floor, pushed along by an elderly waiter responding to an urgent request for Ape Suzette.

And thus it was in a similar way I imagined Michael Cremo, around 8 minutes into Hour 1, (the remaining 3 hours with Linda Moulton-Howe were nevertheless, well worth the listen) with his outmoded ideas, being wheeled out one more time, trundling across the airwaves in order to rain down fire and thunder on the academic establishment for refusing to go along with his ideas that fully modern humans have been on this planet for hundreds of millions of years.

According to Cremo, Homo erectus was no more than "a kind of ape-man", (nice, concise scientific definition there) and thus contends that the footprints found at Ileret must have belonged to modern humans who were not only alive and well at 1.5 million years bp, but presumably behaving in exactly the same way as us too. Strange they weren't wearing boots, or driving around in wheeled vehicles whose fossilized tyre-tracks we might also expect to find, rather than just leaving us the lithic technologies that characterise artifact finds from that era.

When referring to the Laetoli footprints, Cremo further berates science for refusing to accept "The obvious fact that the footprints were made by humans just like you and me." The latter were discovered 30 years ago by Mary Leakey, dated at 3.6 million years, and ascribed to A. afarensis. Perhaps he should have checked this paragraph from the same article at Science Daily...

Other hominid fossil footprints dating to 3.6 million years ago had been discovered in 1978 by Mary Leakey at Laetoli, Tanzania. These are attributed to the less advanced Australopithecus afarensis, a possible ancestral hominid. The smaller, older Laetoli prints show indications of upright bipedal posture but possess a shallower arch and a more ape-like, divergent big toe.

...or even read the abstract of the Science paper itself, which clearly states that the Ileret and Laetoli footprints are different, implying that that the foot evolved in the intervening two million years...

Early Hominin Foot Morphology Based on 1.5-Million-Year-Old Footprints from Ileret, Kenya

Hominin footprints offer evidence about gait and foot shape, but their scarcity, combined with an inadequate hominin fossil record, hampers research on the evolution of the human gait. Here, we report hominin footprints in two sedimentary layers dated at 1.51 to 1.53 million years ago (Ma) at Ileret, Kenya, providing the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human–like foot anatomy, with a relatively adducted hallux, medial longitudinal arch, and medial weight transfer before push-off. The size of the Ileret footprints is consistent with stature and body mass estimates for Homo ergaster/erectus, and these prints are also morphologically distinct from the 3.75-million-year-old footprints at Laetoli, Tanzania. The Ileret prints show that by 1.5 Ma, hominins had evolved an essentially modern human foot function and style of bipedal locomotion.

Cremo seems to be making the case that if feet were anatomically modern back then, the rest of the body - and presumably behavioural aspects as well - must have been anatomically modern too. He cited a complete lack of foot-bones from this era to back up his point, but mysteriously failed to mention any anatomically modern skeletons of H. sapiens securely dated to the same era.

Noory is threatening to bring Cremo back for a full programme, during which air-time he'll no doubt explain why it is that supposedly fully modern humans 1.5 million years ago were walking round in bare feet, using stone tools and living the nomadic dream by refusing to build houses or practice any known form of agriculture, as well as failing to leave behind any written records or visual images of whatever it was they were up to back then.

Here's a brief snippet from Kris Hirst regarding the earliest known use of human footwear....

Earlier evidence for shoe use is based on anatomical changes that may have been created by wearing shoes. Erik Trinkaus has argued that wearing footwear produces physical changes in the toes, and this change is reflected in human feet beginning in the Middle Paleolithic period. Basically, Trinkaus argues that narrow, gracile middle proximal phalanges (toes) compared with fairly robust lower limbs implies "localized mechanical insulation from ground reaction forces during heel-off and toe-off."

He proposes that footwear was used occasionally by archaic Neanderthal and early modern humans in the Middle Paleolithic, and consistently by early modern humans by the middle Upper Paleolithic.

The earliest evidence of this toe morphology noted to date is at the Tianyuan 1 cave site in Fangshan County, China, about 40,000 years ago.

My somewhat laboured point being that if humans 'exactly like ourselves' were extant tens and hundreds of millions of years ago, we might expect them to have been wearing protective footwear from similarly early dates, rather than leaving it until the Middle or Upper Palaeolithic, almost as an afterthought at the dawning of yet another ice age.

This whole argument has it its heart the idea that we humans are in some way a special creation, designed by someone or something intelligent, and that an anatomically modern version of ourselves was delivered out of the box, for reasons that remain obstinately unclear.

Barefoot Across The Tundra

I'd be the first to admit that the evolution of bipedalism and the modern foot thereafter defies any easy explanation; indeed, science and academia have been mulling over these conundra for many years, and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. There was even a recent idea that bipedalism may have evolved over 20 million years ago, as suggested by Aaron G. Filler in his 2007 paper...

'Homeotic Evolution in the Mammalia: Diversification of Therian Axial Seriation and the Morphogenetic Basis of Human Origins',

...published at PLoS ONE.

Whether human use of footwear dating back to the Lower Palaeolithic (or earlier) will become apparent is anyone's guess, but science will need more to go on than the evidence claimed by Cremo and others for a fossilized sandal-print from Utah, aka The Meister Print, which it is suggested, dates to anywhere between 200 million and 500 million years.

But my more immediate concerns are for the future - this evening I again enquired of my son whether he would actually wear a pair of Guggenheim boots - the response was a worrying 'yes', and even though it's probable that no such attire exists, I now have visions of him stomping round his home town, leaving strange indentations in the floors, roads and pavements as his heavy metal shoes gouge out their boat-shaped prints that will cost the town council a small fortune to repair. Worse, they'll easily track us down and fine us, leaving me unable ever again to afford sitting in fancy restaurants, asking for flaming pancakes to be prepared by kindly waiters re-kindling their arcane skills in dangerous proximity to my table.

Reference:

Robin Huw Crompton and Todd C. Pataky. What can fossil footprints reveal about the evolution of the human foot? Science, 27 February 2009; 323 (5918), 1174 DOI: 10.1126/science.1170916

see also :: Eurekalert, where there is a brief video of the site at Ileret, as Rutgers Professor Jack Harris describes what has been found.

image of Ileret footprint from The Boston Globe

blogged via Babel's Dawn

Four! Stone! Hearth! 60! at Middle Savagery

Although I'm far away from my desk these few days, paying visits and my respects to the likes of Machiavelli, Galileo, Fra Angelico and a host of other ghosts from the Renaissance era, I've managed to nip online just long enough to post this heads-up for the current edition of Four Stone Hearth at it hits its spritely sixties. And even though I won't have time to read it for a day or two yet, don't let that delay you for a single instant from heading over to Middle Savagery and checking it all out, especially as there seem to contributions from one or two sources that may not be instantly familiar to all.

Hosting Four Stone Hearth in a couple of weeks will be the Moore Group Blogs, around the 25th of February by my estimates, see you soon.

Neanderthal Soundscape For National Museum Wales 'Origins' Exhibition

BBC NEWS | Wales | Composer's Neanderthal recreation

As part of a new exhibition 'Origins: In Search of Early Wales' which opened in December 2008, jazz composer Simon Thorne has been commissioned to provide a 75-minute musical backdrop to the Palaeolithic section. This from BBC News...

The exhibition includes artefacts like a Neanderthal hand axe and teeth found at Pontnewydd in Denbighshire and, as part of his research, Cardiff-based Mr Thorne visited the cave where they were found.

He said he was the first to admit that knowing exactly what Neanderthal music would have sounded like is impossible.

"It's a ridiculous notion to suggest we could ever know the precise role that music played in the lives of the Neanderthals, but imagining it has been a fascinating experience."

We don't know for example whether Neanderthals merely played music on hand-fashioned instruments such as flutes, composed songs for voice only, or whether they would have combined the two - given that these archaic humans were famously barrel-chested, it's possible they would have possessed a most impressive singing voice, capable of booming out across any valley, come ice, sleet or snow.

Nor could we know whether music was reserved for special occasions only, such as pre-arranged meetings, before or after a hunt, or even as they went roaming across the blasted landscape, feeling the freeze and chilled to the bone.

Back to more tangible details, specifically in that part of the modern world we know as Cardiff - continuing from the linked article, we have this...

The composer has also researched the era extensively and been inspired by two books - Prof Steven Mithen's 'The Singing Neanderthals' and David Lewis Williams's 'The Mind in the Cave'.

Prof Mithen will be at the museum launch and, in conversation with Mr Thorne, will talk about the role music may have played in the lives of the Neanderthals.

The Reading University academic, whose research centres on the evolution of human language and musical ability, said Thorne's work was "a fantastic go at evoking the sense of prehistory of our human ancestry".

He added: "He is trying to create the whole sense of being there at that time."

Ignoring for the moment that the term 'Prof Mithen' sounds a little slapdash by BBC standards (Prof without a full-stop at the end never looks quite right, and shouldn't be encouraged), there's an audio clip to check at the linked story, as well as one at the composer's own website, whilst this article at 24Hour Museum offers us a further glimpse at what is on display at the Cardiff museum...

The most talked about exhibit is surely the Red Lady of Paviland, on loan from Oxford University Museum of Natural History for a year. The ‘Lady’ is actually the skeleton of a man and represents the oldest human remains found in Wales, dating back 29,000 years. The bones are coloured red with ochre, hence the name.

Other highlights on show include spectacular Bronze Age jewellery such as the Capel Isaf bracelets and the Burton hoard neck pendant; a Roman cup with its bronze handle formed into the shape of a leopard (from Abergavenny); and the stunning Viking sword guard found in the Small Reefs off the coast of Pembrokeshire, dating to the 12th century.

We turn once more to caves, which appear to have provided a modicum of inspiration for the composer, Simon Thorne - as we see...

As well as the music, a specially commissioned film will help transport those present into a Neanderthal cave.

It will go on tour, complete with four singers, stone instruments and a video project to Harlech, Cardigan, Milford Haven and Swansea at the end of March, and already Mr Thorne has had "great interest" in his experiment from the British Museum.

Although I've been on a tour of Palaeolithic caves, I must admit I've never heard of a touring cave, so full marks for originality to whoever came up with the idea - on second thoughts, that can't be right, so it must be just the film and musicians who are doing the tour,

A somewhat shorter musical experience featuring our archaic cousins can be obtained by listening to the Fila Brazillia April 2007 single, namely the sublime 'Neanderthal', which at around five minutes' duration, should make convenient listening for even the busiest of modern humans, as they hunt for sub-atomic particles near the zero-point, whilst gathering genetic data from the fossilized bones of our long-gone forebears.


See also : Scenic Dordogne - Ode To A Neanderthal Walking Dordogne Trip

image : Album cover for 'Neanderthal', Fila Brazillia @ MySpace.

The Archaeology Channel - Choquequirao: The Cradle of Gold

The Archaeology Channel - Choquequirao: The Cradle of Gold

This week we're off to an ancient Inca site in Peru, namely Choquequirao, which apparently translates to 'Cradle of Gold', and which moreover is described as 'the other Machu Picchu', or indeed the 'sacred sister' - although as we'll see later, a Machu Picchu minus the vast crowds of tourists which now frequent that site on a more or less daily basis.

And so to the video, which at 12 minutes duration gives us a preliminary look at the site, which even today is only partially excavated, having lain undiscovered since 1752, when the Spanish conquistadors finally vanquished the Inca, against whom they had been fighting since 1536; indeed this has been the case for many Incas sites, often at isolated locations high in the Andes, which over the centuries became hidden from view as vegetation grew and slowly covered many temples, sanctuaries, aqueducts and all manner of other edifices, built in what must qualify as some of the most beautifully designed and expertly constructed buildings, not only of their era, but in the entire historical period. Here's some further description from an article by Ethan Todras-Whitehill, written for the New York Times in June 2007...

In a small chamber two feet from where I stood, the high priest had once meditated daily to seek guidance from his god. In the two-story peaked-roof structures downhill and to the left, workers had dropped off their tools at night — weary men stumbling in after a Sisyphean day of cutting and lugging stones. Beyond lay a panorama of jungle and 17,000-foot peaks. Around me was silence — and isolation.

This was Peru, but not the famous Machu Picchu. I was at Choquequirao, a sister city of similar significance built along similar lines, but harder to reach and, for the time being, still sufficiently free of tourists for a visitor to imagine, without much effort, the priests and builders, the supplicants and courtiers roaming its paths and plaza. Twenty-five years ago, Machu Picchu must have looked much like this.

Choquequirao’s builder, Topa Inca, chose his city’s site and design precisely because of the similarities to Machu Picchu, the city of his predecessor, Pachachuti, according to Gary Ziegler, an independent American archaeologist who worked on the first Choquequirao excavation. The two cities were about the same size and served the same religious, political and agricultural functions. But because archaeologists long underestimated the importance of Choquequirao, the city’s existence was known for almost 300 years before the first restoration was begun in 1993. It is still only 30 percent uncovered. The Peruvian government is just beginning to plan for large-scale tourism there.

The news that Choquequirao is being prepared for the onslaught of mass tourism will be greeted with mixed feelings - on the one hand, it should ensure that funding is available for further archaeological field-work to be conducted, as well as care for the site in general. Set against that is the risk of damage to the site caused by the sheer weight of humanity visiting the place, as well as the likelihood that the sense of tranquillity and separation from the outside world may well be lost for ever - such are the dilemmas facing the Peruvian authorities as they try to balance curation with degradation, but hopefully there won't be any repeats of damaging incidents seen at Machu Picchu, in which the site was damaged during the course of filming a beer commercial.

In any case, there's plenty more information about the ancient site, how it connects to others in the locality, how it was never mentioned by contemporary Spanish chroniclers, and how the journey to get there is equivalent to stepping back into a past world, surrounded on all sides by impressive and rugged peaks, often shrouded in cloud.

Once you've watched the video, there are some links provided by TAC for further online exploration, and which are as follows...

The Andes Web Ring (James Q. Jacobs)

Archaeology Research in Peru (Bruce Owen)

Choquequirao (Wikipedia)

Come to Peru: Culture, Nature and Adventure (PromPeru)

The Other Machu Picchu (New York Times)

South American Sites & Culture (Minnesota State University E-Museum)

Although I missed covering the previous TAC presentation on saving the Indus Valley, the 5-minute video for that can be found here.


image from qoyllur tours

Danny Fund - Danny Federici And Melanoma Research Alliance

Danny Fund

About a day or so ago, I received an email in which was contained information that Jason Heath, son of former E-Street band member Danny Federici, has set up a website dedicated to raising awareness about the potentially fatal risks of contracting melanoma, which caused Federici's demise at the age of 58, back in April 2008, as reported here in the New York Times...

Danny Federici, a keyboardist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band since it was formed in the early 1970s, died on Thursday. He was 58 and lived in Manhattan.

His death, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, was caused by melanoma, according to Mr. Springsteen’s Web site, brucespringsteen.net.

Born in Flemington, N.J., Mr. Federici began studying classical accordion at 7 before switching to electric organ and joining rock bands. He played at clubs in Asbury Park and made his first recording on a single by an Asbury Park songwriter, Bill Chinnock, whose bands included two other future members of the E Street Band: Vini Lopez on drums and Garry Tallent on bass.

Mr. Federici and Mr. Lopez started their own band and invited Mr. Springsteen to become a member. “This skinny guy with long hair and a ratty T-shirt was an incredible guitar player and a good singer, so we asked him to join,” Mr. Federici once said.

The remainder of the article goes on to review Federici's career, and we turn next to Danny Fund.org, the website mentioned above, which amongst other features, is offering a free download of a song called 'A Fighter's Lullaby', performed by Jason Heath & The Greedy Souls, and written by Joe Purdy - in addition there is another free download, 'Carnival On High'.

The page can be accessed at this link, whereupon a video at the top of the page will open, in which Bruce Springsteen explains how the Danny Fund and The Melanoma Research Alliance have been set up to facilitate research into this skin cancer, and further advise us to to take adequate precautions when exposed to strong sunlight for prolonged spells, a well as checking with a dermatologist.

(According to a figure I saw quoted on Wikipedia, melanoma kills an estimated 48,000 people worldwide each year, and is particularly prevalent amongst caucasians, especially those with fair skin and who have emigrated to climates much hotter than their native land - Australia would be a case in point, where many of its inhabitants in recent decades have left temperate zones in Europe, and now find themselves in a climate which can often be far hotter and sunnier than they are able to tolerate.)

We return to the Danny Fund site, where Jason Heath writes thus...

In April of 2008, it was my father's dying wish for us to set-up a website that would help raise melanoma awareness and funding for research. Thousands of people came to the original "Danny Federici Melanoma Fund" site to pay their respects, write kind letters and donate to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the research being done by my Dad's doctor, Paul Chapman. To find out more about Dr. Chapman's research go to Federici Fund Trial.

It's your love and support that got us this far - now let's all take it to the next level.

In the same spririt, the band's first album, 'The Vain Hope Of Horse' has been dedicated to Danny Federici, and if you check this MySpace link, you'll find half a dozen tracks which are free to listen, which in my opinion make for pretty good listening - the genre is described as folk, but there's an element of C/W as well, particularly expressed on the excellent song, 'Thunderstruck'.

By coincidence, the band are playing tonight, February 7th, at The Hotel Cafe, in Hollywood, California, at 11.30 pm, and if by some chance you can't get there, you have an entire month to arrange finding your way to Mr T's Bowl, in Los Angeles, where the band are due to appear on March 6th, at 8 pm - judging by the tracks I've just heard, I've no doubt it would most worthwhile making the effort to show up and lend your support.

My thanks to Versa Manos at Gorgeous PR for passing along this news

Artist Info at Playmayercraft.com

image :: Federici and Springsteen from Seattle Weekly.com

Max Planck Institute To Unveil Vindija Neanderthal Genome

Neanderthal genome to be unveiled : Nature News

This latest news is brought to us by Nature, via A Very Remote Period Indeed, and describes how the genome of a 38,000 year-old Neanderthal has been sequenced, the culmination of a three year project undertaken by Svante Pääbo and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig; This from Rex Dalton at Nature...

The entire genome of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal has been sequenced by a team of scientists in Germany. The group is already extracting DNA from other ancient Neanderthal bones and hopes that the genomes will allow an unprecedented comparison between modern humans and their closest evolutionary relative...

...Comparisons with the human genome may uncover evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans, the genomes of which overlap by more than 99%. They certainly had enough time for fraternization — Homo sapiens emerged as a separate species by about 400,000 years ago, and Neanderthals became extinct just 30,000 years ago. Their last common ancestor lived about 660,000 years ago, give or take 140,000 years.

Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere is all but abuzz with this news, noted at Leherensuge, Greg Laden, and John Hawks to cite but a few, and doubtless many thousands more words will be written once the data are made available. Until then, here are some details from the linked article on how the material was obtained and sequenced, with additional information regarding similar projects currently underway...

Almost all of the Neanderthal genome to be unveiled in Chicago comes from DNA extracted from a single bone originally discovered in a cave near Vindija in Croatia.

The age of the sample means that its DNA has degraded into fragments typically only about 50–60 base pairs long. But the German group used new sequencing technology, developed by 454 Life Sciences of Branford, Connecticut, that can analyse segments of this length.

The German team has recently extracted DNA from the bones of five other Neanderthals — and so is well on the way to creating a library of Neanderthal genomes that would allow stronger comparisons with modern humans.

Rubin's group is also sequencing Neanderthal DNA from the Croatian bone, and is trying to find other specimens to work on; as are other teams in France and Spain.

It seems likely that in the near future, not only will we be able to know a great deal more regarding the tricky question of interbreeding between anatomcially modern humans (AMH) and Neanderthals, somebody somewhere will begin work on cloning a Neanderthal, who may yet walk this Earth some 25,000 years after his or her ancestors took their last steps, lay down, and quietly died, perhaps in the manner described by William Golding towards the end of 'The Inheritors'.

For a fuller report on the forthcoming genome release, the Max Planck Insitute For Evolutionary Anthropology have a press release, Neandertal Genome To Be Deciphered, which includes the following snippet...

Extracting, identifying and sequencing ancient DNA from fossils is a technically challenging task. When an organism dies, its tissues are overrun by bacteria and fungi. Much of the DNA is simply destroyed, and the small amount remaining is broken into short pieces and chemically modified during the long period of fossil formation.

This means that when scientists mine tiny samples of ancient bones for DNA, much of the DNA obtained is actually from contaminants such as bacteria, fungi, and even scientists who have previously handled the bones. Over the last twenty years, Pääbo’s research group has developed methods for demonstrating the authenticity of ancient DNA results, as well as technical solutions to the problems of working with short, chemically-modified DNA fragments. Together with 454 Life Sciences they will now combine these methods with a novel high-throughput DNA sequencing that is ideally suited to analyze ancient DNA.

The researchers would apparently have required many kilograms of Neanderthal bone to conduct this study without the aid of 454 Life Sciences, who appear to have developed a type of synthetic short-cut, clearer details of which can be found by reading the remainder of the press release.

For the neurologically inclined, this August 2006 article at Neurophilosophy, 'What Will The Neanderthal Genome Teach Us About Human Brain Evolution?' should make for relevant reading, whilst the image at top is taken from that same post.

see also :: Vindija Cave And The Modern Human Peopling Of Europe (PDF) by Ivor Jankovic et al, 2006

A Green Comet This Way Cometh - NASA

NASA - Green Comet Approaches Earth

Although for many of us the night sky is all but invisible above the weird orange glow of urban illumination, there are nevertheless multitudes of rural-dwelling people accustomed to sleeping beneath a blanket of authentic nocturnal darkness, in which stars, planets and heavenly bodies sparkle and gleam as they dream. Should some of those folk choose to take leave of their warm winter beds on cold, clear nights over the next few weeks, they might easily be able to spot the vivid green Comet Lulin as it approaches planet Earth, during the middle to latter stages of February. Dr. Tony Phillips for NASA Science News has this advice for would-be watchers of the skies...

To see Comet Lulin with your own eyes, set your alarm for 3 am. The comet rises a few hours before the sun and may be found about 1/3rd of the way up the southern sky before dawn. Here are some dates when it is especially easy to find:

Feb. 6th: Comet Lulin glides by Zubenelgenubi, a double star at the fulcrum of Libra's scales. Zubenelgenubi is not only fun to say (zuBEN-el-JA-newbee), but also a handy guide. You can see Zubenelgenubi with your unaided eye (it is about as bright as stars in the Big Dipper); binoculars pointed at the binary star reveal Comet Lulin in beautiful proximity. [sky map]

Feb. 16th: Comet Lulin passes Spica in the constellation Virgo. Spica is a star of first magnitude and a guidepost even city astronomers cannot miss. A finderscope pointed at Spica will capture Comet Lulin in the field of view, centering the optics within a nudge of both objects. [sky map]

Feb. 24th: Closest approach! On this special morning, Lulin will lie just a few degrees from Saturn in the constellation Leo. Saturn is obvious to the unaided eye, and Lulin could be as well. If this doesn't draw you out of bed, nothing will. [sky map]

The comet, officially dubbed Comet C/2007 N3 Lulin, is named for the Lulin Observatory in Taiwan, where it was first spotted in July 2007, by a 19-year-old student, Quanzhi Ye, whilst examining a photo of a star-field, captured by astronomer Chi Sheng Lin a couple of nights beforehand. Here are some things we need to know...

The comet makes its closest approach to Earth (0.41 AU) on Feb. 24, 2009. Current estimates peg the maximum brightness at 4th or 5th magnitude, which means dark country skies would be required to see it. No one can say for sure, however, because this appears to be Lulin's first visit to the inner solar system and its first exposure to intense sunlight. Surprises are possible.

Lulin's green color comes from the gases that make up its Jupiter-sized atmosphere. Jets spewing from the comet's nucleus contain cyanogen (CN: a poisonous gas found in many comets) and diatomic carbon (C2). Both substances glow green when illuminated by sunlight in the near-vacuum of space.

All of which sounds as if some of us here on Earth could be in for something of a spectacular display, and which got me to wondering where I would hypothetically most like to be in the event that I was for some reason in a rural location one of those nights. Still fresh in my mind is a post I read last night over at Eternal Idol, in which Dennis Price mulls over a snow-bound Stonehenge, which like much of southern England, was inundated by the heaviest fall of snow there for nearly 20 years. Here's a brief excerpt from his most recent essay, Stonehenge in the Snow And The Sound of Silence, ...

I know little of the science of acoustics, but when I ventured out into the snowy woods and fields with Blueboy earlier tonight, there was a particular brand of silence that came into being as a result of what little background noise there was being muffled by the snow.

A snowstorm’s a striking enough phenomenon to see, as snow can range from the most delicate flakes dancing on the faintest currents of air, to thick flurries of the stuff raging around you in a blizzard. As Stonehenge was in active use for millennia and as there’s clear evidence of gatherings in wintertime at the nearby Durrington Walls, it seems unavoidable to me that snowstorms or blizzards would have had a special significance to the people of the time, while the peculiar silence after the snowfall would have added an extra quality to the landscape.

The site of Stonehenge possesses an allure and an otherworldly quality that we each perceive in a different way, but I don’t doubt that after a blizzard in prehistoric times, the stones, banks and ditches were endowed with yet another unique property and our ancestors would have sensed a particularly special brand of “magic in the air”.

It is something that scientific thought finds hard to quantify, but it is also something that is nonetheless very real to many people, regardless of whether or not the site in question is Stonehenge. My forthcoming book, investigating the alleged visit made to these shores by Jesus when he was a young man, contains a multitude of facts that anyone can easily and rapidly check for themselves, but I’ve not neglected to look into and consider the auras and atmospheres that surround numerous sites that I’ve mentioned.

I'd imagine that standing in or near somewhere like Stonehenge in the snow under a cloudless night sky, wrapped in silence and watching the green comet in the southern skies at 3 in the morning would make for a pretty good experience, especially as this would be the first time a human would be able to do this, at it's believed that this approach marks Comet Lulin's first incursion into the inner solar system.

On a final note, this article at Universe Today notes there is a peculiar twist to this comet's tail that has astronomers wondering exactly what it is they are seeing; this from the linked article...

While imaging N3 Lulin for UT Readers, Dr. Joe Brimacombe used a negative luminance frame to take a closer look at what's going on and discovered something quite out of the ordinary. First off, you'll notice an anti-tail - quite rare in itself - but if you take a look about halfway down the ion/dust tail, you'll see a very definite twist in the structure. It it rotating? Exactly what's causing it? Torsional stress? Is it possible that the kink in the tail is an instability resulting from currents flowing along the tail axis? Right now there's absolutely no information available about what's going on in the tail - because what you're seeing is perhaps one of the most current pictures of the comet that can be found!

As mentioned in the NASA article, this comet has a 'Jupiter-sized atmosphere', is toxic in composition, and although it will only come within about half the distance we are from the sun, let's hope that kink in the tail doesn't mean it's about to suddenly veer off-course and give us a rather closer view of itself than we would ideally wish for.

Update Feb. 5th 2009 - According to Spaceweather.com, Comet Lulin lost it's tail, as we see from this brief note...

Disconnected Tail...

On Feb. 4th, a team of Italian astronomers witnessed "an intriguing phenomenon in Comet Lulin's tail." Team leader Ernesto Guido explains: "We photographed the comet using a remotely-controlled telescope in New Mexico, and our images clearly showed a disconnection event. While we were looking, part of the comet's plasma tail was torn away."

Guido and colleagues believe the event was caused by a magnetic disturbance in the solar wind hitting the comet. It's a plausible hypothesis. Magnetic mini-storms in comet tails have been observed before--most famously in 2007 when NASA's STEREO spacecraft watched a CME crash into Comet Encke. Encke lost its tail in dramatic fashion, much as Comet Lulin did yesterday.

Browse the gallery to view the comet's tail before, during and after the disconnection event:

Comet Lulin Photo Gallery

image :: Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin) from Cometography.com

You Don't Know - Ninja Cuts - Compilation Album, Feb 2008 (review)

Link to Ninja Tune w. tracklisting

One of the reasons that it often takes me hours longer than strictly necessary to write even the most perfunctory of blog posts, is the impressive amount of distractions available online, many of which are guaranteed to divert one's attention faster than the time it took to write this paragraph.

For example, during the course of the preceding post about later surviving Neanderthals in Iberian comfort zones of the Ice Age, I unaccountably found myself in the iTunes store, previewing all the tracks that comprise a 50-title compilation from Ninja Tune, namely 'You Don't Know - Ninja Cuts', primarily on the basis that as they'd used an image for the cover very similar to another I'd used here in the past at remote central, this was something I should check out forthwith.

Sometimes it's entirely correct to judge something by its cover - a buying policy that's based on an 'it-looks-nice-so-it-must-be-good' basis works for me every time, (though the resulting glow of happiness often tends to be somewhat ephemeral in aspect).

In any case, when an expensive outfit like iTunes unexpectedly offers you 50 tracks for less than a tenner, there's an extra incentive to actively listen to and embrace tracks that perhaps might not otherwise have been checked out - despite the fact that DRM is a major reason for not relying on iTunes for all one's digital entertainment.

I'm no music critic, timely or otherwise, as will be apparent from the fact that this album was released a year ago in February 2008, so to save my time and your patience, here's an album description from the Ninja Tune site...

The latest “Ninja Cuts” is number five in a series of classic compilations which have studded Ninja’s 18 years of existence. And, like its predecessors, “You Don’t Know” serves as a signpost of both where the label has come from and where it’s heading. Although there are tracks on this three CD package dating back as far as 1998 (Mike Ladd’s rare classic “Blah Blah”) there are also 9 unreleased tracks (from some of Ninja Tune's biggest acts like Mr Scruff, Cinematic Orchestra, Coldcut and others), some from albums which won’t be released until later in the year (John Matthias’ fragile, ethereal “Evermore” leaps to mind, or Pop Levi’s superb, princely “Dita Dimone”). Its fair to say most of this compilation contains rare, alternate and brand new tracks. More than anything else, what “You Don’t Know” shows is the breadth of Ninja’s releases, the sheer ambition and diversity of the music being put out through the imprints of Ninja Tune, Big Dada and Counter.

Where to start? Anyone who thinks they know what to expect from a Ninja Tune compilation is advised to head straight for CD2, track 16, where Baltimore’s The Death Set deliver electro-pop-punk of pure brattish joyfulness. Or the Bug’s “Poison Dart” – harsh dubstep dancehall that’s had FWD bubbling for the last few months. Or check DJ Kentaro’s riotous collaboration with Spank Rock, “Free”. Or the fuzzyfelt-bahia of Long Lost’s “The Art of Kissing”, a folk project by Daedelus. Or the blissful quiescent power of Jaga’s “Swedenborgske Rom”. Or Finks “Pretty Little Thing”. Or…

Some other names you will be expecting. Roots Manuva offers up a couple of rarities on the utterly ill “Seat Yourself” and a version of “Chin High” that’s more Joy Division than J Dilla. The Cinematic Orchestra turn up with the radio version of their scintillating “To Build A Home” plus a new track “Rites of Spring” recorded live at the Barbican in London and a fantastic remix from Susumu Yokota. One of the UK's greatest musical mavericks and pioneer of grime Wiley is on board. Ninja founders Coldcut give early versions and re-rubs from 2006’s “Sound Mirrors” album. Kid Koala destroys the music business single-handed (double-handed?) on “Slew Test 2”. Mr Scruff and Quantic go riding and take us on a bumpy “Donkey Ride”, a brand new track. An unavailable track "Epistemology Suite" by Diplo from a very early deleted 12" is present, Then there’s a heap of remixers and contributors that run from Modeselektor, DJ Shadow, Tiga, RJD2 and the mighty Switch. But even that doesn’t get close.

The list goes on. The best thing to do is to stop reading, put the paper down, press play and just listen…

It's a pretty diverse and imaginitive collection, and although these ageing ear-drums preferred the less frenetic/more mesmeric tracks that start coming in after around the first dozen or so, as well as those towards the end, there should be more than a few songs throughout that will appeal to most Ninja-based tastes, several others with which listeners will already have become acquainted over years past, as well as a few outstanding performances from bands who might not as yet be quite the household names their talents surely merit.

As we know, the point of such albums is to highlight and showcase exactly those artistes who might otherwise slip beneath the radar, by lining them up alongside more established contemporaries, and on this album, Ninja have put together an impressive mix of energy and dexterity, nicely produced, and in my opinion, definitely worth the while.

Biodiversity Refuge Enabled Neanderthals To Survive Longer In South Eastern Iberia

Biodiversity Hotspot Enabled Neanderthals To Survive Longer In South East Of Spain

Judging from the first paragraph of this report at Science Daily, it would appear that Neanderthals prevailed in southwestern Europe for about 10,000 years longer than thought - as we see...

Over 14,000 years ago during the last Pleistocene Ice Age, when a large part of the European continent was covered in ice and snow, Neanderthals in the region of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian peninsula were able to survive because of the refugium of plant and animal biodiversity. Today, plant fossil remains discovered in Gorham's Cave confirm this unique diversity and wealth of resources available in this area of the planet.

The news that they had survived up until 14,000 years ago would be sensational news indeed, but alas this is a typo which I predict will disappear as suddenly and rapidly as the Neanderthals themselves. The date is in reality 24,000 years ago, and it now transpires that contrary to an earlier theory that Neanderthals had died out because of their inability to cope with what would have been their third Ice Age experience, whilst those canny Cro-Magnons not only survived the LGM, but swept to world power thereafter, on account of their supposedly more advanced climate-based coping strategies.

This latest news comes as a result of recent research by J.S. Carrión, C. Finlayson et al, in a paper titled 'A Coastal Reservoir of Biodiversity for Upper Pleistocene Human Populations: Palaeoecological Investigations in Gorham's Cave (Gibraltar) in the Context of the Iberian Peninsula' from which the following is the abstract...

Palaeobotanical (pollen, charcoal) data from Gorham’s Cave reveals a diversified landscape in the Gibraltar region during the Middle (c. 32 560–23 780 year BP) and Upper Palaeolithic (c. 18 440–10 880 BP). Inferred vegetation types include oak, pine, juniper, and mixed woodlands and savannahs, grasslands with heaths, heliophytic matorrals, phreatophytic formations (e.g. riverine forests, wetlands), and thermomediterranean coastal scrub.

A revision of palaeoecological data suggests that patches of trees persisted even in northern and continental territories of the Iberian Peninsula during the cold stages of OIS3 and OIS2. However, a southern Mediterranean coastal shelf extending from Gibraltar to Málaga, and probably further north up to Murcia, was unique in its combination of thermo-, meso-, and supramediterranean plant and animal species.

Given the composition of these assemblages, this shelf and its adjacent mountains represented a crucial reservoir of biodiversity during the Upper Pleistocene. It is within this physiographically complex context with its diversity of resources where the last Neanderthals extraordinarily survived until c. 24 000 BP, that is over 10 000 years later than the disappearance of Neanderthals from elsewhere in temperate Europe.

The rest of the paper is behind a massive $31.50 paywall, far too steep for this blogger to climb, and thus it is to Science Daily we return, for yet more insightful hindsight...

The international team jointly led by Spanish researchers has reconstructed the landscape near Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar, by means of paleobotanical data (plant fossil records) located in the geological deposits investigated between 1997 and 2004. The study, which is published in the Quaternary Science Reviews, also re-examines previous findings relating to the glacial refugia for trees during the ice age in the Iberian Peninsula.

"The reconstructed landscape shows a wide diversity of plant formations in the extreme south of the Iberian peninsula from 32,000 to 10,000 years ago," José S. Carrión explains. He is the principal author and researcher from the University of Murcia. The most significant finding amongst the steppe landscape, pine trees, holm oaks, oak trees, deciduous trees, and others, is the presence of "plant elements indicative of a warm environment," states Carrión.

Obviously there are no population numbers available for this period, but we can at least surmise that humans from across a wide swathe of north-western Eurasia would likely have been tempted to head for these warmer climes, and that as a result, Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Humans would have found themselves in proximal locations to each other. To what degree there would have been intense competition for resources hasn't as yet been determined, nor do we know if this climatic refuge would has promoted closer bonds between the two species whereby a degree of interbreeding took place - as indicated by the very late Neanderthal hybrid from Lagar Velho, in Portugal, dating to around 24, 500 bp. However, it does seem clear that in the climate described, the Neanderthals should have had no problem surviving, had that factor been the sole consideration concerning their eventual demise, as we read in the next quote, for which it's back to Science Daily, and specifically, Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar...

In Gibraltar, the Neanderthals could have had access to more than 140 caves, which provided them with a wealth of resources. The research mentions a corridor along the coasts of the south east of Spain that the Neanderthals possibly used in order to avoid the steep terrain found in the interior mountain ranges which had inhospitable climatic conditions during this Quaternary Period.

The existence of this biodiversity hotspot with a supply of plant and animal foodstuffs available "would explain the extraordinary endurance of the Neanderthals in the south west of Europe," emphasizes the researcher. On the other hand, the Neanderthals in the south of Europe had become adapted to surroundings that had semi forest vegetation, as well as fishing resources off the coast, which encouraged their survival.

The inhabitants of Gorham's Cave were omnivorous and ate land mammals (mountain goats, rabbits, quails, duck and pigeon) and marine foods (monk seals, dolphin, fish and mussels). They also ate plants and dried fruits such as those found in the cave that date from 40,000 years ago. They adapted easily to their environment and took advantage of what this provided.

As something of a generalisation, it would appear that one by one, possible environmental or cognitive reasons cited to explain the Neanderthal extinction, are being ticked off as new evidence is revealed. The traditional view that AMH must have had at least an unwitting hand in this extinction event seems increasingly to suggest that those hands may have had more of a bloody hand in affairs, as a result of physical contact and probable conflict with their Neanderthal neighbours.

Although it is clear that in close physical contact, Neanderthals would have had the upper hand due to their vastly superior physical strength, it might be the modern human capacity for over-arm spear-throwing, that helped tip the balance in the battle for supremacy, rather than mere survival, that may have taken place in the Middle Upper Palaeolithic, from around 35 kyr. Added to the modern humans' ability to run faster than their archaic counterparts, it's possible to imagine situations in which moderns would have been able to engage their perceived enemy at a distance, and run away to fight another day if things looked like going against them, allowing them greater odds of survivability than engagements of hand-to-hand combat.

Although there is as far as I know, no archaeological evidence to support such a scenario - for example, there are no Neanderthal fossils with spear-points embedded in them, nor do we see other signs of intentional killing, such as skulls smashed from the impact of sharp or blunt weapons, as seems to be common from the Neolithic onwards, it should be borne in mind that of all the Neanderthals that ever lived, only a tiny proportion of their mortal remains survive to the present day, and that any or all skeletal remains of Neanderthals killed in combat my AMH may have perished without trace, taking with them any conclusive forensic evidence.

Violent encounters need not have taken place on a frequent basis, especially when we consider that both species cohabited for as much as, and maybe slightly longer than 15,000 years in Europe, but it's not hard to imagine that anatomic moderns may gradually have occupied, or held sway over, the best spots for resources across the landscape, using airborne projectiles as a means of attacking and defending themselves against Neanderthals in the first ever battle for aerial supremacy in the history of human conflict.

Although this putative aerial supremacy would only have had an operational ceiling of about 20 ft (6m) above ground, (or however high a spear travels en route to its target from the thrower's arm) as opposed to the tens of thousands of feet altitude at which modern airforces operate, the overall long-term effect may have been enough to disadvantage Neanderthals to the extent that although they didn't suffer massacres and heavy loss of numbers in direct conflict, they lost out to a superior weapons technology in the shape of a thrown spear, or dart, possibly propelled by an early form of the atlatl.

However, a problem with this idea is that Neanderthals were no fools, and would most likely have responded to this type of threat by entering a type of arms race, whereby they too would have developed the thrown projectile, and accordingly deployed it in much the same way as it had been used against them - assuming that is, they enjoyed the overarm throwing abilities of AMH.


I wondered briefly whether claims from Howiesons's Poort in Africa that projectiles recovered there indicate the use of the bow and arrow at 60 kyr, whether this technology may have been put to use in Early Upper Palaeolithic Europe. However, not only is there little or no evidence of bow and arrow technology in Europe before the Mesolithic, there is considerable doubt as to whether the African artifacts really do represent precocious archery in the Middle Palaeolithic, as this article, The Origins of Bow And Arrow Technology at A Very Remote Period Indeed points out. As we see...

The issue of bow and arrow technology is an important one in the debate over modern human origins and their alleged expansion out of Africa and colonization of the rest of the Old World. This is because if this technology is what gave modern human an edge however defined over the ‘archaic’ populations they would have encountered during their invasion of Eurasia, we would expect the evidence for it to be not only abundant, but also long-lasting. The bow and arrow are such a useful technological innovation that it is highly unlikely that they would have been forgotten at any point over the course of the Late Pleistocene.

This is partly because of the great advantage they provide in hunting tasks and killing fellow humans, by enabling lethal wounds to be delivered from a great distance. This makes hunting of prey large and small much safer for the hunter and permits the hunters to get at prey from beyond their habitual flight distance for humans. Also, think about how versatile bows and arrows are: You have long, heavy compound bows in use by mounted warriors and hunters in the Central Asian plains and small, light bows used by foragers in tropical settings. In other words, bow and arrow technology can be made to fit the ecological context in which it is used without fundamentally altering its nature; this makes it an extremely polyvalent weapon system, so much so that it seems hard to believe that, if invented once and so crucial to the expansion of modern humans out of their African homeland, it would be forgotten or discarded.

Archaeologically, we have no unambiguous evidence for bows or arrows predating the latest Upper Paleolithic or even the Mesolithic. However, we also have no spearthrowers older than the one from the Solutrean occupation of Combe-Saunière (France), which dates to ca. 21,000 BP. This is in spite of now having abundant evidence that suggests that some pointed stone tools likely were used as dart tips much earlier than that date (Shea 2006). Thus, not having found remains of bows or arrows prior to the latest Upper Paleolithic does not de facto preclude their existence before that time.

Julien Riel-Salvatore further mentions that research by John Shea of Stony Brook University concluded the following...

Shea shows rather convincingly that projectile weapons of the sort hinted at by Mellars and others do not appear to have been in use in the Old World prior to ca. 50,000 BP. And after that date, measurements align all Early Upper Paleolithic pointed stone implements with values for darts rather than arrowheads. Admittedly, the case for backed implements is less certain in that paper, but what data are available do not disagree with Shea’s conclusions. Therefore, the available evidence argues strongly against the case for bow and arrow technology having been an intrinsic component of the behavioral package that would have permitted the expansion of the original modern human populations.

Even the spear-thrower application doesn't definitively appear before 21 kyr, long after any Neanderthal would have been available as a target, but nevertheless, as the list of suspects diminishes, the likelihood that anatomically modern (weapons) technology held the key that unlocked the trapdoor of obliteration through which the last Neanderthals fell to their doom. As we see from this article by Emily Sohn at msnbc.com, titled Neanderthals Done In By Competition, published in January 2009...

Climate change has become the default scapegoat for nearly every extinction on Earth lately. But a new study lets climate off the hook for at least one dramatic event: the disappearance of the Neanderthals from Europe about 35,000 years ago.

Scientists have long debated what caused the demise of this human-like species. One camp argues that the Neanderthals fell victim to a dramatic cooling of the environment. The other view holds that prehistoric humans squeezed the Neanderthals out.

"There have been dozens and dozens of articles on one side or the other," said William Banks, an archaeologist at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Bordeaux.

Banks led the new study, which suggests that Cro-Magnon populations simply outcompeted Neanderthals during a period of rapid climate change.

Rather than go into any depth in this post, I'll address the paper to which this article refers in a later essay, which presumably will appear some time later this week or next - who can tell - but just in case it doesn't, here's the link and abstract - and as it's published at PloS One, the entire text is free to access. (let joy be unconfined etc.)


Neanderthal Extinction By Competitive Exclusion - PLoS One, 2009

Abstract

Background

Despite a long history of investigation, considerable debate revolves around whether Neanderthals became extinct because of climate change or competition with anatomically modern humans (AMH).

Methodology/Principal Findings

We apply a new methodology integrating archaeological and chronological data with high-resolution paleoclimatic simulations to define eco-cultural niches associated with Neanderthal and AMH adaptive systems during alternating cold and mild phases of Marine Isotope Stage 3. Our results indicate that Neanderthals and AMH exploited similar niches, and may have continued to do so in the absence of contact.

Conclusions/Significance

The southerly contraction of Neanderthal range in southwestern Europe during Greenland Interstadial 8 was not due to climate change or a change in adaptation, but rather concurrent AMH geographic expansion appears to have produced competition that led to Neanderthal extinction.

Whilst the reference to the paper referred to at the top of this post, appears below...

Journal reference :: Carrión et al. A coastal reservoir of biodiversity for Upper Pleistocene human populations: palaeoecological investigations in Gorham's Cave (Gibraltar) in the context of the Iberian Peninsula. Quaternary Science Reviews, 2008; 27 (23-24): 2118 DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.08.016

I just discovered that there is also complete access to another paper, published in January 2007, by Carrión, namely...

The Holocene and Upper Pleistocene Pollen Sequence of Carihuela Cave, Southern Spain (PDF)

...in whose abstract it is claimed that Neanderthals may have hung on there as late as 21,430 BP, a truly surprising date, more of which will be discussed another time.

see also :: Early Weapon Evidence Reveals Bloody Past - Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News, March 2008

and :: Competition, Not Climate Change, Led To Neanderthal Extinction - Science Daily, December 2008

Blogged via Leherensuge

image :: Present day landscapes of Gibraltar (above) and reconstructed landscapes of Gibraltar from 30,000 years ago (below). (Credit: Museum of Gibraltar) - from Science Daily.

Blombos Cave :: Earlier Start For Human Art? - Balter's Blog

Balter's Blog: Earlier start for human art?

News from Blombos Cave, where it is claimed, incised ochre artifacts have been found, believed to have been made 100,000 years ago, and are directly compared to those dating from 77,000 years bp, as widely reported over recent years. This latest research is due to appear in this week's edition of Science. This from Balter's Blog...

In this week's Science, I report on new finds of etched ochre, some dated 100,000 years old, from Blombos Cave. The work was presented at a meeting in Cape Town in January and is also in press at the Journal of Human Evolution. Here are a few extracts of my report:

"To analyze the latest finds, Henshilwood teamed up with Francesco d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France and independent ochre expert Ian Watts, who is based in Athens. The trick with ancient ochre is to figure out what early humans were using it for.

Many previous studies have concluded that ochre was often ground to make a powder, which could have been used to paint bodies--a form of social identification usually considered symbolic--or for more utilitarian purposes. For example, Lynnette Wadley of Witwatersrand has argued from modern-day experiments that ground ochre could have been used as a kind of glue to haft stone tools into wooden or bone handles.

So Henshilwood and colleagues focused their attention on 13 pieces engraved in ways that seemed inconsistent with grinding alone. Some pieces have lines arranged in apparent fan-shaped or crosshatched designs; others are etched in wavy patterns. Microscopic examination showed that these engravings had been made with a pointed stone tool and a finely controlled hand."

One of the more notable aspects of this research is explained as follows...

...some of the oldest pieces have a crosshatched pattern similar to that of the two original ochre pieces dated to 77,000 years ago. And other researchers have very recently discovered similar crosshatched patterns on a few African stone and bone objects thought to be as old as the new finds, or nearly so. This refutes suggestions that the marks are merely doodles, Henshilwood says, and suggests a 25,000-year tradition of symbolic representation.

I can't as yet find an abstract for this paper, or indeed details of the other cross-hatched artifacts mentioned, but assuming once again that the dates are secure for 100,000 years ago, it does seem odd that a cross-hatched design should be found on pieces of ochre separated in time by about 25,000 years, irrespective of whether they represent the first human symbolic art, which seems unlikely, as Bednarik has suggested in various of his own published material.

Whilst we await further details of the linked story, the American Museum of Natural History has this article, 'Thinking In Symbols - Jewels Of A Creative Mind' published in July 2007, which discusses the wider context of the finds at Blombos, including snail shells, which (again according to Bednarik) may have been in use as items of personal adornment since the Lower Palaeolithic - for further details see this PDF, 'The Technology And Use of Beads In The Pleistocene'.

image from Blombos Cave Project

Malaysia Says 1.8 Million-Year-Old Hand Axes Unearthed - Salon.com

Salon.com link

and...

Rewriting 'Out of Africa' Theory (NST)

Despite a dating margin of error amounting to 610,000 years, Mokhtar Saidin of the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Science in Malaysia, is claiming that hand-axes found at Perak are 1.83 million year old, and thus are older than the 1.6 million year-old hand axes recovered from Africa, hitherto regarded as the world's first known example of this technology. This from The New Straits Times via John Hawks...

Universiti Sains Malaysia's (USM) Centre for Archaeological Research, Malaysia has found evidence of early human existence in the country dating back 1.83 million years.

"This discovery may make the rewriting of the 'out of Africa' theory necessary," the centre's director, Associate Professor Mokhtar Saidin said.

The evidence was obtained from the discovery of artefacts in Bukit Bunuh, Lenggong, Perak.

Mokhtar said the evidence found included stone-made tools such as axes and chopping tools.

The artefacts were found embedded in suevite rock, formed as a result of the impact of meteorite crashing down at Bukit Bunuh.

The suevite rock, reputedly the first found in Southeast Asia, was sent to the Geochronology Japan Laboratory three months ago and carbon dated using the fission track dating method.

Mokhtar said the results were sent back to USM two weeks ago and it showed the rock was dated to 1.83 million years ago.

As Hawks notes, fission track dating is different from carbon dating - only organic materials can be carbon dated, up to around 40,000 years, rather than the 1.83 million years stated above. Suevite rock might be an unfamilar material to some, so here's a link to a page describing the process by which it is formed, albeit from a site called Aumühle quarry, in Europe rather than Asia. Back to the linked article...

He said based on current studies, there was fresh evidence of human mobility coming from Asia and Southeast Asia, and not just out of Africa.

Based on world evidence, there was early human existence "out of Africa" in Georgia (1.8 to 1.7 million years ago); Sangiran, Jawa, Indonesia (1.7 to 1.2 million years ago); as well as Longgupo and Yuanmou in China (1.8 to 1.6 million years ago).

He noted that with the new evidence, there was a possibility that the hominids in Jawa could have migrated from Bukit Bunuh as a result of destruction from the impact of meteorites.

The four square-kilometre site, which was first excavated between 2001 and 2003, revealed a Palaeolithic culture, dated at 40,000 years ago.

The meteorite crash site was also discovered, the impact of which had caused the stones in its original state at Bukit Bunuh to melt, congeal and subsequently form the suevite rock.

Here's some further background on Hulu Perak from the Museum of Lenggong...

Hulu Perak includes Kroh, Grik, Lawin, and Lenggong. This district is bordered by Banjaran Titiwangsa on its east side, and Timur and Banjaran Bintang on its west side. It can be considered as the capital of the country’s Prehistory. Archaeological evidence proved that Prehistoric people had occupied this area since 3,000 years ago. Such evidence from open sites such as Bukit Jawa, Lawin, and Temelong, followed by Kota Tampan and Bukit Bunuh on the banks of ancient lakes also revealed settlements and Paleolithic Age stone tools making workshops – which had been highly adapted.

The shores of those lakes were quite full with activities – until the eruption of Gunung Berapi Toba. In addition to that, there were many rock shelters and limestone caves which were inhibited by animal hunting and food gatherer communities during the Later Paleolithic and Lower Holocene Periods...

...Archaeological studies show that this valley is the only earliest area in Malaysia, and can be presumed as the ‘Capital of the Pre-historic Malaysia’, with its complete chronological order. It had been inhabited by human beings since 200,000 to 1,000 years ago – starting from the Lower Paleolithic until the Bronze Age. Paleolithic sites like Bukit Jawa Lenggong, Lawin, and Kampong Temelong Lenggong are among the early sites – about 200,000 years old, followed by Kota Tampan Lenggong which is about 75,000 years old, and Bukit Bunuh, which is about 45,000 years old.

As we see from the image above (at KansasCity.com), the putative hand axe is both large and somewhat different in appearance from an Achulean hand-axe, depicted here at Handprint.com, (scroll down to 'Achulean'), and hopefully further images including all seven of these recent finds will be online in the future. But until there is more in the way of exact dating, these finds will be disputed as evidence for such a precocious development so far from Africa at such an early date. However, if the dates turn out to be accurate, they might well place the Dmanisi, Georgia finds at 1.7 million years in an Asian, rather than 'Out of Africa' context.

(via On Being Unexceptional :: 'Not Bitter')

see also :: Salon.com : Malaysia Says 1.8 Million-Year-Old Hand-Axes Unearthed