The Combe Capelle burial is Holocene in age

So says this Past Horizons report. This is fairly important in that it joins a bunch of other modern Homo sapiens remain long thought to have been associated with the Aurignacian to recently have been directly dated and shown to be much more recent (Churchill and Smith 2000). One recent and well publicized case was that of the Vogelherd remains, which were redated to between 3.9-5kya as opposed to the 30+kya it was originally thought to date to (Conard et al. 2004).

In the case of Combe Capelle, the redating of the skeleton to ca. 9575BP (the report doesn't give the exact age range) is especially significant for two reasons. For one thing, it's one more blow to the idea that modern humans were in Europe from the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. For another thing, and perhaps most importantly, it conclusively dissociates this set of modern human bones from the Chatelperronian artifacts with which it was found. As I've argued before, who made the Chatelperronian is now hotly debated, and this new piece of the puzzle just makes the question even more intriguing.

Edit Also, check out this photo (included in the Past Horizons report) of Otto Hauser, who discovered the burial, posing with the remains themselves... you just don't see photos like that in paleoanthropology anymore!

© Wegner Archive

References:

Churchill SE, & Smith FH (2000). Makers of the early Aurignacian of Europe. American journal of physical anthropology, Suppl 31, 61-115 PMID: 11123838

Conard, N., Grootes, P., & Smith, F. (2004). Unexpectedly recent dates for human remains from Vogelherd Nature, 430 (6996), 198-201 DOI: 10.1038/nature02690

Independent Neanderthal Innovation - Some Additional Considerations

One of my upcoming papers (Riel-Salvatore 2010) was written-up in a series of mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times, the BBC, Discovery News, AOLNews, MSNBC and sundry others. The original, reproduced in Science Daily, was published under the headline "Neanderthals More Advanced Than Previously Thought: They Innovated, Adapted Like Modern Humans, Research Shows." In the original UC Denver press release, I'm quoted as saying, among other things, that this study helps 'rehabilitate' Neanderthals by showing that they were able to develop some of the accoutrements of behavioral modernity independent of any contact with modern humans. While I've caught a bit of flak from some friends and colleagues for that turn of phrase, I stand by my statement -this study helps to cast Neanderthals in a much more positive light than they have been for a long while now.

In any case, it's always exciting to see your work written-up, but also a bit daunting. In a few days, I'm going to try to put together a post on the whole 'going to the press' experience, but I figured I'd seize the opportunity to provide a bit more detail on the paper currently making the rounds in various news outlets, to clear up confusion and preemptively answer some of the questions it might raise. Here goes...


So,  what is it I did? The short answer: I showed that, among, other things, around 42,000 calendar years ago (ca. 36.5 radiocarbon years BP), a new culture (better, behavioral adaptation) - the Uluzzian - emerged in southern Italy and is widely believed to have been made by Neanderthals. The thing is, the Uluzzian is associated with bone tools, stone armatures likely used as part of composite projectile weapons, shell ornaments, coloring material (ochre, limonite), and possible evidence of small game exploitation. These features are all generally associated with modern human groups, not so much with Neanderthals. Because the timing of the origins of the Uluzzian matches that of the appearance of the Aurignacian generally attributed to modern humans, many people (e.g., Mellars 2005) have argued that the Uluzzian was the result of Neanderthals being acculturated by modern humans, and creating hybrid cultures that ultimately proved to be too little, too late for the Neanderthals.

Here's the rub, though: for acculturation to be a likely explanation, two conditions need to be met, proximity in time (i.e., they need to overlap in time) and proximity in space (they need to be found next to one another). As I show in the paper, for the Uluzzian, while proximity in time to the Aurignacian is established, proximity in space isn't. That's because when the earliest Aurignacian appears in northern Italy and the Uluzzian appears in southern Italy ca. 42,000 years ago, the center of the Italian peninsula is occupied by Neanderthals making the Mousterian tools they'd been making for over 100,000 years. So, in essence, you have a 'Mousterian buffer' (and a long-lasting one at that) between the regions where the Aurignacian and Uluzzian develop. If the acculturation scenario was right in this case, you would expect the Uluzzian to first spring up immediately next to where you find the Aurignacian. Since the condition of proximity in space is not satisfied, it is very unlikely that acculturation is the explanation for the origins of the Uluzzian.

Given that the Uluzzian is assumed to have been made by Neanderthals, this implies that Neanderthals developed it on their own, independent of modern human influence. If that's the case, though, a natural follow-up question is why the Uluzzian should emerge at the same time as you first see the Aurignacian implant itself in northern Italy. To answer this, in my view, you have to consider the ecology of that time period. To keep it short, it's one of the most climatically turbulent periods of the Late Pleistocene, which was climatically turbulent to begin with. In southern Italy, this translated into cooler, more arid conditions that stand in contrast to the Mediterranean scrub-woodland that characterized the region earlier. Given the suddenness with which conditions shifted between one and the other (there was a lot of fluctuation), people would have had to develop behavioral strategies that allowed them to cope with uncertainty so as to minimize the risk of not being able to find the resources they needed to survive. The Uluzzian seems to fit that description, what with stoneworking strategies that minimize production waste; new tools that would have allowed people to better hunt at a distance; mobility patterns that reflect a conscious effort to provision hospitable spots with resources they may have lacked; the exploitation of a wider range of animals; and the development of artifacts to ease social friction when other groups were encountered.

It's hard to establish with certainty a link between paleoenvironments and behavioral innovation. In fact, naysayers would probably point out that Neanderthals were perfectly able to survive shift of the magnitude of those documented ca. 42kya. That's true but it ignores the fact that what Neanderthals hadn't been faced with previously, however, is the close spacing at which these fluctuations started happening ca. 42kya (Finlayson and Carrion 2007) - that was something new, and something that would stress any population, setting the stage for a moment where technological innovation could have been selected for. Now, this is an interpretation based on correlation as opposed to causation; however, any explanation for the origins of the Uluzzian (and the Aurignacian in northern Italy for that matter) that doesn't at least take them into consideration is likely oversimplistic.

Overall then, what I'm proposing in this paper is that climatic instability selected for behavioral innovation, one manifestation of which was the Uluzzian in southern Italy. If Neanderthals are responsible for the Uluzzian, that means they reacted in very 'modern' ways to these conditions by developing some of the very same innovations that seem to have made modern humans so evolutionary successful in the long term.

On to the preemptive questions and answers to them...

OK, but the paper's 33 pages long, is that all you're saying?

The short answer to that is no. The paper is an effort to use niche construction theory (Odling-Smee et al. 2003) as a conceptual framework in paleoanthropology to yield new insights on how to best integrate behavioral, ecological and biological evidence. It's by using that approach, however, that I'm able to propose an alternative explanation for the emergence of the Uluzzian that accounts for its timing, the lack of spatial proximity to the Aurignacian, and the paleoecological evidence. Because it explains more of the evidence, I argue that it's a much more parsimonious explanation than any of the ones that have been proposed in the past, which mostly focus on social factors.

The main advantage of using NCT as a conceptual framework here is that it encourages people to move beyond the identification of single prime movers to explain the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition and the eventual disappearance of Neanderthals from the fossil record. Specifically, I argue that it's only by documenting the changing relationship between behavioral, ecological and biological dimensions of the record that we're likely to get at how this process really unfolded. In this case, I suggest that we can identify three phases of the transition interval, each of which is characterized by distinct dynamics between these three systems of inheritance, that are in part influenced by the interactions between them in earlier phases.

I get it... so is this the same mechanism that accounts for the origins of the Chatelperronian of the Franco-Cantabrian region?

Not exactly. The situation of the Chatelperronian, another 'transitional' industry attributed to Neanderthals and for many decades argued to be the result of their acculturation by modern humans, is slightly different. In that case, the condition of proximity in space is met. In other words, you find Chatelperronian sites in and next to regions where Aurignacian assemblages are found. What people like d'Errico and Zilhao have shown, however, is that the condition of proximity in time is not met, since the earliest Chatelperronian appears to predate the appearance of the Aurignacian in those regions by several thousand years (d'Errico et al. 1998, Zilhao 2006).

Therefore, while an origin independent of modern human influence can be postulated for both the Uluzzian and the Chatelperronian, the evidence for why this is the case is different in the two cases. For the Uluzzian, the reason is that, geographically, its only neighbors appear to have been Neanderthals. It is perhaps not surprising that a consideration of ecological conditions has come to the forefront in models for the development of these 'transitional' industries, which are called transitional, because they fall within the interval of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, starting some 45,000 years ago.

But wait! Aren't there reports of Uluzzian occupations in northern Italy? How does this affect your conclusions?

Peresani and colleagues have recently been making a case for an Uluzzian presence in level A3 and A4-I at Grotta di Fumane, in the Veneto region of NE Italy (Peresani 2008; Higham et al. 2009). I talk about Fumane briefly in the paper, but let me discuss it in a bit more depth here. These are intriguing data. I've seen the material described as Uluzzian presented at a conference but I'm still uncertain about how closely it compares to what is found in southern Italy, since I haven't had a chance to see a detailed typological and technological publication of these objects and since I don't feel right using figures/numbers based on ongoing analyses that I've only seen fleetingly during a talk. Chronologically, they'd fit right in, no question. But there are a number of possibly contemporaneous assemblages in northern Italy associated with some evidence bipolar technology and with backed knives that somewhat resemble Uluzzian crescents (e.g., La Fabbrica, Paina) but that otherwise more closely align themselves with Late Mousterian assemblages, notably La Fabbrica (Bietti and Negrino 2007). So for the time being, it's not really possible to exclude that the Fumane assemblages claimed to be Uluzzian belong to this distinctive Mousterian tradition.

That said, let's consider for a moment what it might mean if Fumane A3 and A 4-I were to be shown to be Uluzzian. For one thing, it doesn't invalid the gist of what I have argued, namely that the Uluzzian could very well be an independent development. That's because in this case, while the condition of spatial proximity would be met (i.e., there are Aurignacian assemblages in the vicinity), the condition for proximity in time wouldn't since the earliest Uluzzian (dated to about 43,000BP) predates any Aurignacian assemblage in the region by as much as 2,000 years (Higham et al. 2009). Furthermore, the Uluzzian in southern Italy lasts until almost 35,000 calibrated years BP, while it would seem to not last beyond 40,000 BP at Fumane. This raises the question of the relationship of the Uluzzian in the two regions, and why it isn't found at all in Central Italy. Could the Uluzzian have originated in northern Italy? If so, how did it reach southern Italy? One obvious explanation would be to argue that people with Uluzzian technology sprinted down the Northern Adriatic Plain exposed during OIS3. However, since that area is now under water, we're unlikely to ever be able to demonstrate this one way or the other. Additionally, it still doesn't explain why Central Italy wouldn't have been explored by these people. The argument that they stuck to the coast is pretty weak in light of the fact that in southern Italy, Uluzzian assemblages are found along the Western coast of the Salento peninsula in the Bay of Uluzzo, and in southwestern Italy, in the foothills of the Alburni Moutains.

One possible explanation is that the Uluzzian originated somewhere else and diffused both in northern and southern Italy from that original homeland. The assemblage from Level 5 at Klisoura Cave, Greece has been proposed as one such potential source of origin. There are two problems with this, however: First, technologically, Klisoura 5 is very different from the Uluzzian in southern Italy. Notably, it displays much less bipolar technology, an almost complete reliance on blade technology, many more microliths, and a different way of making microliths. Second, in light of new dates from Fumane, the timing might be a problem since the assemblages would be almost contemporaneous. Third, there is nothing even remotely resembling an Uluzzian assemblage between the Peloponnese and the Italian peninsula. On the basis of current evidence, then, there is little solid data on which to base a solid link between Level 5 at Klisoura and the Uluzzian as a whole (Papagianni 2009). If that's the case, there are currently no assemblages on which to base the notion of an extra-Italian origin of the Uluzzian.

I'll buy that. But if Neanderthals were so smart and able to innovate in the face of change, what happened to them and their Uluzzian culture?

That's a good question, and before I answer it, let me highlight a few things. First, the Uluzzian is by no means a flash in the pan... currently available dates indicate that it lasted some 7,000 years. If a generation lasts 20 years, that's 350 generation of 'Uluzzians' - that's a hell of a long time, if you think about it, almost as long as the entire Gravettian. That means that, just because it disappears doesn't mean that the Uluzzian wasn't a successful adaptation. So there's that. Second, what I propose in the paper is that the Uluzzian is ultimately supplanted by a series of assemblages that have traditionally been called 'proto-Aurignacian' (a label for the earliest Aurignacian along the Mediterranean coast), but that really bear little in common with 'proto-Aurignacian' assemblages from northern Italy. For one thing, the proto-Aurignacian is characterized by very high frequencies of retouched bladelets in their tool inventories. In fact, as I detail in the paper, formal tools in most proto-Aurignacian assemblages in northern Italy on average comprise about two-thirds retouched bladelets. "Proto-Aurignacian" assemblages in southern Italy, in contrast, comprise on average only about 25% of retouched bladelets. In fact the bladelet frequency of the most bladelet-rich southern assemblages doesn't even surpass that of the least bladelet-rich northern assemblage. In addition, southern Italian 'proto-Aurignacian' assemblages tend to be associated with proportionally more evidence of bipolar technology (an Uluzzian trait in the region). These observations suggest that whatever comes after the Uluzzian in southern Italy may not, in fact, be the same as the proto-Aurignacian in the north, but really more of an amalgam or a form of cultural 'middle ground' between the two traditions.

This means that the makers of the Uluzzian probably weren't dispatched by people making proto-Aurignacian technology. Rather, it seems they were probably absorbed in the growing population from the north that would have been slowly spreading southwards over many millennia. This 'incorporation' makes sense of both the archaeological record, fossil evidence that there was some interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals (Trinkaus et al. 2003), and recent genetic research that shows that Neanderthals contributed a small portion (1-4%) of modern non-African populations (Green et al. 2010).

I only see the dates you mention in support of your argument for a lack of geographical proximity graphed in Fig. 2. Are the raw dates available?

All of the dates used in Fig. 2 are already published (see Riel-Salvatore and Negrino 2009, Table 1), with the exception of a series of dates from Grotta del Cavallo. These are reported in my PhD dissertation (Riel-Salvatore 2007), which is available upon request. These new dates will soon be published in full with colleagues from the University of Siena. In the meantime, they're presented here in graphical form to underscore a point, but since they're not the central thesis of the paper, the raw dates are not included in the paper itself.

What about recent claims that the Chatelperronian wasn't made by Neanderthals? Do they have any impact on your conclusions? 

The short answer here is not directly. I'm the first one to admit that the fossil evidence for the 'transition interval' in Italy is extremely scant. The attribution of the proto-Aurignacian to modern humans is based on a couple of loose while the attribution of the Uluzzian to Neanderthals is based on three milk teeth from two layers in one site, Grotta del Cavallo. The only certainty seems to be for central Italy, where Neanderthal remains are associated with some of the Late Mousterian assemblages. In the past, the consensus view - no doubt in part informed by the Chatelperronian situation - has been that some of those teeth from Cavallo display some affinities to Neanderthals, in spite of the lowermost tooth originally having been described as more modern in appearance (Palma di Cesnola and Messeri 1967), although recent revisions suggest that it falls within the Neanderthal range (Churchill and Smith 2000).

Whatever the case may be, the fossil record is extremely thin here, and while people have traditionally been comfortable with the proto-Aurignacian = modern human and Uluzzian = Neanderthal equations, my own preference is to remain agnostic about who made what industry during the transition interval in the Italian peninsula (Riel-Salvatore 2009). However, because the generally accepted view is that the Uluzzian was made by Neanderthals, I've used it as an operating assumption in this new paper, even though I derive none of my hypotheses from that assumptions. In fact, I think that considering whoever made the Uluzzian first and foremost as foragers helps to avoid predetermining interpretations about what the Uluzzian was, how it came to be and how it disappeared.

That said, it's worth considering what the implications would be for my new paper of a modern human authorship. First, would it alter my main conclusion, that the Uluzzian was developed independent of proto-Aurignacian influence. Here, the answer is a clear no. Authorship has no fundamental impact on what the Uluzzian was. Even if it turned out to have been made by modern humans, it would seem to emerge in southern Italy independently of whatever was going on in the north at that time. The only wrench modern human authorship really would throw in my interpretation would relate to where those modern humans would have come from - in that case, people would probably start looking east towards Klisoura with renewed attention, but as I've detailed earlier, this is an unlikely source for the Uluzzian, unless we're willing to accept that modern humans diffused along the northern coast of the Mediterranean without a single defining industry. While not impossible, this scenario opens a whole new can of worms, though, because then you need to demonstrate the modern human authorship of everything between the Peloponnese and southern Italy, which would be no small feat.However, given that the homogeneity of most new cultures associated with modern humans during the transition is generally interpreted as a positive indication of their adaptability (Roebroeks and Corbey 2000), we'd then have to explain why this feature was not selected for in that specific region, and why/how the Uluzzian grew out of this strategy to last for several millennia. As a thought exercise, though, it is interesting to ponder the ramifications of what it might mean if the Uluzzian had been made by modern humans in the context of the traditional acculturation scenario, since Homo sapiens-Homo sapiens confrontation is not usually taken to be a feature of the transitions... (Riel-Salvatore 2009: 390-391)


OK, I'm posting this now so that it's available for interested readers to peruse in order to complement the press coverage this has been getting... if you have questions/comments, feel free to leave them below, and I'll answer them in short order... if they're substantive enough, I might even incorporate them in the list of questions comprised in this post!


References

Bietti, A. and F. Negrino. 2007. ‘‘Transitional’’ Industries from Neandertals to Anatomically Modern Humans in Continental Italy: Present State of Knowledge. In Transitions Great and Small: New Approaches to the Study of Early Upper Paleolithic ‘Transitional’ Industries in Western Eurasia, edited by J. Riel-Salvatore and G. A. Clark, pp. 41–59. Archaeopress, Oxford.

Churchill SE, & Smith FH (2000). Makers of the early Aurignacian of Europe. American journal of physical anthropology, Suppl 31, 61-115 PMID: 11123838

d'Errico, F., Zilhao, J., Julien, M., Baffier, D., & Pelegrin, J. (1998). Neanderthal Acculturation in Western Europe? A Critical Review of the Evidence and Its Interpretation Current Anthropology, 39 (S1) DOI: 10.1086/204689

FINLAYSON, C., & CARRION, J. (2007). Rapid ecological turnover and its impact on Neanderthal and other human populations Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 22 (4), 213-222 DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2007.02.001

Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M., Hansen, N., Durand, E., Malaspinas, A., Jensen, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Prufer, K., Meyer, M., Burbano, H., Good, J., Schultz, R., Aximu-Petri, A., Butthof, A., Hober, B., Hoffner, B., Siegemund, M., Weihmann, A., Nusbaum, C., Lander, E., Russ, C., Novod, N., Affourtit, J., Egholm, M., Verna, C., Rudan, P., Brajkovic, D., Kucan, Z., Gusic, I., Doronichev, V., Golovanova, L., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Schmitz, R., Johnson, P., Eichler, E., Falush, D., Birney, E., Mullikin, J., Slatkin, M., Nielsen, R., Kelso, J., Lachmann, M., Reich, D., & Paabo, S. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome Science, 328 (5979), 710-722 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021

Higham, T., Brock, F., Peresani, M., Broglio, A., Wood, R., & Douka, K. (2009). Problems with radiocarbon dating the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in Italy Quaternary Science Reviews, 28 (13-14), 1257-1267 DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.12.018

Mellars, P. (2005). The impossible coincidence. A single-species model for the origins of modern human behavior in Europe Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 14 (1), 12-27 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20037

Odling-Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N. & Feldman, M.W. 2003. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Monographs in Population Biology. 37. Princeton University Press.

Papagianni, D. 2009. Mediterranean southeastern Europe in the Late Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic: modern human route or Neanderthal refugium? In The Mediterranean Between 50-25,000 BP: Turning Points and New Directions, edited by M. Camps i Calbet and C. Szmidt, pp. 115-136. Oxbow, Oxford.

Peresani, M. (2008). A New Cultural Frontier for the Last Neanderthals: The Uluzzian in Northern Italy Current Anthropology, 49 (4), 725-731 DOI: 10.1086/588540

Riel-Salvatore, J. 2007. The Uluzzian and the Middle-Upper Paleolithic Transition in Southern Italy. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University, 351 pp.

Riel-Salvatore, J. 2009. What is a 'transitional' industry? The Uluzzian of southern Italy as a case study. In Sourcebook of Paleolithic Transitions, (M. Camps, P. Chauhan, eds.), pp. 377-396. Oxbow, Oxford. DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-76487-0_25.

Riel-Salvatore, J. (2010). A Niche Construction Perspective on the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition in Italy Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory DOI: 10.1007/s10816-010-9093-9

Riel-Salvatore, J. and F. Negrino. 2009. Early Upper Paleolithic Population Dynamics and Raw Material Procurement Patterns in Italy. In The Mediterranean Between 50-25,000 BP: Turning Points and New Directions, edited by M. Camps i Calbet and C. Szmidt, pp. 205–224. Oxbow, Oxford.

Roebroeks, W. and R. Corbey. 2000. Periodizations and double standards in the study of the Palaeolithic. In Hunters of the Golden Age (W. Roebroeks, M. Mussi, J. Svoboda and K. Fennema, eds.), pp. 77-86. Leiden University, Leiden.

Trinkaus, E. (2003). An early modern human from the Pestera cu Oase, Romania Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100 (20), 11231-11236 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2035108100

Zilhão, J. (2006). Neandertals and moderns mixed, and it matters Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 15 (5), 183-195 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20110

Paleolithic whodunnit: Who made the Chatelperronian?

The Chatelperronian is a lithic industry that springs up for several thousand years during the transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic industries. Its precise age is debated, but it clearly is associated with this interval. One of the reasons the Chatelperronian is the subject of so much debate is because, since the discovery of a Neanderthal in a Chatelperronian level at the site of
St. Césaire in 1978, it has widely been believed that Neandertals were the makers of this industry. This is important because up to that point, the Chatelperronian had been considered a true 'Upper Paleolithic' culture. Since the Upper Paleolithic had been thought to correspond to the arrival of modern Homo sapiens in Europe, the St. Cesaire discovery - and the association of Neanderthals with the Upper Paleolithic - meant that this association needed to be rethought. This has led to two main perspectives: those who see the Chatelperronian as an independent development by Neanderthals (d'Errico et al. 1998), and those who see the Chatelperronian as the result of the acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans (Mellars 2005). The key thing here is that, in spite of much acrimonious debate between the two perspectives, both fundamentally attribute the Chatelperronian (and other coeval 'transitional' industries like the Uluzzian and Szeletian) to Neanderthals.

This may be about to change. In a short paper in press in the Journal of Human Evolution, Bar-Yosef and Bordes (2010) question this fundamental association in light of a revision of the two sites on the Neanderthal-Chatelperronian association is based: Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure, and St. Césaire at La Roche à Pierrot, both in France. At Grotte du Renne, the authors suggest that the Neanderthal remains were incorporated into Chatelperronian deposits as a result of that layer's occupants digging into the Mousterian layer when they first settled into the cave. Thus, the Neanderthal bits would come from the Mousterian levels below. To them, such mixing is indicated by 1) the position of the remains (near the cave mouth) where dug up dirt would have been dumped, 2) the presence of a dug hearth indicating digging did take place, 3) a decrease in the number of teeth from the bottom to the top of the Chatelperronian levels, and 4) dicrepancies between radiocarbon dates and the stratigraphy of the late Mousterian and Chatelperronian layers.I think this is a fair argument, especially considering that the site was excavated prior to the establishment of the complete excavation methods used today, as the authors also underline.

At St. Césaire, where the the secondary burial of a Neanderhal was found in the Chatelperronian, Bar-Yosef and Bordes argue that the presence of distinct 'Mousterian' and 'Chatelperronian' components of the lithic industry and the fact that not all artifacts show a similar state of preservation suggest caution is needed before we can accept that it was not a mix of Mousterian and Chatelperronian levels. Because the burial is found in the upper (of two) Chatelperronian level, they argue that it was probably not deposited by occupants of the site anyway, implying that Neanderthals who did not make Chatelperronian tools might have buried one of their deceased at St. Césaire, perhaps in an effort to mark the site as theirs following the arrival of whoever made the Chatelperronian.

In my view, Bar-Yosef and Bordes' case is much stronger for Grotte du Renne than it is for St. Césaire, especially since bone refitting at St. Césaire has recently demonstrated that mixing between the Mousterian and the Chatelperronain was a negligible occurrence at the site (Morin et al. 2005). The need to invoke an explanation that doens't depend strictly on stratigraphic of artifactual data also weakens their overall argument. I say this because if their argument is followed to its logical end, it would mean that, even if you found that unheard of goody that would be a site containing only Chatelperronian layers and thus could exclude stratigrpahic mixing as an explanation, the presence of Neanderthal remains (or at least of a secondary Neanderthal burial) could still be explained away as a result of self-affirming Neanderthals claiming a stake to a given bit of territory. That's not to say that it's impossible, of course, and I will concede that the St. Césaire burial is the only relatively undisputed case of a Neanderthal secondary burial, so the practice was never common and who knows what it really might have meant, as the authors concede. Given that this is the case, though, you wouldn't expect a very unusual behavior to be the preferred manner in which Neanderthals would have marked their territories in the context of encounters with new groups of hominins.

In any case, Bar-Yosef and Bordes raise the specter that Neanderthals may not have been the makers of the Chatelperronian. They're circumspect in their conclusions of what this might mean, suggesting that archaeologists "should therefore start afresh, testing hypotheses about the hominins responsible for the formation of Chatelperronian contexts" rather than assume anything about their makers based on the potential unfounded assumption that they were Neanderthals. This is a view that I have a lot of sympathy for, having myself argued for the need for a similar perspective when interpreting the Uluzzian 'transitional' industry of southern Italy (Riel-Salvatore 2009, 2010 - go ahead, treat yourself and click, you'll find free pdfs). Ultimately, though, the revision proposed by Bar-Yosef and Bordes needs to be taken cautiously, especially as it concerns the St. Cesaire remains. One thing it doesn't do is associate the Chatelperronian with modern humans, though that's certainly one of the possible correlates of their paper, especially when they rail against 'continuity models' of human evolution in their conclusion. That said, if this revision and others like it have the beneficial result of getting people to carefully excavate and document new sites bearing 'transitional' assembalge, I'm all for them!


References:

Bar-Yosef, O., & Bordes, J.G. (2010). Who were the makers of the Châtelperronian culture? Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.06.009

d'Errico, F., Zilhao, J., Julien, M., Baffier, D., & Pelegrin, J. (1998). Neanderthal Acculturation in Western Europe? A Critical Review of the Evidence and Its Interpretation Current Anthropology, 39 (S1) DOI: 10.1086/204689

Mellars, P. (2005). The impossible coincidence. A single-species model for the origins of modern human behavior in Europe Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 14 (1), 12-27 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20037

Morin, E., Tsanova, T., Sirakov, N., Rendu, W., Mallye, J., & Lévêque, F. (2005). Bone refits in stratified deposits: testing the chronological grain at Saint-Césaire Journal of Archaeological Science, 32 (7), 1083-1098 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.02.009

Riel-Salvatore, J. (2010). A Niche Construction Perspective on the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition in Italy Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory DOI: 10.1007/s10816-010-9093-9

Neanderthals'r'us?

By now, unless you live under a rock, you should have heard the news: New genetic studies indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans likely interbred:

Among the findings, published in the May 7 issue of Science, is evidence that shortly after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them interbred with Neanderthals, leaving bits of Neanderthal DNA sequences scattered through the genomes of present-day non-Africans.

"We can now say that, in all probability, there was gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans," said the paper's first author, Richard E. (Ed) Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The results of the study have been published in two papers in the last issue of Science (Green et al. 2010, Burbano et al. 2010 - both free access), where you can also find a free online feature. that provides some context to the public unfamiliar with genetics and/or Neanderthals To get a better idea of the significance and the nuts and bolts of this new work, you must, must go over to John Hawks' blog for a very thorough discussion. I largely agree with his take on the reports and what they mean, but as I've argued elsewhere, we need to reconcile the genetics with the fossil, and especially the archaeological records. Just as there was a great deal of well-founded skepticism by some about 'X woman' a few weeks ago (something which I've been meaning to write about and hopefully will get to relatively soon), people need to come to grips with all of the available data, as opposed to considering one line of evidence as trumping all others. In other words, it's not because some people wear lab coats that their data by definition trump all other!

In practical terms, I think this means that you will see a lot of people more sympathetic to a replacement position start arguing just that, that you need to reconcile these new genetic data with previous data that seemed to strongly support such a position (just how strongly is debatable, but besides the point here). Specifically, I think you'll see these people focus on caveats of genetic studies like they never have before, and latch on to less parsimonious explanations of the genetics as 'something that needs to be considered seriously' (in this case, though, the alternative interpretation is so much less parsimonious as to be untenable). Fundamentally, of course, there's nothing wrong with that; in fact, it's something I've argued for repeatedly both on this blog and in press (link to a free pdf on the Uluzzian). The key difference is that if people on both ends of the spectrum will (hopefully) begin playing by the same general rules.

Now, does this mean that it's time to do the Neanderthal victory dance (to quote Hawks) and to begin re-imagining the caves of Late Pleistocene Europe throbbing to the sweet rhythms of Barry White and Marvin Gaye? Well yes and no. Yes, there is no some fairly conclusive evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred and yielded fertile offspring - this means that, from a purely biological standpoint, the two were part of the same species, Homo sapiens. But no, it does not directly answer the question of how and why Neanderthals ultimately disappeared. And also, NO!, "Let's get it on" is not now a sufficient way of thinking about the relationships between Neanderthals and early modern humans!

That said, in my opinion, the two papers papers (Greene et al. 2010; Burbano et al. 2010) have the potential to considerably change how Neanderthals are discussed, both in terms of how people approach the data and how the data is interpreted, which are slightly different things. First, the people, namely researchers involved in modern human origins research. For one thing, as I mentioned above, you're likely going to hear much more frequent calls to consider all the evidence available and how it agrees/disagrees. On the other, in order to best incorporate all the relevant data in interpretations, the debate should shift away from 'one size fits all' interpretations to interpretations that are more regional in scale. Whether or not any of this actually happens is another story, but these papers definitely have the potential of serving as game changers in the modern human origins debate.

What I find most exciting about the Green et al. (2010) study is that it provides a strong boost for the importance of archaeological evidence plays in understanding the process by which Neanderthals disappear. Quite simply, this is because the genetic data and the skeletal evidence (Trinkaus 2007) now both converge to show some significant degree of biological interaction between the two homminin populations. The thing is, genetics and physical anthropology informing us about the fact that such interaction took place, but they tell us comparatively in terms of how these interactions played out. This is where archaeology comes in, since it's the only way we have of getting at the various types of interactions Neanderthals and modern humans might have had and to remove the preconceptions implicitly imposed by the notion that they were two distinct species.

In practical terms, we should now thankfully be moving away from models that see Neanderthals as fundamentally different from 'us'. This means that there is little reason to continue depending on interaction models that see Neanderthals as merely 'copying without understanding' whatever different behaviors early Eurasian modern humans might have displayed. An extension of that is that if Neanderthals and modern humans interacted enough for the former to have contributed between 1-4% of the genetic material of people of non-African extraction today, the two groups must have been able to interact in a sustained manner, which rules out a scenario whereby rape plays a preponderant role (and plays on prevalent ideas of Neanderthals as the savage/dangerous other). This also has implications about communication between the two groups, by which I mean that they likely were able to speak to one another, as already suggested by both genetic and indirect evidence anyway.

Perhaps most interestingly is that the degree of genetic contribution of Neanderthals to modern human genetics also sheds some light about how intense the interactions might have been, and also what some of the demographic parameters of thee encounters might have been. The numbers do point to some kind of demographic imbalance, though it must also be remembered that genes, like culture, can sometimes diffuse into an area much in advance of the arrival of a new population (Eswaran 2002, Eswaran et al. 2005). In other words, modern human genes might have made their way into Neanderthal areas by virtue of Neanderthal-hybrid interactions as opposed to necessarily only through Neanderthal-modern interactions. What this means for how 'hybrids' might have been perceived or integrated in either population is open to debate, but is a debate that might well shift to the center of ongoing debates about the nature of interactions between prehistoric humans populations.

References

Burbano, H., Hodges, E., Green, R., Briggs, A., Krause, J., Meyer, M., Good, J., Maricic, T., Johnson, P., Xuan, Z., Rooks, M., Bhattacharjee, A., Brizuela, L., Albert, F., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Lachmann, M., Hannon, G., & Paabo, S. (2010). Targeted Investigation of the Neandertal Genome by Array-Based Sequence Capture Science, 328 (5979), 723-725 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188046

Eswaran, V. (2002). A Diffusion Wave out of Africa: The Mechanism of the Modern Human Revolution? Current Anthropology, 43 (5), 749-774 DOI: 10.1086/342639

ESWARAN, V., HARPENDING, H., & ROGERS, A. (2005). Genomics refutes an exclusively African origin of humans Journal of Human Evolution, 49 (1), 1-18 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2005.02.006

Green, R., Krause, J., Briggs, A., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., Patterson, N., Li, H., Zhai, W., Fritz, M., Hansen, N., Durand, E., Malaspinas, A., Jensen, J., Marques-Bonet, T., Alkan, C., Prufer, K., Meyer, M., Burbano, H., Good, J., Schultz, R., Aximu-Petri, A., Butthof, A., Hober, B., Hoffner, B., Siegemund, M., Weihmann, A., Nusbaum, C., Lander, E., Russ, C., Novod, N., Affourtit, J., Egholm, M., Verna, C., Rudan, P., Brajkovic, D., Kucan, Z., Gusic, I., Doronichev, V., Golovanova, L., Lalueza-Fox, C., de la Rasilla, M., Fortea, J., Rosas, A., Schmitz, R., Johnson, P., Eichler, E., Falush, D., Birney, E., Mullikin, J., Slatkin, M., Nielsen, R., Kelso, J., Lachmann, M., Reich, D., & Paabo, S. (2010). A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome Science, 328 (5979), 710-722 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021

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.

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.