Cannibalism at Krapina - or not!

The issue of Neanderthal cannibalism has a long history and a number of important behavioral implications, some of which I've already discussed in a prior post. Two sites are usually invoked to make the case for Neanderthal cannibalism, Moula-Guercy in France (Defleur et al. 1999), and Krapina, in Croatia. A good review of the abundant literature on Krapina up to 2006 is available freely in pdf format (Frayer 2006), should you be interested. Krapina is especially important because of the large number of highly fragmented Neanderthal remains (800+) that have been found there - indeed, the fragmentary nature of the remains has been intimately linked to the case for cannibalism, being often interpreted as evidence of bones being broken to get at the marrow they contained.

So it's with great interest that I saw a paper by Jörg Orschiedt (2008), in the latest issue of Quartär. It's in German, but the English abstract reads as follows:

The Krapina case – New results on the question of cannibalism of Neanderthals.

The human skeletal remains from Krapina / Croatia of almost 900 fragments have been considered for a long time as a proof of Neanderthal cannibalism. Although this opinion was frequently criticised, the fragmentary nature and traces of manipulations on the skeletal remains were mentioned as evidence. Several investigations resulted in contradicting interpretations whether the condition of the human remains are the result of burial activities or ritual cannibalism. The re-examination of the skeletal remains was carried out in order to put a closer look to the breakage patterns and the cut marks. The revision of the inventory of human remains shows that certain skeletal elements like the facial skeleton, skull base, hand- and foot bones as well as vertebrae are underrepresented or missing. It seems therefore unlikely that the bodies were buried in anatomical connection. The investigation also proved that the breakage patterns were not caused by human activity. Although several bones especially the long bone diaphysis, clavicles and pelvis fragments display breakage patterns related to perimortem breakage like spiral fractures, any kind of human activity is absent. In fact the breakage is related to sediment pressure, particularly to rock fall, and carnivore activities. Damage on bones caused by carnivore activity is well visible by bite marks on long bone fragments and on Cranium 3.Any detailed analysis of the cut marks is problematic, since the bones were covered with shellac. Therefore, the analysis by a scanning electron microscope did not yield any significant result. The study of the cut marks revealed serious doubt on their nature. The macroscopic investigation, however, showed that the traces are not consistent regarding their orientation and location with traces commonly related to disarticulation and dismemberment activities. Cut marks related to this kind of activity usually occur in areas of muscle attachments and joints. Several cut marks show evidence for a recent origin. The most striking evidence for this is found on a long bone splinter of a diaphysis. The cut marks located on this fragment cut through the “F” [for femur] written in ink of the bone. The shellac was added only later covering the bone. It seems possible in only two cases that cut marks on two scapulae were caused by dismembering activities. The well known Cranium 3 exhibits possible cut marks on the frontal bone, which might indicate skinning activities like the removal of the scalp. Nevertheless the position and the small size of the marks fail to prove such an activity. A ritual behaviour might be a possible explanation.

If this taphonomic analysis is correct, it certainly throws a sizable wrench into the argument for one of the most celebrated cases for Neanderthal cannibalism. The possible evidence for scalping is also very intriguing.

References:

Defleur, A., T. White, P. Valensi, L. Slimak, and É. Crégut-Bonnoure. 1999. Neanderthal Cannibalism at Moula-Guercy, Ardèche, France. Science 286:128-131.

Frayer, D. W. 2006. The Krapina Neandertals. A Comprehensive, Centennial, Illustrated Bibliography. Zagreb: Croatian Natural History Museum.

Orschiedt, J. 2008. Der Fall Krapina – Neue Ergebnisse zur Frage von Kannibalismus beim Neandertaler. Quartär 55:63-81. (with English abstract).

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.

Fear and loathing in the Pleistocene

There are a couple of interesting items on Neanderthals coming our way today, courtesy of the National Geographic. First is this short video that presents the contrasting views of I. Tattersall and J. Hawks on modern human-Neanderthal interactions:

Now, I'm sure it was unintentional, but this cracked me up: as the narrator announces "Today, it’s obvious who dominates the planet" and pauses, the video cues to a shot of John standing in the middle of Times Square(?), looking straight into the camera! And it's only fitting, really, considering the refreshing perspective Hawks brings to the debate over competition between the two hominin groups (transcripted by yours truly):

"It would be insane to go out and pick a fight. You’re not a military organization going in, looking to conquer. You’re a small group yourself. You sort of have to find a way to live with the locals and, as you do that, you learn from them to some extent. And the locals learn from you.

I feel like the defense attorney for the Neanderthals sometimes. I’m trying to see the ways that they overlap with us and trying to add complexity to the story because any story that involves things happening over a continent over thousands of years has got to be complicated."

Good little video, overall, though I was a bit aggravated by the conclusions narrated towards the end of the video: "Fossils are inconclusive, the answer lies in DNA." Well, no, actually. DNA provides some information, fossils provide other types of information and archaeology provides yet other information, all of which is necessary and complementary to reach an adequate understanding of this process. I hammer this a lot to my students and in my work, but it really cheapens the practice of physical anthropology and archaeology when they're considered only as icing on the interpretive cake of evolutionary genetics. Bones and stones (to simplify) are not just ancillary evidence: they're critically important sources of data that need to be accounted for fully as opposed to simply made to fit in the models derived from other disciplines. It's often all too tempting to grant greater weight to the conclusions of disciplines that are more directly grounded in the life sciences, but it's important to realize that they're also fraught with internal tensions and debates and wide-ranging differences in interpretation.

This ties in neatly with the second NG item, namely a report on a new reconstruction of a Neanderthal female. Here's a shot of this beauty:



But what you should really check out is the set of photos related to this reconstruction. Five pictures in, there's an especially great shot of the Neanderthal woman (nicknamed Wilma) thrusting a spear and sporting an extensive set of black tattoos on her back and upper chest. Now, why is this so neat (beyond being the closest thing to Neanderthal fetish/alterna-porn you're likely to ever see - I mean, it's a naked chick with tats and a weapon!)? Because the reconstruction is based on genetics, skeletal anatomy and archaeology. You have the genetics that have informed the artists about the likely hair and skin color of the Neanderthal. You have the skeletal morphology dictating the overall look and posture of the thing. And finally, you have the archaeology contributing some additional behavioral information. In this specific case, the reconstruction draws on discussions about the fact that Neanderthal females may have been integral to large game procurement strategies (i.e., no sexual division of labor) and on the fact that Neanderthals appear to have used manganese as a coloring material to on their skin. Kudos to the artists for artfully integrating all three lines of evidence!

Well, look at that...

Most of the feedback I've gotten about this blog over the past couple of years has been generally positive, thought most of it is usually qualified with formulas to the effect of "I don't know where you find the time" and "What concrete purpose does it serve?"

Well, over the summer, a commentary of mine came out in the journal Medical Hypotheses. It's entitled "Mad Neanderthal disease? Some comments on "A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction" (Riel-Salvatore 2008). Regular AVRPI readers might find that title sounds familiar, and they would be right. "Mad Neanderthal Disease?" was also the title of a post I wrote last winter in reaction to the publication of a paper by. S. Underdown (2008) and the considerable media buzz it generated.

After I wrote that post, a reader - who happened to agree with me - asked me what the point of posting this (and other things) only to the web was, since, in practice, my comments left no durable trace in 'The Literature' (y'know, the stuff that leaves a tangible papertrail). I've always said that I think of blogging first and foremost as a way of forcing myself to articulate first reactions to articles and newsreports that I read, and to engage a wider audience in debates over archaeology, anthropology, and other topics. This post was a case in point. I received several comments on it, including one that pointed me to a reference to Homo sapiens cannibalism/handling of the dead that I'd overlooked in my original post, and - very recently - another one that brought to my attention an old paper on a very similar model (Wolbarsht 1975) (in fact an extremely similar model, down to the virus, ethnographic comparisons, and mode of transmission).

So, having taken the time to write the post anyway, all I had to do was pull up the file that contains its text (I save all of my posts as individual text files, should Blogger ever decide to cancel this fair blog), add the missing ref, format it for length and style, write a short cover letter to the editor, log on the Medical Hypotheses online submission service, and voila!, a submitted paper. In all, it took maybe an extra hour of work. Funny thing is, had I not blogged about this, I don't think that I would have bothered to write a comment on the Underdown paper in the first place, probably reserving my thoughts for 'over beer' discussions with colleagues.

Arguably, this is not exactly a full-blown peer-reviewed publication. However, it goes to show two things: first, blogging is useful as a catalyst to write, engender debate and refine one's ideas. In my case, this is further demonstrated by another paper of mine (this one currently in press in a bona fide peer-reviewed archaeology journal) that incorporates edited passages of an earlier post; in this case too, the time that elapsed between my writing that post and my writing that academic paper (along with the discussion that post generated) was crucial in helping me develop ideas I originally put together over two years ago now. This ties into the second thing I want to say about blogging: it can have a very real, tangible academic output. Between converting/adapting/incoporating blog posts into 'proper' (or rather, standard) academic papers and helping one to develop thoughts without actually setting out to write in the formal, somewhat more rigid style and structure of an academic paper, blogging can certainly be a stimulus for one's academic output. And this, of course, is in addition to the benefits of making academic literature accessible to a larger public, providing a critical assessment of discoveries that are 'published' only through press releases (*cough*cultofthepython*cough*), and other benefits discussed by Hawks in a thoughtful post about two months ago (John, if you read this, congrats on the tenure, btw!).

Now, I'm not saying this will be true for everyone, and I'm definitely not saying that all my posts are 'papers in becoming' or inherently worthy of publication in peer-reviewed venues (far from it). However, I would argue that it is certainly not a waste of time that might have been devoted to other pursuits, which I think the rest of my academic and personal record demonstrate (this is in addition to the fact that it actually doesn't consume as much time as many people seem to think). Obviously, this approach means that I'm occasionally blogging about 'work in progress' and one might rightfully argue that this exposes me to a form of intellectual 'sniping.' But, beyond the fact that I don't think too many people would want to do that in the first place (especially with my position on some debates!), the beautiful thing about blogs is that everything is neatly chronicled online, with dates and all - if one adds to that the occasional mention of my posts by other bloggers, what this all amounts to is what I think is a fairly secure barrier against sniping, should I ever need one. Plus, most of these ideas I've already presented at meetings anyway, so it's not like they've been exactly secret!

References:

Riel-Salvatore, J. 2008. Mad Neanderthal disease? Some comments on "A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction." Medical Hypotheses 71:473-474.

Underdown, S. 2008. A potential role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies in Neanderthal extinction. Medical Hypotheses 71:4-7.

Wolbarsht, M. L. 1975. The Demese ef the Ne'enderthels: Wes Lengege E Fecter? Science 187:600-601.

Yours truly, rearranged!

Here are some anagrams (give or take a letter) of my name concocted by some of the students who took my Human Evolution class this past summer.... and I just don't know what to make of this common theme:

"Jail, a volunteer's lie."

"Learn evil jail routes."

Jail? Evil? Lies?! Seriously?! My oh my... well, maybe the first two aren't that far off the mark, but I never imagined it'd be so transparent!

Luckily for me, there were also some francophones in the class:

"Je rase le lutin ravi." (English: "I shave the delighted imp.")

... hmmm, on second thought, I really don't know how I feel about that one either!

Carnival!

While I'm running around and posting this belatedly, I nonetheless want to encourage you to take the time to sit back and enjoy as you sip heartily the dark anthropological nectar pouring out of A Hot Cup of Joe for the latest installment of Four Stone Hearth. I'm a bit late to the parade, but better late than never!

Funding culture in Italy

The New York Times has an excellent article summarizing a range of reactions to the decision of the Berlusconi government to allocate only 0.28% of its budget to the Ministry of Culture, which oversees, among other things, the maintenance and development of museums, as well as a sizable fraction of archaeological research in Italy. That's for all archaeology in Italy... with its wealth of Roman and other Classical cultures, I shudder to think how little of even that 0.28% will go to prehistory.

This opening excerpt, about the Pigorini Museum (one of the most important ones in Italy for ethnography and prehistory) wrenched my heart:

On some days visitors to the Luigi Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography here may find its director in the front booth handing out entrance tickets. It’s not a meet-and-greet situation: The museum is chronically understaffed.

In recent weeks museumgoers have tended to speed past the glass-encased artifacts from Oceania and Asia or skim Homo’s evolution to sapiens. They can’t afford to tarry. The Pigorini has no money for air-conditioning, and the Roman sun is merciless.

“We barely have enough money to keep the lights on, or pay for a cleaning staff,” said Vito Lattanzi, director of educational services and of the Mediterranean collections at the museum, which is also a research institute. The custodial staff has been pared down to 11 from 30. Ten years ago there were eight to a shift; now there are four, and in most cases two are volunteers.

The article also does a very good job exploring the reasons behind the disinterest in private donation to support much cultural research in the peninsula, and the tensions about the perception of the need for private funding within the cultural world. Definitely worth a thorough read.

The unbearable lightness of the Paleoltihic record

Whenever I read a report like this one, on the recovery of organic Neolithic artifacts including a birch bark quiver, a wooden bow and parts of leather pants (oh yeah!!), I can't help but to wonder how little we actually know about the richness of the material culture of earlier periods of prehistory.

Preservation bias has a lot to do with why so much Paleolithic archaoelogy is focused on the study of chipped stone technology. And whenever people get too carried with studying stone tools (yes, I've been told that this is possible...), I always like to dredge up this quote about the Wola of Papua-New Guinea:

"While lithics form a unique source for studying prehistory, among the Wolachert is only one among 255 types of raw material. Stone may not have been as significant to the user as it is to archaeologists... Clues to the relative importance of stone lie in a detailed understanding of the local resource base, evidence for subsistence strategies and the types of tools found." (Sillitoe and Hardy 2003:563).

Reference:

Sillitoe P., and K. Hardy.2003. Living Lithics: Ethnography and archaeology in Highland Papua New Guinea. Antiquity 77, 297:555-566.

Surveying surveys

The most recent Project Gallery in Antiquity contains a set of three reports of new Paleolithic surface assemblages from Greece (Mortensen 2008), Iran (Jamialahmadi et al. 2008) and India (Chauan and Patnaik 2008). Mortensen presents a small lithic assemblage form the locality of Loutró, on the southern coast of Crete, which he attributes to the Lower or early Middle Paleolithic on typological grounds (note: all pictures are from the reports which I discuss sequentially in this post).

While he recognizes that a representative sample of artifacts from Loutró will only be collected through a systematic survey of the locality and the gully around it, Mortensen claims that this “might suggest that the first humans reached the island across the sea from Libya. That an early contact between northern Africa and southern Europe existed already during the Palaeolithic periods is a hypothesis now supported by most scholars.” I actually don’t think this is a widely held view, but – if these artifacts can be considered creadible – they do suggest that islands such as Crete might have been settled comparatively early on. Only time will tell.

Jamialahmadi et al. (2008) present some very preliminary results of a survey they conducted in northeast Iran to assess the abundance of its Paleolithic record. In this case, they identified 15 artifact-bearing localities near the Kashafrud and Jamrud rivers, at least two of which (Ghaleh-Gak and Polgazi) have yielded artifacts that, on typological grounds, appear Lower or Middle Paleolithic in age.

They conclude that this survey “revealed the great potential of north-eastern Iran in general and of the river Kashafrud in particular for Palaeolithic studies. Sporadic Palaeolithic finds in this region and neighbouring areas (Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) support the hypothesis that the region delimited today by the geographical boundaries of Iran has been used repeatedly in the Pleistocene period as a migratory pathway linking East with West.” Again, I’m not necessarily convinced that sporadic finds are necessarily indicative of a repeatedly used interregional human corridor, but the data are certainly suggestive of early human presence in those areas as well.

Chauan and Patnaik (2008) also report on preliminary findings of a survey in the Narmada Basin, in India. In this case, the intent of the survey is to obtain contextual information for the taxonomically and chronologically ambiguous. In contrast to the other two reports discussed here, this project “includes systematic surveys, documentation and collection of various types of specimens for geological, palynological and lithic analyses.” In other words, it should yield a representative sample of what is to be found along the Middle Narmada, and in fact “A long-term objective is to map localities using GIS for reference purpose and predictive modelling. It is clear that habitation probably occurred along the peripheral zones, closer to the Vindhyan Hills rather than in the vicinity of the main channel of the Narmada River.” Predictive modeling is basically highlighting which contextual factors (e.g., sediments, distance to river, slope, etc.) are most often associated with archaeological sites, to then target similar deposits in order to maximize the likelihood of finding sites – if this proves fruitful, some general patterns of human behavior can also begin to be outlined for the timespans under consideration here, once again the Lower and early Middle Paleolithic.

The Narmada survey also explicitly focuses on the collection of other types of archaeological evidence, including notably animal bones and dating samples.

From my perspective, this is an interesting set of reports because it illustrates well different manners in which archaeological sites all belonging to the same general periods can be encountered, a topic which we’re about to discuss in my Archaeological Methods class this term. The Loukó finds apparently represent a chance encounter, while the other two projects are bona fide surveys. Only the Narmada project appears to be systematic, however, meaning that it is organized according to regularly spaced/defined spatial units, some of which are then selected for thorough inspection to form a statistically representative sample of the region as a whole. In contrast the Iranian project appears to be a combination of a systematic and survey and chance encounters: you have an area that has reported archaeological potential, which limits your survey area, but within it, sites are encountered as one goes. My point here is not to critique the various strategies used in the identification of these three reports, but rather to emphasize how very different approaches have the potential to increase our knowledge of the archaeological record, albeit in very distinct ways.

References:

Chauhan, P. R., and R. Patnaik. 2008. The Narmada Basin Palaeoanthropology Project in central India. Antiquity 82(317): http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/chauhan/index.html.

Jamialahmadi, M., H. Vahdati Nasab, and H. Fazeli Nashli. 2008. Kashafrud revisited: discovery of new Palaeolithic sites in north-eastern Iran. Antiquity 82(317): http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/nasab/index.html.

Mortensen, P. 2008. Lower to Middle Palaeolithic artefacts from Loutró on the south coast of Crete. Antiquity 82(317): http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/mortensen/index.html.

Read 'em up! New Four Stone Hearth

It's that time again... there's a new installment of the Four Stone Hearth over at Tangled Up in Blue Guy. It's the "layman edition" so even if you don't do much anthropology, you've got no excuse to not check it out...

Where have I been?

Due to the prolonged period of silence on this blog, some of you might have begun to think that I've been hiding in a deep hole these past few months...


... and you wouldn't have been completely wrong! Now that I've managed to climb out, however, stay tuned for some new posts as this new academic year revs up!

Think Indiana Jones - in a dumpster!

MSNBC has a feature on the "10 worst jobs in science" available online. And lo and behold, an archaeological subfield made the cut:

No. 4: Garbologist


Think Indiana Jones—in a Dumpster


Archaeologists usually pick through ancient garbage. But William Rathje of Stanford University won't wait. Since 1973 the self-termed "garbologist" has sifted through at least 250,000 pounds of refuse to analyze modern consumption patterns and how quickly waste breaks down. He typically drills 15 to 20 "wells" to the bottom of a landfill, some 90 feet deep, and pulls 20 to 30 tons of material from each well, which he and his students then catalog. What he's learned: Dirty diapers make up less than 2 percent of landfills, while paper accounts for 45 percent. Hot dogs can last up to 24 years in a dump, and there is a correlation between cat ownership (litter) and National Enquirer readers (discarded copies). Rathje looks at other trash, too. One project involved scouring garbage cans in Tucson, Arizona, cataloging candy wrappers and used dental floss, toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes to compare survey claims about dental health with reality. The conclusion: There's far more junk out there than ways to get it off your teeth.

It comes in right behind elephant vasectomist, hazmat diver and... oceanographer?!

The Paleolithic of the Middle East

If you're interested in the Paleolithic archaeology of the Middle East and surrounding regions, I'd like to point you towards the web site of a recent conference that addressed specifically that topic. The symposium was entitled "The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in the Middle East and Neighbouring Regions" and was hosted by the Institute for Prehistory and Archaeological Science of the University of Basel (Switzerland). The program and abstracts are available online and emphasize the range of interesting research that is currently going on in that part of the world.

Hat tip: F. Biglari.

Why I should watch less TV...

By chance, I caught the last segment of last night’s installment of “The Hour” on CBC, where one of the guests was Ben Stein promoting his recent anti-evolution movie Expelled. When I’ve watched it, I’ve generally liked “The Hour” and the irreverent tone struck by its host, George Stroumboulopoulos. But what I saw yesterday was a real let-down, I have to say. There were essentially no substantive questions about anything in the movie and what the basis is for the latest mouture of creationism, so-called intelligent design. Given Stroumboulopoulos’ penchant for pop culture references, I at least expected some pointed questions about how the film illegally used clips of songs by John Lennon and The Killers, but nope, not even that! And, in contrast to the notion that the movie’s been well-received in the US, check out a compilation of reviews of it on Rotten Tomatoes - less than stellar, especially if you compare it to other movies released on the same day, and to other documentaries.

Instead, the interview consisted of softball questions, and really focused on Stein’s status as a minor pop culture reference. This is perhaps not surprising given the show’s generally chummy attitude towards its guests (which is nice, overall, don’t get me wrong), but still. That’s not an absolution from asking questions that actually matter and objectively addressing an ongoing controversy. Anyway, in the few minutes of the interview actually devoted to the film, Stein was allowed to spout off nonsense about how evolutionary theory (what he calls ‘Darwinism’) is directly linked to the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, how there is ample evidence that everything in the universe is intelligently designed, and how people who espouse this newfangled form of creationism (recognized as such as a result of the Dover trial) have systematically been booted from academic positions because of that belief.

The 4-5 minutes devoted to the film were so dizzyingly choke-full of disinformation and outright lies about evolutionary theory that it’s hard to know where to start. Frankly, I was embarrassed that such a concentrate of lies was allowed to be shown on the English-language version of Canada’s national public broadcaster. To show just how warped Stein’s understanding of science is, let me just us emphasize here that he has recently stated that “science leads to killing people.” Really? Science has nothing good to offer? In contrast, to him, religion just leads to a very glorious place – as we all know, there are no documented instances of religion leading to killing people…

Since the movie isn’t, as far as I know, distributed in Canada (and certainly not in Montréal), let me just point interested readers to the Expelled Exposed website (created by the US National Center for National Education), since it contains a wealth of information that directly address, correct and refute the many, many of the incorrect claims that constitute the backbone of this film. You might also want to watch this video on YouTube to get an idea of the rest of Stein's ideas in this day and age.

This is kinda cool...

Nothing at all to do with anthropology/archaeology, but this is a pretty cool idea: This UK band (The Get Out Clause) was kinda strapped for cash when time came around to make a video for their first single. So what did they do? They stood in front of ca. 80 CCTV cameras located in various public locations around Manchester and played out the song. Then, they requested the footage, using a clause in the Data Information Act that grants people access to such footage, did a few nips, tucks, and cobbles (and apparently interspersed a couple other shots of their own - the stuff that doesn't have id info at the bottom), and voilà, a videoclip. The song itself leaves me neither hot nor cold (well maybe just a bit more hot than cold), but it's a neat idea and an equally neat, if backhanded, commentary about the increasing surveillance our lives are being subjected to. Kind of old news, based on when this was posted to the YouTube, but good stuff nonetheless!

Four Stone Hearth #40 @ Remote Central

The new Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is up now, and you can get to it by clicking here! It's being hosted by Tim Jones at Remote Central, and if the anthro bug bites ya in the next two weeks, feel free to submit an entry by stopping by the FHS web page!

New pierced shells from Grotte des Pigeons

From: http://www.minculture.gov.ma/Images/Taforalt1.jpg

It appears, that they have found yet more pierced Nassarius gibbosulus shells in Grotte des Pigeons (near Taforalt, Morocco) during excavation conducted in March and April 2008. That would be 20 more shells, to be precise, which may be as old as 85,000 years BP, or slightly older than the ones Bouzouggar et al. (2007) published last year.

From: http://www.minculture.gov.ma/Images/Taforalt02.jpg

From the news report:

In 2007, Bouzouggar and Barton discovered 14 perforated shells in the same cave.

"This discovery shows that the making and use of objects of finery is very anchored in the traditions of Morocco's prehistoric people," said Bouzouggar, in whose opinion the country is the original centre of artistic and symbolic creation.

Objects of finery discovered in Morocco are "now considered to be even more ancient than those discovered in Algeria, South Africa and in Palestine", said the culture ministry.

Well, I don't know that these new finds do anything to establish that the practice of piercing and wearing shells is older in Morocco than it is at Skhul (ca. 100-135kya), but we can't say without seeing more information on the finds. From what I gather from a press release by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture (in French), this claim may be based on an assessment that the two shells from Skuhl cave (which I talked about here) "are difficult to date due to uncertainties about the context in which they were found," in part because they were recovered so long ago, in the 1930's. If you buy this, then the earliest shell beads would, in fact, be from Morocco.

The burials of five children dated to at least 12kya were also apparently found during the same field season. The children's remains were covered in ochre, buried under stone blocks with animal bones. Can't wait to hear more about these finds!

Paglicci Cave in risk of collapse

Terrible news from Italy, where a section of the the exterior wall of Paglicci Cave (aka Grotta Paglicci, whose Gravettian and Aurignacian assemblages I discussed previously) has collapsed, thus threatening the integrity of the cave as a whole:

The report includes some comments by Annamaria Ronchitelli and Vincenzo Pazienza:

President of the Paglicci Study Centre, Vincenzo Pazienza, made an urgent appeal to incoming premier Silvio Berlusconi and Puglia region president Nichi Vendola for funds to secure the cave after a section of its exterior wall collapsed on Tuesday.

''It's extremely important to safeguard the cave for research to proceed: if the wall collapses completely it will obstruct the entrance to the grotto,'' he said.

His plea was backed by Annamaria Ronchitelli of Siena University, who leads a team that has worked in the cave for the last 40 years.

''If we're going to continue excavations in the cave, the structure needs to be safe and and we need to guarantee that the archaeologists will be unharmed,'' she said.

I hope the responsible authorities find a way to intervene and stabilize the cave as soon as possible, as it is, quite literally, the only one of its kind in Italy. Beyond having yielded several Paleolithic burials (some of whom have yielded some of the earliest modern human DNA samples), the site is among a handful in Italy to have yielded parietal art. In addition of that, it has yielded the oldest dated proto-Aurignacian assemblage in southern Italy, part of a nearly continuous sequence of archaeological remains spanning the Late Pleistocene, and very probably more. Here's a video of the cave (in Italian) which shows the cave, along with the stratigraphy and footage of excavations at the site, including the uncovering of one of the Gravettian burial.

It'd certainly provide a golden opportunity for Berlusconi to endear himself to archaeologists, were he to promptly intervene in this matter. I'll be sure to keep readers updated with any developments on this story.

Other links:

"Per la grotta dei graffiti imminente rischio di crollo" - La Repubblica, newsreport with a bit more on the history of safety issues at the cave.

"Stone Age cave risks collapse" - Life in Italy

"Historic Italian cave may collapse" - United Press International

"Historic Italian cave may collapse" - Daily India.com

Pod Mrcaru - High Rates of Selective Change in Italian Wall Lizards

In class today, I referred to a recent report on very fast rates of evolution in allochtonous Italian wall lizards (Podarcis sicula) introduced from a neighboring island to the Croatian island of Pod Mrcaru in 1971. It appears that, on top of outcompeting the indigenous lizard population, they have undergone extremely rapid morphological change in less than 40 years, evolving new gut adaptation (i.e., cecal valves, to slow down the passage of food through the gut, to favor digestion of plant matter) and a squatter, more robust skull better suited to chewing plants, which constitute the main source of lizard food on the island. The report, perhaps a bit exaggeratedly, refers to this as "fast track evolution."

The rapid physical evolution also sparked changes in the lizard's social and behavioral structure, he said. For one, the plentiful food sources allowed for easier reproduction and a denser population.

The lizard also dropped some of its territorial defenses, the authors concluded.

Such physical transformation in just 30 lizard generations takes evolution to a whole new level, Irschick said.

It would be akin to humans evolving and growing a new appendix in several hundred years, he said.

"That's unparalleled. What's most important is how fast this is," he said.

Neat stuff. The report includes some cautionary statements by a McGill biology professor (Andrew Hendry), but overall's he seems on board with the gist of the study. The article version of the study can be found by clicking here, and some good comments were provided on several blogs, including Pharyngula and GrrrlScientist.

Welcome ANTH 203C: Human Evolution!

I've started teaching the summer installment of our introductory "Human Evolution" course today, and might thus be shifting the focus of AVRPI some for the coming weeks to deal more with general issues in human evolution and evolutionary theory. If you've come here from the 203C WebCT, welcome and feel free to explore a bit!

From the Comments: More NESPOS

I recently received the following update from Marcel Bradtmöller, one of the people involved in NESPOS, which I had blogged about a few months back:

... since January we had run a lot of modifications on the Open Space of NESPOS so everyone can get a clearer view, of the inside of the project. For students the costs are really low (30€ per year) and you get the software suite for free.
If you get interested, feel free to contact us under info@nespos.org.

The site is indeed updated and looks like an even more useful resource. You can get yourself there by clicking here!

All You Ever Wanted to Know about Grotte des Fées de Châtelperron.... Almost

The latest issue of PaleoAnthropology is out, and it's a good one... it contains not one, not two but three papers about whether or not claims that there is an Aurignacian-Châtelperronian interstratification at Grotte des Fées de Châtelperron (Gravina et al. 2005, Mellars et al. 2007), the type-site of the Châtelperronian technocomplex. Since PaleoAnthropology is an open-access journal, all these papers are available as freely downloadable PDFs, along with another one and several book reviews, including one by yours truly.

The first is a long and detailed paper by Zilhão and colleagues that builds on their prior short rebuttal of Gravina et al.'s case (Zilhão et al. 2006) . In this new publication, they provide a detailed history of research at the site, an in-depth assessment of the stratigraphy documented at the site by prior researchers, as well as a review of the archaeological material recovered from both the Châtelperronian and the Mousterian deposits at the site (Zilhão et al. 2008a). This is accompanied by a reply by Mellars and Gravina (2008), in which they criticize what they consider to be Zilhão et al.'s unnecessarily complex and convoluted arguments against the presence of an interstratification. The series concludes with a reply by Zilhao et al. (2008b) entitled "Like Hobbes' Chimney Birds" in which they accuse Mellars and Gravina of not paying sufficient attention to the substance of the arguments which they raised in their refutation of the interstratification thesis at Grotte des Fées de Châtelperron.

I've been doing more thinking about this issue lately myself, so I'll probably have more to say about these papers in short order. In any case, mark my words when I say that this will not be the last exchange about this issue, especially since the wording of all three papers leaves no doubt about the unfortunately unsurprising fact that neither camp has been swayed by the other's arguments. While there are other ways of looking at the relevant data, these papers focus on the 'nitty gritty' of identifying relevant artifacts and their position within the deposits. Not that there's anything wrong with that, quite the opposite, but at this point of the debate it might also be important to start thinking a bit more about how to actually identify interstratifications 9so people can agree on the baseline criteria necessary to define them) and, if they do exist, what they might mean beyond the fact that people making different artifacts were occupying the same spots over timespans of several thousand years. I've already blogged about some of these issues before (and also here), but there definitely remains much to be done on that front.

References:

Gravina, B., Mellars, P., and Bronk Ramsey, C. 2005. Radiocarbon dating of interstratified Neanderthal and early modern human occupations at the Chatelperronian type-site. Nature 438: 51–56.

Mellars, P.A., Gravina, B., and Bronk Ramsey, C. 2007. Confirmation of Neanderthal/modern human interstratification at the Chatelperronian type-site. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104: 3657–3662.

Mellars, Paul, and Brad Gravina. 2008. Châtelperron: Theoretical Agendas, Archaeological Facts, and Diversionary Smoke-Screens. PaleoAnthropology 2008: 43-64.

Zilhão J., d’Errico, F., Bordes, J.-G., Lenoble, A., Texier, J.-P., and Rigaud, J.-Ph. 2006. Analysis of Aurignacian interstratification at the Châtelperronian-type site and implications for the behavioral modernity of Neandertals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103: 12643–12648.

Zilhão, João, Francesco d'Errico, Jean-Guillaume Bordes, Arnaud Lenoble, Jean-Pierre Texier, and Jean-Philippe Rigaud. 2008a. Grotte des Fées (Châtelperron): History of Research, Stratigraphy, Dating, and Archaeology of the Châtelperronean Type-Site.
PaleoAnthropology 2008: 1-42.

Zilhão, João, Francesco d'Errico, Jean-Guillaume Bordes, Arnaud Lenoble, Jean-Pierre Texier, and Jean-Philippe Rigaud. 2008b. Like Hobbes' Chimney Birds PaleoAnthropology 2008: 65-67.

Paleo Round-Up - April 25 2008

The adrenaline rush that's kept me going through the past two weeks has finally subsided after a few full nights of sleep, and I can now return to the business of talking about paleo things! So, without further ado, here's a round-up of paleo goodness on the blogs these days:

• First, let me point you belatedly to the latest edition of the Four Stone Hearth, hosted at Hominin Dental Anthropology. It's overflowing with anthropological delights, so definitely swing by and check it out. The next edition will be hosted by the one and only Tim Jones at Remote Central.
  
• Another festival of interest is the Boneyard, hosted this time around at Archaeozoology. Even more paleo-goodness to sink your teeth in (shoulda made that joke with respect to Hominin Dental Anthropology...).

• Alex at Anthrosite Blog regales us with posts on papers by Tyler Faith, ahem, J. Tyler Faith on MSA and LSA faunal exploitation patterns and by Hardy and colleagues on the use-wear of Aurignacian tools from Swabia.
  
• Hawks also discusses new images by Peter Brown that clearly show LB1 does not have a filling.

That's it for now! It's short, but there'll be more soon!

An archaeologist's astronaut's best friend?

I'm talking, of course about duct tape, also known as "American Tape" in some of the localities where I worked a few years back! Duct tape is truly wonderful for so many purposes in the field, from patching up boots that are on their last leg (eh!) to sealing sample tubes to holding together dead-ish stadia rods and trowels (all true stories!).

Well, it turns out, other scientists have been making good use of duct tape for years... in outer space!

Paleo Round-Up - April 17 2008

It's been a hectic week, with not nearly enough time to post about all sorts of neat paleo news. In the interest of time, here's a brief run-down of good stories you should absolutely check out:

• John Hawks discusses reports that the type fossil of Homo floresiensis might show evidence of dental work, which would argue strongly against it representing an 18ky fossil, let alone another species. In another post, he also addresses a recent paper that argues that the discovery that Neanderthals had a modern FOXP2 might be due to contamination.
• Alex offers some thoughts about the discovery of whale-bone tools in the Magdalenian deposits of Isturitz, located some 50-60km inland. It appears the whale bone was procured from beached carcasses, and that there were well developed exchange pathways between the Atlantic coast and the foothills of the Pyrenees.
• ArchaeoBlog presents a critical evaluation of a new paper by Braun et al. on the attrition of stone tools during carcass-processing tasks, and whether this leaves diagnostic traces on the bones themselves. The post is further informed by some of his own experimental work as a grad student (I especially enjoyed the "Hurry! The hyenas are at the top of the hill over there!" quote!).
• Martin also talks about the new FOXP2 study, as well as about new claims about the different vocal capacities of Neanderthals and modern humans, based on work by Robert McCarthy.
• Kambiz rips into the recent paper on diminutive humans from Palau published by berger and colleagues and assesses some of the claims presented by Rex Dalton on that case in a recent note in Nature.
• Finally, on a non-paleo note, if you like your rock brawny yet twangy, and if you live in the greater Montreal area, you most certainly should find yourself at Foufs next Tuesday, April 22, when the excellent Yesterday's Ring will be opening for Lucero. Good times to be had by all... punch and pie.
  

Now that's a field trip!

And now for a completely different kind of anthropological field trip...

Field trip brings college class to Nevada brothel.

Perhaps not the best venue to introduce students to the subtleties of participant observation!

Et c'est le but!!

Most of the people who know me will tell you that I'm generally not much of a sports fan. The two exceptions to this is when Italy plays in the World Cup and, as a true Montréalais, when the Canadiens are in the playoffs! So, you might have to bear with a bit of misplaced exuberance over the coming weeks, especially if last night's game is any indication. Yes, yes.

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

Somber Anniversary

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, in Baghdad. It bears reflecting today on what exactly enabled this shameful excoriation of the museum's most striking collections and how far anyone has actually come to the lofty promises of cultural self-affirmation that were bandied about five years ago... some of the AVRPI readership might be able to act on these reflections in a few months. In any case, the LA Times has a perceptive, if short, piece on the topic. I especially liked this quote:

...there are as many reasons to steal antiquities as there are people -- "money, lust, a misguided sense that they are preserving Iraqi culture . . . cultural hatred, heritage used as a weapon . . . every base or self-deceptive motive you can imagine."

Four Stone Hearth, Vol. 38: The Early Bird Special Edition

It's that time again, when anthropologically-inclined bloggers congregate around the Four Stone Hearth to exchange digital perspectives about the stones they've been kicking around lately. It was a close competition between an "Early Bird Special" and a "Death of a Blogger" edition, but since I had the whole enchilada ready one day early, the EBS theme took home the cup. So, in the interest of being early birdy (and special!), let's proceed without further ado:

• At Archaeolog, invited poster Cornelius Holtorf tackles the thorny issue of whether archaeologists really want to be associated with characters such as Indiana Jones and Lara Croft in "Hero! Real archaeology and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"(and why doesn't anyone ever mention Sydney Fox in these debates!?). In related news, an April 1 post at by Thadd at Archaeoporn breaks the news that the new Indiana Jones movie will accurately depict the practice of archaeology... serious reading, that!
• Shifting the focus from what archaeologists do to what the people they study did, Archaezoo reviews a recent paper about Upper Paleolithic horse hunters at Le Solutré that suggests that horse remains accumulated at that site as the result of hunters ambushing large numbers of migrating equids. Alex Steenhuyse of Anthrosite Blog also talks about Paleolithic hunting, in this case focusing on research on shifts in reindeer body part representation at Grotte XVI across the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition.
• In other 'humans killing critters' news, there has been a lot of blogging about the news that it appears that it was both climate and humans that jointly did the mammoths in. Various takes on the study are provided by Andrew Guerin at Artificial Habitat, Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net, and Greg Laden at Greg Laden's Blog.
  
• For something completely different, check out what Jeff Medkeff the Blue Collar Scientist has to say about non-peer-reviewed claims that the Sumerians observed and accurately documented an asteroid impact event at Köfels, Austria. In other odd book news, you should most certainly have a look at what John Hawks has to say about a recent book by Lynch and Granger in which they talk at length about the "amazing" Boskops!
  
• Over at Remote Central, you can find some of Terry Toohill's thoughts on "Human Evolution on Trial - Evolution." Still at Remote Central, Tim Jones also presents a summary of new information about the ongoing excavations at Stonehenge.
  
• In other excavation news, Martin Rundkvist of Aardvarchaeology (and originator of the Four Stone Hearth carnival!) reports on the "big honking hoard" found in a humble Iron Age burial.
• At Shared Symbolic Storage, Michael Pleyer reviews some of the papers presented at the Evolang 08 conference, and talks about the importance of spatial cognition and genetic transmission in contemporary research on linguistic evolution.
  
• Paul Wren of Wanna Be An Anthropologist illustrates a contemporary case of people creating a material record of their discard behaviors as he looks for cultural universals. The one he proposes is that all humans litter.
• At Archaeoporn, Thadd Nelson explores claims that people make to link archaeology and the supernatural, based on recent work reviewing Neolithic well digging.
• Mike Smith of Publishing Archaeology provides some comments about a new open access general anthropology journal, in which authors pay to publish, as well as on sloppy editing in some edited volumes.
• Over at Testimony of the Spade, Magnus Reuterdahl offers some thoughts on the "an ear for an ear" judgment that has been served against a Finnish tourist for damaging one of the Easter Island statues.
• Martin Cagliani (Mundo Neandertal) and Kris Hirst (Archaeology Blog) shoot the... errr, well, discuss the discovery of 'human remains' (literally) on the coast of Washington State that predate the Clovis culture found later in North America.
• At The Ideophone, Mark Dingemanse discusses "Migration Stories" and presents some thoughts about current perceptions of recent transcribed oral accounts of the Cushite past of the Mawu people of present-day Ghana.
• And to conclude this installment of Four Stone Hearth, Daniel Lende of Neuroanthropology offers two related and thought-provoking posts on Human Biology and Models for Obesity and on Culture and Inequality in the Obesity Debate.

Thanks again to everybody who sent links! The next Four Stone Hearth will be held in 15 days' time at Hominin Dental Anthropology! Be sure to send Jason some links!

Dollarware Archaeology

One of the nice things about being at McGill is the generally high caliber of our undergrads and the sheer enthusiasm of many of those interested in archaeology. This is shown, among other things, by the rather sophisticated papers some of them will write for certain classes.

One of the archaeology courses taught in the Dept. of Anthropology is "Archaeological Methods" (ANTH 357). This semester, the course was taught by my colleague Stephen Chrisomalis, who involved the students in an interesting spin on archaeological classification. In lieu of employing actual or replicated artifacts to familiarize them with this facet of archaeological practice, the students selected, handled and studied a few hundred examples items that are part and parcel of daily material culture in Montreal: dollar store coffee mugs (aka "dollarware"). While surprising at first glance, this choice of material culture is actually quite appropriate for several reasons. One of those is that is drives home the point that, during their use-life, artifacts were part of a living system of technological use. Another reason is that dollarware often combine multiple dimensions of analysis that archaeologists care about beyond the physical characteristics of an object, including style, iconography, composition and even writing systems.

Well, the "dollarware phase" of ANTH 357 is done for the semester and there is now a cool little web site put up by Stephen that contains all of the reports on the "collecion" produced by the students. It's really neat to see the various angles taken by different students in their studies! Go check it out and check out the papers to see how contemporary dollarware can be a good proxy through which to understand archaeological classification.

Help Save Lascaux!

One of the neater aspects of the Paleoanthropology Society meeting (more on that soon, no worries) was a the one-hour "Lascaux Video/Special Presentation" session on Tuesday night. It was organized by the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux and drew a fairly sizable crowd of folks interested in hearing about the status of the cave and ongoing efforts to preserve it as best as possible. The presentation included a video montage that detailed some of the recent degradation of the paintings (which I talked about in more detail previously)... that montage was really heart-wrenching, if you care about the site and rock art more generally. It really showed unambiguously the degree to which some paintings have deteriorated and/or been affected by fungus. A petition was circulated during the meeting to encourage the French government to take more serious steps to ensure that Lascaux's art is adequately protected. You can find an online version of the petition here, which doesn't (yet?) include the signatures collected at the meetings. Also, if you're interested in learning more about the committee and ongoing efforts to preserve the paintings, you should definitely visit their "Save Lascaux" web site.

Call for contributions - Four Stone Hearth #38

Back from the meetings in Vancouver, so back to teaching, back to writing, and back to posting. If you haven't already, you should most definitely check out the 37th installment of the Four Stone Hearth (Pulp SciFi Edition!) at Hot Cup of Joe. If this kinda stuff gets your gollies going, you should also most definitely consider submitting one of your own posts to me (julienrs at hotmail dot com), so they can be included in the 38th installment which will be hosted by yours truly here at A Very Remote Period Indeed. I've already gotten a few submissions, but in blogging as in experiencing new foods, more is always better!