An Anthropology Of One's Self. Difficulty Focussing On More Than One Task At A Time

For quite a while now, every time I address the desktop computer on which I'm typing this sentence I am torn from three directions. Before I left Surf City the three comprised 1) you, the reader, 2) readying myself for the move north, and 3) trying to find a satisfying, well-paying job. Now that I'm finally back in the Pacific Northwest, where I belong, the three poles have changed. I think of you first, as always. Then comes looking for that job. Lastly, unpacking and making this a home.

I often feel like Jerry Lewis's hapless bellhop...


The sad truth is that I end up paralyzed. Or, more to the point: I'm unable to focus on any of the three activities. Worse, when I do manage to focus on one of the tasks I'm thinking about not doing the other two. That, of course, lessens the likelihood that I'll do anything like the best job I can on whichever of the three I'm working on.

As an anthropologist and archaeologist who knows all the ins and outs of optimal foraging, embedded activities in a seasonal round, rational decision-making, and so on. Despite that, the explanation for my inability to conform to such theoretical frameworks is a profoundly black, black box. I seem to be cognitively or behaviourally inept at apportioning my time. And, when I do manage to apportion my time to one of the three, I spend most of it worrying about giving short shrift to the other two. I think to myself, "Is multi-tasking a myth? Or am I just a misfit?" I have no answers. No compelling ones, at any rate. According to every cultural materialist tenet, as a human being I should have no difficulty doing what's needed, and in the right order of priority, exactly like a wolf would, or any modern humans worth their salt. Am I a freak of nature?

Hardly. [Used here in the sense of definition #5.]

The answer lies, I think, in the particular way in which my personality developed—through my acculturation in a milieu that was rife with contradictory [and mainly negative] responses to whatever it was I chose to do at any one time. I'll admit, that's more a psychological hypothesis than a purely anthropological one. Except, perhaps, that my early learning took place in a subset of western Canadian culture in the 1950s and early 60s. I can still hear my dead Dad reminding me that "A job worth doing is worth doing well." And, if the job I decided on was akin to colouring outside the lines he'd grumpily state that "If you give [him or 'em, I'm not sure which] and inch, he'll take a mile." Take-home lesson: be careful what you choose to do, lest you be punished for it.

I could come up with a thousand more vignettes to explain what goes on in my psyche, but it wouldn't change the reality. If I have to divide my attention, the result is a diminished finished product. [Aaaaaaaaaand we're back to "A job worth doing is worth doing well." It's vicious (sense 2), I tell you!]

So. Where does that leave you and me? Unfortunately you take a back seat to the other two. I have been working on a blurt about Jim Enloe's spatial analysis of La Grotte du Bison, at Arcy-sur-Cure in France. Bison is the little-known sibling cave phenomenon adjacent the more famous La Grotte du Renne—the La Grotte du Renne from which one of the few claimed "Châtelperronian" assemblages was recovered. While less well known, Jim Enloe's recent work on the taphonomy of Level I at the Cave of the Bison is consequential. So, while I'm dithering, why not give it a read? It's behind a paywall, of course. But I'm certain that you can find a way to procure a copy if you're exceptionally good at the Google.

Enloe, J. G. 2012 Middle Palaeolithic Cave Taphonomy: Discerning Humans from Hyenas at Arcy-sur-Cure, France. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 22: 591–602.

For the moment, then, it's back to the job of getting a job—perhaps the most work for least reward of almost any activity of which I'm aware. *sigh*

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It's Hallowe'en And The Zombies Are Out: Hublin, et al.'s 'Radiocarbon dates from the Grotte du Renne and Saint-Césaire support a Neandertal origin for the Châtelperronian'

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Just when you thought it was safe to think that the Castelperronian (Chatelperronian) was a(nother) dead issue, along come Jean-Jacques Hublin, Sahra Talamo, Michèle Julien, Francine David, Nelly Connet, Pierre Bodu, Bernard Vandermeersch, and Michael P. Richards attempting to resurrect it. I would have thought Easter a better time for that. Perhaps we can extend the metaphor. If the metaphor works, given that it's Hallowe'en, maybe we'll be lucky and the whole matter will settle back into the ground whence it came the minute November 1 comes around.

     Nah. I'm not so lucky.

     The Castelperronian, you'll remember, is an inferred technocomplex that has long been thought to have been the product of late Neanderthals who came in contact with modern humans and were trying to emulate the modern tools and ornaments in a haphazard way [haphazard is, by the way, my preferred way to construct the whole matter]. Here's a picture of what the 'industry' is supposed to comprise.

It's said to combine the Mousterian [the métier of the Neanderthals] with the Aurignacian [unequivocally associated with not Neanderthals]. Problem is, various authors have investigated the issue from a number of different angles, and the growing consensus is that the "Chatelperronian" is simply the result of stratigraphic mixing at the sites where it's found, and not a coherent assemblage produced by the bipedal ape that was on its way out. That the Chatelperronian has been found to "occur" at only a very few of the very, very many Neanderthal localities across western Europe, one is naturally suspicious.

     I have plenty more to say, and I'll get back to it tomorrow, if I'm feeling up to it. But I did want to let you all know that I won't be ducking this one. 

     Au revoir. À demain.

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The World's Oldest Hand[-soap] Axe!

Figure 1. On the left: a hand-soap axe. On the right: dorsal view of a bar of Dial glycerin soap, identical with the one from which the axe was fashioned. 

There's an old saying: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Well, here's my own version of joining 'em, straight from an Industrial Era archaeological site near the world headquarters of the Subversive Archaeologist. What you see in Figure 1 is an astonishing example of the forethought and planning that has been a hallmark of the human lineage from at least 1.75 Ma. The object on the right is an example of the raw material that was used in this case; on the left, the exquisitely symmetrical end-product of a complex series of water-aided reductive events, all of which were intended, from the outset, to result in this aesthetically pleasing and most useful tool. I'm calling it a hand-soap axe. There's no doubt in my mind that the object on the left is a deliberate product of a highly sophisticated, human, brain. 

Figure 2. On the left: a hand-soap axe. On the right left lateral view of the same bar of soap illustrated in Figure 1.

     Just look at the metrics. The raw material blank is rectangular in plan (see Figure 1), with a convex dorsal and concave ventral aspect and 1/2-round bevelled on all vertices (see Figure 2). Its dimensions are given in Table 1. 

These items were measured in the field using the only appurtenance available at the time: a Stanley No. 26 1/2 boxwood folding caliper rule (pictured below). It's an oldy. And it's only calibrated in 16ths, so these are very approximate numbers. We'll be able to get a better handle on the morphology when we're out of the field.

Stanley No. 36 1/2 boxwood folding calipers.

As for the hand-soap axe. A glance at it convinces one that it bears little resemblance to the block of raw material, which should persuade anyone with half a brain that its final shape had nothing to do with the original shape of the raw material block. Its lateral margins, pictured above, are perfectly bi-convex. When viewed on end, the same is true. The intention was for the dorso-ventral bi-convexity to create an angle of ca. 45° that is uniform through almost its entire length. Quite an accomplishment. No? Undoubtedly this would have been used to work skins.
     And look at the length of the product--the axe itself. The artisan who made this was ever-so-careful to avoid reducing the proximal and distal mass so as not to end up with a useless lump of soap. This is indeed an artifact that represents a high level of cognitive ability, and anyone who says 'Nay' is likely to be a closet bigot or someone who doesn't know their glycerine soap from sandpaper!
     As yet we've been unable to computer-model adequately how, with judicious application of plain old water, and simply by rolling it in his hands to create a lather, the human who made this was able to fashion such a gorgeous object. I'd go so far as to say that this example is SO perfect that it may even have been a ceremonial object, or money, or something like that! 
     PLoS one here we come!

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Mirthful Monday: Combe Grenal Eagle Talon is a Turkey

Combe Grenal (tip o' the hat to Don's Maps)

Chalk up another one for PLoS ONE ! From John Hawks's blog today comes news of this hair-raisingly un-empirical beauty, 'Presumed Symbolic Use of Diurnal Raptors by Neanderthals,' by Eugène Morin and Véronique Laroulandie. This is another one of those rapid publications that might have benefitted from a bit more time with the referees. The authors claim that one of the Combe Grenal (Dordogne, France) Neanderthals purposefully removed the talon sheath from an eagle's terminal phalanx to aid in some sort of symbolic activity.
     [!]

Cheers, once again, to Don's Maps! Click to embiggen and look for Combe Grenal in the cluster of red dots in southern central France.

A single [that's right, one only] eagle third phalanx from Combe Grenal, in France [Harold, are you responsible for this unique and important discovery?] is described in this manner:

This well-preserved specimen bears on its proximo-dorsal side two incisions produced by a stone tool. These incisions closely coincide with the proximal margin of the keratinous sheath overlying the terminal phalanx of the digit, which suggests removal of the claw sheath ... . The absence of other parts of raptors in this layer and the fact that bird claws are predominantly made of a tough fibrous protein called β-keratin ... point to a non-alimentary use of an eagle claw.

And here is the magnificent specimen, direct to you from PLoS ONE.

The scale bar refers to the complete phalanx and is 1 cm long. That puts the cutmark at about .25 mm across. Clearly, something extremely sharp made these incisions. Unfortunately the illustration isn't of sufficient resolution to make out any diagnostic stone-tool marks. So, we are left to take the authors' word for it that these are unequivocally the marks of a hominid-wielded stone chip. I strongly doubt their inference, and not just because these are such tiny cuts. Oh, the authors do report two other similar occurrences from Les Fieux. Same story. Same conclusions.
     I know it seems pedantic of me, but would it have been too hard to examine a few living raptor terminal phalanges to see if, perhaps, the habitual grooming behaviours of such animals could leave such marks, on occasion, near the proximal margin of the keratinous sheath? Raptors use their beaks for grooming, and a beak is a rather sturdy structure, and, one would have thought, a very sharp implement that could, no doubt, quite easily put a scratch or two in the relatively porous bone of the terminal phalanx, which almost always gets bits of brain and fur stuck to it during the raptoring part of a raptor's feeding episode. 
     I'm not sure that a geneticist could be expected to act as an authoritative critic of difficult to interpret archaeological materials, so I'll let John Hawks off the hook on this one. However, he does go further and cites another study of modification to bird bone, published in PNAS [another turkey with Erik Trinkaus acting as editor], in which the authors aver hominid modification, again in the form of fine, v-shaped incisions on the bone [more often the effect of carnivore or other attentions], and other markings that convinced them of some form of symbolically mediated preference for wing bones. If anyone wants me to take that one apart, I will. But first, I want someone with an ounce of sense to start refereeing these turkeys.  
     These authors have provided us with not a whiff of empirical evidence beyond an assertion that these marks had to have been made by stone tools. Give me a[nother] break.
     I hope I needn't go further into the matter and discuss the merits of their fanciful conclusion based on the weakly supported inference that these were stone tool cutmarks. I'll spare you my feelings on their assertions of symbolism.

Why No 14C Dates for Blombos Cave's MSA? Not Lobbing Aspersions. Just Sayin' ...

If I were a chess player I probably wouldn't be trying this gambit. But I'm not. So, bear with me.

Worked bone, stone and ochre from Blombos Cave (Wikipedia)

I need help with a question that's been nagging me for years. I'm curious to know if any of the bone artifacts from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) layers at Blombos Cave have been directly dated using AMS 14C. From my reading it appears not. In fact, it looks as if 14C was abandoned in favour of luminescence techniques once they had excavated deeper than those layers identified as Late Stone Age, the earliest of which were dated to give-or-take 39 ka BP. Everything below that is deemed to be MSA, and organic materials such as charcoal and bone were passed over in favour of grains of sand or burned flints in those strata. 
     Remember that, for most of us, MSA is synonymous with the Middle Palaeolithic in the rest of the world, and, for better or worse, it's exclusively associated with the Neanderthals and their ilk, for which the jury is still out as to their cognitive equivalency with us modern types. Finding what are clearly modern human artifacts at Blombas Cave and elsewhere on the order of 30 to 50 ka earlier than anywhere else in the world has stunned and amazed scientists from Barrow to Burbank. But it's never sat well with me. 

Location of Blombos Cave, South Africa (Credit)

     You and I know that 14C is perfectly capable of accurately gauging the age of organic materials until at least 50 ka, notwithstanding the need for calibration that corrects for environmental  and other effects. Why then do we have only luminescence age determinations for the sediments in which the Blombos Cave bone artifacts and charcoal were deposited? Henshilwood et al. (2002) provide some insight, although I'm not certain they realize that by doing so they've left themselves exposed to (at a minimum) questions about their decision.
     That (to me) curious decision is explained in what amounts to a throwaway comment, which I will quote here

In radiocarbon terms, the MSA at BBC is of infinite age (Vogel, personal communication).

The MSA levels are being dated using luminescence techniques: single-grain laser luminescence (SGLL), single aliquot optically stimulated luminescence (OSL and IRSL), multiple aliquot OSL on sediments and also TL of burnt lithics and electron spin resonance (ESR) of teeth (Henshilwood et al. 2002:638). 

Being the skeptical type, I was intrigued by what seemed to me to be such a weak citation as to the inefficacy of 14C beyond 39 ka--the date of the oldest LSA at Blombos. Just a 'Vogel pers. comm.' No reams of empirical evidence. No other justification. So I endeavoured to discover by what authority Vogel had made such a pronouncement.
     No doubt some among you will think it naïve of me, or worse, that I'm poorly informed and ill-prepared to be taken seriously by the palaeoanthropological establishment. Nevertheless, I had no prior knowledge of Vogel's reputation in the radiocarbon world and in the South African archaeological community. His work includes a 1997 paper in Radiocarbon in which he attempted to calibrate 14C dates with U/Th dates within the same stalagmite from a South African cave. That work was superseded a few years later by the more widely cited Fairbanks et al. (2005), who honed the 14C calibration curve back to 50 ka using pristine corals from around the globe. Their findings are that 14C underestimates calendar years such that 45 RCYBP works out to 48,934 calendar years (give or take 500). By this means the calendar date of 39,200 BP from the lowest LSA level at Blombos would have been produced by a radiocarbon age of about 34 ka RCYBP (try it yourself by clicking here to go to Fairbanks's calibration calculator).
     It would seem, therefore, that despite Vogel's pronouncement, cited in Henshilwood et al. (2002), there is no physical limitation on dating organic material that is older than 39 ka (i.e 34,000 RCYBP), as long as its age doesn't exceed 45 RCYBP. That would, theoretically, allow the excavator of Blombos Cave to extend use of 14C for at least a further 11,000 RCY beyond the earliest LSA from Blombos Cave. Surely some of the MSA materials could be presumed to date from this 11,000-year window.
     Directly dating the bone and charcoal from the upper MSA strata may prove nothing. However, knowing that there's no theoretical limit on the use of 14C for that 11,000 year period leaves wide open the question as to why Chris Henshilwood hasn't attempted to date, directly, some of his bone artifacts or charcoal from the MSA layers. It's just possible that they would yield dates far younger than those produced by luminescence techniques (about which I've had a certain amount to say in previous efforts here at the Subversive Archaeologist).

From Henshilwood et al. (2002)

     After all, the MSA levels in Blombos (at least those illustrated in Henshilwood et al. [2002], shown above) appear to be quite shallow--the sort of depth that you could imagine accumulating in far less than the 35 ka that the luminescence dates would have you believe it took for them to accumulate--and it's within reason to suspect that they could easily have been deposited in the 11 RCY or so before 39,200 BP.
     And so. For what it's worth, I'm issuing a challenge from this lofty perch of mine. Chris, try dating some of your MSA bone using good, old-fashioned, AMS 14C and see what you get. A fair few of us are curious to know the result. 

Absence of Evidence. Evidence of Absence?

At any point does absence of evidence stand as evidence of absence? This question has bothered me since the first time I heard it used in relation to the archaeology of former times. Well, the answer, realistically, is that there is a point. There is a point beyond which this aphorism no longer applies, in practical terms as much as in scientific terms! Furthermore, never accepting absence of evidence as evidence of absence, has, I believe, led many, many scholars to accept what amount to myths about past people and our hominid relatives and progenitors.
     First consider the Sasquatch. Ignoring the hoaxes and attempted hoaxes, most reasonable people consider the absence of evidence to be as good as evidence of absence. Likewise the Loch Ness monster. Likewise the allegedly dead Paul. Likewise Russell's teapot. The great 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell once attempted to explain his atheism with a similar argument:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. 

Despite Russell's confidence, it's still the case that, with capable investigative techniques it may well be possible to confirm the absence of the teapot. So, I much prefer the following crystalization, because it not only illustrates my point, but also goes beyond the informal logic to the place we get to IF we persist in rejecting the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

It's one of the reasons we can pretty much make the assertion, "There Is No Santa Claus" with quite a high degree of reliability, despite it being a negative. For it to be otherwise leads to a whole host of rather unlikely conclusions about the real world. --Wikipedia

And that's my point. When we believe, for example, that purposeful burial occurred in the Middle Palaeolithic, instead of treating it like the open empirical question is truly is, it almost always leads to 'a whole host' of ampliative inferences about the belief systems and cognitive abilities of the hominids that were putatively responsible. Belief in that activity among the Neanderthals almost certainly emboldened the excavators of the Sima de los Huesos to claim, blithely, that the deadfall trap in which they found Homo antecessor was a place of ritual disposal of that hominds' dead--hundreds of thousands of years before the emergence of H. neanderthalensis and the Mousterian archaeological record.     

     Sure, in purely objective terms, purely logical terms, it's impossible to say that absence of evidence will ALWAYS be evidence of absence. But in the real world, highly probable usually suits us as enough to conclude that something either exists or doesn't. For gawd's sake the sun just might not rise tomorrow! Who's to say? But, to all intents and purposes, it's a fairly safe bet. Why is it never the case in archaeology? When I ask, 'Where are the Middle Palaeolithic cave paintings? Where are the pre-Clovis sites?' I might as well be asking 'Where are the Leprechaun remains? Where the Fairy cities?' And yet, someone will always repeat the mantra: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

     I hope I've managed to puncture, or at least to create a slow leak, in that argumentative balloon. Now you know that the absence of evidence is often taken as proof of absence. To persist in believing otherwise can easily lead to fanciful constructions of past reality, something I would hope we'd all prefer to avoid.