Why flour matters

A couple of days ago, I mentioned how excavations at a Paleoindian site in Utah has revealed that the site's occupants had been milling various seeds to produce different kinds of flours. In that post, I mentioned how this discovery re-emphasized the fact that hunter-gatherers in general hunt as well as gather. In fact, outside of the highest latitudes, plant foods often account for a majority of the caloric intake of ethnographically-documented forager groups, suggesting that this was also very likely the case in prehistory. This is an especially important realization for Paleoindian research, since public (and sometimes even academic) perception is that Clovis and Folsom foragers were essentially big guys with big spears killing big things, i.e., megafauna. Estbalishing that they were not only collecting plants but also processing some of them rather intensively (grinding is a very time-consuming activity, and so is the shaping of grinding implements) reinforces recent research that suggests that Paleoindian diets were as a whole much more diverse than is generally believed (Hill 2008).

Grinding plant matter into flour also has important other implications about the structure of hunter-gatherer subsistence and social life, however. To understand these, it's helpful to look at some of the earliest traces of flour production in the archaeological record, one example of which is provided by the Gravettian site of Bilancino, in Tuscany, Italy, which dates to about 25,000BP uncal. (Aranguren et al. 2007), and which I mentioned briefly earlier. Bilancino is a very interesting site: because of preservation issues, namely the acidic nature of the sediment there, no bone was preserved at all. This has forced the investigators to thoroughly investigate other kinds of archaeological remains that are not usually the focus of such intensive scrutiny in many Paleolithic studies. This includes notably charcoal, pollen and starch grain recovered from the surface of a grindstone. These efforts have paid off in spades by revealing that the occupants of Bilancino had been grinding cattail (Typha latifolia), likely its roots, as well as wild grasses to produce flour.

Aranguren et al. (2007) explicitly discuss the potential impact of flour on Paleolithic lifeways. They specificallyhighlight that it "implies the availability of an elaborate product, a flour, with high energy content, that is rich in carbohydrates, easily storable and transportable, to make a kind of bread (biscuits) or a porridge" (Aranguren 2007: 853). This means that plant material could be preserved and stored for much longer periods of time, which effectively can provide carbs during seasons such as winter during which they are normally difficult if not impossible to obtain. Also, it provides a subsistence items that serves as a buffer against the fluctuating availability of other types of subsitence resources, such as animal tissue. Lastly, because flour is easily ingested and digested, it also provides a foodstuff that both very young and very old members of a group can consume - and maybe even produce while adults are off procuring other things. This means that survival to adulthood and into old age can be facilitated, which has the potential of significantly reorganizing the way labor is divided within a society, and increasing the generational knowledge available to given forager groups.

References

Aranguren,Biancamaria, Becattini, Roberto, Mariotti Lippi, Marta, & Revedin, Anna (2007). Grinding flour in Upper Palaeolithic Europe (25000 years bp) Antiquity, 81 (314), 845-855

HILL JR, M. (2008). Variation in Paleoindian fauna use on the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of North America Quaternary International, 191 (1), 34-52 DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2007.10.004

Ape-man the hunter?

Well, at least the butcher, if not the tool-maker... McPherron et al. (2010) report the discovery of four bone fragments bearing marks left by stone tools from the the Dikika-55 locality in Ethiopia (dating to between 3.24-3.42 million years BP), a stone's throw from where the juvenile Australopithecus afarensis dubbed Selam was found. This is a pretty monumental discovery, in that it pushes back the evidence for the use of stone tool technology by about 800,000 years, and associates it fairly convincingly with A. afarensis (or, at least, as convincingly as can be done for those time frames). John Hawks and Greg Laden have interesting posts on some of the more salient aspects of the paper, which you should read if you're interested in this.

In a nutshell, McPherron and colleagues analyzed the bones using secondary electron imaging (SEI) and energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) to establish that the marks were, in fact, made in deep time before the bones fossilized. Having determined this, they then examined the morphology of the marks on the bone using ESEM (environmental scanning electron microscopy) and optical microscopes to establish that it was most similar to those of experimentally replicated marks made with stone tools used to cut flesh off a bone and crack bones open. I've looked at my share of cut marks over the years, and like Greg, I also agree with the authors that the DIK-55 cut marks look like marks made by stone tools. You'd have to never have looked at cut marks to argue with a straight face that the marks on the DIK-55 specimens look more like croc tooth marks than cut marks.

Given that the marks really seem to be genuine stone tool cut and percussion marks, the question then becomes one of establishing the age of the mark-bearing bones. As Hawks underlines, we're dealing with only four bones here, out of an unspecified total sample. So, we don't really know how common they were at DIK-55, since they do not meet the criteria usually used for collection - basically, they were collected because field observations suggested they might bear cut marks. And as Laden mentions, it'd be better if the bones in question had been collected in primary context, as opposed to from the surface next to their associated depositional context. This is important because there's always the possibility that they might have washed in or been somehow transported from another, potentially younger locality. That said, based on the absence of adhering sediment and the location of the specimens, their most likely provenience is from a sandy formation with a minimum age of 3.24 million years and a maximum age of 3.42 million years. The sample size issue is an interesting one to consider, but really, in this case the noteworthy feature of these bones is that they bear unambiguous traces of modification with stone tools, so their proportional importance is somewhat secondary.

OK, so, we have bones bearing marks made by stone tools that are older by some 800ky than the earliest known stone tool assemblages, which date to about 2.6-2.5mya (Semaw et al. 1997). What does it mean? Well, the most obvious conclusion is that the use of stone tools must be quite a bit older than has generally been assumed, and since A. afarensis is the only hominin associated with deposits that age in the region, they are the best candidates for having used them.

Here's the rub, though: there are no stone tools at DIK-55. Furthermore, the closest source of rocks that could have been used as stone tools is about 6km away. What does that mean? It means that, if A. afarensis really did use stone implements to process these remains, they must have brought them from a little ways away. That, in and of itself, is not earth shattering an observation. Sea otters, for instance, are known to carry rocks in skin folds next to their forepaws to use them in area where clams, crabs and abalones are present but rocks aren't. In that sense, the DIK-55 provide evidence for some basic planing depth, though not much more than in some other tool-using animals.

The big question relating to the stone tools here is whether A. afarensis made some or opportunistically used naturally occurring sharp pieces of stone. McPherron et al. (2010) remain agnostic on that one, as well they should given that they've already rocked the boat enough with this discovery and speculating would undermine their case. I also remain undecided on the issue, though I will say that there could be a case for the evidence presented in the paper to indicate that A. afarensis manufactured stone tools. This is based on two lines of observation: 1) there are no large rocks at DIK-55, the largest rocks found there being about 8mm in maximum size; and 2) the bones described in the paper bear both cut marks and percussion marks. Now, cut marks need to be made with a sharp stone edge, something like a flake, or a cobble with at least one flake knocked off. In contrast, percussion marks are made by blunt objects, usually a hammerstone similar to those used to knock flakes off of cobbles or cores. This distinction is usually not given much thought in discussion of human agency on bones because, by and large, if humans have flakes, they have a hammerstone to knap them off with. In fact, even at Gona, the earliest known stone tool assemblage, hammerstones, cores and flakes co-occur (Semaw et al. 1997; Stout et al. 2005).

In this case, however, the distinction is noteworthy because it implies that at least two different implements were brought in to DIK-55 to process the tools. Remember that there are no stones larges than 8mm at this locality, and try as it might, not even a Floresian hobbit would be able to use such small pebbles as tools with much success. It also means that there could be no 'crime of opportunity' in which an australopith just picked up a large rock that was just lying there to smash open a bone. In short, it means that both a blunt stone object (i.e., a hammerstone) and a sharp one must have been transported to DIK-55. Granted, it might simply be that hominins were carrying both unmodified cobbles and naturally occurring sharp pieces of stone with them. But if you understand that whacking a bone with a hammerstone will break it open (and create sharp edges on the bone as a result) and that sharp objects can be helpful in slicing meat off a bone, a parsimonious explanation might be that your lithic technological behavior includes the use of hammerstone to produce stone flakes. This would also make sense from the perspective of lithic technology where percussors and flakes are part of even the simplest toolkits.

Granted, this last bit is speculative, but what is certain is that people will be looking at 3.4-2.6mya deposits with renewed interest and attention in the coming years. What comes out of these investigation should allow us to flesh out the range of possible scenarios brought up by this new discovery from Dikika, which is proving to be an immensely rewarding area from a paleoanthropological standpoint.

References:

McPherron, S., Alemseged, Z., Marean, C., Wynn, J., Reed, D., Geraads, D., Bobe, R., & Béarat, H. (2010). Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia Nature, 466 (7308), 857-860 DOI: 10.1038/nature09248


Semaw S, Renne P, Harris JW, Feibel CS, Bernor RL, Fesseha N, & Mowbray K (1997). 2.5-million-year-old stone tools from Gona, Ethiopia. Nature, 385 (6614), 333-6 PMID: 9002516

Stout D, Quade J, Semaw S, Rogers MJ, & Levin NE (2005). Raw material selectivity of the earliest stone toolmakers at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia. Journal of human evolution, 48 (4), 365-80 PMID: 15788183

Modern is as modern does?

Since I last posted, there's been a lot of 'chatter' on the interwebs about the 'modernity' displayed by Neanderthals in their subsistence patterns, because they appeared to have hunted very similar ungulates than Aurignacian foragers and, especially because they have been shown to procure and consume sea mammals exactly as early modern humans at Gibraltar. All sorts of people have talked about the latter (here, and here), but there's one aspect of this discovery that's been puzzling me ever since I read the actual report (Stringer et al. 2008), and it's got me adjusting my spectacle and saying "Not so fast..."

That aspect is, quite simply, the frequency of sea mammal remains present in those assemblages. Now, the authors and commentators have been right in emphasizing that both Middle and Upper Paleolithic hominins display the same behavior and that is a big deal: it is one more solid uppercut to the jaw of the argument that Neanderthals and modern humans were somehow fundamentally different from a behavioral standpoint. That this is true for subsistence patterns is especially important since, as a colleague of mine likes to emphasize, it's how much calories you can extract from an environment that allows you to have more babies and keep them alive (i.e., be reproductively successful)! So, showing that people in the late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic procured resources similarly is an important observation indeed. This is the basis on which people can somewhat legitimately claim that Neanderthals could act in 'modern' ways.

In contrast, my view is that the sea mammals from Gorham's and Vanguard Caves do not support the idea that Neanderthals acted in a recognizably modern way. But here's the catch: neither did the early Upper Paleolithic, presumably modern human, foragers! In other words, yes, Neanderthals and early modern humans acted in comparable manners, but no, that behavior is not what we can really consider modern, based on what we know from historic and prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

What leads me to this conclusion is the proportion of sea mammals to other animals at those sites. I consider the mollusks uncontroversial, since there's plenty of evidence they were exploited by coastal Neanderthal and early modern humans as far back at OIS 6. So, focusing on sea mammals and fish, what do we get?

We get a really weird pattern! Let's start with the material from Vanguard Cave (Stringer et al. 2008: Table 1). We have a NISP (number of identifiable specimens - I could use MNE's instead, but the results are only marginally different, and laden with their own peculiar problems) of 9, with NISP's of 172 for terrestrial herbivores and 20 for carnivores. This means that herbivore remains are almost 20 times more abundant than those of sea animals. Perhaps even more interestingly, carnivore remains are twice as abundant as those of sea animals. The authors talk about the low rate of carnivore gnaw marks on the sea and land mammals at the site (in addition to the absence of traces of human processing on the carnivore remains), implying that carnivores and humans probably occupied the cave at different times. That being the case, it means that carnivores that were not accumulated by humans are twice as frequent as the sea mammal remains.

Before discussing what I think this means, let's turn to Gorham's Cave, where modern human behavior is presumably also documented, in Level III (Stringer et al. 2008: Table 4). In this case, for Neanderthals (Level IV), if you lump together seal and fish (NISP = 3), it means that herbivores (NISP = 49) are 16 times more frequent than sea animals. As for carnivores (NISP = 36, again assumed to be non-accumulated by humans), they are 12 times more frequent than sea critters. In Level III, the sea animal NISP is 5, while that of herbivores is 186 (37 times more frequent than sea animals!) and that of carnivores is 30 (or six times the amount of sea critters). There are also some interesting patterns of small game use at Gorham's, which I'll return to in a bit.

But first why is this pattern of relative representation of sea animals important? Because this is not how ethnographically documented foragers that depend on sea animals. In fact, foragers that have access to sea mammal tend to focus on them a lot! The data I summarized above suggest that the sea mammal:herbivore ratio of the Gibraltar assemblages is as follows:

Vanguard: 172:9 = 19.1
Ghoram's IV (Neanderthal): 49:3 = 16.3
Gorham's III (H. sapiens): 186:5 = 37.2

In contrast, for ethnographically-documented forager groups that depend to sea animals and land mammals, the same ratio ranges from 0.16 (meaning sea animals are six times more frequent than land mammals in the group's diet) to 12 (where land mammals are 12 times more frequent than sea resources) (this is based on data summarized in Kelly 1995: Table 3-1). That latter figure is probably an overestimate, however, since the one group that is associated with the ratio value of 12- the Aeta - procures extra amounts of meat to trade for carbohydrates with neighboring agriculturalists, a situtation that is clearly inappropriate for the comparison being undertaken here. Shifting to the next group down the list of most 'meat vs. fish', we get the Nunamiut, with a ratio of 8.7. This allows us to complete the table above thusly:

Assemblage	Ratio
Vanguard	19.1
Ghoram's IV (Neanderthal)	16.3
Gorham's III (H. sapiens)	37.2
Most sea mammal focused hunters	0.16
Least sea mammal focused hunters	8.7/12

Whether we go with the Aeta or the Nunamiut, the picture is the same: the ratio of land to sea resources of hunter-gatherers is much lower than that documented in any of the three assemblages presented by Stringer and colleagues (2008). Notably, the ratio for those foragers that heavily depend on sea resources is smaller by orders of magnitudes than that found in any of the Gibraltar assemblages. Perhaps most importantly, the Gibraltar ratios are much, much higher than those of those hunters that target the least amount of sea mammals in their diets.

Plainly put, this means that when foragers exploit sea animals, they exploit a hell of a lot more of them than is documented in Vanguard and Gorham's Caves. One may quibble about the fact that I overlooked the Vanguard mollusks in this analysis, but since these are absent from the Gorham's Cave faunal assemblages discussed here, for the purposes of comparing early H. sapiens and Neanderthal behavior, the case stands nevertheless. In short, what we're seeing at Gibraltar bears departs significantly from the subsistence strategies of known forager groups.

Now, obviously, we have to be careful not to impose on the past observations from the present, the old "tyranny of the ethnographic record" (Wobst 1978). However, there is a reason why people focus on sea animals when they have access to them: they are often full of sweet, delicious fat. So, when they know when, where and how to procure sea animals (even if it's only on a yearly basis, when they are most likely to be found beached), hunter-gatherers will preferentially target them, and accumulate them in large numbers. Most critically, the Gibraltar pattern departs significantly from that of those foragers that depend the least on sea critters, which should give one some serious pause.

Stringer et al. (2008: 14323) argue that the presence of sea mammal remains in all the levels of Vanguard Cave and in the Neanderthal and H. sapiens deposits of Gorham's Cave reflects

"that Neanderthals were not only systematically exploiting terrestrial mammals but also marine mollusks, pinnipeds, and cetaceans. Their distribution through the stratigraphy suggests that securing marine mammals was not an accidental or isolated practice, but a focused behavior possibly repeated seasonally or over longer periods... Significantly, the range of species exploited and the age distribution pattern of the prey strongly indicate that the coastal exploitation of resources by Neanderthals was not a sporadic and isolated occurrence but one that required a knowledge of the life history of prey and its seasonality."

Color me skeptical here, and this in spite of my opinion that the behavioral capacities are still systematically underappreciated in contemporary paleoanthropology. But overall, we're talking about numbers of sea animal remains that are absolutely dwarfed by the preponderance of land mammals and that in all cases are significantly rarer than even those of carnivores that occupied the site when humans were absent. Call it what you will, but this is not a behavior that is modern in any real way.

The take-home message here is that, just because some behavior is associated with morphologically 'modern' humans, it does not mean that it is actually modern. In the end, who knows, maybe Neanderthals and early European H. sapiens did exploit sea mammals seasonally - but empirically, the evidence presented by Stringer et al.(2008) rather points to unsystematic, opportunistic acquisition of parts of beached carcasses. But the fact that the Gibraltar data are so odd in light of everything we know about the subsistence patterns of sea-oriented foragers underlines the importance of always defining what is meant by 'modern behavior' and of situating behavioral reconstructions of Neanderthals and early H. sapiens in the broader context of the hunter-gatherer behavioral record. Doing so usually yields some very interesting results indeed!

References

Kelley, R. L. 1995. The Foraging Spectrum. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington.

Stringer, C. B., J. C. Finlayson, R. N. E. Barton, Y. Fernandez-Jalvo, I. Caceres, R. C. Sabin, E. J. Rhodes, A. P. Currant, J. Rodriguez-Vidal, F. Giles-Pacheco, J. A. Riquelme-Cantal (2008). From the Cover: Neanderthal exploitation of marine mammals in Gibraltar Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (38), 14319-14324 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805474105

Wobst, H. M. 1978. The Archaeo-Ethnology of Hunter-Gatherers or the Tyranny of the ethnographic record in Archaeology. American Antiquity 43:303-309.

A Meat-Eating Neanderthal from Jonzac

There is a new isotopic dietary analysis of Neanderthals at the site of Jonzac (Chez Pinaud), in SW France, available in the Journal of Human Evolution (Richards et al., 2008). Here's the abstract:

We report here on the isotopic analysis (carbon and nitrogen) of collagen extracted from a Neanderthal tooth and animal bone from the late Mousterian site of Jonzac (Charente-Maritime, France). This study was undertaken to test whether the isotopic evidence indicates that animal protein was the main source of dietary protein for this relatively late Neanderthal, as suggested by previous studies. This was of particular interest here because this is the first isotopic study of a relatively late Neanderthal associated with Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition (MTA, dating to approximately 55,000 to 40,000 BP) technology. We found that the Jonzac Neanderthal had isotopic values consistent with a diet in which the main protein sources were large herbivores, particularly bovids and horses. We also found evidence of different dietary niches between the Neanderthal and a hyena at the site, with the hyena consuming mainly reindeer.

This is a good, empirically strong study with many comparative data points drawn from associated faunal remains, and the conclusions are robust. It is also original in its use of collagen extracted from tooth dentine as opposed to bone, the latter being the material on which all previous isotopic studies of diet have been done. This is important because:

"Unlike bone, tooth dentine likely does not alter
over a lifetime, and therefore it reflects a specific period of
time of formation. Therefore, the isotopic data from this Neanderthal
premolar do not reflect the lifetime average, but instead
the diet at the ages of later childhood/early adolescence.

Our isotopic results for the Jonzac Neanderthal are compared
to the those reported for other European Neanderthals
in Table 3. The isotopic values are remarkably similar for all
of the Neanderthals, and in all cases, the authors of the various
studies concluded, as we have for Jonzac, that the main source
of dietary protein was animal protein, likely from large herbivores.
In no case do we see isotopic evidence for the significant
consumption of aquatic (marine or freshwater) protein,
as has been observed from Gravettian humans in Europe (Richards
et al., 2001; Pettitt et al., 2003). The results of our isotopic
study of the Jonzac Neanderthal therefore support the
emerging picture from isotopic studies that Neanderthals
have a similar dietary adaptation over a wide range of environments
and over a relatively long period of time." (Richards et al. 2008: 6)

This is interesting because it directly implies that, at Jonzac, a Neanderthal juvenile had a diet similar to that documented in adult Neanderthals elsewhere. This has concomitant implications for how animal food might have been shared within Neanderthal groups, suggesting that even relatively young individual had access to a relatively high quality diet.

Another interesting conclusion of this study is that hyenas and hominins preferentially targeted different herbivore taxa, with humans mainly going after bovids and horses and hyenas targeting reindeer. This might represent evidence for niche partitioning, that is, the concentration on different segments of a given niche by organisms that are in competition for it. In this case, the competition would have been between carnivorous species, and the partition would be reflect by the selective exploitation of different animal species within the high-return large herbivore niche. This, however, is based on the isotopic signature of a single hyena bone from a different layer than that where the Neanderthal tooth was recovered and compared to averaged isotopic signature of herbivores from two layers, so we need to be cautious to draw firm conclusions on the basis of this evidence alone.

Overall, though, it does seem that the Neanderthal at Jonzac had a childhood protein intake heavily dominated by the meat of large herbivores. A few comments, however: the Vindija remains are more recent by several millennia than the Jonzac tooth, so the observation that some comparatively late Neanderthals hunted lots of large herbivores is not completely unprecedented (Richards et al. 2000). Also, while this study provides one more isotopic data point on Neanderthal diets, the fact remains that we still have no such studies from Neanderthals from the southern part of their range, nor from coastal settings. I suspect that such results might alter the picture we have of Neanderthal animal procurement. Even if they don't, however, it is important to remember that

"dietary contributions from fat cannot be evaluated by isotope analysis
of collagen and so carbon and nitrogen isotope
studies can only reconstruct the likely proportions of
different species that made up the protein component
of their diets, which is unlikely to have comprised
more than about 40% of their diet by energy and possibly
only 25% of the diet overall (Cordain et al 2002)."
(Pearson 2007: 6).

Thus, while the results of isotopic dietary analyses of Neanderthals are uniquely informative, it is important to remember that they only provide data pertaining to one part of their diet. Thus, to assume that Neanderthals ate only meat because they appear to have drawn most of their protein from large herbivore is 'jumping the evidential gun'. Given that Neanderthals were top-ranked hunters living at relatively low population densities, it would have made little sense for them not to target the highest-ranked animal resources in their ecosystem as their main source of meat. And this behavior is exactly what isotopic studies have been demonstrating so far. As for the rest of the the Neanderthal diet, various lines of evidence - including a wonderful paper by Henry and Piperno (2008) presented at the Paleoanthropology Society meetings two weeks ago - are beginning to clearly show that Neanderthals also appear to have made extensive use of plant resources whenever they had access to them. Unfortunately, this is effectively invisible from an isotopic standpoint.

References:

Henry, A., Piperno, D. 2008. Plants in Neandertal diet: Plant microfossil evidence from the dental calculus of Shanidar III. Paper presented on March 26, at the 2008 Annual Meetings of the Paleoanthropology Society, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Pearson, J. A. 2007. Hunters, fishers and scavengers: a review of the isotope evidence for Neanderthal diet. Before Farming 2007/2-2.

Richards,M.P., Pettitt, P.B., Trinkaus, E., Smith, F.H., Karavanic´, I.,Paunovic´,M.,
2000. Neanderthal diet at Vindija and Neanderthal predation: the evidence
from stable isotopes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 97: 7663-7666.

RICHARDS, M., TAYLOR, G., STEELE, T., MCPHERRON, S., SORESSI, M., JAUBERT, J., ORSCHIEDT, J., MALLYE, J., RENDU, W., HUBLIN, J. (2008). Isotopic dietary analysis of a Neanderthal and associated fauna from the site of Jonzac (Charente-Maritime), France. Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2008.02.007

Fighting the tyranny of the ethnographic record!

In a short paper, R. Lee Lyman (U Missouri) shows how archaeological data can help flesh out ethnographic observations. I make a big deal about this because archaeologists dealing with prehistoric hunter-gatherers have often been accused of being interpretively 'railroaded' (not to say tyrannized) by the ethnographic record of extant hunter-gatherers (Wobst 1978).

What Lyman does in this paper is actually pretty straightforward, methodologically speaking. Briefly, having shown that the size of lower first molars can be used to distinguish males from female mink, he looks at the sex ratio seen in Mustela vison remains from the Cathlapote and Meier sites, both of which are late-prehistoric(ca. 1400-1800 AD) sites located in the Wapato Valley (in Oregon and Washington). Citing Buskirk and Lindstedt (1989), Lyman argues that "linear trap sets produce a more even sex ratio[i.e., between 1:1 and 2:1, for males], whereas traps placed in a grid catch more large-bodied individuals, typically males" (2007:92). This pattern is the result of sex-specific behavioral patterns. In his archaeological sample, the male:female ratio is at least 3.67:1 and at most 8.33:1, depending on how stringent one is with their sex-id stats. This suggests, then, that late-prehistoric foragers probably disposed traps in a grid rather than linear pattern.

This is where it gets especially neat. Since Franz Boas long ago wondered "How far can archaeological methods supplement ethnological information?" (1902:4), Lyman concludes:

Locations of traps used to take small mammals have, so far as I am aware, not been reported in the ethnographic literature for the Pacific Northwest. The archaeological data for mink recovered from sites in the Wapato Valley suggest that indeed archaeological data may supplement ethnographic data, because mink demography suggests traps were distributed in a grid-like pattern. (Lyman 2007:94)

In other words, rather than place them, say, only along waterways, late-prehistoric hunters of the Wapato Valley most likely set their traps all over the region's marshy lowlands. Given that the sites in question can be linked to the "Northwest Coast Culture Area" and given that ethnographic information available for groups derived from this culture area indicates that they trapped small mammals without specifying how that was done, this study provides a good instance of archaeological data (albeit informed by mammalogy) informing ethnographic observation. This is elegant corroboration of what Guenther (2007:374) terms "an ongoing, mutually strengthening partnership between the two disciplines [archaeology and ethnology], in their study of foraging societies."

References:

Buskirk, S. W., and S. L. Lindstedt. 1989. Sex ratio biases in trapped samples of mustelids. Journal of Mammalogy 70:88-97.

Guenther, M. 2007. Current issues and future directions in hunter-gatherer studies. Anthropos 102:371-388.

Lyman, R. L. 2007. Prehistoric mink (Mustela vison) trapping on the Northwest Coast. Journal of Field Archaeology 32:91-95.

Wobst, H. M. 1978. The archaeo-ethnology of hunter-gatherers or the tyranny of the ethnographic record in archaeology. American Antiquity 43:303-309.

Mammoth hunters of the Russian Far East

They found one of their camps, apparently.

The site, found during a 2007 archaeological expedition to Lake Evoron, is the largest of four Stone Age sites, discovered near the Amur River so far, and was most likely established by mammoth hunters.

"We came to this conclusion after studying flint pikes, arrowheads and a stone scraper," Malyavin said, adding that a comprehensive archaeological excavation could take a couple of years.

Wait, what? Where the hell are the mammoth bones?! There better be some serious use-wear/blood residue analysis being undertaken if they want to make the case that people were hunting mammoths based on stone tools alone.

The modern Stone Age family

The Boston Globe has a feature entitled 'Stone Age Feminism?' (I have to wonder if they had a contest with CNN for the lamest spin on Stone Age news) which talks about how recent discoveries about Neanderthals (FOXP2, 'red hair', extension of their range to Siberia, etc.) may articulate with the argument put forth last year by Kuhn & Stiner (2006) that sexual division of labor was largely absent among Neanderthals. Some people have blogged about this (here and here), just as other have offered more thoughts about the 'spin' or 'framing' put on some of the recent genetic papers (here for FOXP2, here for MC1R). I'm not an anthropological geneticist, so I won't talk about those studies any more than I already have.

In contrast, although the Kuhn & Stiner paper has been discussed at length on some other blogs (including by John Hawks who was fairly critical of their argument), this renewed interest in it a year after its original publication prompted me to finally pitch in my two cents.

I suspect that there's two main ways in which the main conclusion of the paper was greeted by researchers. On one side, people who still think of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in terms of a list of features that distinguish the UP from the MP (and by extension, modern humans from Neanderthals) probably clapped their hands excitedly before chiseling "sexual division of labor" into the stone tablet that bears the other commandments of modern human behavior. Nothing new under the sun here. On the other side, you have people who largely dismissed Kuhn and Stiner's argument by saying that it just doesn't jive with the paleoanthropological record, ethnographic analogy and/or common sense. Again, nothing too earth-shattering.

My own view doesn't really fall on a simple continuum between those two extremes. If someone held a pistol to my head and asked me to pick sides right there and then, I suppose I'd probably say I lean more towards this second pole (though if this situation really were to happen, I'd probably just say whatever the hell they wanted to hear!). However, if the same paleoanthropologically-inclined gun-toting individual was armed with, say, a musket (or any other weapon that would give yours truly a bit more time to talk), I would promptly qualify this statement by adding that, while it may not be congruent with all of the data we now have available, Kuhn and Stiner's paper is nonetheless quite an important contribution to studies of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition for two main reasons:

1) It bring together a wide range of archaeological data whose joint patterns previous synthetic treatments have been unable to account for convincingly. Admittedly, this is done at the expense of some of the finer details of the archaeological record (I think there's evidence Neanderthals exploited small game and plants, and that there's little evidences that modern humans engaged in substantially less close-range hunting), although this is perhaps unavoidable in any synthetic treatment of the evidence. However, it does propose a novel idea to account for some general patterns, although as John Hawks has pointed it is difficult to test empirically. The important thing here is to look at this as a new avenue of research, and not a paleoanthropological received truth to be accepted and repeated uncritically, a point unfortunately lost on the popular media.

2) Most importantly (and I think that's what Kuhn and Stiner were really going for), it forces researchers to come to grips with the idea that the Late Pleistocene archaeological record is now sufficiently well-known that we can and should be focusing on other questions than simply what techniques of tool manufacture hominins used, what their chronology was, what the oldest evidence for "behavior X" is, how hominins moved around and managed their resources, and what critters hominins were eating. These are all obviously critical questions (some that I tackle in my own work), but is there more to Paleolithic archaeology than this? According to that paper, yes. That Kuhn & Stiner tried to roll this specifically into the modern human origins debate, to which they have spent their whole career contributing, is perhaps best seen as secondary. On the other hand, it likely accounts for why the news outfits all latched on the "Stone Age feminism" angle - it's just too easy and speaks to contemporary issues almost more than it does about prehistoric life.

I was (and remain) a little surprised by the gusto with which some people reacted to this paper stressing that we might want to consider addressing social issues from a paleoanthropological standpoint (although I can understand that such reactions were mainly driven by empirical concerns). That idea is not exactly new, having been frequently presented and repackaged by researchers like Gamble (esp. Gamble 1999), sometimes on empirical bases much weaker than those invoked by Kuhn and Stiner (2006). Obviously, we must be careful not to get carried away in that direction and make sure that we can strongly link inference to hard data derived from archaeological research. However, given that we're dealing not only with prehistoric lifeways but with prehistoric people, I think there is a case to be made for looking at a new set of issues in contemporary paleoanthropology, although it is critically important that this work be as solidly anchored in the empirical record as possible. That peculiar vein of research may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it can be worth investigating, especially if we are to make Paleolithic research relevant to the broader world of hunter-gatherer anthropology.

References:

Gamble, C. 1999. The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Kuhn, S. L., and M. C. Stiner. 2006. What's a Mother to Do? The Division of Labor among Neandertals and Modern Humans in Eurasia. Current Anthropology 47:953-980.