Accolades For Tom Wynn: Too Bad About That Hand Axe Thing!

This just in!

University of Colorado
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
Dr. Thomas Wynn

Tom Wynn, of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, has just been given that institution's highest academic position—Distinguished Professor.

Well done, Tom!

He began working on bipedal ape cognition in the late 1970s, and in the past decades he and UCCS psychologist Fred Coolidge have compiled an immense amount of work around the evolution and character of, in particular, Neanderthal cognition.

Both are friends of the Subversive Archaeologist—although I'm well aware that they don't concur with much that I've written about the theoretical constructs that surround Paleolithic stone artifacts.

Tom's early work was highlighted by the 1979 "The Intelligence of Later Acheulean Hominids" (Man, New Series 14:371-391), in which he applied Piagettian genetic epistemology to "characterize the intelligence of later Acheulean" bipedal apes—makers of the ubiquitous, yet to me still inherently enigmatic, stone artifact that many call the hand-ax [or handax or hand axe or hand ax, the artifact formerly also known as the coup-de-poing.]

As you're no doubt keenly aware, I question the fundamental premise that lies beneath any such undertaking. Tom used the illustration below in 1979 when outlining his characterization of the intelligence behind the events that led to its having the shape you see here. According to Wynn, “The maker must have been able to conceive the desired shape . . .  .” That "shape" is the bilateral symmetry that has resulted from flake removals, some of which are labelled in this view because they are examples of what Tom calls "retouch," which he infers to have been the purposeful removal of small flakes to produce the desired end product. Granted, this is just one of tens of thousands of such bifaces that have been recovered archaeologically over the years—but the fundamental premise underlying its identification as a hand axe remains the same, and encompasses a shit-load of variation, including other bifacially flaked objects called 'cleavers,' and 'picks,' and 'discoids.'

Forgive me Tom, and you, Dear Reader, if I demur. While this artifact may have been purposefully shaped, that is by no means a necessary conclusion, and to me the evidence for that claim is shaky at best. Bear with me. Let's first look at the view on the right. You see a classic ventral flake surface, complete with striking platform, bulb of percussion, tiny fissures in the rock radiating from the platform, and the concentric ripples emanating from the same point, created  by the Hertzian cone of force that was required to separate this flake from its larger—source—block of raw material, in other words the original core. 

To begin with, there's really no way that I can see to know what this flake's original dimensions were. Although, I suspect that they weren't much different than you see here. I base my—freely acknowledged to be an informed lay person's—opinion on the ambiguity of the timing of all of the flake removals that I've numbered in red in this annotated view. They might all have been removed from the block of raw material PRIOR to this flake's detachment from that core. As such, absent the nibbling that you see labelled "A," the gross shape of this artifact could have been the natural outcome of the physics of rock fracture. Of course, I suppose one could propose that—as is the case with the Levallois so-called technique—those prior flake removals were intended to produce a flake of just this shape. [I think you can guess where I'd stand on that proposition!]

I'm happy for Tom. Kudos, Tom! For your tireless work, for your teaching, for your enthusiasm and for the excitement you've created in generations of archaeologists. But I still think that your construction of pre-modern bipedal ape cognition is profoundly flawed by your major presumption that artifacts such as this were 'created' purposefully in this shape.

One last comment. In the Gazette article Tom is quoted as saying that "One-point-seven million years ago our ancestors made them and continued making them for the next 1.5 million years. Then they quit." Sorry, Tom. Our 'ancestors' may quit making them—most likely when they stopped being our ancestors—but people like you and me have made objects like this up until recent times, as I've pointed out many time before.

Take, for example, these beautiful 'hand axes' from the Americas, with which I'll end this blurt. Archaeologists on this side of the Atlantic have never presumed that these were tools, in and of themselves. That's a much sounder basis—IMHO—on which to ground inferences of cognitive complexity than the one to which Tom Wynn and sooooo many others cleave.

El Pulguero Suroeste is here, in Baja California:

And the Topper Site is on the Savannah River in Allendale County, South Carolina, approximately where you see the bulls-eye in the logo below.

[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.

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A Good Bloody Mary, a Loaf of Bread, and Kathu Pan 1 Again.!

There's nothing like a decent Bloody Mary when you really feel like a pick-me-up. Seriously. But you should know that I'm not a purist. I like to use vegetable juice, like V-8. Trader Joe's makes a good V-8-like mix called Garden Patch that's way cheaper and prolly better for you. I like my BMs [stop chortling, toilet-brain] on the mild side, so I add a dash or three of Worcestershire sauce and voila! Who'd've thought that cocktails could be so nutritious? I feel all picked up! Which is where I wanna be. 'Cause I'm gonna pick up where I left off a while back. So, if you stick around, prepare to be catapaulted (nay, trebucheted) into the Lower Palaeolithic of Southern Africa for the rest of this blurt.

Wilkins and Chazan (2012)*

     Remember Kathu Pan 1? All those run-of-the-mill, plain, or garden-variety flakes that Wilkins and Chazan* have interpreted as evidence of a 'blade industry' at 0.5 Ma? It would be an extraordinary finding if it were true. Alas. Life as a subversive archaeologist isn't ever simple--deciding on the veracity of such a claim is not a straightforward endeavour. I fervently wish that I could just accept an archaeological inference on the face of it. Unfortunately, in the case of Wilkins and Chazan, it's not to be. 


[I know. I know. I've blathered on about this previously. But in truth, I've only called their claim into question--I haven't as yet produced much in the way of evidence to counter or refute their interpretations.]


     The truth (or reality) of this extraordinary claim hinges on the amount of morphological variability they and their 'MSA'-of-Africa colleagues will accept into the class of flake that they've chosen to call 'blades.' To them, a blade is a 'detached piece' that is at least twice as long as it is wide. Simple. No? No. No archaeologist would say that it's that simple. And those who work on the palaeolithic of southern Africa and elsewhere know that to be the case. But that's where they start. As would be the drill for anyone who's in the business of studying the lithic output of modern humans, the length-to-width ratio (hereafter just L-W) is a very basic starting place. The trouble with Wilkins and Chazan and others is that they try outflank the blade purists by suggesting that a quite different set of behaviours can be looked at as analogous, if not homologous, with the blade industries of modern humans. It's a bit of a reach, as you'll see.

     Have a look at the image up above, which illustrates some of the morphological variability inherent in the Kathu Pan 1 assemblage of 'blades' [ignore the core in the lower left]. Here you see flakes with convergent margins, flakes that have been retouched, flakes that are nearly square, flakes that are slivers of stone, flakes with cortex, and some really thick flakes. None are parallel sided, as is the case with the Mesolithic [the true MSA] blades shown below. None are removed from prepared cores like those in the array immediately following the one below.

I owe a big thanks to archaeologist Anja Roth Niemi, Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Tromsö, whom I've never met, but on whose web page I found these lovely illustrations of 8,000 year old blade cores and blades from Norway (after less than a minute searching Google Images). 

     It's true that modern human groups haven't evinced prismatic-core blade industries in all places and at all times during their tenure on Earth. However, we are fairly certain that the presence or absence of such a technique has nothing to do with the cognitive abilities of the people involved--modern human decision-making and the normal constraints on behaviour often preclude such activities. Unfortunately we can't make a similar assumption about the deep time represented at Kathu Pan 1. There, say the authors, for perhaps the first time in history a group of hominids designed and manufactured blades according to a pattern that evokes the kind of deliberate actions that we all know exist in the modern human archaeological record as part of modern human cognitive abilities. 
     Because it may very well be the first time for such an activity, surely it behooves these authors to be very thorough in their description of the assemblage and in the premises that underpin their argument. That's where I'm going today [or this week, more precisely--I've been working on this on and off when I've had the opportunity, for over a week, now, which is why you've heard little from my pulpit in that time]. I intend to point out just how problematic are the assumptions on which these inferences have been made, and in so doing to demonstrate that the Kathu Pan 1 blades are nothing more than a reified category.
     At the outset, let me say that Wilkins and Chazan have done nothing wrong by identifying certain pieces of debitage and utilized flakes as blades when they have a L-W of 2 or greater. Any good lithic analyst dealing with a modern human assemblage would do no less. But, unlike the average analyst working on the technological basis of a lithic assemblage, Wilkins and Chazan stop there. They don't go on to describe those elongated flakes according to morphology. And that is where their analysis veers from the conventional path. They cite others who've worked on the MSA, including those chaps who've made similar claims at Qesem Cave (see the array of so-called blades from Qesem immediately below), but the truth is that this 'blade' classification is profoundly at odds with that of archaeologists who deal with the products of modern humans. For one thing, classic blades almost never (if ever) include cortex, as do many of those shown below.

Wilkins and Chazan and the others have decided that it's OK to define a blade as a flake having an L-W of 2 or greater, and to go no further. 
     Let me just pause here to mention that they take a simple parameter--L-W--and let it represent a conscious choice on the part of the Lower Palaeolithic hominid, and from there to represent a full-on 'industry' like the modern human blade industry I sketched a moment ago. Theirs is a leap of the variety known as Faith, and not an argument from empirical observation, much less well-warranted assumptions.
     I hesitate to go over again what makes a blade. However, I believe it's crucial to emphasize that how we define a blade produced as part of a 'blade industry' is of the utmost importance in assessing the veracity of Wilkins and Chazan's argument. 
     The difference between just a blade and a blade made as part of a blade industry is that the latter is the product of a conscious effort on the part of the flintknapper to produce only just such pieces and to do so in a repetitive series, in which each removal produces a blade of more-or-less uniform morphology from a specially prepared block of stone. A blade technology--one that could be said to be the product of a modern human--produces blades that bear lateral margins that are uniformly parallel or subparallel, and which display dorsal flake scars that testify to earlier removals that are of the same morphology. Among other analyses that can be done to demonstrate the systematic difference between such blades and just flakes, there is a clear-cut statistical difference between the things that have historically been called blades and those regarded as such by the authors.
     Wilkins and Chazan argue that their assemblage does belie an almost identical process. They argue that the difference lies in the orientation of sequential removals, such that the prepared cores are brick-like, and that the blades removed are removed by taking one or two flakes off one end and then doing the same from the other. In so doing these knappers producing flakes that were the shape intended by their maker, i.e. the finished artifact. Unfortunately for Wilkins and Chazan, not only is this a poor argument for a stone industry thats anchored in the same cognitive ability as that produced by modern humans, even their evidence falls short of demonstrating that part of their claim.
     
[As I've said before, the subversive kind of detailed dismantling of a fallacious archaeological claim demands that no essential verbiage be spared. This is already a long blurt, and it'll get longer. Just so you know.]


Where to begin? I thought it would be useful to see just how distinctive the Kathu Pan 1 blades were in comparison with the non-blades. Unfortunately, as I pointed out previously, the authors provide no data to enable such a comparison, nor, evidently, do they think such a comparison is warranted. In my previous attempt to discredit their claim, I as much as accused them of dissembling in their paper. However, after I had a brief, civil, email exchange with Wilkins, I retracted my thinly veiled allegation of disingenuity. However, based on what I was told in the emails, I can say that I have more reason than ever to doubt their claim. 
     One of the most basic assertions that Wilkins and Chazan make is that there is an emphasis on production of flakes with and L-W of 2 or greater, which they call blades. As evidence, they point their readers to their Table 2, which I've excerpted below. 

 


     The way this table represents the assemblage underscores my discomfort. Notice first of all that the number of what are called 'Complete flakes' is about the same as that of 'Blades.' The authors here represent that blades make up 16.1% of the entire assemblage. That is more or less the same proportion of the 'Complete flakes.' This implies that there are as many blades as flakes in the assemblage. 
     However, while it isn't clearly stated in the table, it is mentioned in passing in the text, that the category 'blades' in the table above includes blades and blade fragments, while the category 'complete flakes' is just that. Excluding the flake fragments makes the proportion of 'flakes' to 'blades' appear almost equal. What happens if you lump 'Flake fragments,' 'Proximal flake fragments,' AND 'Complete flakes' and compare that number with the number of blades and blade fragments? The proportion of flakes to blades is much different, which the authors also report in their paper. They write that the proportion of blades in the total of just the 'discarded detached pieces (including flakes and flake fragments)' (N=3786) is 27%. This is now looking more like an assemblage in which blades are not so much  'emphasized.'
     From this point their presentation becomes more confusing and disconcerting. We're told that the mean length for complete blades is 70 mm. Then we're told that there's little value in presenting a breakdown of blade length, because

A frequency histogram of blade width ... [see below]... can be used to get a sense of size distribution... , providing a larger sample than length because blades often break transversely

[which I guess means that we can't know how long they were before they broke--althought it's an open question if they were ever whole, the vicissitudes of breaking stone being what they are].

KP1 blade size distribution includes blades that would technically be classified as bladelets (<12 mm in width, ... but these small blades are just at the lower end of a unimodal blade size continuum. The mean length to width ratio of the KP1 blades is 2.5:1 (n = 92, sd = 0.4).

A cartoon balloon emerges from the vicinity of my head at this point, and all it contains is a very big question mark flashing on and off like a neon sign. The number of blades in the first table above was 972. Yet, in the quote above, we're given an average L-W ratio for blades--2.5:1 (s.d. 0.4)--based on 92, not 972. This is telling us that there are in total just 92 complete 'blades.' In the paper we have only one clue as to the answer--Table 4 gives the summary statistics for blades from two excavation units.

Thus, it is probable that the number 92, given as the source of the average blade length, is correct. In the subsample described in the table above, the number of blades for which an overall length was in evidence is 113. So we would be forgiven if we settled on 'about 100' as the number of complete blades in this assemblage. 
     I'm not suggesting that you need the rest of the 'blade' to argue that a flake portion is a portion of a blade if that flake portion is 2 or more times longer than it is wide. However, given the altogether un-blade-like morphology of the so-called blades shown above from Kathu Pan and from Qesem Cave it begs the question whether the rest of these allegedly fragmentary blades were at all blade-like throughout their length.
     But, forge on we must. In the absence of (to their way of thinking) a relevant sample of complete blades from which to construct a frequency distribution of L-W, we're given instead a histogram of blade width (shown below). Keep in mind that these widths are absolute measures of a subsample of those flakes deemed to be blades, and not a frequency distribution of the widths of the entire assemblage of 'detached pieces.' 
     And when I think about it, I'm not sure what this histogram is really meant to tell us, as width only has interpretive value in this context in terms of its relationship to the length of the so-called blades. Here the number of blades is 511, because the sample that gave this result is only from 2 of the 4 excavation squares that form the entire assemblage. The authors give the average width of this subsample as 28.2 mm (s.d. 9.2) in their Table 4. In that same table the average length is given as 69.7 mm (s.d. 19.3). The histogram below clearly demonstrates that in this assemblage there is a central tendency evident in 'blade' width. That's great! Except it's next to useless unless we can see what the overall assemblage looks like on this parameter. I'd be very surprised if the just flakes produced a distribution much different from this--after all, we see variation from less than 10 mm all the way up to 60+. I doubt very much if the just flakes width distribution could look any different!

     So, you and I want to know if the authors' blades were in any measurable way distinctive from just plain old flakes. Since the Kathu Pan 1 'blades' clearly don't exhibit a uniform morphology beyond the L-W of >2, it wasn't clear to me why we weren't offered a similar set of data for the un-blade-like flakes. So I wrote to Wilkins:

I'm very interested in the length-to-width ratios that you reported, and I was wondering if it would be possible to acquire the raw data for the 1800 or so 'complete flakes' and 'blades.' You published the mean ratio for the blades, but not for the flakes, and you didn't publish the frequency distribution of length-to-width ratios for either the blades or the complete flakes. Moreover, while you did publish the frequency distribution for blade widths, you didn't publish the frequency distribution of their lengths, and you published neither for the 'complete flakes.' 

From the reader's standpoint, on the basis of your published observations,  it's an open question as to whether or not the distincitveness of your 'blades' isn't simply an artifact of the arbitrary definition of a blade.  

Wilkins was kind enough to glean her data to give me a histogram of the 'complete flake' and 'complete blade' L-W ratios (N=920). It's given below. And it's a far cry from the sense that one gets from the histogram above. 

The first thing I noticed when I saw the L-W ratio distribution for the assemblage as a whole was that complete flakes with a L-W ratio >2 (i.e. what the authors call 'blades') are a minority compared to those <2, and that in no way do they display the unimodal distribution that the blade width histogram above did. As I look at this histogram I don't see a unimodal, bimodal, or a normal distribution. I see that about 700 of the 920 are 'flakes' (i.e. with a L-W of between 0.8:1 and 2.0:1). That works out to about a .76 probability that any piece of rock that was detached from a core and discarded in the excavated portion of Kathu Pan 1 would have had a length to width ratio of between 0.8:1 and 2:1! More fascinating, when you remember the authors' conclusions, is that the distribution of flakes with L-W between 0.8 and 2:1 is close to that of a continuous uniform distribution. A uniform distribution occurs when one is tracking a variate that is varying randomly, as would be the case if one was sampling from a continuous variable (with replacement), and not constrained to any discrete value, such as would be the case in a game of dice. This Kathu Pan 1 distribution of the L-W ratios of all complete 'detached pieces' is not perfectly uniform, to be sure. But when one can predict an outcome inside 25% of the range 75% of the time, we're talking anything but 'normal.'
     As well as being platykurtic this distribution is heavily skewed to the lower L-Ws. As for those flakes that Wilkins and Chazan would call blades, the numbers taper off to the right much as would be the case in any platykurtic normal distribution. This is to be expected even in a distribution that is close to uniform for a portion of the range. You simply wouldn't expect a strongly, but imperfectly random process to suddenly drop to zero at any point. Thus, the shape of the distribution for the longer flakes is what you'd expect, even from a process that was more random than not. 
     I believe that the L-W ratios of complete blades and flakes data more or less destroy the authors' contention that 'blades' were preferentially removed, relative to just plain old L-W <2 flakes. There's nothing distinctive whatsoever about their blade dimensions when compared along with the rest of the assemblage. I fully expect a similar outcome if we were ever to see the frequency distribution of all 'detached pieces,' both fragmentary and complete, whether called 'flakes' or 'blades' by Wilkins and Chazan.



     Alas, I wish I could say that we're finished. We still have to deal with the authors' contention that there are these prepared cores and that the 'blades' frequently demonstrate 'bi-directional' flake removals, which the authors would say was analogous to the prismatic cores that we see produced by modern humans. 
     When I asked as to what it was besides the L-W ratio that distinguishes the flakes they call blades as blades, Wilkins replied   

the majority of the detached pieces that are twice as long as they are wide have bidirectional dorsal scars (relating them to the bidirectional cores that we describe)

I comes down to this, then. Even if the L-W ratio isn't an acceptable criterion to allow most lithic analysts to spot the 'blades' in the assemblage, the authors nevertheless infer that a 'blade industry' existed at Kathu Pan 1 at 500 Ka. They infer that the blades are being removed from 'bi-directional' cores. This, they suggest, is evidence that the 'blades' were sought after, and that the cores were prepared so that the hominids of the time could employ a bi-directional technique to ensure that they removed a series of elongated flakes. 
     Let's look closer at their contention. I don't know any other way than to display what the authors have given us, at a scale that makes sense. These views of the so-called bi-directional cores are more or less actual size. After admiring the lovely layered effect of banded ironstone in the photo, have a look at the drawing labelled 'c.'

A 'bi-directional core'

I think if I were holding the lump of rock illustrated in 'c' I couldn't have found very many more places from which to strike off flakes. And, regardless of the hard sell that the authors are perpetrating, I think you'd have to be pretty generous to say that the 'directions' of the flake removals do anything but point to the central mass of this core from a variety of angles. As an example of a prepared bi-directional core, this leaves a lot to be desired.

     Think on this. These drawings no doubt represent the best examples of what the authors want to call bi-directional cores, drawn from the approximately 700 cores in the entire assemblage. The authors need to hope that there are better examples if they want to convince anyone but themselves and the Journal of Archaeological Science's referees that there is any merit whatsoever in their argument. 

Now have a look at e, above. I see the same story repeated. No preferred orientation of flake removal, except that the knapper appears to have been aiming at the central mass of this lump of rock, somewhere near its geographic centre. The same story is repeated in the following examples. Bi-directional cores? My ass.

Same story.

A little more ambiguos, but still...

Finally! A 'core' with only 'bi-directional' flaking. Sadly, it's on a small bit of rock that only truly lent itself to end-on flaking, and to the removal of a small number of flakes.

But that's still not all. The authors aver that the flakes they call blades show dorsal flake scarring indicative of at least one previous removal going in the opposite direction--i.e. evidence of having been struck off one of their fantasy bi-directional cores. They say that even the complete flakes don't show the same dorsal morphology. Here's what I think.

     Let’s imagine a core with a long axis of x cm. The knapper is removing flakes from either end so as not to end up with a useless wedge in short order. Flakes of length < X/2 will in all likelihood exhibit unidirectional dorsal flake scars, while flakes in excess of X/2 will in all likelihood exhibit bi-directional flake scars.  I fail to see how the authors' observations imply anything other than that long flakes struck from brick-like cores are more likely to display bidirectional flake scars because they're longer than those flakes called just flakes. 
     And if you don't believe me about the brick-shaped core thing, just listen to what Wilkins and Chazan say about their wonderful, prepared, bi-directional cores.

The authors use the term idealized a lot in this illustration. Go figure! Here they provide no evidence of the presumed preparation of a chunk of rock to produce such a shape from which to strike off elongated flakes bi-directionally. And even if you give the hominids the benefit of the doubt (the half-million year old ones, not the authors), all we're seeing here is, perhaps, the result of a choice as to which of the four 'sides' to exploit. 
     
     Of course, what I think doesn't matter a hill of beans. The palaeoanthropological 'community' will think whatever they want to think, regardless whether the evidence is real or trumped up. So, I'm gonna go back to the store now and get me some more vegetable juice!
     Cheers! Chimo!




* Wilkins, J., Chazan, M., Blade production ~500 thousand years ago at Kathu Pan 1, South Africa: support for a multiple origins hypothesis for early Middle Pleistocene blade technologies, Journal of Archaeological Science (2012), doi:10.1016/ j.jas.2012.01.031

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A Human Evolutionary Battle of the Technological Titans for the Undisputed World Heavyweight Championship of Nest Building: Castor Canadensis VS. Pongo pygmaeus

Round 1: In which Pongo makes a nest (Credit)

In the world of ethology one group stands head and shoulders [well, head, anyway] above the rest--primatologists. Unlike their scholarly kindred primatologists can make a claim that's unique among those who study animal behaviour. That is, they can always justify their days spent grunting, hooting and chest beating, and walking about on all fours so as to acclimatize their subjects to their presence by arguing that they are investigating behaviours that might [a mighty might, that] have a bearing on our understanding of how humanity dragged itself up out of the primordial muck savannah dust to stand erect and eventually to free its hands for tool making or rickshaw pulling and in the process enslaved its feet, qua pedal extremities, qua locomotory appurtenances, forever [credit goes to my old acquaintance Gary Richards for that bit of podial insight].

Jane Goodall in the early 1960s

     Indeed, since the time Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall removed herself from her (probably girlie) English roots to insinuate herself into Pan trogolodytes (chimpanzee) society on the shores of Lake Tanganyika at Gombe, revelations about the human-like behaviour of the great apes [other than humans] have punctuated an otherwise brutally hot, sometimes deadly, but always physically and emotionally difficult vocation. 

Gombe (© 2003 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.)

Dame Goodall has shown us that chimps pull the leaves off of twigs to enable them to reach into termite mounds to attract termites for consumption [or did some oblivious ranch-hand inadvertently show one of them how to do it, resulting in a new 'tradition' amongst the group?]. Crumpling leaves to make sponges to extract water from puddles also emerged from the studies at Gombe [so, too, did brutal rape, torture and cannibalism of fellow anthropoids, but we won't dwell on that. At least we can be certain that it wasn't the same oblivious ranch-hand that taught them those things...].
     And yesterday comes fresh news of the startling cognitive capabilities of a great ape--Pongo pygmaeus, the orangutan. This animal is, by all accounts, something of a nest-building, evolutionarily precocious, civil engineer! van Casterena et al.'s 'Nest-building orangutans demonstrate engineering know-how to produce safe, comfortable beds' [published online before print April 16, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1200902109, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)] brings us face to face with ... ourselves [albeit about 12 million years in the past]. Like the good anthropologists the authors are, they've thoroughly anthropomorphized this animal's actions by deeming it 'engineering' and saying as much in print, in a scholarly journal [albeit one about which there are serious questions as to the seriousness of the review process]. This adds to the long list of claims made in behalf of science [the list I've just alluded to] for the other members of what's come to be known as the Homininae,* the Linnaean Family that includes you and me.
But, before you get too caught up in the weltanschauung of willy-nilly anthropomorphizing that permeates higher primate studies, let me bring you back down to the ground. Remember this little furry rodent? Castor canadensis? They build 'nests' too! Only theirs are permanent, unlike those of primates [which are constructed from scratch at least once a day], and are sometimes fairly large structures. Did I say 'fairly' large?
One recently observed in Alberta is an incredible 850 metres long! That's about half a mile! Have a look! Like the Great Wall, you can see this thing from space (thanks to Google Earth). These piccies are from a MailOnline article touting the [ahem] 'engineering' capabilities of this relatively small-brained, furry creature.

The brown area has been denuded by Beaver logging. The water flow is toward the top of the picture. The arrows point to two beaver lodges (themselves quite elegant feats of 'engineering'). There must be myriad smaller ones, considering these ones, too, can be viewed from a satellite orbiting the Earth!

Giving credit where credit is due, the lead author of the orang nest article did say this in an interview.

'We think the skills you'd need to build such a sophisticated nest are on a par with those you'd need to make and use tools, so require a similar cognitive ability. In this context, it would be interesting to investigate nest-building by other animals like beavers and birds,' says van Casteren [click here for the full story of this quote].

I wonder what they'd conclude from a 'study' of the other nest builders. Chances are it won't be that our closest relatives are on a par with beavers and bower birds. Nuh-uh. They'll be lumping beavers and beaked dinosaurs with humans and the other great apes! I mean, really, what else can you say, on present understanding, than that most mammals are capable of some very complex behaviours, that are often, in part, learned from conspecifics. So, it seems, are birds. So are bees and mud wasps. So, too, are web-building spiders! If you wanted to take this whole anthropomorphic engineering meme to its logical conclusion, you could probably see evidence of cognition on a par with humans in the colonial habits of some single-celled organisms. Where does it stop?? 
     If I had my 'druthers it would stop here, with the sensible conclusion that our closest relations are clever mammals. Full stop. Let's face it, the nesting behaviours we're witnessing amongst, for example, Pan and Pongo were probably extant at the time of the last common ancestor, so we're not talking about some inevitable trajectory from nest building (however 'clever' it might seem to us primatologically impoverished humans) to modern human cognitive abilities--such as the ability to understand what these pixels are meant to mean to you. And even if we could possibly understand what it takes in the way of brain function to make a bloody orangutan nest, all we'll have done is identify an ability that's (conservatively) about 12 million years old. So. What!
     I think the study of our primate relations is important (if only 'cause they might not be around forever). But let's get serious about the implications of what we observe.
     I'll now go back to my torpid state.


* I, however, will continue to refer to this small group of extant and fossil forms as belonging to the Superfamily Hominoidea, and to the Families Pongidae, and Panidae, Gorillidae and Hominidae. Unlike so many of my siblings in the biological/physical anthropology clade of the academy, I'm not taken in by the vocal claims of the primatologists that certain behaviours amongst our closest genetic relatives makes them any more human than they were before Johnny Weismüller and Cheetah cavorted in the treetops together before Jane came along [all churlish innuendo intended!] Thus, I am not convinced by the recent, arbitrary revision of the Superfamily Hominoidea, and I will cleave to the taxonomy I've just outlined until either a) someone persuades me to think otherwise, or b) I expire.

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. 

Leading Lam to the Laughter--Her Teachers, Not Me!

From the AAAS web site

There is no way I'm gonna let this go without a response. Mimi Lam, graduate student at one of my alma maters, UBC, has been much in the news of late. She purports to argue that the 'handaxe' was the 'first commodity,' and that its persistence in the archaeological record was due to meaning with which it came to be imbued, including what she calls 'cultural power,' whatever that is. Lam's brand of scholarship is the kind that makes me squirm in my seat when I hear it in person, and makes me scream out loud when I'm reading it in private. It's at least twice removed from the reality of actual Lower and Middle Palaeolithic scholarship, and makes so many perilous leaps of faith as to take one's breath away.
     Although I 'published' this a few minutes ago, it occurred to me as I was walking away that none of this is, strictly speaking, Ms. Lam's fault. In fact, this is about the best 'object lesson' I could think of to illustrate what the Subversive Archaeologist is all about. Ms. Lam bases her entire argument on 'knowledge' that she, no doubt, received from her anthropology instructors--perhaps even her own advisor. That 'knowledge' has led Ms. Lam to construct an elaborate argument that, were any of its assumptions in reality true, she may (maybe) have a cogent argument. I'm talking about the notion that there is a thing called a handaxe that was the desired end-product of a lithic reduction sequence performed by, in the earliest times, by Homo erectus (and variations thereof), and later by Homo neanderthalensis. She would also have been taught, unequivocally, that the 'handaxe' was the product of a mental template in the mind of the maker. That mind may well have been capable of language, and 'culture' and so on.
     So, in what follows, please keep in mind that, but for the occasional grammatical issue (which can easily be forgiven in a conference abstract), the problems that I point out in Ms. Lam's presentation are, on the whole, the fault of her teachers and mentors, and those whose work she has read, and that she is in no way culpable for having constructed this argument on that basis. As such, her paper is an example of just what happens if you let your anthropology babies grow up to be carbon copies of people who peddle conventional wisdom using hackneyed course notes and stenographic repetition of mantra-like presumptions about the hominid past.
     So far the only published version of her oral presentation at the 2012 AAAS Annual Meeting is the abstract that's published on the conference web page. I think it contains quite enough grist for my mill. Enough, at least, to obviate the need to read any longer version that might (improbable though it seems to me) make it into print. Lam's words are shown in white. Mine will be subversive yellow. In her own words: 

I argue that the ability to build

'Build' is not an accurate description of making a stone artifact. It is a subtractive process, and can in no way be considered a 'construction' or something that is 'built.'

portable,

This is hardly a useful addition to this sentence, given that portability was not a question for about a million and a half years. For portability to make any sense at all there must be an alternative, and as far as we know, with the possible exception of nests made in trees or refuges that were used repeatedly, there was no alternative to portability.

durable

The durability is likewise of no relevance here--we're talking about 'tools' made of stone, not, presumably, the ability to choose between making a 'handaxe' out of stone vs. malleable or perishable material. 

artefacts may trace the evolution of human cognition.

This almost goes without saying. 

Hominins evolved a complex suite

In the whole history of Hominidae (or Hominini, if you prefer) this may be true. But for the first 2 million years the 'complexity' of stone tool making amounted to smacking one rock against another such that a sharp chip was removed. True 'complexity' came much later, and depending on whom you canvass, might have occurred during the tenure of Neanderthals and their contemporaries, or not until the advent of modern humans. 

of stone tools, which reflected both emerging individual cognition

I am at a loss to know what is meant by 'individual' cognition? I was unaware of any other kind. 

and embodied knowledge.

To say that 'knowledge' was involved in this acitivity is to presume a level of cognitive ability on a par with our own, which is by no means a secure position. 

The manufacture of robust,

again, meaningless against a backdrop of stone, stone, and more stone.

standardized

This is where Lam starts to stray into areas she ought not to have strayed into. While it's true that many, many archaeoalogists have historically held to the idea that the handaxe represented a 'standardized' form, there is by no means a consensus on the question, and indeed very good reason to doubt the assertion. Those who've been visiting the Subversive Archaeologist since its inception will remember this, and this, and this, where I attempt to take apart the idea that there is anything standard, or even purposeful, about the shapes of bifacial cores in the archaeological record until the Upper Palaeolithic.

artefacts may have enabled their trade

Creation of whatever is implied by the 'handaxe' 'may' also have enabled their use as door stops, but that would entail the further inference that doors existed in those times--hardly a reasonable assertion. To say that there would or could have been 'trade' at that time depth is speculative, at best, and cannot be considered a serious hypothesis, much less a well-warranted assumption. Also, whether or not the artifacts were robust or standardized they would nonetheless be tradable. So, this statement is either really ambiguous or truly nonsensical. You choose.

and imbued them,

This is purely a pedantic observation. As the sentence is constructed, the 'manufacture imbued the biface with cultural meaning.' I think not.  

over time, with cultural meaning within hominin social groups.

Again, the 'meaning' of an object or of its manufacture is something that you and I are quite able to grasp, because we give meaning to everything in our world. Whether or not previous hominid forms were capable of having this conversation, and thus able to give an arbitrary meaning or meanings to a given object is still a very open question.

Here, the longevity,

The persistence through time and space of the 'handaxe' can be explained by hominid cognition or the absence thereof, and is therefore a non-question. 

ubiquity,

The wide distribution of 'handaxes' can only be explained by the ubiquity of the hominids, and not the intrinsic or semiotic attributes of the things themselves. 

durability,

The preservation of handaxes cannot be explained by anything other than that they are made of extremely durable material. It's a crying shame that all of the wood handaxes didn't preserve. But that's the archaeological record for you! 

and stability in design

There is nothing stable about the 'design' of a handaxe other than the stability of the paradigm with which archaeologists have viewed them through time and in distinguishing the 'handaxe' from other bifacially flaked pieces that do not conform to the mental template in the mind of those archaeologists. 

of Acheulean handaxes is explained by viewing handaxe construction in three temporal phases, co-evolving with the human niche:

More pedantry, I'm afraid. I fail to see how 'handaxe construction' could 'co-evolve' with the 'human niche.' According to Lam the construction and shape both remained static over immense time and space, and in fact did not 'evolve.' 

first, as iconic

To label the 'handaxe' 'iconic' presumes that their hominid creators had the cognitive ability to 'see' such things as other than lumps of hard stuff. 

multipurpose

The function of the handaxe has always been and continues to be the subject of endless speculation, and it is by no means a certainty that it had any purpose beyond that of a source for sharp chips of stone with which to cut or scrape. 

functional tools,

I believe this is a straightforward redundancy. 

fashioned by ancestral hominins

Finally a well-warranted assumption! 

; second, as standard

Ditto on the whole 'standard' thing. 

indexical commodities

Again, this presumes the hominids that left the 'handaxes' had the ability to conceive of such things, which is by no means a given, especially amongst what Lam goes on to label as 'pre-linguistic' hominids. 

exchanged in social relationships, perhaps as a paleocurrency among pre-linguistic hominins; and third, as symbolic of cultural power, carried and exchanged as gifts by modern humans within socially constructed niches, now filled with shared meanings and language.

I hope that Lam is describing the circumstances that would surround, say, one of my friends getting a hold of a real archaeological 'handaxe,' knowing that I'm a palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist, and giving it to me as a gift, whereupon I would display it on my mantle. Ascribing such behaviour to any 'hominid' other than cognitively modern humans is a huge leap of faith. In fact, the entire abstract, and no doubt the entire paper is no more than a giant leap of faith. In no way does it represent the level of scholarship, even, in the matters about which it claims to have something to say.