tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-229254012024-03-06T22:42:37.686-07:00A Very Remote Period IndeedA blog reviewing recent archaeological publications having to do with Paleolithic archaeology, paleoanthropology, lithic technology, hunter-gatherers and archaeological theory.Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.comBlogger339125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-10922654102500158752017-11-17T15:15:00.001-07:002017-11-17T15:15:48.472-07:00Comment on "A parsimonious neutral model suggests Neanderthal replacement was determined by migration and random species drift"
Note: This comment was originally posted on the article's Nature Communications site on Nov. 10, 2017.
As
strong supporters of open, reproducible science, we are happy to see
that Kolodny and Feldman replicated our research, published six years
ago, and obtained results very similar to ours—results that they, like
us, referred to as a “neutral model” for apparent Neanderthal
Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-84293412230847461772017-11-06T14:40:00.004-07:002017-11-06T14:40:53.970-07:00Trigger on teaching archaeology in CanadaThis quote stood out, as part of the thinking and reading I've been doing since my last post on Canadian trends in the hiring of PhD to staff archaeology faculty positions:
"By December, however, I had accepted an appointment at McGill for the following academic year. [Raoul] Naroll urged me not to accept this appointment, arguing that in Canada I would find myself in an academic backwater fromJulien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-12278673027165283502017-10-25T13:22:00.000-06:002017-10-25T21:21:20.971-06:00A 'Canadian connection' in North American faculty jobs in Archaeology?<!--[if gte mso 9]>
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Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-10162950071447733662015-11-16T13:19:00.000-07:002015-11-16T13:19:05.077-07:00Reconstruction Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer MobilityThis past Friday morning, with my colleagues Becky Wragg Sykes and Suzie Pilaar Birch, we held a first webinar as part of our project "Reconstructing Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Mobility". This is a project sponsored by INQUA (the International Union for Quaternary Science), and it aims to "[e]stablish the current state of knowledge and unite diverse research
practices regarding prehistoric Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-65513334406236015212015-11-15T15:21:00.001-07:002015-11-15T15:21:47.844-07:00Back from the dead!<!--[if gte mso 9]>
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Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-86481465293642795292013-02-27T01:39:00.001-07:002013-02-27T01:39:22.655-07:00On the variability of Upper Paleolithic burials: Hype, facts and fiction (and Neanderthals?)A new study of mine (written with Claudine Gravel-Miguel of ASU) is getting a bit of press, and I really want to write a post on AVRPI to serve as a proper companion piece to it, since the narrative in the press is already slipping away from what the paper actually says. In short, our paper does not say that Upper Paleolithic burials were not more sophisticated than those of Neanderthals. Rather,Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-263024380349062742012-12-06T17:50:00.001-07:002012-12-06T23:47:40.216-07:00Cavemen, quadrupeds and science, oh my!So... there's a new paper in PLoS ONE about how 'cavemen' depicted four-legged animals better than 'modern' artists (Horvath et al. 2012). I usually try to refrain from paper bashing here, but there is such a high density of wrong (if not downright fail) in this one, that it's hard not to. Becky Farbstein agrees, and points out that:
1) anyone using the word 'cavemen' with a straight face in a Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-15873917392775995022012-11-18T16:43:00.000-07:002012-11-18T16:43:19.579-07:00More paleo-porn fun!Hot on the heels of my recent paleo-porn post, here's a wonderfully sarcastic - and dead-on! - comment about the post that I received on my Facebook.
Can
I just say/rant one thing that always irritates me about Venus
figurines and art with respect to sexuality/repro in the past is the
conceit that saying "they were concerned about reproduction, or it was a
focus" whatever is somehow Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-79858064073678491122012-11-16T01:55:00.001-07:002012-11-16T01:55:36.805-07:00A Sum Greater Than Its Parts: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on Later Human EvolutionWhat are you doing this weekend? If you're in the San Francisco area, you should come to the AAAs, specifically to attend this session I'm in entitled "A Sum Greater Than Its Parts: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on Later Human Evolution." It's being organized by Jamie Clark (University of Alaska Fairbanks) and Adam Van Arsdale (Wellesley College), and it will be jam-packed with human Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-77184557496674270652012-11-13T16:20:00.000-07:002012-11-13T16:20:40.162-07:00Taking peddlers of 'paleo-porn' to taskThe New Scientist has a short interview with April Nowell ('Palaeo-porn': we've got it all wrong) about an upcoming paper of hers (with M. Chang) in which they expose (eh!) the pernicious tendency to view Venus figurines as having overt sexual meaning. This is timely as my students and I were discussing Venus figurines in my Research Design grad class last week! Among other things, I really dug Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-9359106540403483212012-10-26T17:08:00.000-06:002012-10-26T17:08:35.596-06:00Picking a journal to publish in as a studentMike Smith has a post on picking what kind of journal to publish in (mostly) as a graduate student. Rightly, he points to the need of striking the right balance between the prestige/name recognition of the journal and the desire to have the publication come out in a timely manner. As he says "They need quick publications, which would favor a lower-ranking
journal. But a paper in a top journal Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-90587125963766543422012-04-10T23:08:00.001-06:002012-04-10T23:08:25.484-06:00A Very Neanderthal EasterThe thing I love the most about Easter? Chocolate. The thing I love the most about paleoanthropology? Neanderthals. So this past weekend, I decided to combine the two!
From left to right: Chatelperronian ornament, déjeté sidescrcaper, convergent sidescraper (or is it a Mousterian point? no choco-cave bear around to test it), and Levallois point (milk chocolate); center: Neanderthal (white Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-57863062750349753662012-03-15T11:11:00.000-06:002012-03-15T11:11:46.992-06:00About those Neanderthal eagle talon ornamentsThe recent paper by Morin and Laroulandie (2012) in PLoS ONE has been creating a bit of a buzz, suggesting as it does 'non-nutritional' and possibly symbolic use of eagle talons at two Mousterian sites in France. The authors rightly emphasize that the discovery of several eagle talons bearing cut marks from La Ferrassie and Les Fieux articulates quite well with the evidence from Fumane that Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-17124530584819442172012-03-04T16:25:00.002-07:002012-03-04T18:57:40.760-07:00Shake your (Acheulean) money makerThere was a paper presented by Mimi Lam at the last AAAS meeting in Vancouver and which was covered in LiveScience last week and has bit causing something of a stir (and it spells Acheulean correctly!). While I'm always leery of relying only on press reports to make sense of unpublished papers, its abstract is available online and provides a bit more info. In a nutshell, one the arguments of the Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-81755544998421444782012-03-01T01:04:00.000-07:002012-03-01T01:04:06.731-07:00Bitumen used as hafting material in the Middle Paleolithic of RomaniaCârciumaru and colleagues (2012) report on artifacts from Gura Cheii-Râşnov Cave (Romania), of which a couple bear residues of a blackish material on their surfaces. One comes from the one of the site's Upper Paleolithic levels, while the other comes from its Mousterian deposit which date to between roughly 33.3-28.9 kya (uncalibrated radiocarbon ages).
The reason this is noteworthy is that the Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-84325095493705342442012-02-25T15:35:00.002-07:002012-02-25T15:35:38.334-07:00John Hawks lecture at UCD, March 2: Paleogenomics and the Evolution of Neandertals and DenisovansBack belatedly, but bearing great news! This coming week, John Hawks will be in Denver. On his blog, he's already mentioned the talk that he's giving at the DMNS, but I want to highlight the fact that he'll also be giving a talk at 2:30PM on Friday March 2 on the UC Denver campus, as part of our Anthropology Colloquium series. The event is open to all and free to attend. Here are the details.
Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-21158963632093632642012-02-07T10:46:00.001-07:002012-02-07T10:46:23.644-07:00What's new on the Italian Middle Paleolithic?I'm traveling this week, participating in the Roundtable of the Middle Palaeolithic of Italy hosted by the Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies(http://camnes.org), which takes place in Florence this coming Thursday and Friday (Feb. 9-10, 2012). I'm really looking forward to it, and looking at the final program, it sounds like a good range of perspectives and regional records Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-70078560247256876382012-02-03T22:03:00.000-07:002012-02-03T22:05:56.086-07:00How to feed a pregnant NeanderthalShorter can be better: Case in point, Bryan Hockett has a short (five pages) paper in press in Quaternary International entitled "The consequences of Middle Paleolithic diets on pregnant Neanderthal women," and it is a must-read for anyone interested in prehistoric nutrition. In a nutshell, what he does here is consider what the hypothesized Neanderthals caloric requirements proposed by a number Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-12561384087698527422012-02-02T23:46:00.002-07:002012-02-02T23:46:17.035-07:00Videos as visual aids in presenting experimental archaeologyFor reasons that should become clear fairly soon, I've had experimental archaeology videos on my mind lately. In many cases, actually seeing segments of an experimental study play out can convey so much more of the experience itself than summary tables and graphs, which really take the human element out and often don't do justice to some of the phenomena observed as they unfold.
I saw a couple Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-89177231019903041082012-02-01T17:44:00.000-07:002012-02-01T17:59:30.734-07:00Is Academia.edu decreasing scholarly communication?I love Academia.edu - I think it's a fantastic way for papers to reach the broadest possible audience, and it's made me aware of many studies I wouldn't have otherwise heard of. While I'm not necessarily the best Academia citizen myself (I really should start following some people), it's really been a tremendous help in tracking down some papers published in obscure sources that might have Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-15528418388966007492012-01-15T17:19:00.000-07:002012-01-15T17:42:42.464-07:00Quote of the day: Matt Cartmill on evolutionary lawsFrom the inimitable Matt Cartmill:
"The trick in discovering evolutionary laws is the same as it is in discovering laws of physics or chemistry-namely, finding the right level of generalization to make prediction possible. We do not try to find a law that says when and where explosions will occur. We content ourselves with saying that certain sorts of compounds are explosive under the right Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-78319374412292453192011-11-21T01:17:00.001-07:002011-11-21T21:05:24.839-07:00Archaeology and pepper sprayPepper spray has been in the news for all the wrong reasons these past few days, after being used unnecessarily on UC Davis students protesting tuition hikes and income inequality. Several professors have already bravely denounced this chilling excessive violence by police, and Rosemary Joyce (a Berkeley archaeologist) gives us a bit of context on the long history of how chili by-products have Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-30412926365769199772011-09-26T01:57:00.001-06:002011-09-26T01:57:44.022-06:00Write, and write right!This piece from a couple of years ago and entitled "Righting your writing" has been making the rounds in my FB network. It provides a pretty good series of tip/strategies for scientists to write more clearly. One that stood out to me was the one about developing daily writing habits
Write daily for 15 to 30 minutes
During your daily writing sessions, don’t think about your final
manuscript. Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-65708051005560022002011-09-15T13:21:00.000-06:002011-09-15T13:21:42.069-06:00Neanderthals shellfishing 150,000 years agoThe news is out: the site of Bajondillo, in southern Spain, has yielded clear evidence of Neanderthals collecting and eating shellfish as far back as 150,000 years BP, and pretty much continuously, though at different intensities, after that. One obvious thing to point out: this is almost as old as the earliest evidence of modern humans collecting shellfish (Marean et al. 2007), and the way Julien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22925401.post-15427017576150520062011-09-14T00:04:00.000-06:002011-09-14T12:44:05.858-06:00A Mousterian wooden spade from Abric Romani, SpainA group of researchers from the IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social) reports on the discovery of a handheld wooden implement from Mousterian deposits at Abric Romaní, Spain. The tool was found in Level P which dates to about 56,000 years BP, and its morphology suggests that it might have been a small spade/shovel, or perhaps a poker, given its association to a hearthJulien Riel-Salvatorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05344338385695383003noreply@blogger.com2