[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.

A Very Remote Period and A Gigantic Fail: Riel-Salvatore and Gravel-Miguel on Upper Palaeolithic Burial Variability

I've been watching the media coverage of a paper by Julien Riel-Salvatore and Claudine Gravel-Miguel, which is to appear in the soon-to-be-published Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial. In it the authors make much of the variability of Upper Palaeolithic (UP) burials in Eurasia since the first modern humans began colonizing at give-or-take 40 Ka. I first heard of their work through the February 23 Past Horizons archaeology web log, which is featured in the blogroll on SA. That blog reported on the article, and included quotes from Julien himself. This morning I noticed that Julien had put up a long post on his own web log, A Very Remote Period Indeed. The authors, through J. R.-S., thought it best to put the article in context, because they feared the media were running with a slant that didn't do their work justice. In J. R.-S.'s blog was a link to a galley proof of their contribution. It is to that original paper that my remarks are aimed, and not any of the spin---whether that of the media or the authors. 

The lion's share of their 44-page-long contribution comprises 19 pages of tabulated observations, 9 pages of references, 1 1/2 pages of pie charts, one page of histograms and the 1/2-page map reproduced below. [Yawn] The remaining 11 pages of introduction and analysis remind me that, where burial is concerned, I might be tilting at windmills. But if I'm tilting at windmills, these authors are fencing with straw men. According to the authors, it's necessary to investigate the variability in Upper Palaeolithic burials because the conventional wisdom states that burials from this time are rich in grave goods and stand in contrast to what came before (i.e. Middle Palaeolithic burials). I'll leave it to you to decide how big a straw man this is. Suffice it to say it was big enough in the authors' minds to warrant this research.

To achieve their goal of assessing Upper Palaeolithic burial variability the authors set their temporal limits at 45 Ka and 10 Ka. They seek to capture any data from the presumed earliest incursion of modern humans until approximately the end of the Upper Palaeolithic [and prior to the transitional Mesolithic]. The authors are keen to use what might be termed a 'clean' dataset. So, they exclude burials from their chosen period in southwest and southeast Asia. Bang, out goes the Natufian, particularly rich in burials, but which might be tainted by agriculture and therefore not useful for comparison with the rank and file Upper Palaeolithic of the rest of Eurasia.

Be that as it may. They get to draw the lines any way they please. It's what they do within those lines that matters most.

My big beef about this paper stems from what appears to be a whopping great authorial blind spot where the Late Pleistocene climate of Europe and North Asia are concerned. Indeed, the authors make much of what they perceive as the qualitative differences between what went on in two arbitrary temporal subsets---one between 31,250 and 28,750 cal. bp; a second between 13,750 and 11,250 cal. bp. In their words

the number of interments show two peaks, the main one during the 31,250–28,750 cal. bp interval, and a slightly more modest one between 13,750– 11,250 cal. bp. They are separated by over 15,000 calendar years which suggests the pattern is not simply an artefact of time-vectored differential preservation where we would expect to see a continuous increase in the frequency of burials as we move towards the present ... . While the absence of corroborating palaeontological and geological data prevents us from ascertaining this ... , some very unusual preservation biases would have had to be at play to exclude human intentionality as the driving factor.

No need whatsoever to ascribe differential preservation to any graves that may have existed in the period and the region about which the authors are speaking. There wan't anyone there to bury! I hate to be the one to point this out to the authors [the Hell I do!], however the time between about 26,000 and about 14,000 years BP circumscribed the Last Glacial Maximum. As you can see from the graphic below, the ice sheet during this period engulfed most of the British Isles, all of Scandinavia and a great east--west swathe of northern Europe. Most of the unglaciated land to the south across northern Europe [the area with few burials during that time] was periglacial. Nothing but permafrost and tundra vegetation. There's no mystery that the UP people weren't there at that time, even when they had been in the early part of the UP. It was too friggin' cold!

The quote following the map below pretty much says it all.

From Riel-Salvatore and Gravel-Miguel 2013.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

[... the map above] also highlights that only southwest France and the Italian regions of Liguria and Puglia have yielded burials attributed to the two periods. Since most of Italy has yielded Late but not Early burials, this pattern is unlikely simply to be an artefact of regional research histories, a point reinforced by the fact that countries with rich histories of research (e.g. Spain) have yielded no UP burials despite having a rich Mesolithic burial record ... . [...The figure] therefore suggests that there was a dramatic contraction of the area in which burial was practised after the end of the Gravettian [i.e. during the LGM]. The Late sample also becomes considerably denser over the more limited area over which it is distributed, with areas of Western Europe devoid of Early burials looking as though they were somehow ‘backfilled’ by burial- practising populations (e.g. central and northwestern Italy, parts of Germany).

They're saying that they're bemused at the absence of burial in the more northerly reaches during the middle of their temporal range. Doh! That these authors would even consider research intensity and forget all about the effect of the climatic conditions during the middle of their temporal range amazes me. How about you?

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.

Archaeological Zombies Won't Stay Dead! Neanderthal Burial at Sima de las Palomas, España

I'm tryin' ta figger out whether or not I'm playing a metaphorical game of Whack-a-Mole. I suppose I could be trapped in an endless loop in The Night of the Living Dead. "These things are sent to try us," my agnostic Dad used to say. My gut tells me to scream and run very fast for the nearest exit.

Once again I'm face to face with a bit of archaeological inference-making that I missed whilst wandering in the desert. This bit was gleefully dropped in my email inbox just this morning. The news might be half-a-dozen years old, but this news item is hot off the presses. None other than Iain Davidson was responsible. The subject line read "You're gonna love this!" Love is hardly the word for it!

Published on 10 Jan 2013
Until recently, scientists have encountered scant evidence of Neanderthal ritual or religious practice. A new discovery, though, suggests that Neanderthals—much like today's bear hunters—ceremoniously cut off panther paws and kept them as trophies.

You've all read the 'book' on Sima de los Huesos and the other sites in northern Spain. This latest bit of skull-duggery archaeological myth-making comes to us from the other side of that country, from a locality named the Sima de las Palomas, near Cartagena. The depositional circumstances are clear from the flashy graphic they've made, shown below.

From labrujulazul: Weblog sobre Patrimonio Cultural, Artístico, Arqueológico, Documental

As with the other Sima, this one is what's known as a natural trap. All kinds of animals met their death here, including at least nine Neanderthals. What's strangest of all: I've never heard of this guy or his site. Fact, if I mentioned his name in a room full of my closest archaeology buddies it'd sound like a flock of owls.

So, you've all read the 'book.' Now, thrill to the movie!
Direct from PBS's Nova... [which, as you know, in Spanish means 'it doesn't go'].



I'm convinced. I wonder if it was a black panther. If so, perhaps its proximity to Gibraltar means that these Ns were just like the ones at Gorham's Cave in picking out for reverence [or evening wear] just those animals with black or very dark plumage/pelage. Food for thought.

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.

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off! You Say Hominidae and I Say Homininae.

[UPDATE UTC/GMT 15:49 on Monday, February 25, 2013
Between the stars is the original introduction to this piece. I started and stopped so many times and drafted so many versions that I was despairing of ever saying anything of relevance. I left this out more by accident than by aim.]

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Jonathan Marks alerted his facebook pals to this, and I'm gonna use it as a springboard to argue for a revision of the most-recent revision of the Primate Superfamily, Hominoidea, to which you and I belong.

 

The Great (Ape) Taxonomy Debate

By Cadell Last | February 13, 2013

The author asks why it is that humans are lumped with the Old World hominoids---Pan, Gorilla, and Pongo---also known as the great apes. The author cleaves to a point of view to which I and a rare few others have propounded for quite some time. To wit, modern humans are unique among the other apes, notwithstanding all of the marvelous behaviours of which we know our ape cousins are capable. Cadell posits two reasons for the relatively recent reclassification.

a) a scientific tradition that emphasizes ancestry over emergence and
b) an evolutionary past that has left us with no extant sister taxa.

The author cites our Jon Marks and Robin Dunbar in support of a) and the vicissitudes of evolution for b). Last ends by concluding that

splitting humans from great apes taxonomically would be beneficial. Conceptually it would allow researchers to better understand the hominid/ape divergence and the key differences between humans and great apes today. But perhaps more importantly, splitting humans from the great apes allows us to reconceptualize our own humanity.  We are not the great apes; we are humans.

You don't need to have spent too much time reading the Subversive Archaeologist to be able to predict my feelings on the matter---we modern humans are unique, even within the genus Homo. Thanks to Last's musings, I have another excuse to play around with the question of hominoid taxonomy [Yes, again!]

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Heeeeeee's Baaaaaaaaack. [Apologies to MGM.]

But he feels a little like he's been dragged by rope through death and back to life in the context of a cult horror classic film. [Why is he writing in the third person? Why am I writing as if I'm not here?]

I should start by saying that I've passed my 60th birthday, and I cut my human-palaeontological teeth 40-plus years ago at a time before molecular comparisons included individual base pairs. In those days it was quite all right to classify all apes in one exclusive taxonomic group, the Superfamily Hominoidea, and subdivide them as follows.

Order Primata
   Suborder Haplorhini
      Infraorder Simiiformes (or Anthropoidea)
         Parvorder Catarrhini
            Superfamily Hominoidea, broken down as shown below.

Clean and simple. No? We're different from the other apes. In retrospect this classification appears somewhat naïve. From molecular biology we now know that the oldest extant lineage among the tailless Catarrhini is the one from which the four extant gibbon genera have evolved. That hasn't changed---the gibbons are still classified as Hylobatidae.

[Off topic aside. Any idea which American country and western song is Biruté Galdikas's favourite? Scroll down for the answer.]

During my absence from the pixels before you I've many times thought I should retitle this blog the Submersive Archaeologist, so deeply this time has it seemed to me that I've descended into the rabbit-hole. Which rabbit-hole was that? The one out of which emerged the present-day view of Hominoid taxonomy, against which I've been fighting a losing battle with cladistics on the matter of what to call you and me and the other members of the genus Homo in terms of which the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature would approve. Wood and Richmond pretty much carved in stone this new view of the Superfamily Hominoidea a few years back. ["Human evolution: taxonomy and paleobiology." Journal of Anatomy 196:19--60, 2000.] Their scholarship is not in question here. I'm quibbling about names, not anatomy; natural groups, not genes.

I lost the battle I waged with windmills over the past couple of weeks because the molecular biology can't be refuted. As we construct the hierarchical relationships between us and progressively less closely related organisms, it's simply irrefutable that we share common ancestry with ever-more-inclusive pairings of hominoid groups.

According to the consensus view,  the most recent of these common-ancestor diads to which we belong is the tribe HOMININI---comprising the Subtribe HOMININA [Genus Homo],  several subtribes of fossil bipedal apes, the Subtribe PANINA [Genus Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos)], and any subtribe or subtribes of Pan's fossil precursors.

The next most inclusive grouping---Subfamily HOMININAE---includes the tribes HOMININI and GORILLINI [Genus Gorilla and the tribe or tribes comprising Gorilla's fossil precursors].

Next most inclusive grouping---Family HOMINIDAE---consists of the subfamilies HOMININAE and PONGINAE [which includes all of the fossil hominoids not belonging to either the subfamily HOMININAE or the family HYLOBATIDAE].

This use of the taxon HOMINIDAE (Gray 1825) is, I believe, pre-emptive and arbitrary. By rights it should be the Family PONGIDAE that makes up of the group of hominoids that remain once you exclude the gibbons and fossil forms belonging to the family HYLOBATIDAE.

Instead, the wizards that renamed the entire superfamily chose to use HOMINIDAE (Gray 1825), most likely because according to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature the family name HOMINIDAE has 'priority' over PONGIDAE (Elliot 1913) in the long history of naming organisms.

While I can understand why one taxon should have priority over another when one is deciding what to call a previously recognized species or genus, the choices aren't as clear-cut at more inclusive nomenclatural ranks [I've ALWAYS wanted to use the word nomenclatural in a publication. This is as close to real publication as I'm ever gonna get again. So, I'm really stoked!]

I've made a slide that I think presents the choices entailed in classifying the hominoids. It has made it easier for me to get my head around the issues. Keep in mind that the first two chips off the old block---the gibbons and orangs---arose we know not where, at about 18 Ma and 14 Ma, respectively. All we can be certain of is that their descendants are today found only in east and southeast Asia. [Yes, I said east Asia. The gibbons are extirpated throughout most of what's China today. However they were widespread historically and figure prominently in iconography and legend in that part of the world.

In presenting the above, I'm hoping that it'll become clear that it's not a straightforward matter what to call the smaller and smaller remainders of the great geographic swathe of hominoids when all that's being considered are the molecular data from extant lineages. What, for example, do we decide to do about the inevitable evolutionary dead ends at each successive rank? As it is, the nomenclature is being stretched. A few more spurs on the family tree and we'd run out of nomina in a real hurry.

The upshot: no one's ever made such an inclusive classification as the one depicted above. Thus, I think that nomenclatural priority shouldn't apply in this case, and that the group that sits opposite HYLOBATIDAE by rights ought to be PONGIDAE (Elliot 1913), if only because PONGIDAE has priority when naming the group containing Pongo, Pan, and Gorilla and all of their fossil precursors. That had been the case up until molecular data put the kibosh on lumping Pongo with Gorilla and Pan. Adding the bipedal apes shouldn't, to my mind, imply substituting PONGIDAE with HOMINIDAE. In addition, using HOMINIDAE in this way, after so many, many years of using it in the old way, seems to me to be more confusing than it needs to be. And, alternatives are available, which wouldn't require as all-encompassing a revision as the one seen above. I say, dump HOMINIDAE as a taxon!
Nothing, for example, precludes use of the zoological rank of Epifamily as the rank immediately following Superfamily. The following provisional revised revision more closely follows what we know of the pace of hominoid evolution. The Epifamilial split occurred about 18 Ma. That of the Family happened about 14 Ma. Thus, the African great apes, more closely spaced in time---a common ancestor some time in the last 7 or so Myr---comprise a family, within which the gorillas on the one hand, and chimps and humans, on the other, inhabit different subfamilies.

Superfamily Hominoidea
   Epifamily Hylobatoidae
   Epifamily Hominoidae
      Family Pongidae
      Family Hominidae
         Subfamily Homininae
            Tribe Panini
            Tribe Hominini
               Genus Australopithecus
               Genus Ardipithecus
               Genus Sahelanthropus (?)
               Genus Orrorin
               Genus Paranthropus
               Genus Homo
         Subfamily Gorillinae
               Genus Sahelanthropus (?)
               Genus Gorilla

This suggested hierarchy violates none of the molecular data, while still providing plenty of leeway for the addition of taxa as our knowledge of hominoids expands.

I welcome your comments.

That's all I'm a gonna say about that! 

Biruté Galdikas's favourite American country music song is "Take the gibbon from my hair."

[I really hope you haven't been waiting with 'bated breath for the return of SA. Somehow the above is less satisfying than it ought to be. Never mind.]

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.

I know! I know! Sloth is a Sin! But I Just Can't Help Myself...

Forgive me, Reader, for I have thinned. It's been 9 days since my last expression. I think I'm a victim of learned uselessness. It's the only way I have to explain my absence from the intertubes this past week or so. And it's not as if I've been busy doing anything else. Piles of piles surround me and the final solution will undoubtedly be to bring a firehose in here and just flush it all out and start over again.

I've been wrestling with a couple of issues pertaining to my work here, but I'm having great difficulty bringing them to light [or keyboard, as it were]. One is an argument against the conventional wisdom that has relegated you and me to a subtribe within the Hominoidea, specifically the Hominina. The only other mammal group that I'm aware of that employs just fine distinctions is that of the cow-like animals---the bovids. Hell! Even the Old World monkeys---all 20 something genera---eschew the subtribe in favour of the loosely collective taxon "group" [which is, by the way, a valid taxon according to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature]. I think a re-revision of the revision of Hominoidea is long overdue. And I'm just the archaeologist to do it! [Psssst. Wanna buy a bridge in New York City?]

The other matter that keeps trying to worm its way out of my overworked brain is a novel argument that seeks to put an end, once and for all, to the notion that hand axes and Levallois flakes are the result of ideas in the heads of every hominid since Homo erectus. You can probably guess how easy that's going to be.

So, please, have pity. My mind's working 23/6, but nothing is ready to be excreted therefrom as yet.

Wish me luck!

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.