Those Awesome Neanderthals

How many ways can I express these thoughts without you, Dear Reader, getting totally tired of hearing them? 

I have no choice, since the message doesn’t seem to be sinking in for a great many Very Important Palaeoanthropologists. If you’re one of those readers, read on and be joyful.

I've had an epiphany. I’ve come to realize that the oft-maligned Neanderthals were really truly brilliant bipedal apes. Let me count the ways.

They 

had bigger brains than us;

made stone tools using a technique that most contemporary human flint-knappers find difficult, if not impossible, to emulate, and which was so awesome that they and their predecessors did it the same way for upwards of 250,000 years, and produced more stone tool types than the Midas Muffler Man has Craftsman wrenches;  

knew how to dry-distill birch bark to produce a very sticky substance that they used to glue an incredibly-difficult-to-produce pointed piece of stone to a piece of wood with which to thrust into or hurl at prey animals, large and small. In a pinch [one presumes] they used asphalt for the same purpose;

made pointed sticks that are like javelins;

buried their dead;

made and used fire, with which to cook food and, as foreshadowed above, to dry-distill birch bark to make birch tar;

were able to copy the artifacts of us skinny bipedal apes;

knew about the medicinal qualities of various plants in their environment;

were smart enough to rule the world and all its creatures for more than 50,000 years;

made dugout canoes, but strangely, not birch-bark canoes;

lived in the Holy Land, but without all the wars and shit;

buried their dead;

made useful items out of animal skin, such as clothing and ditty bags;

turned naturally occurring objects into works of art;

talked like you and I;

built amazing structures inside caves and rock shelters, and even more amazing ones out in the open that they made out of mammoth bones;

had dentists and social security;

charmed the skinny newcomers to Europe, and made babies galore, from which you and I are descended.

were so attractive that they bred so often with us as to water down their genome such that no modern people have big faces, retro-molar gaps, huge noses and eyes, big fat cortical bone in their legs, and so many other traits that distinguished them from us for their entire existence up ’til about 40,000 years ago;

and they buried their dead;

collected dark-coloured feathers, probably to make capes for the important Neanderthals;

dismembered birds of prey to acquire their talons, prob’ly to use as symbols of power, or to guard against evil spirits or, Bush-like, Evil-doers;

liked shiny, colourful things, like seashells and red ochre;

sometimes ate each other, like the Donner Party, when there was nary an edible anything in their environment;

wouldn’t have looked out of place on a New York subway train;

were really, really strong. So strong that they’d have kicked ass as wrestlers, boxers, or football players (whichever way your culture construes the term football);

Oh, yeah, they buried their dead, often in invisible graves, and sometimes used natural depressions to save time and energy for more important stuff, like . . .  everything else;

I can prob’ly stop there. As I said, there’s no longer any doubt in my mind that the Neanderthals and their contemporaries were excellent at everything we are, and better than us in so many ways that it’s almost embarrassing at the species level.

Spoilers! Next Up: Hardy et al.'s "Neanderthal medics? Evidence for food, cooking, and medicinal plants entrapped in dental calculus"

Phenanthrene

Fluorene

Pyrene

Fluoranthene

[Update: Please have a look at the four-part response from the biologist who undertook the chemical composition study of the El Sidrón Neanderthal's dental calculus. It's in the comments, at the foot of this post. 2012.08.21]

You may be wondering why I didn't jump on this when it was first announced. Published online on July 18 Hardy et al. claim to have extracted *cough* hard evidence of Neanderthal behaviours akin to those of modern humans from the dental calculus that formed on the teeth of 5 individuals from the Iberian Peninsula.
     I've been waiting for the time to look in detail at their claims, and although I haven't finished the fact-checking, I can say that Hardy et al.'s inferences are looking awfully shaky. As before when Very Serious Archaeologists have published chemical analyses, my focus is the authors' interpretation of their findings. I'll give but one example of this from their paper.
     They claim the following:

The additional presence [in the calculus] of the main combustion markers, fluorathene [sic], and pyrene, along with smaller amounts of fluorene and phenanthrene, strongly supports the evidence for cooking/smoke inhalation in this sample (621).      

For this exciting discovery they cite two studies: one on the chemicals produced during charcoal production, and the other on smoked salmon. Seems reasonable. No? Well, not really.
     Pyrene and fluoranthene are the products of combustion, it's true. However, they are characteristic of incomplete combustion, i.e. combustion in a reducing atmosphere--one in which there is insufficient oxygen for complete combustion to occur. That describes perfectly the 'cooking' environment only if you're producing charcoal or, indeed, smoked salmon. Phenanthrene is found in tobacco smoke and that of coal-burning appliances. Fluorene occurs naturally, and according to the EPA, '[f]umes from vehicle exhaust, coal, coal tar, asphalt, wildfires, agricultural burning and hazardous waste sites are all sources of exposure.'
     Now, remember that it was the authors' intention to produce evidence for cooking, fire, and plant use. Their inference here--that the Neanderthals were inhaling smoke-- depends entirely on the erroneous claim that the four compounds are present in the Neanderthal's dental calculus because of smoke inhalation. I have to ask, 'How likely is it that this group of Neanderthals inhaled smoke from charcoal production or salmon smoking in a reducing environment, tobacco smoke, vehicle exhaust, or hazardous waste?      
     I think you can guess the answer to my rhetorical question. But that doesn't address the possibility that the Neanderthals in question weren't dry-distilling birch or coal tar, and sniffing asphalt. After all, as the authors remind us others have made claims that Neanderthals were capable of dry-distilling birch tar and using asphaltum to haft points on wooden shafts. Why couldn't these Neanderthals have been doing just that? 
     I suppose they could have been dry-distilling birch or coal tar (if either Betula or coal were components of the El Sidrón environment--an open question at the moment). Except, if so, they'd have been inhaling the smoke from the wood fires used to 'cook' the two substances, rather than inhaling any of the compounds given off while the birch or coal were 'cooking,' because it's necessary to keep the substances being 'cooked' in hermetically sealed vessels throughout the process! Likewise, they might have been inhaling asphaltum while they were gluing a rock to a stick. But...well, I think you get the point.
     And the point is this. The authors have done nothing, not a thing, to rule out the natural sources of the chemicals they report on. And that is a subversive's take on but one of the claims made by Hardy et al. I'll have more on this cockamamy paper in a subsequent post.

     

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The Scoop On 'Mousterian' Bitumen Hafting Adhesive from Romania

As unaccustomed to using hyperbole as I am, it's with great effort that I must label this latest claim for hafting in the Middle Palaeolithic as the biggest aggregate of meadow muffins in the history of the Journal of Archaeological Science. Whom do they get to referee this stuff? George W. Bush? Anyhow. My friend Iain Davidson, once again, lobbed this my way earlier today. And then I find that this new claim is in the spotlight at A Very Remote Period Indeed, Julien Riel-Salvatore's blog. Of course, J. R.-S. simply acts as the stenographer, with NO critical appraisal whatsoever. Anyway. 
     Ripped from the (soon to be published) headlines: 

'New evidence of adhesive as hafting material on Middle and Upper Palaeolithic artefacts from Gura Cheii-Raşnov Cave (Romania),' by M. Cârciumaru, R.-M. Ion, E.-C. Niţu, and R. Ştefanescu. Journal of Archaeological Science, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2012.02.016.

In this case the adhesive is bitumen. As with previous well-identified sticky stuff, I have no quarrel with the chemical characterization. I must, however, point out some red flags in the manuscript. 
     By the way, for those of you unfamiliar with what used to be behind the 'Iron Curtain,' Romania is the country that encompasses the N45 lat-long marker in the map below.

Romania is one of those places where you might expect a lot of great archaeology. In this case, not so great.
     The authors report one bitumen-spattered piece from the Upper Palaeolithic, and one from what they deem to be a Mousterian stratum (i.e. Middle Palaeolithic). The MP article is pictured below, straight from the in-press manuscript.

Aside from being non-descript, this piece could easily have been produced at any time since Mousterian times. That leads me to the major criticism of this claim, which, don't forget, made it into the JAS, no doubt after having been closely scrutinized by some Very Serious archaeologists! Here is how the authors describe the archaeological context of the putative MP flake.

The ... item belongs to the Mousterian layer, characterised by a rather poor lithic industry.

They aver that the industry was 'poor' because of the quality of the raw material, which was quartzite. Poor, indeed. If this bitumen-stained artifact is any example of the 'Mousterian' at this site, one wonders how the authors and their predecessors ever managed to characterize the assemblage as Mousterian, in the first place! Actually, if the original excavators hadn't been using an old and now thoroughly discredited means of guessing at the age of the 'Mousterian' layers--that which assessed the granulometry of the éboulis (the exfoliated bedrock that naturally builds up in the stratigraphic column)--they probably wouldn't have given the assemblage another thought. And, in all likelihood they wouldn't have called it Mousterian, and in all likelihood neither would the more recent excavators, the authors of today's cannon fodder JAS article. So, 

     Next, the dates. Again, straight from the horse's mouth.

... the hearth in the lower area of the Mousterian level – GrN 13,009: 33,300 ± 900 BP; the upper hearth that marks the end of the Mousterian habitation – GrN 11,619: 29,700 + 1700 / - 1400 BP and GrN 14,620: 28,900 + 2400 / - 1800 BP. A bone sample in between the two hearths, obviously belonging to the Mousterian layer, was dated back to 30,450 ± 300 BP (GrN 13,008). 

I don't know about you. But if I had dates on what was, IN FACT, a Mousterian (read Neanderthal) (read Middle Palaeolithic) occupation that were this young, I wouldn't be wasting my time blathering on about some bitumen stains of a single artifact! I'd be screaming at the top of my voice that here is the latest evidence for Neanderthals anywhere! And that's where I think this article falls on its face.
     There's no solid (or any even good) evidence that the so-called Mousterian flake couldn't have been made by a modern human. The other flake they describe in this article is, they say, from the UP. Have a look at it. Hmm.

I dunno about you, but I don't see a lot of difference between the two artifacts. That means little in absolute terms. But if all the authors are going on is someone's intuition that a non-descript assemblage is Mousterian, why is this getting into the JAS? I hafta tell ya, palaeoanthropology today is one whacky business!