Call For Nominations: The Dawson Awards 2015

Charles Dawson (1864–1916)

It is with extreme pleasure that I call for nominations for the inaugural

Charles Dawson Prize

in recognition of the nefarious amateur archaeologist said to have been responsible, in 1912, for mounting the Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni) hoax, which set paleoanthropology back at least four decades. Heck! Even if Dawson wasn't the perpetrator, his name belongs on these awards because he should've known better than to fall for such a cheap trick!

Tip o' the old brown fedora to Leon Jacobson for suggesting that The Subversive Archaeologist host an archaeological equivalent of the much-revered Darwin Awards. It took less than a second to decide in whose honour this prize should be named.

One Grand Prize will be awarded, along with honourable mention for two runners-up. The awards will be announced on the first of April, 2015.

SELECTION CRITERIA
 
First and foremost, the Dawson Prize will be given for ignominious achievement in the archaeological sciences—broadly construed as those endeavours that contribute to knowledge of human or bipedal ape past behaviours and cognitive or cultural abilities and achievements—from observations made during excavation, or from excavated materials.

Nominees must possess advanced degrees, although it isn't necessary that they be in archaeology or anthropology. Any discipline that aids or makes possible archaeological or paleoanthropological interpretation is a potential candidate. However, possession of an advanced degree is crucial. How else to gauge how far the mighty are fallen?

The work in question must be reported in a peer-reviewed publication, to ensure that the Dawson Prize is shared equally by the researchers and their enablers—the estimable referees. The more high-profile the publication; the greater the failure, and more apt and just the deserts of this award. Publications such as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and their ilk will garner the most attention from the judges—work published in PLoS ONE will be considered only in the absence of nominees who publish in scholarly vehicles of long standing.

Special weight will be given to research findings that are uncritically parrotted in the media as having huge scientific importance. Included are minor- and major-market newspapers, and web sites devoted to science writing—especially archaeology and paleoanthropology. If you wish to have your nomination considered for this criterion, please include links to several examples.

NOMINATING PROCESS

To expedite judging, the following minimum information will be required from you.

1. Name(s) of those responsible for the research.
2. Full bibliographic information for the publication(s).
3. A hint as to why you think the work is deserving of the Dawson Prize.
4. Your name and affiliation, if you're fortunate enough to have one—an affiliation, I mean.

Submit nominations using the Comments function at the bottom of this announcement.

THE DECISION OF THE JUDGES . . .  ER . . . JUDGE . . . WILL BE FINAL.

Let infamy reign!

Proof That We Are Living in the Archaeological End Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did the Denisovans Cross Wallace's Line?

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

Israel conference: Cavemen discovered recycling

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

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

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

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

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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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Synonyms for 'Hooey'

I'm compiling a catalogue of words to use when I'm talking about anything less than sensible. By now you're all getting pretty tired of me saying preposterous!

     The first group that I've culled from the web follows.

balderdash, baloney, blarney, blather, blither, bull, bunk, claptrap [a personal favorite], codswallop [another], crap, a crock, drivel, drool, folly, foolishness, garbage, guff, hogwash, hokum, nonsense, malarkey, poppycock, rot, rubbish, silliness, twaddle

More to come. I've been on official Hogwart's business the past few days, so not much time to blurt. More soon.

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