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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It's Not Monday! It's Fry-Day.

I just pressed send on an email to Francesco Berna and Paul Goldberg, asking them to respond to my argument just the other day that they shouldn't have expected to see Berlinite in the fire-affected sediments at Wonderwerk Cave. Viz.

Berna, et al. 2012. Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. PNAS April 2, 2012. Published online before print April 2, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1117620109

Remember? They argued that the fire had to have been deliberately introduced to the cave by hominids because they found nothing that would suggest that spontaneous combustion of bat guano was responsible. They erroneously believe that bat guano spontaneous combustion necessarily produces Berlinite. But they are tripped up by an empirical bump in the road. They report finding the effects of heat, but only up to 550 degrees Celsius. Unbeknownst to them, Berlinite forms at 583. Thus, their claim for fire use at 1 Ma is baseless. 
     I'm hoping that the direct approach will coax them either to overcome the shortcomings of their empirical findings or publish a retraction of their huge claim that at 1 Ma hominids were using fire.

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Kathu! Gesundheit! More Archaeologists With Rocks On Their Brains

This blurt is aimed squarely at the archaeological aristocracy and their supplicants, who rely on increasingly tenuous classifications, such as handax and Levallois technique to paint the past in a way that cannot, for much longer, stand up to the scrutiny of serious scholars. In this case the issue is the notion of a blade, and what two sets of authors have recently claimed is evidence for what's called a 'blade industry' half a million years ago.
     I hope to challenge the cognoscenti to confront my criticism with cold hard data, as a way of getting them to contemplate entire assemblages of artifacts rather than just those they recognize as belonging to an arbitrary system of classification.
     This blurt has been festering inside me ever since I had some rather unflattering things to say about Wilkins and Chazan (2012) 'Blade production ~500 thousand years ago at Kathu Pan 1, South Africa: support for a multiple origins hypothesis for early Middle Pleistocene blade technologies' [which you may remember was posted on the Subversive Archaeologist back in February]. The Wilkins and Chazan article had been published online in advance of the papyrus version, which is now available. Although some might think that I had quite enough to say about the claims for blade manufacture at 0.5 Ma, I find that there is some unfinished business to take care of.
     Two bits of unfinished business, in fact. The first is methodological; the second is empirical. Method precedes analysis.
      These authors are making a similar claim to the one we heard coming out of Israel last year--from Qesem Cave [and about which I have opined here, here, and here]. In what follows I'll briefly synopsize my methodological quibble with Wilkins and Chazan [cited above], and Shimelmitz, Barkai and Gopher (2011) Systematic blade production at late Lower Paleolithic (400—200 kyr) Qesem Cave, Israel.
     And it goes something like this. And a one, and a two and a one, two, three, four... These authors profess to be dealing with blades, a specific category of stone flake that, traditionally, is associated with the Upper Palaeolithic and people like you and me. Somewhere along the line, someone seems to have forgotten what a blade truly is, and instead these authors seem to think that any flake that is twice as long [or more] than it is wide is a blade. This is poppycock! As I pointed out previously, and as every undergraduate in archaeology understands, blades are defined as follows [courtesy of Wikipedia--who else?]

Blades are defined as being flakes that are [A] at least twice as long as they are wide and [B] that have parallel or subparallel sides and at least two ridges on the dorsal (outer) side. Additionally, a tool must be [C] part of an intentional blade industry in order to properly be considered a blade; tools which show the characteristics of blades through variation but are not intentionally produced with those characteristics are not considered true blades [emphasis mine]. 

The papers mentioned above play fast and loose with this notion of blades [which I'll remind you is bog standard descriptive lithic analysis speak for blade]. These authors more or less ignore the [B] and [C] criteria in favour of a simplistic definition based on [A] that allows them to argue that they have evidence of the tricky but necessary [C] criterion--that they must be part of an intentional blade industry to be considered blades. What do traditional lithic analysts consider evidence of a 'blade industry?' Here's a good example, taken from a site of Mesolithic antiquity. 


As you can see, each of the complete flakes is in most cases three, four, five, and in one case six times as long as it is wide. They all have more or less parallel lateral margins. Many have two dorsal ridges [the sharp crests that you can see running along the body of the flake parallel to the lateral margins. This set of examples includes some elongated flakes that possess only one such ridge. Under the circumstances the archaeologist is correct in ascribing blade status to them simply because there is an undeniable abundance of 'true' blades here, and because the assemblage from which these blades came also includes the carefully prepared cores from which blades such as these are struck [and only from such carefully prepared cores can a flintknapper repeatedly remove such flakes successively, which is the essence of what's called a 'blade industry.'

Each of the cores shown here is radially symmetrical, meaning that if you turned them over you'd see the same effect on the opposite side. They've been carefully chosen and carefully prepared by creating a relatively plane surface at what in this image is the top of each core. Once the core is prepared the flintknapper can remove, serially, flake after flake that's well more than twice as long as it is wide, and parallel-sided--over and over again until the core is exhausted, as is the one in the second row from the top, second in from the left.
     Contrast this assemblage with what Wilkins and Chazan and Shimelmitz, Barkai and Gopher consider to be 'blades' based on morphology.
     First Wilkins and Chazan's 'blades' followed by their 'blade cores'. In the photo immediately below you can see a number of flakes that are at least twice as long as they are wide [ignore the core-ish piece in the lower left]. As you can see, calling their lateral margins 'parallel' would be a bit of a reach. You might also have a frustrating experience trying to find more than one that has anything like the parallel ridges seen in the Mesolithic blades above. So why are we being shown these artifacts as evidence of a 'blade industry'?  Good question. Some of these flakes even have cortex dorsally. You wouldn't get a serious lithic analyst to accept a 'blade' with cortex on the dorsus. As anyone can plainly see from this photo and the line drawings that follow it, these so-called blades are anything but. Catch up with me below, where the prepared 'cores' from Kathu Pan 1 are illustrated.

     
One thing I might remind you before I say anything about these cores--Wilkins and Chazan wouldn't be showing us these artifacts if they weren't the best of the lot. Imagine what the other 900 or so 'blades' must look like! 
     On to the 'prepared cores.' Wilkins and Chazan say that the flake removals indicated by the arrows below represent the intention on the part of the 500,000 year old hominid to remove 'blades' in a systematic fashion, and that thus they stand as evidence [along with the abovementioned 'blades'] of a 'blade industry.' Their claim is preposterous. Where do they find the referees to vet this stuff?

I think I'll leave it there for the time being, and return to bring out the finer points of Wilkins and Chazan's pseudo-argument at a later date.

     Good night, All.

Kathu!

     Gesundheit! Busily beavering away constructing a bigger pond in which to thoroughly examine the 'blade industry' at Kathu Pan 1, which has now gone from online only to print. Time to get out the knives  er blades. It'll be good. I promise!

Hey! It's Thursday Again.

 But you'll have to wait for your weekly taste of nostalgia, 'cause...

I'm tired and I want to go to bed

I had a little drink about an hour ago

And it went right to my head

Where ever I may roam

On land or sea or foam

You will always hear me singing this song

Show me the way to go home

 ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz................

Handax, Schmandax!

It's been awhile since I blurted about the completely fanciful myth of the so-called handaxe. My metaphorical slumber was interrupted the other day when I came across a really quite lovely bit of banded ironstone from South Africa's Kathu Pan (see below). Kathu Pan, you'll remember, caught my eye back in February after some rather exaggerated claims about a blade industry at a half a million years BP [about which I'll have more to say in the next day or so]. In the case of this bifacial core, the same crew is claiming perhaps the most perfectly symmetrical handax that's ever been discovered from this or any other period. 

I'll agree it's pretty, and irrefutably symmetrical, but I'm reminded of an old saw: If you have an infinite number of chimpanzees and an infinite number of typewriters, eventually you're going to find a Shakespeare sonnet amongst the infinitely large stack of incomprehensible scrabble. You are free to disagree, but if Lower and Middle Palaeolithic archaeologists ever see fit to acknowledge the full range of bifacially flaked pieces in their assemblages this most symmetrical handax EVER, would be seen for what it is--a one in a million fluke.  
     To illustrate a point [cough] that I've made before, I spent about a half-hour this morning Googling images using terms such as Acheulean handax, cleaver, pick and discoid, which if memory serves are the four official categories of Lower Palaeolithic bifaces. Half an hour! Imagine what I could show you if I had some serious time to examine every biface that ever came out of a Lower Palaeolithic site. You can see a smallish version of the collage below. If you'd care to see it a bit larger, just go here. 


 There are at least three kinds of variability in evidence. First is likely due to the raw material. Quartzite [thanks, IainS] doesn't release nice little flakes, so you end up with something that looks like the one shown at the middle of the right hand edge of the above array. On the other hand, micro- or cryptocrystalline material is more amenable to large and small flake removals. So you tend to see the kind of morphology exhibited in the centre left, where if you focus on the hand resting on a table you'll see the difference a fine-grained material makes. You'll also see the second kind of variability that's illustrated here--overall size. The four bifaces in this image range from palm sized to clipboard-sized dimensions. Just to show you how ridiculous this typology is, have a look at another artifact from the Kathu Pan area.

Look at the size of it! Not even as long as a ball-point pen! And don't get any ideas about it's being a 'point' because it's about as thick ventro-dorsally as it is wide from margin to margin. The wonder of it all is that no one seems to care! No one seems to notice that some of these so-called handaxes are almost too big to heft, much less wield effectively as a cutting tool. Check out the guy up above, middle right near the top. He's demonstrating exactly why the idea that any of these bifaces are finished artifacts is a laughable myth. Come on, people!
     The third kind of variability about which archaeologists are in desperate need of acknowledging is the abundance of different shapes that Lower Palaeolithic bifaces can take. Don't, please, let the old four-fold classification colour your perception. When, for instance, Louis Leakey showed up in National Geographic in the 1960s he had to give the rocks he'd found some kind of function that you and I could apprehend, and so he called some picks, some cleavers, some discoids, and some handaxes. I think you'd have to be blind or simply obstructionist to view the variability that's in evidence above as anything other than an expression of the continuous variability of Lower Palaeolithic bifaces from 'amorphous lump' to the shining example from Kathu Pan. 
     Face it! Are all of those shapes the result of mental templates in the Palaeolithic hominids' heads? You must be joking! If you persist in thinking that way, then you'll want to come up with something better than the four-fold classification with which we've all 'grown up.' Nothing short of several dozen nomina would do to describe half the variability in evidence here. And don't waste my time trying to tell me that the ones that don't fall neatly into the handax, cleaver, pick and discoid classes fail because they were imperfectly made. If you think that, you'll want to rethink the idea of a mental template, since the only seemingly constant amongst all of the above is that they exhibit flake removals on both faces. They're BIFACES, fer gawd's sake! 
     The only thing that distinguishes one from another is planted firmly in the mind of the thoroughly indoctrinated archaeologists who perpetuate this farce of a classification system. What, pray tell, would one do with the one that's one frame in from the left edge about half way down? It looks like nothing so much as a flaccid penis! What about the one that looks like a sawfish bill, second row from the top, three in from the right? And look at the size of it! It's like half a metre long! I think it's time for a fifth category--chain saw! For reals? For reals. 
     Handax? Schmandax!
     GIVE ME AN EFFING BREAK!
Get over it.

We Lost A Great One Yesterday

George Lindsey, known to all of my generation who watched The Andy Griffith Show as the lovable goofball Goober Pyle, is dead at 72. We hardly knew ye, George.

     

They Must Have Rocks In Their Collective Head!

Credit National Geographic Magazine
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2001/08/01/feature/images/ft_hdr_20010801.6.jpg

I think a just-published paper begs for comment, even if I have no clue what's going on, empirically speaking, besides presentation of a particularly elaborate way to waste hard-to-get research funds. In fact, the only thing I had to say when I came upon this was 'WTF?'

You should all recall the discovery some years ago of a truly wonderful Upper Palaeolithic painted cave--La Grotte Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in France. Well, apparently Hélène Valladas's radiometric dating of the Chauvet Cave paintings didn't convince some people of their antiquity. The publication, today, of the following proves that there's less than meets the eye where some research is concerned.

For reasons known only to the authors, an elaborate admixture of hard-rock geology, arcane radiometric determination, some often very awkward Anglicized French words, and some breathtakingly convoluted argumentation resulted in the conclusion that the cave has been closed to humans since about 21 ka. Ta Da!

     Who knows how much this all cost in time and treasure. All we know for sure is that this research was undertaken to shore what wasn't in need of shoring up. The paintings have been dated at least 80 different times to well before 21 ka. 

     I have two questions for the editors of PNAS. 'When are you going to get a real editor and real referees,' and 'When are you going to stop presenting superfluous research results?'

    

Tell Me Why?

Not that I wish to come across as moribund or worse, realizing that I haven't blurted one original thought since who knows when, I thought I'd sum up my feelings at the moment with a few lines from an old Boomtown Rats recording.

Tell me why?
I don't like Mondays.
Tell me why?
I don't like Mondays.
Tell me why?
I don't like Mondays.
I want to shoot
The whole day down.

I'll be back soon with another fun-filled adventure. I had hoped to hear something from the Wonderwerkers. So far, nothing.

Well! It's About Time! Tom Higham Raises [or Lowers] the Bar [Chronologically Speaking] for the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic Transition

See? Sit in front of my news ticker long enough and something good will come of it. Take, for example, today's news from Nature.com in which Tom Higham's 14C dating exploits are highlighted. He's the son of Charles and late last year he published a new date for the fossil from Kent's Cavern. It caused a big stir 'cause it made that fossil the earliest inhabitant of that part of Europe.

Tom Higham and one of numerous dates. Floozy! 

(http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-date-with-history-1.10573)

It seems Tom is initiating a revolution in dating the European Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition. It may, in the end, upset a few people. [Love that!]
     And here's some insider information that my sibling subversives will love. Apparently 

He thinks that Neanderthals probably went extinct gradually. His work re-dating Neanderthal sites in Croatia and the Caucasus suggests that Neanderthals disappeared from these regions by about 40,000 years ago. Other researchers say that the last Neanderthals may have eked out a living in the Iberian peninsula until as recently as 24,000 years ago, although Higham and his former graduate student, Rachel Wood, have unpublished work that questions that timing.

PLoS one! PLoS one! PLoS one! Ooh! Ooh! They'll publish that in a heart-beat! No waiting! Pleeeeeeeez, Tom! Rachel? Who cares about Nature? A new species of Fame awaits those who publish in PLoS one.
     Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Last Night I Shot an Elephant in My Pajamas

     How it got in there I'll never know.
I need your help. The news ticker keeps popping about Spaniards eating elephant 80 kyr ago. There's got to be a phrase or a one liner that captures the inherent lunacy of such a headline. You're on!

I MUST BE BAT-GUANO CRAZY!

All right. I'm working on the dregs of a halfway decent boxed chardonnay. I'm waiting for the washing machine to be free. I'm ready. It's time to turn up the heat on the claims emanating from Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa. There's a fatal flaw in the argument that there's evidence for the controlled use of fire in the Acheulean (i.e. Lower Palaeolithic) levels, at about 1,000,000 years BCE [and I'm not talkin' 'bout Brigitte Bardot].
     Wonderwerk Cave's located where there's a diamond labelled WK in the heart of the photomap below.

After Henshilwood and Dubreuil. 2011. The Still Bay and Howiesons Poort, 77–59 ka: Symbolic Material Culture and the Evolution of the Mind during the African Middle Stone Age. Current Anthropology, 52, 361-400.

I'm seeing all these news reports! This story is everywhere you look. If you watch the news ticker up top for a few minutes, you'll see not only the English-speaking media reports, but also those from areas where they speak Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Scandihoovian and some I don't even recognize. In words of one syllable this is big news to a lot of folks. And well it should be, if it were true. As you now know, I have have reason to counter the claim.
     I may not be a geochemist or a micromorphologist, but I am sentient. And when I see an extraordinary claim... Well, you know how it goes. I do what I can to learn enough to achieve a minimal level of critical ability and then assess the extent to which the claimants attempt--successfully--to rule out natural processes. In the case of this Lower Palaeolithic Prometheus, the chemistry and the technology are my stretch domains. However, logical argumentation is my comfort zone. So, with a little Googling and some gumption, that's where I'm headed today. 
     I'm talking about a paper, recently published in PNAS.

Berna, et al. 2012. Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. PNAS April 2, 2012.

 Published online before print April 2, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1117620109

[Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a(nother) rabbit outa my hat!]

The authors contend that their findings provide 'the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.' [At this point all of you readers will, automaton-like, voice the pre-eminent subversive question: 'Did they rule out natural causes before imputing their discoveries to humans or other hominids?' Pat, pat. Good little Subversive! Here's a biscuit.]

Paul Goldberg and Francesco Berna

I've been seeing similar claims from Middle Palaeolithic contexts since the late 80s, almost always accompanied by Paul Goldberg's micromorphological analysis and Steve Weiner's or Francesco Berna's Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometry of the phosphate minerals. I've been skeptical all along, which is my proclivity, nevertheless I've been reluctant to mount a critique. Until now. The stakes have finally grown too great to remain silent. 
     I've known Paul since the mid 80s. We spent time together at Keatley Creek, in B.C. Then after a month-long stint at Kebara Cave in '89 he toured me around the south of Israel, at which time I met Arlene Rosen, and during which I got hotter than I can remember ever being before or since, in the Dead Sea Depression. 
     I had a job once when I was at SFU. I was to impregnate a bunch of micromorphology samples from the Keatley Creek site with fibreglass resin. Unfortunately the vacuum chamber I was using was a little short of breath and some of the samples turned out crap. But that's beside the point. [Really, Rob? What IS the point of all this reminiscing?] The point is that I know Paul. I know his work. He [quite literally] wrote the book on the micromorphological study of archaeological sediments. I accept his findings. Nevertheless, when all's said and done in the authors' analysis of Wonderwerk Cave, it's not Paul's micro-study that's at fault. Nor is it Francesco Berna's FTIS results. It's the way they argue on the basis of their findings at which I baulk.

Wonderwerk Cave [er, the entrance, at any rate]

In case there are one or two of you who're wondering what's so special about fire, I would just remind you that the controlled use of fire has always been considered one of the hallmarks of human achievement [remember Prometheus?]. It's the same in human evolution. Making and using fire is as human as it gets. That there are numerous articles propounding its use in the Middle Palaeolithic is at odds with other evidence of cognitive evolution [there's much subversion yet to be done there]. That's bad enough for this subversive; the claim from Wonderwerk Cave could set back empirical enquiry into the true first use of fire by a hundred years. 

     At Wonderwerk a deeply stratified deposit contains an abundance of what are referred to as 'rubefied' [or reddened] sediments. This should come as no surprise, since the deposits are made up almost exclusively of aeolian sand that's encrusted with iron oxide [=rust]. However, there are also places where the excavators recovered floral ash and burned faunal fragments. Bat caves are capable of building up prodigious deposits of guano--they've been mined, historically, for fertilizer--and those deposits are known to burst into flame spontaneously. So, why couldn't the fire-affected traces be the result of naturally occurring fire(s)? After all, the authors report no features at the site that might be construed as hearths.
     To their credit, Berna et al. have succeeded in mounting a convincing argument that enough heat was generated here and there in the deposits to have altered the chemistry of plant and animal remains, leaving ash and burned bone and plant remains. They infer that temperatures higher than 550 °C were not in evidence. 
     They base their refutation of the spontaneous combustion argument on the work of one geologist from one cave in Romania, Cioclovina. The authors conclude that natural, spontaneous combustion of bat guano had not occurred in Wonderwerk Cave. 
     This is the shape their argument takes

a) When bat guano spontaneously combusts it transforms some of the guano's aluminum phosphates into two very rare forms: Berlinite and hydroxylellestadite.

 b) FTIS found no Berlinite or hydroxylellestadite in the samples from Wonderwerk cave.

c) Therefore no spontaneous combustion of bat guano can explain the fire-affected flora and fauna in the cave.

Here are some brutal facts up against which this argument cannot stand.

1. The discovery of Berlinite in unconsolidated sediments at Cioclovina Cave is unique. All the rest of the Berlinite known in the world occurs in the form of ore. At Cioclovina the Berlinite formed during one or more episodes of very high temperature combustion of bat guano--so hot, in fact, that a stratum of sediment was fused solid (Onac, Effenberger and Breban, High-temperature and “exotic” minerals from the Cioclovina Cave, Romania: a review, Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai, Geologia, 52, 3- 10, 2007).

2. The discovery of hydroxylellestadite at Cioclovina Cave is equally unique. 

3. Berlinite forms at 583 °C (http://www.mindat.org/min-633.html) [I was able to find no empirical data on the temperature at which hydroxylellestadite forms].

4. Bat guano degrades normally to form phosphate minerals including, but not limited to Brushite, ardealite, monetite, Taranakite, variscite, crandalite, sasaite, hydroxylapatite, whitlockite, vivianite, Hopite, sampleite, and churchite (Encyclopedia of Caves, 2nd Edition, by W.B. White and D.C. Culver, Academic Press, 2012).

5. Under great pressure and very high temperatures bat guano will form Arnemhite, Berlinite, and Pyrocoproite [and is now known to form hydroxylellestadite] (Encyclopedia of Caves, 2nd Edition, by W.B. White and D.C. Culver, Academic Press, 2012).

Berna et al. have argued that because no Berlinite was found at Wonderwerk Cave they were able to rule out spontaneous combustion of bat guano at the source of the heat that altered the floral and faunal remains they examined. However, the same authors have determined that at Wonderwerk Cave combustion occurred at temperatures below 550 °C. Mineral science teaches us that Berlinite and hydroxylellestadite form at temperatures at or above 583 °C. No such temperature was reached in Wonderwerk Cave. Ipso facto, prest-o change-o, Berna et al. have erred in presuming that Berlinite would have formed at Wonderwerk Cave.
     Berna et al. state the following

Moreover, micromorphology and mFTIR did not show evidence for remains of guano and/or high-temperature phosphate mineral phases (i.e., berlinite and hydroxylellestadite); these minerals characteristically form during spontaneous combustion of bat guano—a rare event but one documented inside caves. 

I would be verrry interested to see the complete results of the FTIS analysis of the Wonderwerk sediments. Given that there are Chiroptera remains in the sequence it's likely that there would have been at least some guano lying around at some time during the hominid use of the the cave. And, as you prolly know, bats are known to aggregate in the gabillions in some caves. I'd be surprised to find NO evidence of the phosphate minerals that would belie the earlier presence of bat guano--burned or not.
     So, there you have it, Paul and Francesco [we've never actually met, Francesco, but I hope you won't mind me using your first name--they always told me I should act like a grown-up once I got my Ph.D., and so I try now and again to follow their advice]. 
     The gauntlet is thrown down. 
     Gentlemen! Show me the monetite!