World's Biggest Handaxe? You Betcha! [Warning! Here Follows a Short Treatise on Best Archaeological Practices]

Photo courtesy of Shelby Graham

I lied. It's not a handaxe. Clearly it's a pick, according to any authoritative Lower Palaeolithic typology.

Actually, this is today's object lesson in archaeological site formation. The above is [to my eye] an artist's impression [in grand style] EITHER of what happens to an artifact on the surface of a predominantly clay substrate when the clay becomes dessicated and cracks form, OR of [for example] a peri-glacial environment when the frozen ground expands due to the presence of liquid water and [again] cracks form in the surface. In either case, should the crack open just a smidgeon wider [and those enormous wedgy things holding it up be removed], the artifact, which might have been dropped last week, will suddenly become encased in dirt that was deposited at some unknown time in the past--perhaps many thousands of years in the past. And, who's going to be able to infer the depositional circumstances once the ground closes back up, and before the crack fills in with aeolian or colluvial sediments in the here and now to make it visible in profile for the archaeologist to recognize? [The illustration on the right, below, is an example of a frost wedge that's only visible because it has been filled in before it could close up.]

Dessication cracks in clay soil (Photo source)

Frost wedge (Photo source)

     The answer lies in the encasing sediments, and in the palaeoecological indicators found within them. If there's wooly mammoth skeletal remains in the same context, you can be sure it was a cold environment that would have been susceptible to frost cracking. If, on the other hand, you were to find the remains of terrestrial vertebrates AND crocodiles or other water-loving animals, you might suspect that the encasing substrate had been susceptible to periods of drying and the development of cracks such as the ones in the photo above, left. In either case the archaeologist should know to be wary of making any hasty conclusions as to the contemporaneity of [in this case] the pick and the animal bones.
     That's what I love about archaeology. You really have to have your head on straight and pay attention to the things that can mess with associations. So, if you're digging in a pan, or in the Perigord, you should. Be. Careful.  

[Forgive me if this ended up looking like a case of the preacher preaching to the choir. Something tells me this may not obtain in every reader's case, and therefore I was emboldened to hold forth.]  

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on 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]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. 

A Momentary Lull. Or a Monterey Lull. Whichever You Prefer.

There won't be anything earth-shaking emanating from World Headquarters today. That's 'cause it's time for the weekly archaeological fieldwork, beginning with the deeply stratified dishes. Then it's on to sorting out the depositional history of dirty clothes. After that, wide-area, laminar dust removal. Then it's over to the recycling lab for some typological work prior to sending the collection off for .... collection. 

So, I'm 'turnin' up the music' à la Chris Brown, and opening a 2010 Chalone Vineyard Monterey County sauvignon blanc. Tasting notes and interim site report to follow.

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

You Gotta Hand It to Them: From Handedness to Humanity in One. No, Two. No! Seven Inferential Leaps!

All in a row...Regourdou 1's lower front tooth crowns viewed labially.

It has to be said: no outrageous leap of reason is beneath the editors of PLOSONE, who, in their zeal to hasten publication of research to meet the instantaneous demands of the information age, choose to publish papers that could readily have waited months or years to reach their audience, and, no doubt because of the haste with which they are published, reviewers of which tend toward an uncritical, and unprofessional-seeming, credulity.
     In this case, it's the breath-taking intellectual journey of Volpato et al. from scratches on the anterior mandibular teeth of the Regourdou 1 Neanderthal to language ability comparable to that of modern humans. Thanks to Bob Muir for his good natured challenged to me to say something about the latest plonk from PLOSONE. So, I read it. And here is my response.
   
     O. M. G.! Sorry. Disdain attack. I'll be fine in a minute.

Boiled down, the authors are ostensibly presenting novel evidence for handedness among the Neanderthals, in the form of scratches on dental enamel. That's it! That's all there is. Possibly useful information. But even their foundational inference is open to question, because it's based on an unwarranted assumption. As a result, the follow-on inferences lose cogency, one misstep at a time. A good number of inferential leaps occur in this paper. I'll enumerate them here.
     Leap number one. Volpato et al. examined the labial surfaces of the six lower anterior teeth of an adult Neanderthal. They found scratches that they attribute to accidental contact with a sharp stone [presumed to be an artifact]. But only those scratches on the incisors count as artifact-induced damage--those occurring on the canines must, according to the authors, be environmental, rather than of cultural or behavioral origin, since they are shorter and less frequent. [I would guess that this could easily be due to the canines' location deeper in the mouth and the possibility that whatever is scratching the teeth during life was positioned more toward the front of the mouth.]
     Leap number two. The preponderance of the surface scratches, when viewed from the front, are oriented with left end lower than the right. With no explanation, the authors [again] presume that the course of the sharp object must have been from left to right from the Neanderthal's point of view--in other words, from upper left to lower right--rather than the other way around.
     Leap number three. Based on the assumption that the scratches were made by a stone tool or tools, and the further assumption that they show a preferred oritentation, and that therefore this stands as evidence of the Neanderthal's preference for using the right hand to wield the sharp object, the authors conclude that the scratches must have occurred while the Neanderthal was in the act of cutting off a hunk of [presumably] meat after stuffing a morsel in the oral cavity. For this, they simply cite C.L. Brace's characterization of a documented modern human practice as the 'stuff and cut' technique, and paste it onto their narrative about a Middle Pleistocene hominid. [Why the Neanderthal didn't just bite off a chunk, as you or I would, the authors don't explain. I guess they were trying to be genteel in a ravenous, trogolodytic sort of way.]

     Yet, even if the genteel Neanderthal was doing so, I have to wonder where the authors got the idea that a sharp edge used to assist cutting would ever have come in contact with the teeth [except in the case of a thoroughly uncoordinated individual]. As it's easy to see from the photo of an inhabitant of northern North America, the cutting is most often achieved outside of the mouth. So, ethnographically, I think the authors have this idea very wrong. Of course, if a rude, or uncoordinated, or malicious neighbour were to have bumped the Neanderthal's right hand in the act of cutting, the stone tool might have found its way past the meat and the individual's lips and come in contact with the dental enamel. I really can't imagine that happening all that often. Can you?

Human brain function expressed in
terms of the brain real-estate
associated with
different body parts. Our brains are
primarily there to operate our
hands, followed by our mouth
and tongue, eyes, limbs, and so on.
Language is in there somewhere,
but I believe that it's the result of
homology and thus not directly
tied to any of the structures and functions
for which the brain evolved prior to
its advent.  

     Leap number four. By analogy to modern humans, the authors aver that the [now] right-handed Neanderthal must have had a genetically based neurological asymmetry such as that observed in the here and now. [Frankly, I've never heard a good explanation as to why, in view of the lateral brain asymmetry documented in our species, right-handedness is seen to be governed by the left-hemisphere, with no good evidence that a mirror image of that symmetry is responsible for left-handedness. To my mind this weakens the authors' argument that handedness in a Neanderthal is evidence of the same degree of lateralization as that occurring in modern humans.]
     Leap number five. Again by analogy to modern humans, the brain lateralization inferred by the authors is tied to the notion that brain lateralization in us is predominantly due to the brains preference to house the language capacity in the opposite side of the brain from the right hand. [Again, I'm afraid this raises the question 'What about left-handed people?']

Kebara 2 hyoid

     Leap number six. The Kebara Neanderthal hyoid bone is evidence of linguistic ability [and not just a quasi-modern morphology that may have nothing at all to do with language].
     Leap number seven. Taken together, all six of the above leaps converge on the conclusion that Neanderthals had linguistic capabilities. Quite an intellectual journey! No?

Homology demonstrated. These
structures all have the same
embryological origin--they are the
same skeletal elements in each
kind of animal. They've all been
re-shaped and re-purposed for
different functions. All locomotory,
it's true, but all very different.

     No. And I say no if only because, as any evolution scientist will tell you, no genetically determined physical or neurological trait in an extant organism can be seen as anything other than the result of selection acting on those same structures in the species' evolutionary history. Our lungs, for example, did not arise in evolutionary history so that we could breath air. In fact, they arose for completely different reasons, but were gradually transformed to perform the function that they do in mammals. I'm talking about the concept of homology, and it is a pillar of evolutionary theory. It's simply wrong to view any structure that's visible in the fossil record and formally similar to that occurring in modern humans as evidence that similar somatic or neurological functions or behaviours were present in the fossil form. This goes for brain morphology as much as it does for biomechanics or any other facet of past life that can be observed in the skeleton. It's why I cannot view the emergence of the modern skeleton at almost 200 kya as evidence that modern humanity arose at the same time.
     In the illustration of homology up above, it's plain to see that the front limbs of vertebrates have evolved for very different purposes, even though the skeletal elements themselves are the same--i.e. they have the same embryological origin, and thus they all express the same skeletal elements. Even within these groups there is considerable inter-specific variation in these structures. This is why I'm very wary when similar structures in the hominid past are unequivocally treated as having the same function as they do in modern humans.
     

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

Make a Note on Your Calendar: Check Out the September 21st Issue of Science

It might be nothing. But just the same I'm gonna wanna see the September 21st issue of Science. That's because yesterday I received a request to comment on my feelings about the recent findings from Roc de Marsal--that the Neanderthal child long believed to have been purposefully buried wasn't, whether or not I saw this as a vindication of my ancient efforts, and my assessment of the role of new techniques, such as micromorphology, to document site formation processes in aid of the arguments. The Science writer who did the asking mentioned that he'd just returned from a week at La Ferrassie, where the Roc de Marsal team are presently working with the same goals as their previous project. Add it up. La Ferrassie + Roc de Marsal + Science + the comments of one might be said to have foreseen it all = major story. But I could be wrong. You know... Mind befuddled by years of bitterness, suddenly brought into the spotlight, imagining the glory that never was, and all that. It could be nothing. But what if...?

     For the record, here's my statement to 'the press.'

I'm very proud of Sandgathe, Dibble, Goldberg and the rest for having the audacity to undertake their re-examination of the Roc-de-Marsal burial, and of the French authorities who have shown some flexibility in allowing such a project. I'm especially happy that I can claim to have had a role in paving the way for their work. As for the techniques that have been deployed in support of the new excavations at Roc de Marsal, and now at La Ferrassie, if the palaeoanthropological community is more likely to accept revisions of erroneous claims based on new techniques, I'm all for it. However, the fact remains that there never was sufficient evidence of any kind to support the claim of purposeful burial in any of these cases, a point I thought I'd made forcefully in my two papers on the matter. Unfortunately I was one of the few to have seen it that way and in reality I've been dismissed by the majority of palaeoanthropologists for the past 23 years. I'm afraid that a few ambiguous in-text citations bearing my name in the present is hardly what I'd call a vindication. 

Yep. Bitter. But a justified bitterness. A well-steeped bitterness. Tannic, you might say. Tannins? Wine? brb... That's better. Bitterness goes better with wine. 'A drink is like a hug'® I always say!

Roc de Marsal (Dordogne, France). From oldstoneage.com

Roc de Marsal Neanderthal child

Roc de Marsal contained the partial remains of a Neanderthal youth that was claimed to have been purposefully buried. There never was any good evidence for it, although the remains were found 'in a depression' and they were articulated for the most part. In 1989 and again in 1999 I said as much. One of my major contentions has always been that depressions can occur naturally for a good number of reasons, and that depressions in caves and rockshelters--which already tend to preserve bone well--are places where vertebrate specimens can be expected to preserve extraordinarily well, as compared with those that decayed on a plane surface under the same depositional regime.
     Moreover, the excavators described the 'fill' of the 'grave' as being just like all the rest of the breakdown sediments in the cave--i.e. no new stratum created at the time of the 'burial' which could be seen to be distinct from the sediments into which the 'grave' was dug and from those sediments that accumulated naturally after the 'grave' was filled in. Given the propensity for nature to create depressions, that new stratum is one of the only--if not the only--way that one could be certain that a purposeful burial has occurred. [My colleagues complain that this is rarely the case even in modern burials, and that they shouldn't be held to such a standard. My only response to that is: such thinking has given us the myth to end all myths about the Neanderthals.] Sandgathe et al. excavated at Roc de Marsal expressly to recover as much information about the depositional circumstances of the remains as was possible. It was only good fortune that the original excavators left the cave deposits adjacent the burial for the perspicacious Sandgathe and the rest of the équipe to study.
     Those I'd give anything to call my Champions [sense #3 below*] will no doubt have a far more difficult time at La Ferrassie, where the remaining profile, the témoin, is well away from the area where the skeletal remains were recovered. Nevertheless, their efforts will not go unrewarded, especially since they're attempting to work out the depositional history of the site as a whole, something which has been lacking in previous work at that site.

La Ferrassie, témoin, or 'witness profile.' The Neanderthal remains were found in the lowest levels shown here. From our friends at Wikipedia.

New excavations at La Ferrassie at the close of the 2011 season. From oldstoneage.com

La Ferrassie I

     La Ferrassie is, perhaps, 'ground zero' in the debate about whether or not the Neanderthals buried their dead [if you can call one voice crying in the wilderness a 'debate']. There, in the early twentieth century [and into the later second half] a series of skeletal remains were excavated, beginning with the early discovery of an almost complete skeleton, La Ferrassie I.
     La Ferrassie is also claimed to have been the location of a veritable Neanderthal cemetery, based on the inferences of the early excavators. You may remember the 'nine mounds' from your introductory anthropology courses. I predicted that these would eventually be found to have been the result of cryoturbated sediments, which can take the form of wavy strata when viewed from the side. Indeed, the profile that J.-L. Heim published shows these wavy sediments in profile, presumably redrawn from the original, with the crests of the waves almost a meter above their bases. I look forward to the results of the current excavations with glee.

Early 20th century plan of the La Ferrassie 'cemetery.' From our friends at  Wikipedia

*cham·pi·on noun \ˈcham-pē-ən\
1: warrior, fighter
2: a militant advocate or defender
3: one that does battle for another's rights or honor
4: a winner of first prize or first place in competition; also : one who shows marked superiority

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

Hard Drive Failing: Hold, Please!

As the sign says. I've just discovered that my hard drive is manifesting a fatal error message preparatory to failing completely and without warning. So. Gotta go. Bye. See ya.

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

Grumpy Old Men Archaeologist

I'd be the first to admit I'm grumpy. My daughter tells me all the time. My co-workers know that I am. Even my shrink thinks so.
     I'm grumpy when I get up. I'm grumpy at work. I'm especially grumpy when I run out of wine. I'm even grumpy in my dreams!
     Why so grumpy, Rob? 
      It's like this. In 1986 I was looking around for an Honours B.A. essay topic. My reading of the Neanderthal archaeological record had left me with a conundrum. 'Why,' thought I, 'were the archaeological traces of the Middle Palaeolithic so darned different from what we know that modern humans have been capable of for, oh, about 40 kyr?' Neanderthals left no serious candidates for representational imagery--just the stuff that some really imaginative people have willed into meaningfulness. The stone tools were nothing to write home about, even if François Bordes said there were fifty-plus formal 'types' (not including the 14 Levallois core types). Bordes and many others thought that there were different Neanderthal 'cultures' roaming around, 'expressing' themselves willy-nilly across the landscape. As regards what I saw as the absence of anything quite like the modern human archaeological record, I didn't think much of the old 'absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence' way of thinking.
     Think about it for a second. Those Neanderthals and the contemporary morphospecies known variously as anatomically modern and skeletally modern did the same things, and left (plus or minus) the same archaeological traces everywhere they went for upwards of 250 kyr! Incredible when you compare that with the record of the past 40 kyr. In that comparatively short span humankind has shown an immense amount of cultural and material variability, from all-but-possessionless foragers to what we see around us today--robotic missions to Mars, iPads, iPhones, iMacs, and Windows 8 [by including the latter I’m just being polite to those of my friends who are saddled with having to use that infernal OS and its predecessors], nuclear fission.
     So I said to myself, 'Self,' I said, 'how is it that they could they have been burying their dead and practicing bizarre rituals with cave bear bits and so on, if they couldn't manage an impressionist painting or two, or a musical instrument?' The answer at that time lay in the (mainly) foreign language literature, mostly French. [Good thing I paid attention in French class, thought I.] However, there wasn't a lot of foreign language literature available at the Simon Fraser University library, nor, as it turned out, at UBC, either. So, it wasn't easy to acquire the original publications on the record of Neanderthal burial. But I persevered.

Artist's conception of the depositional
processes at Teshik-Tash, Uzbekistan

I thought I'd start with one of the more spectacular claims. I found the original writeup of the Teshik-Tash excavations by Okladnikov in an unreadable Soviet-era journal. Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan) if you'll remember is that place where a Neanderthal youth was said to have been buried with a number of goat horns placed around the grave with their pointy parts stuck in the ground. Sort of like a little Bone-henge. Teshik-Tash has been cited innumerable times as evidence for not just purposeful burial, but also mortuary ritual in the form of those deliberately placed goat horns.
     Silly me! I was hoping to find a photograph or two of those goat horns as they were being exposed during the excavation. At a minimum I thought I'd find a very carefully drawn plan or two. However, all I found were two line drawings and a very muddy photo-reproduction [I'm trying to track it down]. The photo depicted the goat horns all right, except that they were all horizontal! And, if three items separated from one another make a triangle, four a square, five a pentagon, then six must surely describe a 'circle.' At least, that's what Okladnikov, the excavator, wanted us to believe. That was the first inkling that I was on the right track. In all I examined five other chestnuts of the archaeological corpus: La Chapelle-aux-Saints, La Ferrassie, Le Moustier, and La Grotte de Regourdou [for the icing on the cake]. Same outcome; different circumstances. And all of them could be seen to be the result of the natural processes operating in caves and rockshelters that promote bone preservation.
     The rest is history. Sort of.
     But that doesn't answer the question of why I'm so grumpy. Does it?
     All the while I was working on the research I was energized. It was a hard slog, what with the French and the difficulty accessing the literature. But the outcome was well worth the effort. I was naive to imagine that my thesis would be embraced by other palaeoanthropologists. But that's what I believed. Until, that is, I gave it to my mentor Brian Hayden, to read. He was dismissive. I was dismayed. And so, even though my fellow undergraduates and my Honours supervisor, Mark Skinner, were pleading with me to submit it for publication, Hayden's reaction [and my lack of belief in myself] convinced me not to try to have it published. My final GPA was 3.87 out of 4. I graduated with a B.A. Honors (with First Class Honors), and was the Archaeology Department's nominee for the Dean's Medal. But I had to wait almost a year before I could apply for grad school. I took the GRE: 97; 93; 67. And the paper languished while I worked in CRM and travelled with Hayden to Central America for some hit-and-run ethnoarchaeological research.
     When the time came to apply, I chose Berkeley and Michigan as my American 'reach' goals, and only U of T in Canada as a place I knew would likely admit me. I was also applying for financial aid, 'cause I hadn't the resources to attend any of those places--least of all, I thought, the American universities, since as a Canadian I would have been burdened not just with the enormous fees, but also with the out-of-state fees. Alongside my application I sent a copy of 'Grave Shortcomings' to Clark Howell at Berkeley, both seeking his advice regarding its possible publication, and in a rare Machiavellian gambit, hoping it might tip the scales in my favour at his institution. I also sent it, at that time, to a Canadian ex-pat at NYU, Randy White. He had recently published 'Re-thinking the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transtion' in Current Anthropology, and it had immediately become must reading for anyone interested in that period.
     I was, as you can imagine, ecstatic when I received a telephone call a few days later from Randy. He was positive. Then he asked me if I had applied to NYU. I was sort of embarrassed to say 'No.' He assured me that I would be admitted and that there was a first-year scholarship for which I might be competitive. So, that's what I did.
     A few days after my conversation with Randy White I received a handwritten note from Clark Howell at Berkeley. He, too, was positive, and encouraged me to publish it. So I frantically prepared it for submission and mailed it off to Current Anthropology.
     A few weeks went by, and I received a phone call from Randy White. He said that I'd been accepted at NYU, and that I was being offered the scholarship. In the interest of disclosure may I say that at that time he also advised me that I would need to make my mind up quickly. I told him I'd think about it. I'd heard nothing from the other universities at that time. Next day I called him and said I'd accept the offer. The day following, Brian Hayden and I departed Vancouver for Chiapas. We were gone three weeks. I arrived back to see that my application had been accepted at U. Michigan, U of T, and UC Berkeley, as well. AND, although Michigan had no money for me, and U of T could promise no more than a one-year tuition waiver, Berkeley was offering me a Regents Internship-Fellowship, which provided free instruction for the duration of the Ph.D., two years on a stipend (!), and two additional years with guaranteed teaching assistantships. [I sheepishly called Randy White to let him know that I'd received a better offer.]
     The Berkeley acceptance was, I have to say, an apotheosis of sorts. That, and the fact that I received word from Current Anthropology that the referees were all positive and that my manuscript had been accepted with no revisions. I thought certain, then and there, that I had therefore 'nailed it,' and that the discipline would thenceforth have to continue with a new view of Neanderthals. I'm certain of two things: if I hadn't seen fit to send Clark Howell the manuscript I would a) never have tried to have it published, and b) never have been accepted at Berkeley with a 'free ride.'
     Still no idea why I'm so grumpy? It's not so terribly difficult to understand. I had presumed that with positive responses from Howell and White--one giant in the field and one out standing in his field--the paper's acceptance with no revisions, and a massive incentive from UC Berkeley to do a Ph.D. there, I had pinned the tail on the donkey. And so, I wasn't prepared for the barrage of negative and often vituperative comments that I received upon publication of 'Grave Shortcomings.' Nor was I prepared for the sheer number of backs that I was shown in the months and years that followed its publication. A few, I knew, were on my side. And there was faint encouragement from a few others, who suggested that I'd done a service to the community by bringing the issue to their attention. But it wasn't the general acceptance that I'd hoped for and even, yes, anticipated. 'You've got them thinking!' was, I'm afraid, not what I had in mind. I'd set myself up for a fall. And fall I did. *picks self up, dusts self off* 
     I hope you'll forgive me if I'm a bit grumpy at the treatment I've received when I frequently have to confront the evident ineptitude of so many of my fellow palaeoanthropologists, who somehow manage to gain instant acceptance for the silliest claims imaginable. *starts all over again*

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

The Acheulean in Arizona: More Bizarre News From the Dark Side of Archaeology

It really doesn't get any better than this. And mind, I wouldn't normally expend much energy dispelling incipient myths like this one, were it not that in this case there's a real danger of it sprouting legs and moving under its own power thanks to a daft academic archaeologist in Boston.

We won't be so crass as to point out the misspellings, 
erroneous capitalization and poor punctuation. Will we?

My dad used to say 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.' The only serious danger in the field of archaeology [aside from liver disease and arthritic knees] is that a patently false claim--however well-intentioned--becomes received knowledge. In other words, an erroneous claim that becomes an archaeological myth. In this instance, the danger to archaeology is being multiplied by a gullible Phoenix media hungry for an interesting story and, in an unusual turn of events, a truly credulous and misinformed 'professional' archaeologist, Curtis Runnells, from Boston University.

A putative Acheulean site in Pheonix, Arizona (Photo credit)

      The story goes like this. Mr. Ken Stanton, Amateur Archaeologist, thinks he's found an Acheulean archaeological site. The Acheulean, previously known only from Europe, Africa and southern Asia began about 1.5 Ma. This isn't the first time that such objects have come to light in the southwestern United States. Indeed, the Arizona story is virtually identical to that of the Calico Hills site, famed for having fooled Louis B. Leakey into thinking that Homo erectus had somehow made it to the Americas in the Early to Middle Pleistocene. His attention was drawn to the site  in the late 1950s after broken rocks similar to those Mr. Stanton has lately found compelled archaeologist Ruth DeEtte Simpson to announce her interpretation--that the site contained very old, very crude, stone tools like those that had been known in Europe and Africa for nearly a century. The Calico Hills' proponents are still making those same claims fifty years on, even though they've been thoroughly and rigorously refuted by archaeologists who know a great deal about the geological processes and their expectable outcomes in the production of a desert alluvial fan--C. Vance Haynes, for one.

Ruth 'Dee' Simpson and L.S.B. Leakey at the Calico Hills Early Man site.
(Photo credit)

     But what are the claims, Rob? We wanna see!
Behold and be dismayed. First, photos of Stanton's finds and a cross-section of the sedimentary context, all kindly provided by Mr. Stanton, himself.

An amorphous lump of 
angular vein quartz

A pointy lump of angular vein quartz.

A tiny piece of angular quartz

As one can plainly see from these illustrations, this is vein quartz, which while being very hard, is also quite brittle. And, while some forms of quartz fracture conchoidally, this type does not. Its material nature aside, the geological context is most important in this instance. That these artifacts are found in a desert alluvial fan should be a red flag for any archaeologist, especially one who's geomorphologically aware or is in fact a geoarchaeologist. Alluvial fans develops as a result of the intense, but infrequent, rainstorms that are characteristic of desert climates. The rain falls upslope and quickly entrains every loose bit of rock and dirt that has, through colluvial action, come to rest in the dry course of the newly active ephemeral stream since its last activation. Depending on the energy level of the flow and the nature of the rock being carried along, the overall result is what you see in the profile below.

A cut through the alluvial fan, with quartz geofact visible in the centre.

This high-energy alluvial phenomenon is more appropriately called a debris flow, rather than an ephemeral stream, because the water represents just one component of the stream, the majority consists of sedimentary clasts of various sizes that collide forcefully with one another to produce what in some cases may be seen to resemble chipped stone artifacts that humans or human ancestors have made. This kind of object is called a geofact because it was created by geological processes, but nonetheless fools a naive observer because they appear to have been chipped in a manner that broadly resembles early hominin stone technology. And Rule #1 states that if something that you think is made by people, but that could just as well be made by other natural processes, you can not give priority to people, but must instead show cause as to why we should think anything other than that these are geofacts! 

     The kind of deposit shown in the profile is a diamicton--comprising an unsorted (or at best poorly sorted) mélange of newly angular bits of rock as well as sand, silt and clay, not all of which are clast supported. Such deposits are very UNlike the ones that a permanent stream produces in its path. In the Arizona case the quartz stands out from the rest of the material in the fan because it happens to be of a type that's analogous to that of the finer-grained rock that makes good stone artifacts. I wonder how many bits of vein quartz Mr Stanton passed up because they didn't look like 'good' artifacts!

     Aside from the attention that Stanton's claims received in the Phoenix media, news of his 'discovery' reached an academic archaeologist who is, unfortunately, credulous and is giving these naturally broken rocks more attention than they warrant. The following three passages are messages that archaeologist Dr. Curtis Runnels of Boston University has sent to Mr. Stanton, which have given the Arizona man no reason to suspect that his claims are theoretically unsound.

 These are extremely interesting artifacts and the context is very interesting too. I am not an expert in Arizona desert geology, but the the [sic] deposit looks like a cemented debris flow or perhaps a lake-margin deposit. It could very well be Pleistocene in age. It should certainly be possible to date that context if you can get a knowledgeable regional geologist to look it over; for instance by a technique like Infrared Stimulated Optical Luminescence on the sand grains I can see in the surround [sic] matrix.

We can only guess about the nature of Pleistocene humans: our own species, Homo sapiens, is dated securely at sites like Herto (Ethiopia) to 200,000 years ago and would certainly be a candidate, as well as Homo heidelbergensis (a hominin grade that dates to ca. 400,000 years ago). Without fossils there is no way to tell because these kinds of tools were probably made by more than one hominin grade, perhaps by as many as four or five! 

My summary is that you have early looking artifacts in a definite geologic context that might help pin down their age.

and

Dear KC,

Thank you for showing me the photographs of the lithic artifacts and their findspot from the site that you have discovered near Phoenix.

My specialty is the Palaeolithic of the Old World in the eastern Mediterranean and SE Europe, and not the American SW, but the artifacts that you have shown me would be considered as Lower or Middle Palaeolithic if they were foud [sic] in my area.

They are definitely artifacts [emphasis added], and the typological and technical characteristics that I see in the photographs are consistent with their identification with Pleistocene industries (modes or technocomplexes).  Similar artifacts are widely distributed in the Old World, and have been reported also in the United States over the past century or so. Unfortunately they are rather hard to date: in the Old World such industries have a wide chronological span, ranging from 1.6 myr to ca. 0.175 myr (and some similar forms occur in the Middle Palaeolithic or Middle Stone Age in Europe and Africa much later, down to ca. 50 kyr). Therefore, it is of particular importance that your finds appear to be in a datable geologic context. The photographs you showed me appear to show artifacts in situ (geologically speaking) in a cemented breccia or debris flow. This suggests two things to my mind. The original sites, in the sense of living floors or occupation areas, have no doubt been destroyed by erosion and the artifacts have been redeposited downslope.  Dating the breccia/debris flow would, therefore, give a minimum age for the artifacts, but that would be an important start. My geological training is in the Mediterranean in regions (e.g. Greece, Albania, and Turkey) with similar arid conditions to the American SW, and from what I can see in your photographs I would consider the artifact-bearing deposit to have considerable age, probably Pleistocene.

A more precise estimate In short, I would accept as a working hypothesis to be tested by further research in the field that these artifacts are of Pleistocene age and likely to pre-date, perhaps by a considerable margin, the earliest accepted industries such as Clovis and Folsom in the SWof their age or the affinities with other industries would not be possible at this stage of research.

Good luck! Sincerely yours, Curtis

Curtis Runnels, MA, PhD, FSA, Professor of Archaeology, Archaeology Department, Boston University, 675 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA 02215

Editor, Journal of Field Archaeology

and later on

Here is a longer message than I could manage yesterday on my phone in the train. No need to send me the Washington Artifacts; let's not risk getting them lost in the mail. I want to concentrate on the Arizona stuff for the moment. My plan is to discuss the artifacts you already sent me with a geoarchaeologist who is familiar with Arizona geology and get his opinion on the context.

My other plan is to write an essay in the Journal of Field Archaeology as Editor-in-Chief (co authored with my contributing editor Professor Norman Hammond, who is also the Archaeology Correspondent for the Times of London and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement). He is a New World specialist and we have already talked about how the Pre-Clovis picture is becoming clearer. We will call for a total reexamination of the old sites (e.g., George Carter's Texas Street Site and Calico among others) and a new open minded approach to the Pre-Clovis question and invite contributions of manuscripts on the subject for publication. I think the timing is right. The Stanford and Bradley book, Across Atlantic Ice, will be published in January and in it they make their case for the movement of Solutrean people by boat across the Atlantic in the Palaeolithic to the east coast. If one group of Palaeoliths could make the trip, then anything is possible and a complete restudy of the archaeological record is warranted.

All this takes time and don't worry about your priority (i.e. credit for your discovery). I have the evidence before me that you found this stuff first and am willing to say so whenever and wherever necessary.

Best wishes,

Curtis

I ask you, 'How lame can this guy Runnels be?' He recognizes that this is a debris flow, but somehow fails to make the connection between the nature of an active debris flow and the concomitant and expectable damage to, in this case, vein quartz. I will be very surprised if, when Runnels approaches the 'geoarchaeologist who is familiar with Arizona geology' he is told anything other than that these are perfectly good geofacts and not, as Runnels proclaims, 'definitely artifacts.' [By the way, I'm guessing that the above-mentioned geoarchaeologist is none other than Paul Goldberg, whose academic appointment is also at BU. Paulie, you still haven't responded to my Wonderwerk Cave take-down. Clock's ticking...]

     Nitey, nite!

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

Wine Tasting with the Antipodeans

    I'm pleased to say that I'll be otherwise occupied for the next couple of days as I introduce my visitors to the Santa Cruz Mountains' wineries. Old friends Iain Davidson and Helen Arthurson from Armidale have come to visit me and Surf City for a couple of days. We're goin' huntin'. For wine, that is.
     I've been wanting to do this for the longest time. The plan it to visit the Ahlgren Vineyard, source of one of the best wines I've ever had. It was years ago, a chardonnay/sémillon blend, and the new-mown grass was right there in the glass. Art. We'll also try to catch the Byington Winery when it's open, and brave the tasting charge, which I hope is worth it. Also Bargetto, because it's been in these parts forever, and tastes like it. 

Byington Vineyard and Winery's tasting room!

Then we'll hit the winemakers' enclave. Bonny Doon started the ball rolling some years back when they plopped their complete winery and tasting room down in a small industrial area on the west side of Surf City--about a km from World Headquarters. Their tasting room and bistro are one of the kewlest destinations in town. And their blends and varietals are as funky as their digs.

But the highlight will surely be our visit to the Rexford Winery. Ex-Director of the UC Observatories Joe Miller is the vintner and he's an alchemist, turning carefully selected crops from nearby vineyards into liquid gold. He doesn't plant or keep vines--part of his craft involves, as he puts it, is cultivating growers! And what growers they are: Regan and Fambrini vineyards are two that come to mind. Their terroir and microclimates are ground zero for pinot noir on this side of the Atlantic. And Joe coaxes the little black fruit to evince the complex characteristics for which the variety is rightly legend.

The Rexford back end, with winemaker Joe Miller at right

     *drooling*

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

This Bears Repeating: Dunsworth et al.'s 'Metabolic hypothesis for human altriciality'

This would have been inconceivable forty years ago. And, if the results hold up, it's an intuitively satisfying explanation for why we're born helpless, and remain so for many months post-partum. A tip o' the hat to Erin Wayman for alerting us to this story.
     Using biomechanical studies in tandem with the metabolism of pregnancy Dunsworth et al. have ruled out birth canal size as the limiting factor where gestation length is concerned. Instead they posit an energetic equation whereby the pregnant female is constrained to give birth at around nine months by her body's inability to produce the energy necessary to maintain her life and that of her foetus. Brilliant concept! It's a good day to be a palaeoanthropologist.

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

Monday Morning Mirth

Genius. Pure Genius.
This one goes out to Meg.
From the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.

Possibly an Act of Desperation. We'll See... Rule #1 Applies Here

It had been a brutally hot summer, and the earth looked as if it had been scorched even before dry lightning ignited the wilderness. The devastation covered over a million hectares. The same gray landscape stretched beyond the horizon in every direction. Blackened, leafless trees stood silent watch over nothing. No birds. No ground dwellers. Not a plant. Not a single living thing, save for the three bipedal creatures making their way up the dry valley. 
     There had never been much water in this region, where streams suddenly disappeared beneath ground, and elsewhere emerged from gaping holes in the rock. The three were stumbling up the steep hillside. Their breath was rasping, and they frequently coughed. One was spitting blood after each paroxysm of coughing. The smoke had been thick in the air for weeks as the world around them was slowly and inexorably consumed by the fire. Now they were debilitated by it, and they needed to stop often to catch their breath. 

Photo source

     They had survived the summer before the fire because there'd been many drought deaths amongst the animals in their range, and having a decent olfactory sense the three knew where to look for a feed. Precious water was available in the dead one's gut. But now even the carcasses were inedible, and whatever water their tissues once had held was either too meagre or so befouled as to make it worse than unpalatable. They seemed to be the only things moving on the landscape. And in truth they were. They alone had survived the fire because they knew the location of many holes in the rock, and had sheltered in one while the fire had burned outside. There had been a small seep in the wall of the fissure in which they'd huddled, and it had been enough to sustain them until it was possible to move about outside the hole.
     At first they could find grass seed and nuts, survivors only because of the their hardened outer coverings. Day after day they combed the ground for the insubstantial rewards. Their saving grace was no doubt that they expended little energy and never moved very far from their den. As they depopulated one area after another of the seeds and nuts, they moved further away from the hole in their search.  
     Now, at the top of a ridge the three stopped, then stooped and began scraping at the dirt with the stones that each carried. Here and there they could see the charred tops of edible tubers that had been growing just beneath the surface. The three ate ravenously whatever was left of the acrid, starchy roots, as they had now done for more than a month since the ground had cooled enough to make walking possible. They would need to return to the hole each day, since it was the only place they could get water. Without water the end would come swiftly.
     Instead the end would come slowly for the three, and in all likelihood they would die in the hole that had given them a reprieve from the inevitable. 
     
I know that the foregoing could easily be construed as a desperate act, considering that I've failed in my efforts to discover alternative natural sources for the organic compounds found in the dental calculus of the El Sidrón hominids. This left me wondering as to the possible natural circumstances under which those Neanderthals could have inhaled sufficient wood smoke for it to be recorded in the calculus adhering to their teeth, and have ingested quantities of cooked, starchy vegetables with the same effect. 
     I believe that the word picture I've painted here, rather than being the desperate act of a beaten skeptic, is not just possible or plausible, but must have been experienced by hominids throughout history. The degree to which they could survive such devastation would've been determined to a large degree by the areal coverage of the wildfire. Too widespread and the bipeds couldn't have weathered the vicissitudes of the natural world.
     Remember Rule #1: Rule out the natural before imputing your observations to the actions of bipedal apes.

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Twitter, or friend me on Facebook. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there using any link on this site. There's a donate button, too. Your generous gift will always be used to augment the site and its contents.