Why Are Subversive Archaeologists A Rarity?

Click here for this guy's bio.

What do a) the dead white male at left, b) archaeology, and c) the three antitheses 

• Scientism vs Scientific
• Empiricist vs Empirical
• Deductive vs Inductive

have in common? Moreover, what do the three dichotomies denote that'd be of any interest to a green, or even a full-fledged 
subversive archaeologist? 

The Fictional Master Po and
"Grasshopper" (Kwai Chang Caine).

If, Grasshopper, you know the answers, go straight to the head of the class, because you possess the raw materials for a thoroughgoing and rigourous understanding of archaeological epistemology. As my friend would say, "Good on you, Mate!" But, if your experience of archaeology hasn't taken you into such matters, I'd ask you to be patient. First I want to elaborate on matters of professional conduct and advancement.

As the Beowulf story-teller famously began, so I shall.

 Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga,  þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas  ellen fremedon! *

Having thus laid the foundation for an epochal blurt** I turn now to the business at hand. 

[Note to Self: Electropsychometer now in need of repair, due the insane randomness of what I've just written, and its extreme irrelevance to. well.  anything.]

In a future outing, I promise I'll make good on my promise to explain the three dichotomies listed up top,
and what they have to do with archaeology and palaeoanthropology. For reals!

As far as I'm aware, the sort of commentary you find here at The Subversive Archaeologist is a phenomenological rarity. The SA is the only critic of archaeology, not just here on the intertubes, but in the literature as well. Why so? I can hear you whispering, "So, what's the big deal?" Listen closely. 

Let's face it. It's not as if there's a shortage out there of dumb archaeological inferences and theories—knowledge claims, as philosophers of science call them. Regular SA readers will know that I have little trouble finding juicy targets for the SA treatment. So, if [bear of little brain that I am] even I can manage a steady stream of empirically well-founded refutations of archaeological knowledge claims, you'd think, wouldn't you, that there should be a lot more criticism floating around—and concomitantly more critics. 

Putative self-portrait. Leonardo da Vinci: 

a man possessed of the range of 

knowledge required to explain, adequately, 

the reasons for there being no tradition of 

criticism in archaeology, specifically, and of

science, in general.

The explanation, as it turns out, is manifold and ramified. [I've always wanted to use that expression.] Explaining the absence of criticism in our field involves possessing a modicum of expertise in 

sociology
philosophy of science
epistemology
ontology
economics
socioeconomics
informal logic [AKA critical thinking], and
all the archaeological background required to be a halfways decent archaeologist.

[I'll leave it up to you to decide which are the halfways decent ones.]

Today's blurt suggests some of the reasons for there being so little criticism of problematic archaeological knowledge claims—it is an labour-intensive and professionally expensive undertaking [even with the modern ability to operationally define crap, first of all, and second, the availability of objective measurement instruments like the Crap-o-meter shown at right, virtually eliminating inter-observer variation]. 

Needs no introduction, nor should it need explication.

It's also expensive for the time it takes to acquire the background knowledge of a site and its constituents, the range of depositional processes that figure in the site's formation, and many other classes of information. Moreover, one's critical appraisal requires not just examining the premises of the argument in question, but also those of the work that's referenced. In other words you have to dig as far as the bedrock of an argument, however noxious, however off-putting [see below]. And then you work back through the 'evidence' to form a reasoned assessment of the claim. 

I suspect that limitations on one's background knowledge are enough to dissuade oneself from embarking on such a voyage. I further suspect that limited background knowledge contributes to mute acceptance of a great many archaeological knowledge claims.

An ivory tower, as symbol of Mary, 

in a "Hunt of the Unicorn Annunciation" 

(ca. 1500) from a Netherlandish book of hours. 

Okay. So. Given the time involved in becoming thoroughly critical of others' work, it's understandable that academic archaeologists (and referees) simply can't afford the time. Besides, the resulting critiques wouldn't impress the tenure or promotion committee, unless it's published in a peer-reviewed journal. What's more, it's likely never to be published as anything other than a comment, which are not refereed, and therefore don't attract the attention of Very Serious Scholars. It also pisses off your peers [just ask me]. 

So who does that leave? Students with more energy than political savvy [of which I was one once upon a time], and underemployed, ageing, ex-academic archaeologists with nothing to lose and nothing better to do with their spare time than pour out their bile in cyberspace. Neither is taken very seriously, so it's no wonder that the Grown-ups in our discipline have no time to spare for such activities.

All ready for the slings and arrows!

All righty. I've said before that I learned too late of the major reason that an archaeologist should be reluctant to retrace the steps of another archaeologist’s inferential process: it could be profoundly damaging to their career. That's because there are no funding sources for such reappraisals, nor tenure committees that would value the enterprise as a first line of research. Besides, most archaeologists are quite happy to employ those authorities whose inferences bolster their own argument of the moment. Thus only someone secure in their position (unconcerned by the career treadmill) could or would undertake such examinations. This, as much as anything, explains why re-examinations of previous findings are usually undertaken by graduate students whose careers have yet to blossom, and who have not yet developed the self-preservation instincts of tenure-track and tenured academics.

Nevertheless, such activities are capable of propelling nascent careers into the intellectual stratosphere by virtue of their “game-changing” implications.

Sadly, few are bold enough (or naïve enough) to question the conclusions of a senior principal investigator (while said PI is still living, or still considered reliable by their peers). Caution prevails even when, for example, there is a general suspicion that a long-accepted narrative is flawed. Adding to the peril is the risk of alienating those whose interpretations and livelihoods are likely to be threatened because they rely on the authority’s interpretations to shore up their own findings. As a result, those who presume to call into question the “standard story” are often dealt with harshly, if stealthily. This may be direct and in print. Usually, however, punishment is less overt—for example, limiting access to collections, giving negative reviews on grant proposals, or whispering campaigns that can influence hiring or promotion. Either way, careers can and do suffer. 

Next time: in search of further factors that work against a critical stance in the archaeology literature, a tiptoe through the tulips of epistemology and philosophy of science. 

I'll bet you just can't wait!

* “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”
** Blurt is my own synonym for a blog post. One day I was announcing an SA post on Twitter. As you know, Twitter posts are called tweets. I immediately became jealous of the logical—almost poetic—relationship between the thing, a post, and the verb used to describe the act of uploading it. I thought about it for a few moments. If, I said to myself, a Twitter member tweets, could not a blogger be said to bleat? Sadly, for most in my culture, the kind of animal that makes such noises—most notably sheep—isn't considered a stand-on-your-own-two-feet sort of animal. Indeed, sheep, when used to describe a person, or sheepish their action, connotes weakness or submission. So, I thought 'bleat' might not be such a good analogue for 'tweet.' And so, I settled on 'blurt,' because it captures the nature, both of the act of blogging, and what is usually, for me, an forceful ejaculation inserted in the 'conversation' that is archaeology. So, blurts these are, and blurts they will be called. So sayeth the Lord of this bare pinprick on a period in the sphere known as Blogi.     

Part One of [Probably] Many: What Does It Mean To Be A Subversive Archaeologist?

I'm betting most people are surprised to hear the word 'subversive' spoken in the same breath as 'archaeologist.' After all, subversives work against evil governments or brutal oppressors, not university subjects. So, what's up? 'Subversive archaeologist' seems almost oxymoronic. You're getting close. Oxymoron is from the Greek words for 'sharp' and 'foolish.' In archaeology, as in life, one is either 'sharp' or 'foolish,' and from my perspective, there's no in-between. 
     This blurt is about the distance between getting it right and makin' stuff up, between a good theory and a bad myth, a well-warranted inference and a mistaken one. Whoa! Wait a minit! Inference? Don't people infer stuff from partial information? Exactly. But, that doesn't sound like science to me. Well, that's science, and in this case, archaeology, all over.
     It's not up to me to comment on the way knowledge is made in the other sciences. But in archaeology, artifacts don't come out of the ground with labels on 'em. Believe me. I've spent years on my hands and knees, scraping back time, in search of a long-forgotten past. And you don't 'discover' the past, you make it up. Sort of.
     Archaeologists dig to find traces of the past. And those traces don't speak for themselves. In a very real way, archaeologists give those things meaning. We try to get it 'right.' We don't try to pull the wool over your eyes. But much of the time the bits we find are ambiguous, and sometimes we don't find that out until years later. That's how archaeological myths are born. The job of a subversive archaeologist is to reveal the ambiguity, and in that way to help in dismantling both the myth and the web of mistaken beliefs that it spawned down through the years.
     The work of a subversive isn't popular with the 'government' of archaeology--the hierarchy of Professors and Directors and such. And they let you know it, in various ways, overt and insidious. So, being a subversive archaeologist, like a lot of subversives, is almost like being in an armed conflict. There are skirmishes, strategies, tactics, logistics, even outright war in archaeology. And it's all because of the tension between 'getting it right' and getting it embarrassingly wrong. Come with me and I'll show you worlds you never imagined [there's a lot of that in archaeology], and ideas you hoped you'd never have to grapple with.
     No worries. I'll talk you down. We'll have fun. Honest.
     Maybe an example will help. You've probably heard of the Piltdown Man, once considered a fossil ancestor. You may even have heard that it was a hoax. It was. But thanks to the guile of the hoaxster and the gullibility of most archaeologists of the time, it's reality was unquestioned for decades. That's because the people who study our fossil relatives decided that it was a proper piece of the jigsaw puzzle of human evolution. That expectation and the acceptance of Piltdown Man held back real scientific progress, real knowledge, for nearly forty years.
     Piltdown is still a small country crossroads in southeastern England. Too far from London to be built up. It had or has a gravel pit. In nineteenth and early twentieth-century England that meant one thing--there be fossils here.

The Piltdown Pub, Piltdown, East Sussex, England. (From Wikipedia. This image was taken from the Geograph project collection. See this photograph's page on the Geograph website for the photographer's contact details. The copyright on this image is owned by Nigel Freeman and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.)

Group portrait by John Cooke, 1915.
Back row (from left): F O Barlow, G Elliot Smith,
Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward.
Front row: A S Underwood, Arthur Keith,
W P Pycraft, and Sir Ray Lankester.

To make a long story short, in 1912 Charles Dawson came across a skull and jawbone that looked to him as if it was the 'missing link' between the apes and humans. [For the time being we'll ignore the specious distinction between 'ape' and 'human,' since we're all apes. Humans just happen to be the only apes that habitually walk upright on their hind legs--A.K.A. obligate bipeds.] The Piltdown specimen was readily accepted because it had a modern sized skull and teeth and jaws like the other apes [the lower jaw was actually that of an orangutan, with its long canines literally filed down]. This all fit perfectly with conventional wisdom of the time--that the essential difference between apes and humans was our big brains, and that the 'missing link' would have a big brain and [most likely] a body like an ape. Therefore, the Piltdown specimen 'fit' with what scholars expected to find, and what the hoaxster knew they'd be ready to accept. Unfortunately the strength of scientific orthodoxy meant that for nearly forty years no one seriously questioned the find. Well, almost nobody.

The 'Taung Child' (Australopithecus africanus).

South African anatomist and anthropologist Raymond Dart knew differently. But for most of those forty years he faced a sceptical discipline that pooh-poohed his work. You see, in 1924 Dart had discovered a tiny skull of a very ancient, infant ape. It had a little ape brain, and big ape canine teeth, just as you'd expect in an ape. But it had one huge difference. The place where the spinal cord emerges from the skull wasn't near the back of the skull--the normal place for apes--it was instead almost directly underneath it. That's where yours is, and mine, too [though some have called me a little monkey now and then for my *clears throat* efforts, I'm still human when it comes to the big hole in my head. That's funny. Having a big hole in my head is actually something people have accused me of. But they must have been thinking of my anatomy, and not my intellect. Maybe not. Actually, that hole in our heads has a scientific name--foramen magnum--which is Latin for *almost under his breath* 'big hole.' Look. I can't help it if eighteenth-century European scientists thought it'd be cool to use Latin for scientific discourse, most likely to get past the problem of having about a million languages in the Europe of the time. Besides, doesn't foramen magnum sound more learnéd than 'big hole'?]

Raymond Dart

     So, Dart had this infant ape that would most likely have walked upright as an adult. [He knew its age because it still had its baby teeth. Yes, chimps and gorillas and people all have baby teeth. But as far as I know only humans have the tooth fairy...] ] That it walked like us was a perfectly plausible inference. Having the foramen magnum underneath the skull, Dart's new species must have evolved to have a bipedal gait like ours. This was a bold argument, since he had no fossil bones from the rest of the body to compare with ours. But it was a brilliant induction, just the same. [Yes, yes, I meant to say induction. Sherlock Holmes was actually mistaken in his use of the word 'deduction' to describe his characteristic brand of reasoning. Math problems involve deduction. 'This is a three. This is a two. What must you subtract from three to get two.' There's only one possible answer. That's what's known as a deduction. Rather like what happens to your pay when the tax is taken out! Doh! Focus, Rob. Most things that we know about the real world are inductions from insufficient observations. Think about it. We don't actually know that, after we step off the curb, a car isn't going to appear out of nowhere and wipe us off the face of the planet. In the love of truth--the original meaning of 'philosophy'--we really can't know such things. There'll always be a possibility, however remote, that something we don't expect is gonna happen, regardless of the evidence from long experience. But, even though we can't be certain that we're gonna be wiped out when we cross an empty roadway, we can be comforted by the fact that, so far, it's never happened. Moreover, we have no reason to think that it might--unless, of course, you believe that the movie Back to the Future was a documentary. But, don't take my word for it! Read anything on informal logic. You'll see. I'm right!]

     So, there was Dart. A [literally] small man, with a small, unique fossil skull, living in a small backwater of the British Empire, trying to subvert [in the eyes of the scientific establishment] the conventional wisdom of the English scientific aristocracy. Fat chance. So, Dart labored mostly in obscurity for decades, accumulating more fossils. Over time, he and Robert Broom found more evidence that the English scientists were mistaken, and that the Piltdown fossil MUST be a fake. I don't need to bore you with the details of how that fake was exposed. It's all there in books by people much more steeped in the minutiae of Piltdown hoaxery. Read them.]
     Wow! As examples go, that was a long one, eh? Unfortunately, that's one of the downsides of being a subversive. Almost always the effort it takes to unravel a bad inference is way more than it took to make it in the first place. The reasons for that will, I hope, become clear to you as you work your way through future blurts on this and other matters. [Whaddaya mean you don't wanna hafta work while you read? You always have to work when you read...unless, that is, you believe everything you read, or hear--like the people who watch Fox News. I suspect you don't, otherwise you wouldn't have clicked on a link to The Subversive Archaeologist. You're ready. I know you are. And I know you can 'do the work.']
     If you're up for more, I sure am. Let's go, shall we?

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Google Friend Connect or Twitter, friend me on Facebook, check out my publications at Academia, or connect on Linkedin. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. And please don't forget. Oh, and you can always put me on your blogroll! By the way, I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there by clicking through from this site. 

[Updated] The Subversive Archaeologist's Plaint: 'Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me'

Some of you may have seen a comment from Maju informing me that I'm a bigot because I happen to think that the Neanderthals aren't our cognitive equals. Maju unsubscribed from this blog because he believes I'm biased against Neanderthals, whom he considers to be among his forbears. What Maju has failed to realize is that I've got lots of reasons to think the way I do about the Neanderthals, based on my 'reading' of the archaeological record. And, rather than making fun of the Neanderthals, I'm much more likely to mock the authors of the extraordinary claims that have been made for their cognitive capabilities.

With Maju's gripe in mind, you might well be wondering if there's any evidence that could make me change my mind about the possibility of the Neanderthals being the cognitive equals of modern humans. You might be surprised to learn that the answer is 'Yes.' But I won't 'believe' just any evidence. In fact, it's my singular purpose to expose bad inference-making for what it is, as you know. I won't accept 'any' evidence if it's wholesale rubbish, untestable imagineering, or just one of two or more possible inferences that could be made from the observations--that's Rule #1.

I do think that Neanderthals were clever bipedal apes, as are we. And, of course I think their genome must have been doing something right to have enabled them to persist as a recognizable morphospecies for so long. We have abundant evidence for that. But when it comes to the notion of what stands as 'evidence' for their cognitive abilities, I think the discipline could use a bit of remediation.

All claims to have 'evidence' of something need to be examined for their veracity. I'll give you a contemporary example: Mitt Romney says 'such and such' in a presidential debate. You may be inclined to believe him, or not. But how you go about assessing the veracity of his statement? In the empirical and epistemological world the answer to that isn't the personage (their electability or ability to drink beer with the good old boys), and it's not about your political stance. Checking a candidate's veracity is about seeing if an argument measures up to a close, empirical examination of the premises behind the statement and the logic of the links between the premises and the conclusion. In political discourse [as opposed to archaeological science--most of the time] it's common for two sides to have wildly different interpretations of the 'facts' in question--this is known colloquially as 'spin.' It's the spin that needs to be examined, in and of itself. However, if it's the case that the polar conclusions are the result of equifinality, and it's logically impossible to choose between them, in politics it's not a problem. That's because, from the point of view of the voters, the political arena can countenance two interpretations that are equally well supported (I suppose). It's okay in a political arena because one of the interpretations will no doubt suit even the most discerning voter if there's no way to distinguish unequivocally between them. [I'm not sure that's the case where Governor Romney is concerned, but that's another question--one for the American electorate to decide.]

It's not okay for two competing explanations of the archaeological record to be treated in the same manner as in the example above. For me, the question of which inference to accept isn't about politics. We're not voting on an issue, we're presumably heading for a more realistic understanding of what came to pass millennia ago. And thus, where there are competing explanations it's illogical and unscientific to choose bipedal apes over nature as the explanation for the archaeological observations. After all, we're talking about determining whether or not the Neanderthals were our cognitive equals (whatever that might mean), and in most cases it means deciding on whether or not to accept what's claimed as evidence to be the very first occurrence of a given behaviour in the history of bipedal apes--one that can be equated with modern human capabilities. To my mind that makes it even more important--crucial, if you must know--to resist accepting one favored 'interpretation'--one 'claim of evidence'--when others are equally (and I mean equally) likely.

I, for one, know how easy it is to get caught up in a belief based on just one possibility when there are other, more parsimonious, interpretations. However, since I began to write as the Subversive Archaeologist I think I've managed to 'expose' as equivocal [at a minimum] a goodly number of well-established and widely accepted claims for 'evidence' of modern behaviour amongst the Neanderthals: hafting, mastic making, eagle-talon beading, featherbedding, insecticidal mattress-making, and so on. Before SA came along, the discipline had incorporated those claims into their 'modeling' of 'hominin' cognitive evolution. Don't ask me whether or not I'm prepared to change my view. What are they prepared to do with their models now that they've been shown there's a whiff of ambiguity about those claims for hafting, mastic making, feathered capes, eagle talon jewellery, and so on, and so on? Are they prepared to unhinge their overall view of the Neanderthals from what they've now come to know are equivocal arguments, and reassess their long-held beliefs? I doubt it.

You might think that my view of the Neanderthals should have changed in light of recent work. Indeed it has! My view of Neanderthals as clever apes--and not the cognitive equals of modern humans--has been reinforced and strengthened of late, simply because of the fantastic nature of most of the recent claims, and their utter failure to overcome the buggaboo of equifinality. Note that, here, I'm including the recent genetic findings of Svante Pääbo and others, which I find incapable of escaping from the noose of ambiguity as to when interbreeding may have occurred between the Neanderthal and the skeletally modern lineages, and whether or not we were like us at the time.

Do I think my view of the Neanderthals might ever change? Yes, although my hunch is that it won't need to. But before I change my mind the discipline will have to be much better disciplined when it comes to making claims based on equivocal 'evidence,' or worse, no evidence at all [and here I'm thinking about Paul Pettitt's extended thesis on the evolution of what he calls mortuary practices, or J. L. Arsuaga's claim that the Atapuerca bipedal apes were flinging their dead down a natural well].

In that case, you may well ask what it would take to convince me that Neanderthals were the cognitive equals of people like you and me. Easy. It would take just one Neanderthal skeleton, unequivocally buried, with a string of eagle talon beads around its neck, a hafted knife or spear unequivocally associated with it [preferably gripped in its paw], a treatise on the rationale for the Levallois so-called technique, a wedding ring made with gold from northeastern Africa [preferably around its ring finger first phalanx], a bundle of black feathers flung over its back, wearingf a black feathered cape over a well-tailored wooly mammoth skin jerkin and matching loincloth, a Betty Crocker cook-book in one hand and a box of matches in the other. I think you get my point.

Getting back to the reason Maju unsubscribed, which was my response to Nathan Wales's 'Modeling Neanderthal Clothing Using Ethnographic Analogues.'* I believe the paper falls short of making a convincing argument, even though it's convincing within the context of the data sets that it considers. However, it seems to me that it's premised on the notion that Neanderthal behaviour and modern human behaviour are commensurable--i.e. that one can be understood in terms of the other--that modern analogues can be used to model any bipedal ape's behaviour other than that of modern humans. I believe that this approach is philosophically flawed. Because of how I view the 'evidence' I happen to believe the two species are incommensurable. But it matters very little what I think.

However, until and unless there is clear, unequivocal evidence that the two species' behaviours are commensurable, the discipline ought to proceed with a fair bit more caution. Alas! Regardless of what I think, Wales and many others believe that our behaviours and those of the Neanderthals are commensurable, because of their common belief in a long list of equivocal claims for all sorts of modern human behaviours that have been unjustifiably imputed to the Neanderthals over the years, beginning with purposeful burial [and you know what I think about that]. To conduct oneself as do Wales and others serves no one, least of all the discipline of archaeology, and it certainly doesn't suit me. As long as I'm able, within reason, and within empirical and epistemological bounds, to posit natural causes or alternative interpretations of what others claim to be evidence of Neanderthal cognitive abilities, I'll not go along with the rest of the discipline. And, as long as my alternatives can be upheld, the rest of them cannot imperiously claim to 'own' the correct interpretation.

[Update 20121022.1200 UTC: It occurs to me that we might begin by using ethological analogy when examining the movements of the Neanderthals. Then, at least, if anomalies begin to appear in comparison with other species in the top carnivore guild, we can investigate those for their bearing on the question of cognitive abilities in Homo neanderthalensis.]

*Abstract

Although direct evidence for Neanderthal clothing is essentially nonexistent, information about Paleolithic clothing could provide insights into the biological, technological, and behavioral capabilities of Neanderthals. This paper takes a new approach to understanding Neanderthal clothing through the collection and analysis of clothing data for 245 recent hunter-gatherer groups. These data are tested against environmental factors to infer what clothing humans tend to wear under different conditions. Beta regression is used to predict the proportion of the body covered by clothing according to a location's mean temperature of the coldest month, average wind speed, and annual rainfall. In addition, logistic regression equations predict clothing use on specific parts of the body. Neanderthal clothing patterns are modeled across Europe and over a range of Pleistocene environmental conditions, thereby providing a new appreciation of Paleolithic behavioral variability. After accounting for higher tolerances to cold temperatures, it is predicted that some Neanderthals would have covered up to 80% of their bodies during the winter, probably with non-tailored clothing. It is also likely that some populations covered the hands and feet. In comparison with Neanderthals, Upper Paleolithic modern humans are found to have worn more sophisticated clothing. Importantly, these predictions shed new light on the relationship between Neanderthal extinction and their simple clothing.

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Google Friend Connect or Twitter, friend me on Facebook, check out my publications at Academia, or connect on Linkedin. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. And please don't forget. Oh, and you can always put me on your blogroll! By the way, I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there by clicking through from this site. 

You Must Be Bleeping Joking! JHE: "Modeling Neanderthal Clothing Using Ethnographic Analogues"?

O. M. G. !!!!!!!!!!
R. O. L. M. F. A. O. !!!!!!!!!!!!
Available online today!

Journal of Human Evolution
'Modeling Neanderthal clothing using ethnographic analogues,' Nathan Wales. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.08.006

In the first place, when I saw the title announced I expected to see a parade of plough pullers on a catwalk. But I gave my head a shake the minute I clicked on the link. It was JHE. I knew it was the kind of modelling that always makes me nervous, whether or not there's a stick of a justification for doing it at all.

     Jeebuz. And to think I was getting a little depressed because it's been a while since anything really worth biting on came over the transom. Well. This is it! This is the jackpot! This...is delicious. I could take this apart on soooooooo many levels. But I'll spare you, just for now.

     My first response is to shower JHE with expletives. I always new those guys were Very Serious Scientists. But I had no idea. This paper takes archaeological science completely out of the ground, pumps it up with hot air, let's it go, and whaddayaknow, it floats. Okay. Okay. I know. I shouldn't be so hard on them. After all, they clearly have no inkling of the degrees of separation between the theoretical space in which Nathan Wales exists and any theoretical framework that resides in reality. Did I imagine it? Did I not live through a time in archaeological thought when [archaeologists actually thought] Middle Range Theory, philosophy of science, and reality coincided on a sensible approach to inference making? Diane. Help !@&*

     At best this is a 'thinking' paper. A 'what if' scenario. You might even call it a momentary lapse of sanity. At worst, it's a thinly veiled attempt on the part of JHE's referees to publish anything that aims to reify yet another category of presumed Neanderthal behaviour--in this case, making clothing. There is not a shred of evidence. Not a shred. [heh, heh. Just realized I made a bad pun.] There's less than a fragment. There's not just an emperor without any clothes. There's no damned Emperor!

     Analogy. *catches his breath* Analogical reasoning depends for its veracity on the linkages between the object under examination and the objects being used as the source of hypotheses as to how things might have been. Show. Me. The. Linkages.

     No. Wait. I've just found the linkages. Wales isn't suggesting that the Neanderthals made clothes, he's arguing that the traditional societies supplying the ethnographic analogues are, in fact, modern Neanderthals. Else, why could he use them against which to compare the 'modelled' Neanderthal fashions. It's inherently racist. It's obscene [even if you ignore the vapid referees]. Show me where I'm exaggerating!

     Indeed, the corollary implicit in Wales's paper compels me to ask, why should anyone accept the premise that modern humans are anything like the Neanderthals? 'If they build it Neanderthals will come,' is the best answer I can come up with. I'm beginning to think that the weight of the so called-evidence supporting a modernized view of the Neanderthal cognitive abilities is so damned heavy that there's no getting out from under it. I might as well fold up the tent and steal away into the night.

      Argh.

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Google Friend Connect or Twitter, friend me on Facebook, check out my publications at Academia, or connect on Linkedin. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. And please don't forget. Oh, and you can always put me on your blogroll! By the way, I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there by clicking through from this site. 

A Kick-Ass Scientific Illustration to Illustrate an Ass-Kicker of an Epistemological Dilemma

I'm gonna treasure this.

'Remains of Holocene giant pandas from Jiangdong Mountain (Yunnan, China) and their relevance to the evolution of quaternary environments in south-western China,' Nina G. Jablonski, Ji Xueping, Liu Hong, Li Zheng, Lawrence J. Flynn, and Li Zhicai. Historical Biology: An International Journal of Paleobiology 24:527-536, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2011.640400

Thank you Nina Jablonski of the Cal Academy et al. for this beauty of a graphic. I can't wait to erect it the next time I'm forced to comment on the idea of purposeful anything at Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. In fact. I might just say something right now, because this illustrates what I mean when I talk about equifinality.

I suppose we can't altogether rule out purposeful disposal of the panda dead by other pandas. No, wait! That's not true. We can. If today's pandas aren't capable of it, it's unlikely that yesterday's pandas were. And so, if this can happen naturally to a panda it can equally naturally happen to one or more members of the species Homo antecessor. [Take a deep breath before saying the following out loud] You can take Paul Pettitt's* position and say that the Sima de los Huesos bipedal apes could have been cacheing their dead in a depositional environment virtually identical to that of the unfortunate panda's (something that neither Pettitt nor anyone else could ever in a million years verify empirically), or you could take the only truly logical position and say that, while it may have been the case that someone dropped each and every Homo antecessor individual into the Sima de los Huesos, it's equally likely that, panda-like, those Iberian Penisula exponents of Homo heidelbergensis were unfortunate enough to lose their footing at the top of a 13-m deep natural trap. Ergo, there's no power whatsoever in the Pettitt hypothesis, which is merely a restatement of the same claims made by Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the principles of the Atapuerca projects. [Yep. The guy even has his own Wikipedia entry.]
     A tip o' the hat to Trina MacDonald for first bringing this to my attention, all the way from (near) Melbourne by internet Pony Express.

* You could pay the $115 for the hardcover, or just $7.48 for the Kindle edition. You can probably guess which one I purchased!

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