More On David Frayer et al.'s Ham-Handed Effort to Use Regourdou 1's Anterior Dentition To Argue For Language in Neanderthals

Every once in a while a story drops into my lap that makes me thankful there are other disciplines and other minds at work in and around our beloved discipline. In this case, it's something I found at Phys.org,

A predominance to be right-handed is not a uniquely human trait, but one shared by great apes, study finds

I know, I know. Me mate, Mark Collard, has recently upbraided me [in what I hope was a friendly poke in the ribs] for turning off my bullshit-ometer when something comes along that fits with my view of the world. Be that as it may. In this case, I wouldn't know where to begin to be critical of the results, since it'd prolly mean watching thousands of hours of video of children and gorillas doing stuff with their hands. Not something my mother raised me for.
     So, I'm provisionally accepting the findings of Dr Gillian Forrester [who did do the hard yakka watching and coding the video], a visiting fellow in psychology at the University of Sussex and a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Westminster.

The ... findings, published in Behavioural Brain Research, challenge a widely held view that right-handed dominance in humans was a species-unique trait linked to the emergence of language. Scientists have long been aware of the association between the left hemisphere specialization for language in the human brain and human right-handedness. For example, 95% of those who are right-handed typically have language function supported by the left hemisphere.

Rewind to about September 8. The Subversive Archaeologist. A piece entitled 'You Gotta Hand It to Them: From Handedness to Humanity in One. No, Two. No! Seven Inferential Leaps!' and followup a couple of days later, 'A Final (Maybe Not) Word on The Regourdou 1 Micro-Scratches: A Case of Archaeological Foot-and-Mouth?' I was responding to the claim that the minute scratches on the labial surfaces of Regourdou 1's anterior teeth were evidence of right-handedness. The authors preposterously proceed from there to proclaim that it's also evidence that the Neanderthals had language. Whether or not the Neanderthals could carry on a conversation with me or you, the claim made on behalf of Regourdou 1 and Neanderthals has just suffered a[nother] crippling blow [the first, of course, was my pithy take-down].
     Dr. Forrester also, and crucially, notes that while right-handedness shows up in gorillas when they are manipulating inanimate objects, they cease to favour one or the other hand when interacting with other members of their species. As the good Dr. points out:

'Human right-handedness is not species-specific as traditionally thought, but rather is context-dependent – a pattern that has been previously masked by less sensitive experimental measures. Our findings support the idea that both human and ape brains have this left hemisphere specialisation directing the right side of the body for ordered sequences of behaviours, but that humans have been able to extend upon this neural architecture to develop language.'

The mighty silverback contemplates manipulating an object with his right hand. Either that or he's getting ready to signal the pitcher.

In closing, allow me to say that Victory [even a whiff of it] is sweet!
Nitey-nite to all my subversive archaeologist friends.

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

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

I'm gonna treasure this.

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

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

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

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

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

Disconcerting, to Say the Least: Owsley Still Trying to Keep Kennewick Man Out of the Ground

Ceci n'est pas Jean-Luc Picard

I'll have more to say about this when I have some time. But for the moment, know that the seemingly perpetual plight of Kennewick Man is evidence that we need to scrub clean the persistent stain of scientism in anthropology.

Ripped from the headlines

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

I'm Officially in Awe.

You may remember that I restarted the unique visitor counter at around 2300 UTC on October 5. [It's the last item on the sidebar at left.] I did so because I was aware that an indeterminate number of those visitors counted up until that time were likely to have been people looking for Gary Larson cartoons, images of Sid the Sloth, and inadvertently reaching others of my posts that contained famous phrases that people might be looking up on Google. I've taken those down--all but the Watson and Crick post, because I want anyone coming here for information on those two to learn about the substantial contribution made by the unheralded Rosalind Franklin. So, I reasoned, the unique visitor counter could now record only those visitors whose intention it was to study at the feet of the Subversive Archaeologist.

I had a little trepidation doing so--resetting the counter, I mean--in case my worst fears were to come true, and the total would end up amounting to my five BFFs and some well-meaning card masquerading as my dead mother. I was surprised, moments ago, to see that it's already at 509 and counting. I figure it must be too good to be true. Read on.

I'm guessing that unique visitors are identified by their ip addresses. Maybe someone can explain to me what happens when a service provider, for example, employs a dynamic ip address [I think that's what it's called]. Is it possible that the counter could be counting as unique visitors a number of different cookies generated by a dynamic system during a single visitor's session? Or, by the same token, could it be counting the same visitor as different people each time they click on a link to go from page to page, because their ISP's dynamic system registers as a unique IP address. Bottom line. Is it possible that there's some unknown multiplier in such counters? I don't really want to hear that the total is closer to 5 or 50 than 500, but at least I'd then be more certain of my reach, as it were. So, if you know anything about such things please leave a comment below.

Thanks!  

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

Shedding New Light on the Schöningen Spears

Check out the stratification on the profiles behind the besotted archaeologist. Nightmare alley.

I've been waiting for ever to look into what I've always suspected was an archaeological myth--the claim that bipedal apes were fashioning javelin sized wooden spears at about 400,000 years ago at Schöningen, a lignite open pit mine in Germany. It's an old story (1995), and in all they've found eight such spears. The original announcement was in Nature.

'Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany,' Hartmut Thieme. Nature 385:807-810, 1997.

The artifacts are indeed suitable for throwing or piercing, and some have longitudinal grooves near the tip that might have held sharp stones. This would indeed be an astonishing accomplishment for Homo heidelbergensis or antecessor. Alas! There's something rotten in Schöningen.
     The archaeological traces at Schöningen are said to be Middle Pleistocene. However, their method of dating is biostratigraphy. Indeed, many of the mammal species associated with the spears had their origin in the Middle Pleistocene. However, all survived well into the period of modern human presence in Europe.
     Arvicola terrestris is extant.
     The Merck's rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus kirchbergensis) survived until at least about 25 kyr ago, according to the following paper.

‘The Pleistocene easternmost distribution in Eurasia of the species associated with the Eemian Palaeoloxodon antiquus assemblage,’ Diana Pushkina. Mammal Review 37:224–245, 2007. 

     The youngest age for Elephas antiquus is 37,440 (+350, 310) BP (GrA-25815), as reported in the following.

‘The presence and extinction of Elephas antiquus Falconer and Cautley, 1847, in Europe,’ Dick Mol, John de Vos, and Johannes van der Plicht. Quaternary International 169–170:149–153, 2007.

So, while it's possible that the spears are as old as the Schöningen crowd say they are, it's also possible that they are a lot later--as late as 37,400 BP. With no way to gain a more accurate date for these deposits, why should we privilege the older estimate?
     Update 20121008.0400 UTC: In his comment below Marco Langbroek asks 'How do you explain the full interglacial character of the deposits (from sedimentology as well as pollen) if they are (according to you) late Weichsel?' Simple. All of these finds are said to be included in fluvial/lacustrine or fluvial deposits. My answer to Marco is as follows. If the spears and other artifacts are from the Weichselian, the sediments in which they occur would have been eroded from older sediments. If so, the pollen record goes from straightforwardly interpretable to intractably mixed in less time than it takes to say 'Fail!'

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

The Subversive Archaeologist: Anniversary Finger in the Dike* Edition

"The Hero of Haarlem" from Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland, by Mary Mapes Dodge (1865)

I sometimes feel as if I've spent much of the past year pissing into the wind, both because of what I'd call the 'squall' of fantastical archaeological literature that I've seen and the multiplicity of smaller 'whirlwinds' spawned by a slavishly credulous media. Extending the weather metaphor a bit further, the amount of precipitation has been, from my measly perspective, 'way above normal.' Because of it, the river of mythopoeic archaeological scholarship is rising in its channel and threatening to spill over its banks and obliterate the lowland archaeological purgatory on which I'm resigned to live. To carry this metaphor to it's logical extreme, I would see myself very much like the little Dutch Boy who, upon finding a small breach in the dike, inserted his finger and started calling for help. He saved the community from certain destruction. That, alas, is where his story and mine diverge. So far, I haven't saved anyone. But I hope I can say that I've managed, at least, to stem the flow for you and the other readers of the Subversive Archaeologist, to give you time to get to higher ground. And happily, you've heard my calls for succour, and spread the word of warning throughout the land.

* the theatre begins to fill with shouts of "Narcissist!" and "Egomaniac!" followed by "Wanker!" and "Self-Serving Wretch!" and "Vainglorious Megalomaniac!"*

[This whole medieval, questy, metaphorey thingy clearly gets old fast, so I'm gonna end it here and now!] 

     *clears voice*

     One of the readers of this blurt will be the 66,000 and somethingth someone ever to have arrived at the Subversive Archaeologist to receive enlightenment. I think that's rather respectable for 52 weeks. [Course, I have nuttin' to compare it to, so feel free to take my self-flattering rhetoric with a grain of salt.] At last count, since February 7, 2012 it had registered above 24,000 unique cookies [or whatever it is these gizmos register]. I can't claim that every one of those unique visitors arrived here lured by the promise of archaeological gospel. So, I'd knock off about 10,000 for the people who parachuted in to see what Gary Larson or Sid the Sloth were up to [before I took those posts down], and another [what's probably an overestimate of] 4,000 for people searching for well-known phrases that often pop up in my writing--such as 'a rose by any other name would smell as sweet'--only to find themselves washed up on the shores of a very, very strange land, indeed. That still leaves a respectable 10K. I'm humbled and heartened by your patronage and support, and want to thank each and every one of you [however many of you there are, in actual fact, if you see what I mean].
     It's a new year and I'd like to get a clearer idea of the SA's reach. So, I've zeroed the Unique Visitor odometer as of October 5, 2012. We'll see how many of you there really are.
     I'd like to offer a special shout out to PLOS one for giving me some of the best of the worst material to work with. You'll see, in this first year's annotated medley of scholarly epic fails that follows--i.e. those toward which I've bent my wroth over the past year--that PLOS one is by far the greatest source of questionable scholarship in the bunch. Between them, Science and PLOS one provided the bear's share. Hands down co-winners!

I begin with an heart-felt acknowledgement. This blog was born because I caught wind of the following publication... for which I have nothing but praise.

 'The Roc de Marsal Neandertal child: A reassessment of its status as a deliberate burial,'Dennis M. Sandgathe, Harold L. Dibble, Paul Goldberg, and Shannon P. McPherron. Journal of Human Evolution, 61:243–253, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.04.003

Perhaps the word 'reassessment' in the title should be replaced by 'refutation,' because that's what the article amounts to. I was buoyed by these findings because they bore out my own dusty arguments. At the same time I was dismayed, because my work has been relegated to the archaeological equivalent of limbo, and after 20+ years on the margins I was in no state to consider it a vindication. Now, here it is, a year later. What a long, strange trip it's been!

Very soon after the Subversive Archaeologist was born, the world was startled to hear the latest from Blombos Cave, where it appears a group of incredibly precocious bipeds were sytematically processing ochre, apparently to use as paint...

‘A 100,000-Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa,’ Christopher S. Henshilwood, Francesco d’Errico, Karen L. van Niekerk, Yvan Coquinot, Zenobia Jacobs, Stein-Erik Lauritzen, Michel Menu, and Renata García-Moreno. Science 334(6053): 219-222, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1211535

From the beginning I was vocal about my ambivalence toward this and similar extraordinarily early dates for modern human behaviour. I believe, and have good reason to, that the dating of this and other southern African cave sites is off by tens of thousands of years.

     The bizarre claims began popping up early on, as well. The first was this one...

‘Systematic blade production at late Lower Paleolithic (400–200 kyr) Qesem Cave, Israel,’ Ron Shimelmitz, Ran Barkai, and Avi Gopher. Journal of Human Evolution 61:458–479, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.06.003 

How many times do I need to remind people that there's a difference between an elongated flake, generically called a blade, and the kind of blade production that one sees in the modern human past? There's a world of difference, and although Shimelmitz, et al. prefer to look at the Qesem assemblage as representing a blade 'industry,' they've shown merely that wishful thinking, like flattery, will get you nowhere.
     Nothing new here, either...

‘Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington,’ Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., H. Gregory McDonald, Carl Gustafson, Morten Rasmussen, Enrico Cappellini, Jesper V. Olsen, Damian Szklarczyk, Lars Juhl Jensen, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, and Eske Willerslev. Science 334(6054):351-353, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1207663

Gary Haynes graciously dipped his pen into the internet's swirling waters for the SA's first guest blog. His view accords with mine: this wouldn't be the first time that naturally occurring animal bone found its way into a context that 'could' be interpreted as the result of human activity, and that's treated as the only possible explanation. In this case, it's just as wrong-headed as all the rest. Gary's personal experiences surrounding this 'find' are an indication of just how 'objective' our science can be.
     Whenever I see a title with the word 'model' in it, I'm immediately suspicious...

‘Modeling Human Ecodynamics and Biocultural Interactions in the Late Pleistocene of Western Eurasia,’ C. Michael Barton, Julien Riel-Salvatore, John M. Anderies, and Gabriel Popescu. Human Ecology 39: 705-725, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10745-011-9433-8

This one purports to have found evidence that the Neanderthals were so much more 'in tune' with their environment that they bred themselves out of existence by exploiting their periphery so intensively that they bumped into the invading modern humans too often in small groups, and before you could say 'Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir,' the Neanderthals were screwed [literally, and figuratively]. I like saving my favorite epithets for work of this stature. Horse Hockey!
     Some palaeoanthropologists are so enamoured of the Mousterian bipeds that they think every new assemblage is a different manifestation of a distinct culture [whatever that may mean to them] ...

‘The Nubian Complex of Dhofar, Oman: An African Middle Stone Age Industry in Southern Arabia,’ Jeffrey I. Rose, Vitaly I. Usik, Anthony E. Marks, Yamandu H. Hilbert, Christopher S. Galletti, Ash Parton, Jean Marie Geiling, Viktor Černý, Mike W. Morley, and Richard G. Roberts. PLoS ONE 6(11):e28239. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0028239

The authors' follow a very African practice and call their assemblage an example of what's called the Nubian Complex. Lo and behold, after all the prestidigitation, instead of the first foray of Nubian Complex bipedal apes out of Africa the authors have found *yawn* yet another example of the Mousterian toolkit, which we already knew extended from the Iberian Peninsula to about the Aral Sea and from about the Cape of Good Hope to Germany and for a long time before the time it popped up in Arabia.
     So, on to to even bigger intellectual leaps...

‘Middle Stone Age Bedding Construction and Settlement Patterns at Sibudu, South Africa,’ Lyn Wadley, Christine Sievers, Marion Bamford, Paul Goldberg, Francesco Berna, Christopher Miller. Science 334(6061):1388-1391, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1213317

Oh, boy. You may remember that I produced much in the way of evidence to counter the numerous claims contained in this paper. Insecticidal mattresses? Puhleaze. 
     When I saw this next one, I thought the archaeology fairy had just laid a huge bounty on me...

‘Mammoths used as food and building resources by Neanderthals: Zooarchaeological study applied to layer 4, Molodova I (Ukraine),’ Laëtitia Demay, Stéphane Péan, and Marylène Patou-Mathis. Quaternary International online, 26 November 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2011.11.019

A complete disregard for the sedimentary context, the behaviour of elephants and their relatives in and around seasonal pans, and not, I'm afraid, Mousterian bipedal apes, led the authors to make these widely accepted claims. You just can't tell a big enough story and not have it slavishly pounced on by the Mousterians 'R' Us crowd.
     This next paper just seemed like easy pickings. Who cares if I know this much about the neolithic of Europe? I did, however, take an senior undergraduate survey of that place and those times from Ruth Tringham some time in the late twentieth century--so, at least I've heard of these phenomena!

‘Ancient lipids reveal continuity in culinary practices across the transition to agriculture in Northern Europe,’ Oliver E. Craig, Val J. Steele, Anders Fischer, Sönke Hartz, Søren H. Andersen, Paul Donohoe, Aikaterini Glykou, Hayley Saul, D. Martin Jones, Eva Koch, and Carl P. Heron. PNAS 108:17910–17915, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1107202108

I merely pointed out that the authors had made much of some spotty archaeological traces, and probably left out some more mundane explanations.
     Then someone played right into my hand...

‘Why Levallois? A Morphometric Comparison of Experimental ‘Preferential’ Levallois Flakes versus Debitage Flakes,’ Metin I. Eren and Stephen J. Lycett. PLoS ONE 7(1): e29273. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029273

Notwithstanding all the wonderful replicative lithic technology undertaken by the likes of François Bordes and Don Crabtree [and everyone since], the fact remains that just being able to do something in the present doesn't mean that it was what took place in the past. When applied to lithic assemblages the utility of uniformitarian principles ends with the way that stone fractures--everything else is up to the individual's ingenuity, persistence, and patience, and may be thought about in ways that earlier bipedal apes were incapable of achieving.
     This one caught me flat-footed...

‘Hafted armatures and multi-component tool design at the Micoquian site of Inden-Altdorf, Germany,’ Alfred F. Pawlik, and Jürgen P. Thissen. Journal of Archaeological Science 38:1699–1708, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2011.03.001

Imagine it. Neanderthals were dry distilling birch bark to produce a mastic to use in preparing composite tools. No matter that the process wasn't successfully achieved again until the Mesolithic. In the end it was the sloppy chemical characterizations that deep-sixed this one.
     At first I thought these authors were being disingenuous by not reporting the observations that would have allowed one such as I to make a reasoned assessment of the claim. When all was said and done, I think they just don't get it. 

‘Blade production ~500 thousand years ago at Kathu Pan 1, South Africa: support for a multiple origins hypothesis for early Middle Pleistocene blade technologies,’ Jayne Wilkins and Michael Chazan. Journal of Archaeological Science 39:1883-1900, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2012.01.031

I must say that Jayne Wilkins was more than forthcoming when I queried her on the absent information. However, I think I lost her when I started asking questions about that information's implications. I don't think I made any friends that week.
     I asked Iain Davidson to deal with this one...

‘Early seafaring activity in the southern Ionian Islands, Mediterranean Sea,’ George Ferentinos, Maria Gkioni, Maria Geraga, and George Papatheodorou. Journal of Archaeological Science 39:2167–2176, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2012.01.032

Iain is well acquainted with the reasoning having to do with the earliest navigation. He has long held that the colonization of Australia is the earliest securely dated evidence for modern human behaviour anywhere in the world. Needless to say, I think he's right, southern African sites notwithstanding [and you know what I think about those].
     I was reluctant to have a go at this one... it seemed such a naive contribution that I barely had the stomach to go at it.

‘The First Commodity: Handaxes,’ Mimi E. Lam. Paper presented at the 2012 AAAS Annual Meeting (16-20 February 2012), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 7115, 2012.

In fact, the only reason I bothered to address Ms. Lam's thesis head on is because this was a paper at the annual meeting of an august scholarly society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They publish Science, ferhevvensake! 
     This beauty got all kinds of media attention...

‘Presumed Symbolic Use of Diurnal Raptors by Neanderthals,’ Eugène Morin and Véronique Laroulandie. PLoS ONE 7(3):e32856, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032856

Talk about clawing your way to the top! A couple of terminal phalanges have microscopic scratches on them and immediately they're evidence of removal for use as mojo-swelling jewellery. Heady stuff. But bigger and better awaits.
     Does the expression 'Fire in the hole' mean anything to you? Apparently Berna et al. think that bipedal apes on the order of 100 Ka were so au fait with fire and its use that they caused incredible buildups of ash and other sediments in Wonderwerk Cave.

'Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa,' Francesco Berna, Paul Goldberg, Liora Kolska Horwitz, James Brink, Sharon Holt, Marion Bamford, and Michael Chazan. PNAS Published online before print April 2, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117620109

Their failure to consider any number of natural processes to explain their findings and their mistaken notion that they'd ruled out spontaneous combustion of bat guano are what brings this paper to its knees.
     This next one brought me face to face with my ignorance, and the cruel reality that there are some empirical findings against which even I can't rail.

'Neanderthal medics? Evidence for food, cooking, and medicinal plants entrapped in dental calculus,' Julie Wilson, Ángel Fernández Cortés, Antonio Rosas, Karen Hardy, Stephen Buckley, Matthew J. Collins, Almudena Estalrrich, Don Brothwell, Les Copeland, Antonio García-Tabernero, Samuel García-Vargas, Marco de la Rasilla, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Rosa Huguet, Markus Bastir, David Santamaría, and Marco Madella. Naturwissenschaften 99:617–626, 2012.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00114-012-0942-0

Still, there was an unexpected bright side to this. Stephen Buckley, the geochemist who performed all of the chemical characterizations, happened to post a comment at Linkedin, where I'd shamelessly left a breadcrumb to lure unsuspecting prey to the red-back spider's web that is the Subversive Archaeologist. He very patiently counselled me on the various compounds and their likely origins, even though I kept trying to tell him he was daft. I was reduced to creating a plausible word picture as a way of finishing off the conversation.
      I had a lot of trouble taking this one seriously, because it seemed so obviously to have been submitted just so that the authors could say that Mousterians 'R' Us.

'Hand to Mouth in a Neandertal: Right-Handedness in Regourdou 1,' Virginie Volpato, Roberto Macchiarelli, Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, Ivana Fiore, Luca Bondioli, and David W. Frayer. PLoS ONE 7(8): e43949, 2012. 

Notice that the last author is one David Frayer, the vituperator whom I quoted in the Subversive Archaeologist's inaugural. In this gem he and his cadre conjure up an argument that the Neanderthal individual is right handed. But it's only so they can jump from right-handedness to brain lateralization and from there to conclude that this Neanderthal, at least, was just like you and me between the ears. Pish posh, I say.
      There's not much more I can say about the next one that I haven't tried to say already. 

 'The Pace of Cultural Evolution,' Charles Perreault. PLoS ONE 7(9): e45150, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045150

Perreault's conclusion is that culture, viewed as social learning, brings about faster change than biological evolution. Unfortunately, such a broad brush, while including humans, also includes a large number of animal species, from ants to zebras. With that kind of reasoning, Perreault's conclusion can only be claimed to be accurate for the extant species of bipedal ape, which for my part obviates his entire outing.
     Fiddlesticks! Finlayson et al. have in this next article made a mountain out of a ... mountain. By that I mean, the rock of Gibraltar--a mountain by any definition. [Or is it just a craggy hill? ... Oh, never mind!] Some very tiny scritchy-scratches on a relatively very few skeletal elements and suddenly we're to believe that Neanderthal couture in the one thousand twenty-first century B.C.E. was all about feathers and the colour black. 

'Birds of a Feather: Neanderthal Exploitation of Raptors and Corvids,' Clive Finlayson, Kimberly Brown, Ruth Blasco, Jordi Rosell, Juan José Negro, Gary R. Bortolotti, Geraldine Finlayson, Antonio Sánchez Marco, Francisco Giles Pacheco, Joaquín Rodríguez Vidal, José S. Carrión, Darren A. Fa, and José M. Rodríguez Llanes. PLoS ONE 7(9): e45927, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045927 

Too crafty, those Neanderthals from Gorham's Cave. Too crafty. Unfortunately, given the predominance of choughs (black-feathered members of the Corvidae) in the faunal assemblage, and a few individual wing elements of some dark-feathered diurnal raptors (including a ... ugh ... vulture) makes it hard for this argument to stay aloft.
     My favorite fallacious argument is made in the recently published final target of the SA's first year. I've settled on the term nothing buttery to best describe a case like this, when only one of any number of equally plausible process is erected as the best explanation.

'Earliest Porotic Hyperostosis on a 1.5-Million-Year-Old Hominin, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania,' Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Travis Rayne Pickering, Fernando Diez-Martín, Audax Mabulla, Charles Musiba, Gonzalo Trancho, Enrique Baquedano, Henry T. Bunn, Doris Barboni, Manuel Santonja, David Uribelarrea, Gail M. Ashley, María del Sol Martínez-Ávila, Rebeca Barba, Agness Gidna, José Yravedra, and Carmen Arriaza. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46414, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0046414

Needless to say, their conclusion that the cause was a dietary deficiency was transparently a result of the authors' zeal to argue that the bipedal apes in question were obligate carnivores.
     I congratulate PLoS ONE [yes, and Science, too] for providing me and you so much 'pon which to ruminate in the last 52 weeks [or so].
     Last, but most of all, I tip my hat to you, Dear Reader, for following me down this last and all the rest of the Alice-in-Wonderland-style rabbit holes into which we've fallen in our first year together.

[Note: at some point while writing this, my internal censor alerted me to a potential for my more puerile readers to make what would be an embarrassing [for me] misinterpretation of the title. Be advised that the title was never intended to conjure up one of those obscene, extreme-right-wing Christianist efforts at 'healing' homophiles. So, get your mind out of the gutter, abjure your bigoted expletives, and pay attention to what I'm sayin', dammit!]

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The Weekend Digest or Put That In Your Old Cake-hole!

Forgive me for trying either to euthanize you or evangelicize you. But if you aren't there to see my updates, tweets, blurts, bleats, shares or discussion, you'll miss some good stuff. They say rust never sleeps. Well, I can assure you that, here at World Headquarters, we often sleep all day, then wake up in the middle of the night to pee, succumb to inspiration, and poop out a good one in the middle of the night. You snooze, you definitely lose. So, I'm gonna make it easy for you to catch up after what I hope was a ripping good weekend for you.

[By the way, mine was pretty good for a change. I made love to my brand new (and first) iPhone--5--all weekend. It was sublime. I'm in love with Siri, and like a good marriage I'm gonna work with her to get in sync. Imagine being able to talk to your phone--which is actually a hunk of plastic four times as thick as a credit card and about the size of three credit cards laid joined at their long edge! I'm ecstatic.]

Anyway, here's what you missed if you were having a good time this past weekend.
[Fanfare]

Defending One's Honour in Cyberspace: My Beef with Michael Balter's Science Article on Neanderthal Burial

No Intelligent Life Here: Representative Paul Broun - R on Life As We Know It

OMG! They Found Lady Snake Lord Buried in Guatemala!?!?!?!

And I apologize. What was to have been a grand 1st birthday present for the hardy among you who've been here from the start turned into a nine-headed hydra, sapped all my strength and left me making up stories about bad politicians and crazy ex-wive's mothers. It'll be up next. I pwomise. Cwoss my heart and hope to die.
Yours sincerely,
Elmer Q. Fudd

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OMG! They Found Lady Snake Lord Buried in Guatemala!?!?!?!

Here she is, emerging from her ceremonial conch shell. (National Geographic photo)

Lady Snake Lord. 

She ruled the roost. 

Her word was God. 

Her husband was more like a bond-servant than her equal. 

Her children and her children-in-law quaked before her might.

I could be talking about a Classic Mayan ruler they just found in El Perú-Waka', Guatemala. But I'm not! 

I'm talkin' about my first wife's mother! She could freeze your heart with a glance. And you didn't want to step on her toes for fear she'd go off like a Claymore. Wow! Archaeology can sometimes tell you more about the present than the past.

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

Defending One's Honour in Cyberspace: My Beef with Michael Balter's Science Article on Neanderthal Burial

The Roc de Marsal child skull and facial reconstruction
CREDIT: © PLAILLY/ATELIER DAYNES/EURELIOS

After again reading Michael Balter's September 21, 2012 article in Science I was a bit taken aback by the part where he talks about my work. A friend suggested that I try sending a letter to the editor. It was knocked back. So, aware as I was that Science allowed e-comments on its web journal, I asked the editor to up it there for me. Et voilá, here it is.
     However, assuming it's behind the Science pay wall, I'll save you the trouble. Here's what I wrote.

I fear you may have promulgated a misconception in Michael Balter’s September 21, 2012 article “Did Neandertals Truly Bury Their Dead?” It mentions my 1989 and 1999 contributions, then states that “at the time [of their publication], most archaeologists rejected Gargett’s arguments.” To the great detriment of my work, the article juxtaposes that statement with a quote from one of my detractors, Maureille, who avers that “[Gargett’s arguments] were based on nothing, no data.” Your readers are forgiven if they accept this pronouncement as fact. With your assistance I wish to set the record straight.

My publications were the first, and remain the only, explicit examinations of the 'evidence' of Neanderthal burial. For me, this issue hinges on an archaeological dictum, that one must first rule out natural processes before imputing one’s findings to purposeful (or cutural) behavior. Indeed, no amount of wishful thinking or ‘nothing buttery’ can erase the ambiguity inherent in archaeological traces that could have been the result either of natural or cultural processes.

Contra Maureille, rather than basing my work on “nothing, no data,” I examined the literature, the only public account of the empirical findings that others have claimed as evidence of purposeful burial. Furthermore, my work is grounded on a far broader spectrum of expectable, natural processes than the burial claimants ever considered. In the end I argued that natural processes could not be ruled out as the cause of archaeological traces claimed as evidence of purposeful Neanderthal burial. Thus, my work was based on ‘something,’ and the data I employed are identical with those to which Maureille cleaves.

Ironically, it may be the inferences of purposeful burial that turn out to have been based on “nothing, no data” whatsoever. I live in hope!

That was fun. Next.

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Thank you, Svante Pääbo and Your Accolytes for Settling The Matter of When the Human Lineage Acquired that Neanderthal DNA!

A tip o' the hat to Brendan Culleton (old friend) and Iain Davidson (older friend) for tonight's mill grist. I hope I can in some way cast doubt on it, even if it contains no calculations that I can possibly comprehend, and more genetics mumbo-jumbo than, I'm sure, most of you would comprehend [please let me know if I'm wrong, there]. Luckily for me, the authors employ some fairly squishy factors in coming to their conclusions. Moreover, they completely misunderstand the issues surrounding the question of whether or not Mousterians 'R' Us!
     This article arrived on my metaphorical driveway courtesy of PLOS Genetics. [Something familiar about the name of that journal. Can't quite put my finger on it.] It's titled 'The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans,' and it's by Sriram Sankararaman, Nick Patterson, Heng Li, Svante Pääbo, and David Reich.  [I don't know about you. But, considering the subject matter I think the authors could have done a little better with the title. I mean ... jeebuz! Imagine passing on the opportunity to both introduce the work and have a field-day with the dual meaning of dating...incredible, in and of itself!] 
     Briefly, the authors think that they can accurately measure the probable last time that Neanderthal-like things mated with Us-like things, according to the degree of ... well ... genetic stuff in the Neanderthal and the modern human genomes. As I said above, I'm very glad that I don't need to be critical of the authors' findings and calculations. All I need do is talk about the probable cultural capacities of the two palaeospecies involved.
     To wit. The narrowest date range that Sankararaman et al. report is 47,000 to 65,000 years ago. To my way of thinking that's perfectly all right. No problem.  It's so all-right that I think I could kiss them for figuring this out [if in fact they're correct]. See...it comes down to the cultural capacities of the critters that did the canoodling during those times. I grant you, there are disagreements on just that issue. But, bear with me.
     At about 100 ka we see skeletally modern hominids at Qafzeh Cave (Israel). About 35 ka later, there are Neanderthals a few kilometres away, in Kebara Cave. Both were employing what we like to call a Mousterian lithic technology. Again, depending on whom you're listening to, that could mean either that the critters were just like you and me, or not. The point is this. As long as the earliest evidence for people like you and me in northeastern Africa and western Asia (which includes Europe, Dopey!) is younger than than the latest date for interbreeding between the modern morphotype and the archaic one [sorry, Neanderthal Guy], I can rest comfortably. That's because when the interbreeding would have taken place they were both still 'Them' and not 'Us.' We may be the inheritors of Neanderthal DNA from that late temporal window. However, all that we know for sure is that it was pairs of two cognitively similar Mousterian individuals who were doing the wild thing, and not, as the authors would have you believe, someone like me and a Mousterian female.
     [Even if I found the rugged beauty of that Neanderthal princess something to write home about, chances are good that I would have been put off by the complete lack of conversation--intelligent or otherwise. Even if she and I were biologically capable of producing offspring, I'll go to my grave believing that there would have been nothing in common between Miss Neanderthal '67,000 BP and me such that I would have been, even in a drunken stupor, remotely interested. I don't know what the Middle Palaeolithic variant of 'Coyote Ugly' was, but I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't ever have needed to make the choice of whether or not to chew my arm off rather than wake 'her' up.]
     I s'pose I should acknowledge that there are all those discoveries of putatively 100 kyr old modern human behaviour in a number of south African cave sites. My position on those old dates is a matter of record. I think they're kak.
     And that's the way it is, on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Subversive Archaeologist. See you on the morrow!

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Porotic Hyperostosis, or, How to FlimFlam Your Way to Fame and Fortune

I've about had it up to here with nothing buttery! The idea that you can simply choose the explanation you want for the observations you make. I'm done. I'm through. I'm pissed off. I don't know whether to thank Iain Davidson for this gem, or throw something at him for raising my ire when I should be moping by myself at World Headquarters. But, who am I to look a gift-horse in the mouth. Ripped from the pages of [you guessed it] PLONK ONE, comes this. 

'Earliest Porotic Hyperostosis on a 1.5-Million-Year-Old Hominin, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania,' Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Travis Rayne Pickering, Fernando Diez-Martín, Audax Mabulla, Charles Musiba, Gonzalo Trancho, Enrique Baquedano, Henry T. Bunn, Doris Barboni, Manuel Santonja, David Uribelarrea, Gail M. Ashley, María del Sol Martínez-Ávila, Rebeca Barba, Agness Gidna, José Yravedra, Carmen Arriaza. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46414. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046414 

It's a benign enough title. Not the sort of thing that would normally attract the media's attention. It might have been better phrased: 'Pleistocene parents unable to provide enough meat for their progeny.' That, at least, might explain this article at Phys.Org. This is another example of what's known in philosophical circles as argument from want of evident alternatives. It's well known among charlatans, and I like to call it 'nothing buttery.' Such and such a phenomenon can ONLY be the result of such and such a cause. Too bad there are about thirty others that come to mind!
     Domínguez-Rodrigo et al. are reporting on a diagnosis of porotic hyperostosis. Wouldn't be a big deal in the grand scheme of things. However, this pathological condition [and the bony lesions that present themselves in the skeletal remains of sufferers] is a rarity for Plio-Pleistocene bipedal apes. Shown below is a photo of the inner and outer tables of the specimen and a cross-section through the cranium of the 1.5 Myr old genus species indet.

Source

I don't dispute their diagnosis. I do, however, question their explanation of the observations. At last count there were about 47 squillion conditions that are capable of producing porotic hyperostosis. The main one is anemia, which has many causes. Yet, the authors fasten on one cause of anemia, that of dietary deficiency, specifically of meat. But that's a HUGE leap from the evidence, and the authors optimistically rule out the alternatives in a bald statement that has ABSOLUTELY no support. They say

The relationship between porotic hyperostosis and hemolytic anemias, like sicklemia and thalassemia, has also been stressed, suggesting its linkage to malaria .... Given that porotic hyperostosis is often documented in human infants of roughly the same estimated age as OH 81 from regions free of malaria ... , we thus conclude that serious nutritional stress at a key phase in the development of the OH 81 individual was the most likely cause of the porotic hyperostosis observed on the fossil. 

I'm gonna let that one sink in for a minute.





Hold on a minute! Porotic hyperostosis occurs in places where malaria doesn't. So, in those places something else is causing porotic hyperostosis. But, that doesn't mean that OH 81 couldn't have had sickelemia or thalassemia! It only means that elsewhere malaria doesn't cause anemia. Doh! Moreover, even though there are a squillion other possible causes of porotic hyperostosis, the authors fasten on only one--meat deficiency, or meat deficiency in the lactating female parent.

Can anyone tell me why the authors' position makes any sense? Sure, dietary deficiency is one possibility. But wishing it away doesn't privilege that interpretation--which, in this case, is way sexier than sickle-cell anemia, 'cause it lets the authors blather on about how the OH 81 hominid/n and it's conspecifics were already obligate carnivores [itself an odd choice for a preferred interpretation--after all, that would mean that we moderns would need to have devolved from carnivory to omnivory, a concept I find preposterous, along with the rest of this putative scholarly contribution]. So. I ask you. How can one take this article seriously?

Oh, and by the way, PlosOne, if you're trying to convince people that you're a legitimate and authoritative source of up-to-the-minute information you should probably spend a bit more time copy-editing [or, perish the thought, reviewing] the manuscripts submitted for publication. The title of Domínguez-Rodrigo et al.'s contribution [the charitable epithet under the circumstances] includes the term 'hominin,' which is de rigueur these days as a way of distinguishing us from the African and Asian Great Apes. YET, in the paper itself the authors revert to the historical nomenclature [which, by the way, hasn't as yet been dumped by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature], Hominidae. Furthermore, there are numerous terms and phrases that are not grammatical or even colloquial English. I know that we're all warm and fuzzy for inclusion these days, but I'm pretty sure your contributors wouldn't like to be accused of publishing 'broken English.' Get it right, or get out of the way.

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Nearer, my Wine, to Thee...

It'll soon be time to mosey on over to University House at UC Santa Cruz. Chancellor George Blumenthal is hosting a Thank You fete for Professor Mike Bolte, who recently stepped down as Director of the UC Observatories, for which I work. I've been tagged to pour wine. Go figure! Mike has been the director almost the entire time I've worked for this organization. But I reckon they could've found someone more suited for the job of wine-pourer--I'm so much better at just drinking the stuff. If I have to pour it, too, I get all confusticated and bebothered. Wish me luck!

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Touchdown! Touchstone...er...Tuesday is Back: Sherwood Washburn's 'Australopithecines: the hunters or the hunted?'

For some time now I've been neglecting your higher education--can anyone remember the last Touchstone Thursday? Me, neither. Given the time elapsed since the last offering, I think it's ok if I'm a couple of days early. 
     After the flurry of questionable archaeological inferences I've dealt with lately, I was keen to present a work that epitomized the SA Dictum--always rule out natural processes before imputing your observations to bipedal apes. I was all set to champion C. K. 'Bob' Brain [again] for today's flashback. His work on the geology of Swartkrans Cave and his early actualistic studies of butchery among the San people of southern Africa are a perennial topic of undergraduate archaeology and physical anthropology classes because they put to rest Raymond Dart's hypothesis of Plio-Pleistocene australopithecines making and using bone, tooth, and horn tools--the so-called Osteodontokeratic Culture--in a convincing and elegant manner. 

The 'Brain' scenario for the punctured australopithecine skulls at Swartkrans (Source)

Thus, today's touchstone was to have been Brain's 1967 paper 'Bone weathering and the problem of pseudo-bone tools' (South African Journal of Science 63:97-99). HOWEVER, I happened upon the above-linked Wikipedia article on Dart's hypothesis, and discovered something I'd either long-since forgotten or was never actually aware of. Brain's work was motivated in large part by Sherwood L. 'Sherry' Washburn's 1957 'Australopithecines: the hunters or the hunted? (American Anthropologist 59:612–614). In fact, Brain's (1981) major work--Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy (University of Chicago Press: Chicago & London)--was obviously titled in that way to pay homage to Washburn's inspiration.
     So, on the basis of my latest 'live and learn' experience, I thought I'd put Sherwood Washburn up as this week's touchstone. It's short--just three pages--and pithy, as I think you'll agree. [Quelle surprise! It's behind a pay wall! Poke me if you're desperate to read it and don't have access through your institution.]
     Washburn begins by acknowledging the 'high frequency of jaws, skulls, and upper cervical vertebrae in the australopithecine deposits.' This is precisely what had led Dart to think that something odd was happening in the caverns he was excavating. Washburn, in contrast, notes that '[it] is not necessarily evidence for hunting, head hunting, or human activities, but may be due to selective eating by carnivores.' He continues

…it is clear from the description of the brown hyena den that normal eating and collection of bones by living carnivores produces accumulations which are peculiar, both in regard to the species of animals represented and the distribution of bones. A high frequency of skulls, jaws, and cervical vertebrae is the result of normal eating habits of carnivores. The brown hyenas in Kruger Park collected the heads of medium sized antelopes, baboons, and a few carnivores. This is the kind and distribution of bones found in the australopithecine deposits.'

Thus, on the basis of Washburn's intuition and an ad hoc survey of 35 animal carcasses he observed while looking for baboons to anthropologize, he was able to posit a plausible and parsimonious alternative explanation for the traces that Dart thought must have been the result of australopithecine hunting. If Bob Brain can be considered the English-speaking founder of the study of taphonomy, Washburn must therefore have been the Muse.

Spotted hyaena (Crocuta crocuta), adapted to eating bone, and bone collector extraordinaire (Source)

     In the end, Washburn focusses on hyaenas as one of the more prolific bone collectors, and notes that depending on the carcass size of any given species, a different pattern of skeletal parts will find its way into a hyaena den.

It should be stressed that a variety of animals may have been involved, and there is no reason that any particular animal should have been responsible for all the deposits. However, it seems to have been generally assumed that hyenas were the most likely candidates, but Hughes ... and Dart ... have questioned whether hyenas do in fact accumulate bones. I saw a spotted hyena carrying off the head of a medium sized antelope, and Colonel Stevenson-Hamilton, who was Warden of Kruger National Park for many years, gives an excellent account of a brown hyena den. 'The vicinity was littered with bones. ...The heads of fourteen full-grown impala rams, all quite recently killed, the skulls of several baboons, and of two chitas (one of them a full-grown animal) remains of guinea fowls, and a large tree snake ("boomslang") partly chewed, were among the exhibits' ... . This is the same den described by Maberly ... in his excellent guide to the 'Animals of Kruger National Park.'

The brown hyaena (Hyaena brunnea, formerly Parahyaena brunnea), another prodigious bone transport agent and accumulator (Source)

Returning, finally, to the Swartkrans deposits, Washburn summarizes by saying, 'Combined with the fact that hyena coprolites have been found in the deposits, this makes it probable that the australopithecines were themselves the game, rather than the hunters.'

Refreshingly brief, concise, insightful, with a hint of tropical fruit on the finish. Bon apetit!

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