Fingering Species or Putting Your Foot In It.

I'm very pleased today to bring back the Subversive Archaeologist's good friend, Iain Davidson. He's voicing what, no doubt, some of you already suspect in regard to some of the most recent pronouncements having to do with our distant relatives, the Neanderthals, and us.

Since before Iain and I became acquainted in about 1988, we've shared what I facetiously refer to as an 'intellectual pathology.' We both think that a lot of the claims for modern-human behaviour in the Early and Middle Palaeolithic are misguided at best---misinterpretations for the most part---and, at worst, mythical.

Iain Davidson

Iain has recently retired from his Professorial duties at the University of New England, in Armidale, New South Wales, where he plied his trade for several decades. His research and fieldwork have spanned the length and breadth of Australia, from the dream time to the European occupation. He has expertise in, among other fields, animal bone archaeology, taphonomy, lithic replication and lithic analysis (including having to do with the Near Eastern Middle Palaeolithic).

He has published a good number of books, including a ground-breaking treatment of cooperative ties with Aboriginal groups in Australia. But the ones that are most closely connected with our favorite subject are one on the evolution of cognition and language and another on the relationship between lithic 'technology'* and how we became human: Human Evolution, Language, and Mind and Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition.

In today's oeuvre Iain has a bone to pick with the Neanderthal genome gang, who've lately been very vocal about your and my ancestors' sexual behaviour in Europe about the time the Ns were checking out. It looks to me as if Iain has discovered another one of the rabbit holes that seem to abound in the land of subversive archaeology, down which we're all being told to descend, and which leads to a bizarro world of fractured logic, Mad Hatter-like knowledge claims, and ... well ... before I give away the plot, I think I'll turn the reins over to Iain.

Fingering Species or Putting Your Foot In It

Back in 2010 a modestly titled paper (1) announced that a whole sequence of ancient Mitochondrial DNA had been extracted from a pinky bone by the team who have been constructing the Neandertal genome (2): they called it “an unknown hominin”. This, despite the fact that this unknown hominin is known only from the pinky and perhaps a tooth from mixed sediments at the back of Denisova cave. The dating samples for the cave came from the better stratified sediments elsewhere, so the pinky and the tooth are effectively undated. The creature was subsequently dubbed “the Denisovans” on the assumption that, in life, more than one little finger was needed to reproduce a genetic sequence. The whole genome was subsequently presented (3) and it was shown that the distinctive sequences in the Denisovan genome could be found in present day people in Melanesia, Fiji and the Cook Island but not in modern Chinese or Native Americans (4). All of this is brilliant science and fascinating, but puzzling.

The bigpuzzle is what on earth we can do with this information in relation to everything we have known before. That is to say that the whole business of giving names to different species of hominins—in most cases it is not too much of a distortion to say “our ancestors”—has been done by identifying distinctive patches of variation in the skeletal remains from a particular time or place. But with the Denisovans we have a pinky and a tooth. People are bolder now about identifying teeth to species but it was once thought difficult. I am pretty sure that most people would be cautious about identifying a species from a pinky bone. So it is going to be difficult to classify any other fossil skeletal remains as Denisovans until ancient DNA has been extracted. Which is a big ask.

That puzzle means that it is really difficult to discuss population histories, say, of how the Denisovan genetic material got to Melanesia without leaving a trace in modern Han Chinese. I discussed this in my recent paper in Quaternary International (5). I suggested that it is highly likely that some of the presently known fossil specimens, especially those that have been difficult to classify, might end up to have been Denisovans, but until we have their DNA sequences we cannot know.

But wait there’s more. This week there have been two new studies which brought me up short.

First, a British team tried to assess the differences in structural organisation of the brains of Neandertals and humans (6). I do not want to go into the statistical manipulations that made that possible (well, I do, but that is not my point here—and the SA has already started that task). Rather, hidden away in the Supplementary Online Material, the samples were identified including the Chinese specimens from Dali and Jinniushan and the Indian specimen from Narmada as Denisovans. I could find no argument saying why they were so identified. In his recent book (which must have one of the best titles on human evolution ever—The origin of our species) Stringer, one of the team, emphasised the need for the DNA analysis (7). I wonder why he ignored that advice in the paper.

Second, yesterday the ancient DNA team from Leipzig released the full genome of the Neandertal, promising a paper on it would be coming out soon (8) [and see below]. That is not a surprise, as the original paper (2) only claimed to have a draft of the complete genome. What was surprising was that the genome included material from another very non-diagnostic bone, this time from the foot. But even more surprising was that this foot bone came from the same Denisova Cave as the pinky bone. I have not been able to access the paper in which the bone is described, but John Hawks (9) says that it found some similarities with Neandertals and some with recent humans. But here’s the thing: as Hawks pointed out, we could be about to witness a real confusion in the literature. We have two sets of evidence, from skeletal remains and from ancient DNA. I am not sure that they are compatible even in the most straightforward of cases. After all the original draft genome sequence was obtained from non-diagnostic leg bones. 

Press release from the Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. 

A high-quality Neandertal genome sequence. 

The genome sequence was generated from a toe bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia in 2010.  The bone is described in Mednikova (Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 2011. 39: 129-138). DNA sequences were generated on the Illumina HiSeq platform and constitute an average 50-fold coverage of the genome. 99.9% of the 1.7GB of uniquely mappable DNA sequences in the human genome are covered at least ten times. Contamination with modern human DNA, estimated from mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences, is around 1%. The figure shows a tree relating this genome to the genomes of Neandertals from Croatia, from Germany and from the Caucasus as well as the Denisovan genome recovered from a finger bone excavated at Deniosva Cave. It shows that this individual is closely related to these other Neandertals. Thus, both Neandertals and Denisovans have inhabited this cave in southern Siberia, presumably at different times.

What we actually have is skeletal and behavioural variation on one side which has been partitioned into species by physical anthropologists and on the other side we have variation in ancient and modern DNA and a capacity to identify distinctive sequences of DNA attributed to a couple of ancient species in living populations suggesting low levels of admixture. The DNA variation will yield vast amounts of information. I am not sure the skeletal variation will yield so much, particularly if a typological approach is the best we can do. Certainly, giving the name Denisovan to skeletal remains is going to be a very counter-productive activity until DNA has been extracted from some more diagnostic parts of the skeleton.

And at the back of my mind is the crisis in physical anthropology caused by the difficulties of agreement about the most fundamental aspects of classification of the remains from Liang Bua in Flores. There are claims in the literature that one or more characters are most like hominins from Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, H. rudolfensis, H. georgicus, H. erectus, H. antecessor, or that the creatures were the remains of modern humans either with one pathology or another, or with no pathology (this is summarised in ref 10). If it is so difficult to classify a nearly complete skeleton into an appropriate place right across the range of hominin variation then I am not sure I am going to be convinced by extending a classification from a pinky bone to a whole skeleton or even a skull. And I am going to remain puzzled by the presence of two bones of the extremities from different species in the same cave. Dare I say we need to proceed with caution, perhaps on tippy toe.

1) Krause, J., Fu, Q., Good, J. M., Viola, B., Shunkov, M. V., Derevianko, A. P., & Pääbo, S. (2010). The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. [doi: 10.1038/nature08976]. Nature, 464(7290), 894-897. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7290/full/nature08976.html

2) Green, R. E., Krause, J., Briggs, A. W., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., . . .  & Pääbo, S. (2010). A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome. Science, 328(5979), 710-722. doi: 10.1126/science.1188021 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710.abstract?sid=4f93e3a0-e172-4994-b57f-178bdf78d8f0

3) Meyer, M., Kircher, M., Gansauge, M.-T., Li, H., Racimo, F., Mallick, S., . . . & Pääbo, S. (2012). A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual. Science, 338(6104), 222-226. doi: 10.1126/science.1224344 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6104/222

4) Reich, D., Patterson, N., Kircher, M., Delfin, F., Nandineni, Madhusudan R., Pugach, I., . . . Stoneking, M. (2011). Denisova admixture and the first modern human dispersals into Southeast Asia and Oceania. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 89(4), 516-528. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.09.005 http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reich/Reich_Lab/Welcome_files/2011_AJHG_Stoneking_Denisova_Impact.pdf [free access]

5) Davidson, I. (2013). Peopling the last new worlds: The first colonisation of Sahul and the Americas. Quaternary International, 285(0), 1-29. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2012.09.023 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618212031965

6) Pearce, E., Stringer, C., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2013). New insights into differences in brain organization between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1758). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.0168 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1758/20130168.abstract

7) Stringer, C. (2011). The origin of our species. London: Allen Lane. 

8) http://www.eva.mpg.de/neandertal/index.html 

9) http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/altai-denisova-neandertal-high-coverage-2013.html 

10) Aiello, L. C. (2010). Five years of Homo floresiensis. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 142(2), 167-179. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.21255 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.oca.ucsc.edu/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21255/abstract

~Iain Davidson


* Sorry! I had to put technology in inverted commas, because technology is a word that implies mindedness, and as you know, it's still an open question whether it existed throughout the history of stone artifact production.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

The Impending Social Sciences A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E.

Remember Rick Scott? The Florida State Governor, Rick Scott? The Rick Scott who as much as said that anthropology is about as valuable to society as screen doors on a submarine? That Rick Scott? Yes.

Florida Governor R. Scott. The Bloomberg caption reads: "Florida Governor Rick Scott proposed linking more than $167 million of the state university system’s $3.8 billion budget to performance standards that include the percentage of recent graduates with jobs, the cost of their education and their salaries."

Our collective ass is grass.

"Anthropology Mocked as U.S. Governors Push for Employable Grads"

That headline in Bloomberg.com announces the impending doom of the affordable liberal education. If, that is, Rick Scott and like-minded politicians get their way.

Just feast your eyes on this thinly veiled misogynist, anti-intellectual bullshit from out the mouth of North Carolina's governor [I refuse to call him by his given name's diminutive] McCrory.

“If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine,” McCrory, 56, said in a January radio interview. “Go to a private school and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if it’s not going to get somebody a job.”

I'm sorry. Did I say thinly veiled? I meant bald-faced. This dick-head and many more like him are hoping to turn public universities into vocational institutes.

But, get this. If you looked up 'ironic' in the encyclopaedia there'd be a picture of this guy looking back at you. From the Bloomberg article:

McCrory, a graduate of North Carolina’s Catawba College, a private liberal-arts school, defended the type of education he received yet said the state shouldn’t subsidize some courses -- gender studies and philosophy -- now offered at Chapel Hill.

And the shoe drops. This salient member of the North Carolina upper class could afford to take his own advice. He went to a private college. They're really expensive and none but the very best applicants receive financial aid. Something tells me McCrory wasn't one of them, if, an indeterminate number of years afterward he can gleefully work to turn public universities into glorified apprenticeships.

It's not all gloom and doom. The Bloomberg article also includes this:

[McCrory's] comments prompted critical newspaper editorials, an Internet petition and a letter from faculty inviting McCrory to learn more about the university.

Ooooooh. I'll bet the 1% are shakin' in their Gucci loafers. Okay. It doesn't really come close to dimming the gloom or the doom. Letters? Petitions? I'd think torches and pitchforks are needed! After all, how far is righteous indignation gonna go to slow the already precipitous decline---the dumbing of America? The answer may lie in this very telling bit of background. The implications don't make me feel any safer. You?

The university has been a target of Republican criticism before, including by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, founded by the family foundation of McCrory’s budget director, Art Pope. One headline on the center website reads: ‘‘Teaching Marxist Subversion at UNC.’

It's the same Republican shit: "liberal" equals "socialist" equals "Marxist-inspired" equals "We don't want any uppity women or [must be said with barely disguised contempt] 'people of colour' either!"

Wish all of us in the 99% "good luck." We're gonna need a big fat pile of good fortune to surmount the even bigger pile of crap that's being thrown into the path of those who'd like, eventually, to become members of an informed electorate!

Have a look at what McCrory, Scott and their other U.S. of A. Republican gubernatorial pals have been doing to the public [read 'affordable' and 'accessible to minorities'] universities in the past decade or so. Be very afraid.

Copyright belongs to Bloomberg

Linking funding to jobs. That's gonna be hard to do if there aren't any god-damned jobs! Oh. Yeah. Sorry. That's beside the point.

Kayso, let me see. Gender studies is out. Anthropology, too, no doubt. Whaddayathink? Economics? No sense letting the rank and file know how badly they're being screwed by the banks. Sociology? Prolly on the chopping block, too. After all, who needs a bunch of effete, bleeding-heart do-gooders telling us how ass-backward our penal and other social systems are, or worse, suggesting that medical marijuana is a good thing?

I know that the 'slippery slope' argument is fallacious, philosophically speaking. But as a metaphor it's still a very powerful one. How far down this slippery slope will the U.S. [and other fascist governments] take the populace? I shudder to think of it.

Clench your buttocks. Looks like it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Fly. Meet Wall. Calico Hills Public Presentation, Big Bear Lake, California, March 23, 2013

What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall on March 23, 2013, when the Friends of the Big Bear, California Library host Adella Schroth, Curator of Anthropology at the San Bernardino County Museum, and Director of the Calico Mountains Archaeological Site Project. Ripped from the headlines of Big Bear, California's Big Bear News, an online service of Big Bear's KBHR 93.3 FM. The March 15, 2013 edition is almost cautious in its mode of presentation---as if they know too well what to expect:

The dating of the site is still controversial as is [sic] the artifactual constituents. This lecture will introduce the Calico site and address two controversies. It is up to the audience to draw their own conclusions. 

Seating is limited. Best show up early to get the good seat.

I'm sorry. I can't help myself. As it is I've spent the past three minutes biting my tongue so hard it's bleeding! Talk about Zombie Archaeology. I thought this one had been bayed by a crucifix and staked through the heart at least 50 years ago. Evidently not.

I don't doubt that one or two of the younger readers, and those of any age whose interests or places of residence happen not to include North America, will be unfamiliar with the tale of Calico Hills. Maybe this'll help.

On the left is the discoverer of the Calico Hills site, Ruth DeEtte Simpson.
On the right is Louis S. B. Leakey---Mary's husband, Richard's father, and so on.
They're happy 'cause they think they've found a Lower Palaeolithic (i.e. Acheulean) (i.e. Homo erectus) site in California.

The back story on the above photo. Leakey's fame led Ruth Simpson to contact him about a site she'd located in California. Leakey thought it'd be worth a look. So, he got some National Geographic money, and for several years until his death in 1972, he ran the investigations. Claims for the antiquity of the site ranged anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 years. And, in places, it's possible to find dirt that's that old. Something I did not know until this moment... In her autobiography  Mary Leakey allowed that Louis's involvement was "catastrophic to his professional career and was largely responsible for the parting of our ways." Bottom line: the site has for a very long time kept a small coterie of devotées archaeologists busy, and not many serious archaeologists will accept an age for the site much, if any, in excess of 15 kyr. It would indeed be interesting to hear what Adella Schroth will say about it at the talk in Big Bear on March 23rd.

The nearly vertical bank of an arroyo at the Calico Hills locality.

Sadly the depositional history of the site is the sort that has bedevilled many an archaeologist. It's part of a complex of alluvial fans that are subject to anything from a light rain to high-energy debris flows. These high-energy events are more than capable of causing rocks to fracture in ways that mimic simple stone artifacts. Those so-called geofacts---found in ancient contexts---coupled with the light sprinkling of modern human presence in the area for most of the last 15,000 or so years, said to Simpson and Leakey: This is one really old site.

As it is plainly visible in the stratigraphic column illustrated below, the geology of the area is very much net-aggradational, although, as one can see from the view above of the wadi/arroyo/dry gulch/wash, such structures are often multiplex coalescent, spatially and time-transgressive phenomena and often new alluvial activity downcuts through older sediments. Thus, as one traverses one of these huge landforms it's quite possible to see, at the surface, cultural material from the entire span of human presence in the area, and beyond. And as you probe the fan itself you're likely to find an unsorted diamicton, comprising all sizes of rock, and including numerous highly angular gravel, pebbles, cobbles, boulders and everything in between.

I hope that the Friends of the Big Bear Library have their thinking caps on at the March 23rd talk.

The rugged, sere, landscape in which the Calico Hills site is located [red pushpin in centre of view]. The active alluvial fans occur in sediments that were themselves alluvial fans in an earlier epoch. Sites in places like these are riddles, wrapped in mysteries, carried inside enigmas. [Apologies to Winnie Churchill.]

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

[Updated]Grandma! What Big Eyes You Have! Neanderthal Eyeballs the Focus of Pearce, Stringer and Dunbar

This post now includes an additional comparison of these authors' results at the 80% probability level, which is a much more generous statistical regime than the 99% that I originally proposed, which remains in the text. Together these calculations pretty much nail the coffin shut [provisionally] on the notion of big eyeballs and latitude. Here beginneth the original lesson.

Back out on the limb I go...

It isn't often that I seek to disparage the work of people I know and of whom I'm fond [not necessarily, but frequently, mutually exclusive subsets of humanity]. So, I won't do it today, either. But I do want to query the authors of two papers having to do with the Neanderthal eyeball, one of which was published yesterday. [Was it only yesterday? Seems like I've been thinking about these two for way longer than that. Ah, well. On we go.] Get out your slide rule ... erm ... graphing calculator. [By the way, did you know that the iPhone calculator is just like a regular number pad in portrait, but it switches to a scientific calculator when you turn the phone to landscape mode???? I think that's way kewl. What's that you say? "Small things amuse small minds." What's your point?] Grab your calculator, and hold on!

Yesterday's publication is

Eiluned Pearce, Chris Stringer and R. I. M. Dunbar,
"New insights into differences in brain organization between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans." Proceedings of the Royal Society B[iological Sciences], 280, 20130168, published 13 March 2013

And the earlier one on which yesterday's is partly based is similar, but not so similar that even I'm compelled to ask questions. The preceding paper is

Eiluned Pearce and Robin Dunbar, "Latitudinal variation in light levels drives human visual system size." Biology Letters 8, 90--93, 2012. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0570 first published online 27 July 2011

Kayso in the oldest of the two articles the authors looked at some modern human skulls from different latitudes and arrived at the data presented below. In (a) you see the tight correlation between latitude and orbital volume [a proxy for eyeball size---a reasonable assumption]. Their sample comprised 55 healthy adult people like you and me ['cept these ones were dead---so, not that much like you and me (although, there have been days...) nor, under the circumstances could they be described as being very healthy. So, I'm sure the authors meant something else ;-) ]

In the graph below you see that orbital volume varies between about 22 ml and 27 ml [roughly 27 cubic centimetres (cc)]. The samples were drawn from 12 populations at different distances from the equator. A scatter plot of orbital volume against latitude shows that the further away from the equator one lives, the larger one's eyeballs will be. Someone living at about 65 degrees north latitude has the largest eyeballs. Ahh. But there's more to this comparison than *cough* meets the eye, as I'll explain on the other side of this graph.

From Pearce and Dunbar 2012.

The authors attribute this variability to microevolutionary adjustments to varying levels of ambient light, which, they say, becomes dimmer and dimmer the further away you are from the equator. Therein lies my first question. Surely the average ambient light at 60 degrees and above---which amounts to nearly constant daylight for upwards of 6 months---would beat out the roughly 50/50 day--night split at the equator. I think the Inuit might have a different tale to tell, especially when you consider that what llight there is gets reflected and multiplied such that in the daylight in the winter, those wandering about outside the igloo had better have their sunglasses on or risk snow blindness and ultimately persistent blindness. And what about the rainforest dwellers who rarely see the sun? There should be plenty of variability, even holding latitude constant, dependent on average actual ambient light. So how do the authors arrive at such a compelling distribution of eyeball size and latitude? Follow me! ... Um. Better bring an umbrella---there might be fallout from the following. [Fallout from the following. That's practically poetry.]

The data for the above graph are given in the supplemental material. I reproduce it here to illustrate my point.

From Pearce and Dunbar 2012. 

I compared mean orbital volumes for each of the 12 groups graphed above, taking into account sample size and sample variance [i.e. standard deviation]. As I suspected, at the 99% probability level one finds that those means between about 23 and 27 are not statistically different from one another. In other words, it's impossible to argue that those 8 or 9 samples weren't drawn at random from a single population having a mean somewhere between 23 and 27. The same can be said for those means between about 22 and about 26. Depending on where you cut, there might be two populations with statistically different means. Certainly nowhere near 12.

{Update 16:41 UTC March 15, 2013}

The 99% level is perhaps a little too stringent, even for my liking. So I went back to the group mean orbital volumes and discovered that, even at the 80% probability level [a really generous level, I might add] the following is true. Of the twelve group means...

None of the four group mean orbital volumes in the 26 ml range are statistically distinguishable from one another.

None of the four group mean orbital volumes in the 24 ml range are statistically distinguishable from one another.

None of the four group mean orbital volumes in the 21--23 ml range are statistically distinguishable from one another.

From these results the potential number of groups means falls from 12 to 3. This would mean that the graph shown above is, at best, tantalizing as to the hypothesized relationship between latitude and orbital size in modern humans. This is more like I would have expected given the potential for widely varying levels of ambient light at each latitude.

Continuing with the update. At the 80% probability level

None of the eight smallest group mean orbital volumes---i.e those between 21.83 and 24.46---are statistically distinguishable from one another.

Thus, within the 12 groups of orbital mean volumes one can reduce them to just two distinct groups: one group with a mean somewhere between 21.83 and 24.46 ml; another group comprising the four means of 26 ml and above.

I think I can probably stop the update here.}

All in all, the mean values of orbital volume vary so little from the equator to 60 degrees latitude, and the within-group variance is often so great that the authors' conclusions in this paper are severely undermined. To provide a more robust dataset they would need to sample more individuals at each latitude such that mean orbital volume was statistically different for each group in comparison to the others.

So much for my questions about Pearce and Dunbar 2012. Now it's on to yesterday's publication.

Pearce, Stringer and Dunbar (Yesterday) examine the orbital volumes and endocranial volume of 'Anatomically Modern Homo sapiens' (AMHs) and Neanderthals. They report significant differences in cranial capacity between AMHs and Neanderthals, and adduce the difference to different evolutionary pathways wherein the Neanderthals devoted more grey matter to ocular efficiency (in the form of larger eyeballs) in the face of latitude dependent reduced ambient light. On the other hand,  those wicked AMHs said we're gonna get along fine without better eyesight as long as we can live in larger social groups. [I won't get into what I think about that conclusion.]

Here I'm reproducing Table 1 from Pearce et al. 2013, to illustrate a bit of arithmetic that might make me three new enemies of two and a half friends. [The half is for Pearce, whom I know not, but because Pearce works with Robin, it's like what? Two degrees of separation? Heck! We're practically family.]

From Pearce et al. 2013

The first bit that caught my eye is the orbital volumes of the two kinds of Homos. A whopping 34.15 ml (cc) for the Neanderthals. Moreover, by comparison with the earlier work by Pearce and Dunbar the AMHs in this study also have a whopping orbital volume---29.15 ml (cc). In their earlier paper the largest sample mean for the present-day AMHs was just shy of 27 ml (cc). That was for someone living above the Arctic Circle. My first question is: where did you find these AMHs? At the North Pole? So that's why Santa sees you when you're sleeping---he has way bigger eyeballs than you and I put together? Well, sort of. Actually. Maybe not. Okay. Call a spade a spade. No way.

Keeping in mind what I said earlier regarding the mean orbital volume in the Pearce and Dunbar paper, have a look at the means, standard deviations and sample sizes upon which Pearce et al. hang their conclusions about Neanderthals and AMHs. In the table above the mean orbital volume for the Neanderthals is given as 34.15 cc (s.d. 3.39; n=5). That of the AMHs is 29.51 cc (s.d. 2.07; n=4). Seems substantial. No? No. Do a difference of means test and whaddayaknow? They're statistically indistinguishable at the 99% level, and at the 95% level. I.O.W., statistically speaking, the two results cannot be distinguished from two separate samples drawn at random from a single population with mean of X and s.d of Y. So, what does that do to their thesis about eyeballs and brain size and evolution and stuff?

I'll let you break it to them.

All right. To use a quaint saying of British origin, I'm knackered. And I think it best if I lay low for a while.

So, fare ye well until we meet again!

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

[New Title] Archaeology, My Foot!

The original title of this article was

"Biblical Archaeology is Just a Cover For the Forces Trying to Take Over the World!"

Please allow me to rescind that one, in the interest of one showing at least a modicum of sensitivity.

Believe it or don't, my intent was to draw attention to a fictive 'force' of Christian Fundamentalists, Christian Supremacists, and Christianists in general, who seem bent on turning the United States into a Christian Theocracy along the lines of the Islamic Theocracies with which we're all familiar. As far as the article discussed below is concerned, these groups of oftentimes pseudo-archaeologists seem to be able to get permission to dig on the West Bank with little else than a hope to find something that would give evidence of the Bible's historicity.

As an atheist, I can hardly favour one or another group of zealots. So ...

I apologize to everyone whose feelings are bruised in the following. Obviously, what I hoped would be a title to hook a large audience turned out, instead, to get imbedded in my own cheek.

So, as the Overture to the Bugs Bunny Show used to say, "On with the show, this is it."


The Biblical Pseudo-Archeologists Pillaging the West Bank
The Atlantic.com February 28, 2013.

I dunno who's more to blame for the wholesale desecration of "The Holy Land." It might be the Israeli authorities, the Israeli Defense Force, the Christianists, or all of the above. [What a confection that would make!]

Qumran, near Jerusalem. Wikipedia.

Riddle: Which biblical archaeologist can excavate on the Israeli occupied West Bank but not in Israel? Answer: the people who've botched up their legal excavations within Israel's pre-1967 borders, that's who! 

And who has the authority to issue permission to biblical archaeologists wishing to excavate within the Israeli occupied West Bank? The Israeli government? Nope. The Palestinian Authority? Nope. The Israeli Defense Force? Yes and No. It's complicated. 

Since 1967 the Israeli Defense Force has excavated more than 6,000 [yep] sites on the Occupied West Bank. All [and they mean all] of the booty spoils of war items collected are stored in warehouses within the bounds of pre-1967 Israel. Now, get this, one guy's in charge of it all. The guy's name is Himzi. Here's the gist of the situation, as it appears in The Atlantic.com.

For those allowed to dig, however, strict guidelines exist to facilitate the transfer of any artifacts discovered to Israeli military control. According to Ziad al-Khatib, Bethlehem regional commander for the Palestinian Antiquities Police, "The Civil Administration works within the borders of the West Bank and moves items into the Israeli areas," he said. "They decide which items to be kept, which to move out of the country."

Al-Khatib describes this system as "legal theft." Though the Hague Convention disallows moving artifacts out of occupied territory, the Civil Administration transfers huge numbers of them to storage units in disputed Israeli settlement blocs, and others to universities and museums inside Israel. The officer behind these operations works in tandem with foreign archaeologists ... in a system that discreetly siphons thousands of artifacts out of the Palestinian territories.

The entrance to the Archaeology Department of the Civil Administration (ADCA) is an unassuming steel gate tucked between rows of flowering hedges. The compound consists of three flat-topped units arranged in a "C", their walls painted a blinding shade of white with thick blue lines along the top. In the middle, a rock and flower garden is arranged inside a lawn of dusty synthetic turf.

The ADCA is a notoriously secretive organization whose leader, the Staff Officer for Archaeology (SOA)---an elusive man named Hananya Hizmi---enjoys a staggering amount of power within his jurisdiction. He is immune from oversight, exempt from excavation licenses for his own digs, enjoys a lifetime term, and is not required to publish his finds, the majority of which reside in storage facilities under his sole control. The West Bank is, in effect, his personal sandbox, and he is loath to divulge information about his operations.

Shown below is a screen capture I made of the interactive map published in the same Atlantic article, by which you can learn only the most minimal information on the more than 6,000 sites overseen or excavated by the aforementioned IDF, under Hizmi's control---and only his control [so far as the authors were able to determine]. O' course, if you want anything more than the minimal information provided by this map, I wish you good luck. According to the authors, you're not gonna find it.

From The Atlantic 

So as not to keep you in suspense 'til you make it to the article in question, here's an example of the quality [using the term loosely] of information this interactive map thingy supplies. Keep in mind this is all that anyone is allowed to know. I clicked on one at random, at the southwestern extreme of the Occupied West Bank. Et, voilà!

Although the Atlantic article focusses on the whack-os who profess to be scientific and say they're looking for evidence of literal biblical history, it's really an open question as to whether or not such endeavors are anything more than fishing expeditions hoping to retrieve whatever they can to use as Medieval-style relics to take home to show the soon-to-be-fleeced Christianist flocks. On the other hand, maybe they're loafing expeditions. ... ... ...

*crickets chirping*

[You know! Loaves and fishes? The New Testament? Seriously. You don't get it? Well, no matter. I think I just explained it. BTdub, I apologize for my sometimes errant self-professed humour. However, I take no responsibility for the presence (or absence) of cultural sensitivity on behalf of my (occasionally) funny bone.]

It's been fun. We'll chat later.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Old New World News: The Great Inca Rebellion That Nobody Knew About for 400 years!

If this is old hat for you, feel free to browse the Subversive Archaeologist for something you didn't know before. BUT, for you who, like me, were one of the last people on the planet to still think that Pizarro and a couple of hundred treasure hunters single-handedly [well, I guess that would be 200 handedly] brought down the Inca Empire, read on and feast on the video embedded here, courtesy of the United States Public Broadcasting System.

This film, The Great Inca Rebellion, tells the story of two Peruvian archaeologists who undertook excavation of a huge Inca cemetery on the outskirts of Lima, and who, in the early 2000s found compelling evidence for events that one had only imagined must have occurred during Pizzaro's rape of the Inca Empire. Instead of a couple of hundred swashbuckling Spaniards overthrowing the Inca and his empire, Pizarro and his men did so with the willing assistance of those groups who had fallen under the thumb of the aforementioned Inca, Atahualpa. 

They say that history is written by the victors. In this case you might even want to say that history was rewritten over and over again by the victors, to such a degree that the hired help just disappeared from everyone's consciousness, leaving Pizarro making bank to the detriment of the 'heathens.' 

And so, when it came time for the archaeologists to interpret what they were seeing in the most-recent stratigraphic position in this cemetery, they needed to think well 'outside the box' of history. If you were previously unaware of this work, you'll be as impressed as I was by the detective work, even before the forensic ringers from the States appear on the scene.

This is a story about some present-day and archaeological 'local heroes.' Prepare to be impressed and heartened by the outcome. The bastards who razed the Inca Empire didn't do it without some serious assistance. [Much, it turns out, as in the case of Hernán Cortés, who ransacked the Aztecs ONLY with the help of a multitude of disaffected nearby peoples that had been previously conquered by Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin (A.K.A. Montezuma or Moctezuma) c. 1466--29 June 1520.]

Watch The Great Inca Rebellion on PBS. See more from NOVA. Or view at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq_21QfGRpg

Thank you for your continued support!

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

More on Blombos Bombast at ScienceNow

Michael Balter's latest at ScienceNow, about some more shell-bead bombast from Blombos Cave:

Human Ancestors Were Fashion Conscious

My comment can be viewed here.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Neolithic Houses Do Not Grow On Archaeological Trees: Until Now

Our pals at Pasthorizons: adventuresinarchaeology have just released this.

FOUR NEOLITHIC HOUSES UNEARTHED AT QUARRY

Honestly, this is almost epochal. Neolithic habitations in England [at least] have been notoriously elusive. Much is due to the deforestation and resultant deflation of the landscape thanks to those very same, pesky Neolithickers. One of the four is shown below, from CEMEX's Kingsmead Quarry in Berkshire, radiocarbon dated to between 3,800 AND 3,640 B.C.E. 

One of four Neolithic domestic structures in Berkshire. [Stolen, with thanks, from www.pasthorizons.com.]

A house this large is, to my way of thinking, evidence of what Brian Hayden has called corporate groups. One well-known example of this kind of social arrangement was visible in the ethnographic large plank houses on the northwest coast of North America. Each 'house' was more like a family business. Several related families would occupy the house and all would cooperate to exploit the environment in a cultural system that included frequent competitive feasts---feasts that did less than distribute wealth [as some archaeologists and anthropologists have claimed] and more to beggar other similar groups. Each guest at a 'potlatch' would leave in debt, basically, to the family or person holding the party. If you've gone to the link to read up on the potlatch you'll very quickly discover that the preponderance of anthropologists cleave to this idea of wealth redistribution. That's pretty much caca in my book.

Anyway, onward to the past. 

As the folks at Pasthorizons will tell you, finding four such places is, to say the least, extraordinary. As you can see in the photo, this was an enormous structure, on the order of 10 m by 20 m. Finding this site is a good news story, archaeologically speaking. Let's hope that CEMEX will see fit to conserve this unique settlement.

Stolen, with thanks, from www.pasthorizons.com 

That's it for today!

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Rabbits? Did Rabbits Kill the Neanderthals? LMFAO!

Be vewy, vewy quiet. I'm hunting wabbits (after Warner Brothers, with thanks in advance).

 The Subversive Archaeologist news ticker comes through for me again! This just in...

Did Rabbits Kill the Neanderthals?

At first I thought I was experiencing a little déjà vu with a 70s flavour. And so it was, with a touch of nostalgia I hied meself over to YouTube and found this clip. In the context of today's subject, you have to watch it. It's only 2:08 and it's really, really funny. So, indulge me, won't you? You won't regret it!!!! The scene is a crucial turning point in the epic Monte Python and the Holy Grail. [You great Scottish Git! has to  be my favourite line.]



Allrighty. Back to a semblance of reality, and the matter at hand---real killer rabbits. Or not.

From the History Channel online [if that's not a technological oxymoron]---just slightly further north than Fox News when it comes to "truthiness,"---comes this tale of the cottontails of Pleistocene Europe. The scientist in question is one John Fa, of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, Jersey.

I have to admit that, after reading Jennie Cohen's History Channel article, I was creased over laughing. Here's why. The Neanderthals are introduced in this way:

What happened to the Neanderthals? Our close evolutionary cousins dominated Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia for hundreds of thousands of years before dying out an estimated 30,000 years ago. Along the way, the stocky hominins developed a rich culture, stalked many a wooly mammoth and rubbed elbows with the ancestors of today’s Homo sapiens [emphasis added]. 

And, by contrast with the rabbit-ready modern humans that entered Europe around 40 kyr ago, as the global climate deteriorated into what became the Last Glacial Maximum, we're told that the

Neanderthals, meanwhile, were strictly “large game specialists,” the researchers postulate. Perhaps they didn’t have the right body type for scampering after small, speedy critters like rabbits—or maybe they simply, stubbornly refused to eat Thumper and his adorable friends. As a result, they succumbed to famine while their cousins feasted. “The specialized diet of Neanderthals consisting of large and medium-sized terrestrial herbivores may have made them more vulnerable at a time when these animals disappeared or became scarce,” the scientists write.

And so it was with some trepidation that I found the source and had a read. Published online on February 17, this year: John E. Fa, et. al., "Rabbits and hominin survival in Iberia." Journal of Human Evolution http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.01.002, 2013. [However did my Dunland crows miss this one?] 

In brief, Fa et al. compile observations from more than 300 sites across Europe, of which only 104 had rabbit remains throughout the temporal span---from 300,000 right through to the Mesolithic, at around 9,000 years. They found that not only did rabbits comprise significantly smaller proportions in the Mousterian components than in all of the components representing modern human activity, but also the majority of rabbit remains from Mousterian contexts has been identified as part of the non-Neanderthal accumulations.

So, the weight of evidence appears to support the thesis that Neanderthals didn't chase rabbits, and that we moderns did. Thus, as climate deteriorated in Europe the large mammals on which the Neanderthals are said to have specialized became by degrees less plentiful, while rabbits were able to persist, and in their usual large numbers. How did the Neanderthals make such a cognitive blunder??? That is still an open empirical question. However Fa et al. go some way toward making sense of it.

Some things never change!
(Thanks, again, in advance, to Warner Brothers)

And, while Fa, et al. is not the 'smoking gun' when it comes to identifying THE process that eased the Neanderthals out of the evolutionary picture, their work does act as a counterpoint to the much-heralded conclusions of, for example, Mary Stiner, that the Neanderthals were in fact capable big-game hunters, and therefore pretty darned good at the survival game. Against that, one might see Fa et al. as a work that exposes the heretofore unrealized 'chink in the armour' of the Neanderthals. That those Neanderthals appear not to have been capable of extracting the maximum from a given biome, especially ignoring as readily available, and as prolific a quarry as rabbits, should be a red flag to palaeoanthropologists and palaeolithic archaeologists. Neanderthals might have been big and strong, but they clearly weren't 'thinking' straight when it came to survival in the late Pleistocene of Europe.

Just a suggestion. The title of the History Channel piece---"Did Rabbits Kill the Neanderthals?"---should be rewritten as "Neanderthals couldn't kill rabbits."

*Thanks to Spawn of Endra for reminding me that the Bugs Bunny cartoons were the intellectual property of Warner Bros, and not Walt Disney, as I originally posted. My big bad.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Perhaps Some Grist For the Mill Come May

Click here to embiggen the poster

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Complete This Sentence: Put That In Your Pipe ...

Thanks to Phys dot org for this really cool home-grown archaeological news.

Ceçi c'est une pipe!

Residues trumpet tobacco use by the ninth century C.E. in what's now northern-most California. Chew on that for a while *cough*. UC Davis in the news courtesy of a just-published article in Journal of Archaeological Science!

Camel will be wanting to change its name to Megatherium. To the right is my suggestion for new packaging  artwork.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Vancouver, B.C. My Home and Native Land!

Downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. The stadium in the centre recently acquired a retro-fitted retractable roof. It's old inflatable roof was called the Mushroom in Bondage. I'm thinkin' Slumbering Porcupine might best describe it now.

I'm not braggin' I'm just sayin' ... [Oh, what the Hell!] 90% of those high-rises are residential. That's the downtown core. It's the vibrant heart of Vancouver. No concrete canyons. Instead it's rivers of people all year long. Well, almost. Miles of sandy beaches within walking distance. The City of North Vancouver snuggles up to those 1500 m-high mountains. Three ski resorts within a 20 minute drive of these buildings---one just off the left edge; another two hiding off to the right. Perennially voted one of the most livable cities on the planet. No freeways in sight---the major north--south highway, by design, bypasses the whole of Vancouver's central business district and adjacent suburbs on its way to Horseshoe Bay and its ferries to Vancouver Island. The Sea to Sky Highway continues from there, past Squamish and the new Quest University, then on to Whistler--Blackcomb, the alpine event centre during the 2010 winter olympic games. A jewel.

Light a candle. I'll be back soon!

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

In Memoriam Garniss Hearfield Curtis MMXII.XII.XVIII

I didn't know him. But like everybody else who paid attention, his work erecting temporal signposts in human evolution thrilled and enlightened me. Funny thing is---if you said Potassium-Argon dating to most archaeologists they'd know what you were talking about. On the other hand, if you said do you know Garniss Curtis I'm willing to bet those same people would say, "Who?" 

As an eight-year-old I can remember when the September 1960 National Geographic came in the mail. I still have it on my bookshelf---a bit the worse for wear. It announced the Leakey's discovery of Zinjanthropus boisei. The next year, in October's National Geographic was the truly momentous recounting of the newly developed radiometric dating technique---Potassium/Argon, and the estimated age of Zinj. It seems 'old hat' now, after more than 50 years of tracking hominid phylogeny using that technique or its variants. To get a better feeling of the exhilaration of the time, read my scan of Curtis's brief letter to Louis Leakey, which appeared on page 568 of the October 1962 National Geographic.

National Geographic 120:564--589, 1961.

The Leakeys had previously suspected that Zinj might have been as old as 600,000 years. They, Curtis and Evernden, and most of all the world got a big surprise. For me, this moment in the history of human palaeontology stands apart from all the rest, not least because I was an impressionable 8-year-old. As I said above, I didn't know him. So, when I was introduced to him at the Institute for Human Origins in late 1988 I'm embarrassed to say that I had to ask who he was. I haven't thought of him in years. The banner on the SA news ticker this morning was the first I'd heard. He died last December 18. He was 93.

There's a reverent obituary at the UC Berkeley [online] News Center.

Auld lang syne

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days o'lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my Dear,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes,

And pu’t the gowans fine;

But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot,

Sin auld lang syne!

For auld lang syne, my Dear,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidlet i' the burn,

Frae morning sun till dine:

But seas between us braid hae roar’d,

Sin auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my Dear,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty feire,

And gie's a hand o’ thine;

And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,

For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my Dear,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp,

And surely I’ll be mine;

And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my Dear,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

Robert Burns (1759–1796). "Auld Lang Syne." Transcribed from an online facsimile autograph manuscript written within a letter, dated September 1793, to George Thomson. The Morgan Library & Museum. MA 47.27.

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.