Proof That We Are Living in the Archaeological End Times

"And Lew said unto the earth diggers that there would be four or five signs that the End of Days was nigh."

"And the Prophet spake that when it came to pass that the signs were abundant there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, together with hand-wringing and whinging, and a great waving of arms, and raised voices, acrimonious debate, and free-range theory. 

"And lo, to all who moiled in the earth it seemed as if, verily, palaeoanthropology had started down the slippery slope of over-reaching inference-making. And it was vouchsafed that the theoretical underpinnings of scientific knowledge was rushing toward utter irrelevancy at great speed."

I, too, have seen the signs! They are everywhere. And they really do abound! [For reals] You will know the signs by their Reality Distortion Field, the work of forces unknown, first espied by the holy Apple men of Cupertino. 

Here followeth the signs [modern translation: article titles] foretold to us of the numbering of our days.

Toothpicking and Periodontal Disease in a Neanderthal Specimen from Cova Foradà Site (Valencia, Spain) 

Did the Denisovans Cross Wallace's Line?

Impossible Neanderthals? Making string, throwing projectiles andcatching small game during Marine Isotope Stage 4 (Abri du Maras, France)

Israel conference: Cavemen discovered recycling

Scientists 'bad at judging peers' published work,' says new study

Fear not. For unto you this day is come a champion to counter the runaway imaginations and poor judgement of these grubbers in the earth.

Cometh ye anon unto the Subversio Archaeologicus and ye shall undoubtedly find good stuff to counter these very outlandish scientific claims. Do not despair. Let me do all the despairing. You have real work to do. And I look forward to fun in abundance.

ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Fingering Species or Putting Your Foot In It.

I'm very pleased today to bring back the Subversive Archaeologist's good friend, Iain Davidson. He's voicing what, no doubt, some of you already suspect in regard to some of the most recent pronouncements having to do with our distant relatives, the Neanderthals, and us.

Since before Iain and I became acquainted in about 1988, we've shared what I facetiously refer to as an 'intellectual pathology.' We both think that a lot of the claims for modern-human behaviour in the Early and Middle Palaeolithic are misguided at best---misinterpretations for the most part---and, at worst, mythical.

Iain Davidson

Iain has recently retired from his Professorial duties at the University of New England, in Armidale, New South Wales, where he plied his trade for several decades. His research and fieldwork have spanned the length and breadth of Australia, from the dream time to the European occupation. He has expertise in, among other fields, animal bone archaeology, taphonomy, lithic replication and lithic analysis (including having to do with the Near Eastern Middle Palaeolithic).

He has published a good number of books, including a ground-breaking treatment of cooperative ties with Aboriginal groups in Australia. But the ones that are most closely connected with our favorite subject are one on the evolution of cognition and language and another on the relationship between lithic 'technology'* and how we became human: Human Evolution, Language, and Mind and Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition.

In today's oeuvre Iain has a bone to pick with the Neanderthal genome gang, who've lately been very vocal about your and my ancestors' sexual behaviour in Europe about the time the Ns were checking out. It looks to me as if Iain has discovered another one of the rabbit holes that seem to abound in the land of subversive archaeology, down which we're all being told to descend, and which leads to a bizarro world of fractured logic, Mad Hatter-like knowledge claims, and ... well ... before I give away the plot, I think I'll turn the reins over to Iain.

Fingering Species or Putting Your Foot In It

Back in 2010 a modestly titled paper (1) announced that a whole sequence of ancient Mitochondrial DNA had been extracted from a pinky bone by the team who have been constructing the Neandertal genome (2): they called it “an unknown hominin”. This, despite the fact that this unknown hominin is known only from the pinky and perhaps a tooth from mixed sediments at the back of Denisova cave. The dating samples for the cave came from the better stratified sediments elsewhere, so the pinky and the tooth are effectively undated. The creature was subsequently dubbed “the Denisovans” on the assumption that, in life, more than one little finger was needed to reproduce a genetic sequence. The whole genome was subsequently presented (3) and it was shown that the distinctive sequences in the Denisovan genome could be found in present day people in Melanesia, Fiji and the Cook Island but not in modern Chinese or Native Americans (4). All of this is brilliant science and fascinating, but puzzling.

The bigpuzzle is what on earth we can do with this information in relation to everything we have known before. That is to say that the whole business of giving names to different species of hominins—in most cases it is not too much of a distortion to say “our ancestors”—has been done by identifying distinctive patches of variation in the skeletal remains from a particular time or place. But with the Denisovans we have a pinky and a tooth. People are bolder now about identifying teeth to species but it was once thought difficult. I am pretty sure that most people would be cautious about identifying a species from a pinky bone. So it is going to be difficult to classify any other fossil skeletal remains as Denisovans until ancient DNA has been extracted. Which is a big ask.

That puzzle means that it is really difficult to discuss population histories, say, of how the Denisovan genetic material got to Melanesia without leaving a trace in modern Han Chinese. I discussed this in my recent paper in Quaternary International (5). I suggested that it is highly likely that some of the presently known fossil specimens, especially those that have been difficult to classify, might end up to have been Denisovans, but until we have their DNA sequences we cannot know.

But wait there’s more. This week there have been two new studies which brought me up short.

First, a British team tried to assess the differences in structural organisation of the brains of Neandertals and humans (6). I do not want to go into the statistical manipulations that made that possible (well, I do, but that is not my point here—and the SA has already started that task). Rather, hidden away in the Supplementary Online Material, the samples were identified including the Chinese specimens from Dali and Jinniushan and the Indian specimen from Narmada as Denisovans. I could find no argument saying why they were so identified. In his recent book (which must have one of the best titles on human evolution ever—The origin of our species) Stringer, one of the team, emphasised the need for the DNA analysis (7). I wonder why he ignored that advice in the paper.

Second, yesterday the ancient DNA team from Leipzig released the full genome of the Neandertal, promising a paper on it would be coming out soon (8) [and see below]. That is not a surprise, as the original paper (2) only claimed to have a draft of the complete genome. What was surprising was that the genome included material from another very non-diagnostic bone, this time from the foot. But even more surprising was that this foot bone came from the same Denisova Cave as the pinky bone. I have not been able to access the paper in which the bone is described, but John Hawks (9) says that it found some similarities with Neandertals and some with recent humans. But here’s the thing: as Hawks pointed out, we could be about to witness a real confusion in the literature. We have two sets of evidence, from skeletal remains and from ancient DNA. I am not sure that they are compatible even in the most straightforward of cases. After all the original draft genome sequence was obtained from non-diagnostic leg bones. 

Press release from the Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. 

A high-quality Neandertal genome sequence. 

The genome sequence was generated from a toe bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia in 2010.  The bone is described in Mednikova (Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 2011. 39: 129-138). DNA sequences were generated on the Illumina HiSeq platform and constitute an average 50-fold coverage of the genome. 99.9% of the 1.7GB of uniquely mappable DNA sequences in the human genome are covered at least ten times. Contamination with modern human DNA, estimated from mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences, is around 1%. The figure shows a tree relating this genome to the genomes of Neandertals from Croatia, from Germany and from the Caucasus as well as the Denisovan genome recovered from a finger bone excavated at Deniosva Cave. It shows that this individual is closely related to these other Neandertals. Thus, both Neandertals and Denisovans have inhabited this cave in southern Siberia, presumably at different times.

What we actually have is skeletal and behavioural variation on one side which has been partitioned into species by physical anthropologists and on the other side we have variation in ancient and modern DNA and a capacity to identify distinctive sequences of DNA attributed to a couple of ancient species in living populations suggesting low levels of admixture. The DNA variation will yield vast amounts of information. I am not sure the skeletal variation will yield so much, particularly if a typological approach is the best we can do. Certainly, giving the name Denisovan to skeletal remains is going to be a very counter-productive activity until DNA has been extracted from some more diagnostic parts of the skeleton.

And at the back of my mind is the crisis in physical anthropology caused by the difficulties of agreement about the most fundamental aspects of classification of the remains from Liang Bua in Flores. There are claims in the literature that one or more characters are most like hominins from Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, H. rudolfensis, H. georgicus, H. erectus, H. antecessor, or that the creatures were the remains of modern humans either with one pathology or another, or with no pathology (this is summarised in ref 10). If it is so difficult to classify a nearly complete skeleton into an appropriate place right across the range of hominin variation then I am not sure I am going to be convinced by extending a classification from a pinky bone to a whole skeleton or even a skull. And I am going to remain puzzled by the presence of two bones of the extremities from different species in the same cave. Dare I say we need to proceed with caution, perhaps on tippy toe.

1) Krause, J., Fu, Q., Good, J. M., Viola, B., Shunkov, M. V., Derevianko, A. P., & Pääbo, S. (2010). The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. [doi: 10.1038/nature08976]. Nature, 464(7290), 894-897. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7290/full/nature08976.html

2) Green, R. E., Krause, J., Briggs, A. W., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., . . .  & Pääbo, S. (2010). A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome. Science, 328(5979), 710-722. doi: 10.1126/science.1188021 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710.abstract?sid=4f93e3a0-e172-4994-b57f-178bdf78d8f0

3) Meyer, M., Kircher, M., Gansauge, M.-T., Li, H., Racimo, F., Mallick, S., . . . & Pääbo, S. (2012). A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual. Science, 338(6104), 222-226. doi: 10.1126/science.1224344 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6104/222

4) Reich, D., Patterson, N., Kircher, M., Delfin, F., Nandineni, Madhusudan R., Pugach, I., . . . Stoneking, M. (2011). Denisova admixture and the first modern human dispersals into Southeast Asia and Oceania. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 89(4), 516-528. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.09.005 http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reich/Reich_Lab/Welcome_files/2011_AJHG_Stoneking_Denisova_Impact.pdf [free access]

5) Davidson, I. (2013). Peopling the last new worlds: The first colonisation of Sahul and the Americas. Quaternary International, 285(0), 1-29. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2012.09.023 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618212031965

6) Pearce, E., Stringer, C., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2013). New insights into differences in brain organization between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1758). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.0168 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1758/20130168.abstract

7) Stringer, C. (2011). The origin of our species. London: Allen Lane. 

8) http://www.eva.mpg.de/neandertal/index.html 

9) http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/altai-denisova-neandertal-high-coverage-2013.html 

10) Aiello, L. C. (2010). Five years of Homo floresiensis. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 142(2), 167-179. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.21255 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.oca.ucsc.edu/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21255/abstract

~Iain Davidson


* Sorry! I had to put technology in inverted commas, because technology is a word that implies mindedness, and as you know, it's still an open question whether it existed throughout the history of stone artifact production.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Chicane Or Chicanery? A Breath of Fresh Air on the Hybridization Front.

Neanderthal (silver) and modern human DNA (gold).

This comment from Nature News is satisfyingly subversive, but troubling, nonetheless. In its infancy The Subversive Archaeologist opined here, here, and again here that the then-recent conclusions of population geneticist Svante Pääbo and his team--beginning with publication of these data--was a load of hogwash. Based on the newly sequenced Neanderthal genome, his [their] claim was that the presence of identical genes in the 'nomes--of the archaic and the modern human--demonstrated that the modern genome must have been the result of the two interbreeding. Breathtaking. No? Well, actually, no.   

Svante Pääbo

Despite the fancy mathematics and the tone of finality in the numerous papers on the matter [including, somewhat later, the Denisovan cohort] there's nothing to be taken from their primary observations other than that we and the Neanderthals share a common ancestor. Full stop. And who took any notice of the Subversive Archaeologist? I think you can guess. Only you, dear Reader, and your fellow visitors to this blog.
     And so, Ewen Callaway's very sensible note in the August 13 Nature News comes as a complete, and refreshing, surprise. Apparently others have raised similar doubts and similar arguments in response to the genetic work, which has been trumpeted near and far by John Hawks and numberless media outlets. Callaway's summary of the debate, and her advertisement of the literature critical of the interbreeding hypothesis, represents for me a vindication that is both too little and too late. 
     Still, I'm encouraged by the Callaway article. My mother didn't raise me to be a mathematician--least of all a population geneticist--which is why I, like most of my colleagues in palaeoanthropology, are mostly at the mercy of the twists and turns of argument and data that the gene-totallers publish. [Hence this blurt's title.] Whether the interbreeding claim is just another chicane in the collective climb toward a more reality-based story of the past, or the inadvertent [even, perhaps, self-deluding] chicanery of gene teams like the 1000 Genome Project's, most of us are forced back on our fundamental understanding of allele-frequency change through the generations, and, as well, our instincts. Neither is a comprehensively critical approach to the genetics, but it's really all I've got in my defensive arsenal. 
     As for my absence from the published debate, blame it on my mother!
     I must to work. Catch you later.

Post scriptum: I'm humbled by the skill sets that I, an applied scientist who does archaeology, lack. There's really nothing more productive of dismay than impotence in the face of others who're au fait in areas that one isn't. As I've previously whinged, archaeologists, moreso palaeoanthropologists, are hamstrung by gaps in their knowledge of the total breadth of disciplines that can be used in making inferences about the human past. For this reason alone, it's imperative that we all approach new knowledge claims with a thoroughly critical eye. And if, as in my case, one lacks the knowledge to be critical of one approach or another, there is always the possibility of employing simple, informal logic when assessing newly minted knowledge. Such was the case in my approach to the latter-day claims that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred--I side-stepped the math and population biology models simply applied the fundamental principle of homology in confronting the matters that are covered in the Nature News piece.

       

Let Me 'splain Somethin' to You 'bout John Hawks, Svante Pääbo, and You, Lucy

I suppose I should just come out and say it, since there's no point in being coy. The now-irrefutable evidence that you and I share varying amounts of apomorphic genetic material with the Neanderthals does nothing to settle the question of whether or not the Neanderthals and we might have, could have, would have, or should have had offspring together. 
     No good. 
     Whatsoever. 
     And here's why.
     For a moment, put aside whatever 'feelings' you may have about the Neanderthals' cognitive abilities compared with those of you and me. 
     About 100,000 years ago, at Qafzeh Cave, there are skeletally modern humans. A geological minute later there are Neanderthals a few km down the road at Kebara Cave. These two morphotypes may never have set eyes on one another. But the overlap in their territories, whatever the reason, means that there's at least a good chance they bumped into one another. Which means that if they recognized each other as potential mates the strong likelihood is that they did the wild thing and had families.
     You can slice it and dice it, split hairs, and argue 'til you're blue in the face, but the archaeological traces associated with each of these two species leads to the  robust inference that they behaved in the same manner. They produced Mousterian assemblages at each site, with a Levallois facies. If we had never found the skeletal remains at Kebara or Qafzeh, we archaeologists would no doubt have reached the same consensus--that those traces were left by hominids that were, more or less, behaviorally and cognitively identical.
     As you're no doubt painfully aware by now, I have strong reservations as to the abilities of the Neanderthals, based on my 'reading' of the archaeological record. And, those of you familiar with my three (Yep, 3) solo publications will know that, when I speak of the cognitive abilities of the Neanderthals I'm also speaking of morphologically modern, but archaeologically identical, penecontemporaneous hominids such as those at Qafzeh. What many of you don't know is that, if asked, I would also include Homo sapiens idaltu, at 160,000 kya and any other shape of hominid that left a similar archaeological record, regardless of their epoch. 
     I'm an archaeologist with a deep knowledge of evolution, human and otherwise. I'm also equipped with a modicum of knowledge in comparative vertebrate paleontology, geomorphology, pedology, animal bone identification, interpreting animal bone from archaeological sites, vertebrate taphonomy, site formation processes, lithic analysis, and informal logic. But I'm still just an archaeologist when it comes to the Middle Palaeolithic. 
     And, until such time as it's possible to say that Broca's Area unequivocally demonstrates that the owner possesses the ability to read this blog, or that we're able to say that the FOXP2 gene unequivocally demonstrates that its owner possesses a similar ability, all that remains for anyone to use in understanding the abilities of those ancient hominids is the archaeological record. 
     Archaeologists are uniquely placed to interpret ancient behaviours from archaeological traces. Anatomists cannot. Vertebrate palaeontologists cannot. Geomorphologists cannot. Sometimes I really wonder if lithic analysts can. I am profoundly aware that my expectations and presuppositions of Neanderthal behaviour can clutter and colour my perceptions. That's why I concentrate so heavily on the physical evidence and its context, because that's the only way to move past my expectations in understanding the cognitive abilities of Middle Palaeolithic hominids.
     Along the way, if I find knowledge claims that don't stand up, or represent, merely, one alternative explanation for the archaeological traces under examination, I'm compelled to point that out. There are so many extraordinary claims in the literature of the Middle Palaeolithic that it would takes decades of work like mine to really put the feet to the fire of those who've come before. I simply can't stand by while the real howlers are allowed to remain in the archaeological corpus. 
     And you're here to observe me at it. 
     So, to get back to the genome data. I'm in awe of the biochemical wizardry that John Hawks, Svante Pääbo, and their extremely adept colleagues are demonstrating. Yet, their documentation of the degree of relatedness between modern humans and the Neanderthals, or the Denisovans, means only that we share a common ancestor with the ancestors of those groups. 
     I'm very proud to say that it's still up to the archaeologists, and they alone, to decide which Middle to Late-Pleistocene hominid morphotype or population gave rise to people like us, and when that occurred. As it was before the 1000 genome data became available, when it comes to Middle Palaeolithic hominid behaviour we have a lot of work to do before we've investigated every alternative explanation for each and every extraordinary claim that's made about that distant time.
     I'm gonna go back to that task now.