Picking a journal to publish in as a student

Mike Smith has a post on picking what kind of journal to publish in (mostly) as a graduate student. Rightly, he points to the need of striking the right balance between the prestige/name recognition of the journal and the desire to have the publication come out in a timely manner. As he says "They need quick publications, which would favor a lower-ranking journal. But a paper in a top journal looks awfully good on your CV." He then provides a few personal rules of thumb to help resolve this tension.

I'm in the process of writing another post about tips for publishing as a graduate student that builds on another one of Smith's recent posts, and one of the points I'm making is this: As unbelievable as it probably feels to graduate students, they actually have more time than faculty members, given that the impacts of not publishing are somewhat less negative to their immediate success - though of course publishing during your grad years is nothing but a net positive. In any case, this relative luxury of time means that students can (and should) risk 'shooting for the stars' and submit to prestigious venues, even if they have long turnaround times and/or high rejection rates - Current Anthropology would appear to be a prime example here. Now, this piece of advice comes with one fairly major caveat: you have to start publishing early as a graduate student; if you're staring graduation in the face or are at an advanced stage in the PhD and you need publications to be competitive on the job market, then this advice is null and void. But assuming you're at the end of your MA or first year or two of your PhD, the gamble can pay off big. And if it gets turned down, then you still have time to turn the paper around and resubmit somewhere else, now with the benefit of some reviewers' comments.

PS: I realize this is kind of a weird 'getting back to blogging' post, but bear with me... life has been hectic these past several months.

A Very Neanderthal Easter

The thing I love the most about Easter? Chocolate. The thing I love the most about paleoanthropology? Neanderthals. So this past weekend, I decided to combine the two!

From left to right: Chatelperronian ornament, déjeté sidescrcaper, convergent sidescraper (or is it a Mousterian point? no choco-cave bear around to test it), and Levallois point (milk chocolate); center: Neanderthal (white chocolate). Thought about putting in a drop of milk chocolate to give it brown eyes, but figured it might be overkill...

About those Neanderthal eagle talon ornaments

The recent paper by Morin and Laroulandie (2012) in PLoS ONE has been creating a bit of a buzz, suggesting as it does 'non-nutritional' and possibly symbolic use of eagle talons at two Mousterian sites in France. The authors rightly emphasize that the discovery of several eagle talons bearing cut marks from La Ferrassie and Les Fieux articulates quite well with the evidence from Fumane that Neanderthals purposefully harvested visually striking feathers from a variety of bird species, especially raptors. Hawks underscores their observation that this behavior at La Ferrassie likely goes back almost to 100kya, pushing back the age for potentially symbolic use of bird parts by Neanderthals considerably. In my mind, the study also shows how productive it can be to take a new look at old collections.

While I think the paper reports some very interesting observations and that it makes a solid case overall, I'm left wondering about two things:

1) How were these things used as ornaments? They're not pierced, nor do they display no obvious wear traces from having been worn suspended on strings or thongs. With purported feathers, it's one thing. But these things puzzle me a bit from that standpoint, since even the shells found in Aterian and other MSA sites show some kind of wear from having been strung and worn. 

2) I would have loved to see better shots of the cut marks. By this, I mean microscopic shots of the internal morphology of some of these marks themselves to show unambiguously that they were made by stone tools? Don't get me wrong, they certainly look like cutmarks, at least superficially, and their standardized placement on multiple specimens strongly supports the authors' claim. But as the controversy over the Dikika cutmarks has shown all too well, multiple factors can result in marks that can look like those produced by stone tools, so why not rule it out with some good photographs in this case?

Be it as it may, these new data build on the growing corpus of evidence for the use of things like feathers, ochre, manganese and shells as ornaments by Neanderthals well before the arrival of modern humans on the scene. All in all, it also suggests that different groups of Neanderthals likely used different types of ornaments and coloring materials depending on the ecological setting and available animal and mineral resources.

Reference:

Morin E , Laroulandie V (2012) Presumed Symbolic Use of Diurnal Raptors by Neanderthals. PLoS ONE 7(3): e32856. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032856

Shake your (Acheulean) money maker

There was a paper presented by Mimi Lam at the last AAAS meeting in Vancouver and which was covered in LiveScience last week and has bit causing something of a stir (and it spells Acheulean correctly!). While I'm always leery of relying only on press reports to make sense of unpublished papers, its abstract is available online and provides a bit more info. In a nutshell, one the arguments of the paper is that by the Middle Pleistocene, handaxes might have been used as a form of currency. I've talked about handaxes before on this blog, along with some of the debates about what drives their morphology - the focus is often on their alleged symmetry and the fact that this feature might not have been purely functional.

I wasn't at the AAAS meetings, so I didn't hear the paper. All I've read so far are the LiveScience piece, the abstract, and a very thoughtful blog post by Rosemary Joyce in which she rightly points to the at the tangled ball of conceptual yarn that money or currency represents from an anthropological standpoint. Definitely worth a thorough read.

My main concern about the study, however, has to do with the handaxes themselves. There is this notion (often repeated in archaeology textbooks) that they can be very symmetrical, and that the overall degree of symmetry in handaxes increases over time. Frankly,  I don't think we can safely assert this at all. Sure, handaxes can be symmetrical on occasion, no question there. But to my knowledge, this remains a very qualitative impression based on selected samples of handaxes, with selection operating both on the geography and age of the biface samples being observed, as well as on the fact that these samples themselves can be selected for. By this, I mean what gets considered a handaxe/biface and considered in these studies about their symmetry (and what the controls are to evaluate what is 'unnatural' symmetry in various contexts), and how that can vary across analysts and studies.

The main problem with the 'time-vectored increase in handaxe symmetry' as I see it is this: to the best of my knowledge, this hasn't been demonstrated empirically to hold true across all of the Old World. Yes, this seems like a fairly tall order. But this is the scale that is implied by this view. Based on my own biased view and experience with handaxes (and I've looked at a few), the opposite could even be said: there is no fundamental change in the degree of symmetry in handaxe assemblages over time - symmetry is a contingent variable determined by factors like blank size and shape, reduction intensity, use-life, technical skill, and maybe social considerations - the social dimensions being the hardest of all to establish objectively, let along attribute a function to. So, if this idea is not demonstrated, any interpretation of handaxe function based on symmetry is also potentially problematic.

I was talking about this with a colleague on Friday, and it struck us that a great dissertation idea would be to actually test this. What you'd need is a large-ish area with many handaxe assemblages recovered using modern excavation techniques for which a baseline chronology is known - some place like the Middle Awash River Basin, maybe. Then, you explicitly define what gets considered a handaxe, and you apply it to all these assemblages (e.g., at minimum, any piece with removals from both surfaces - this is obviously a minimalist definition, but it's given here as an example). Then, you define a way to measure symmetry and establish a baseline for what is considered 'symmetrical' or whether you're looking at symmetry as a continuous variable (ideally, you do both in order to fend off eventual critiques). Then, you get a sense of raw material constraints, site function and reduction intensity for each assemblage, in order to see whether or not any of these is a recurrent conditioner of handaxe morphology, and to factor them out if they do. In particular, you need some controls such as an evaluation of how inherently 'symmetrical' cobbles or flakes used to make handaxes are at various locales, and whether or not this is correlated to symmetry in various assemblages across the study area. Lastly, you measure symmetry on these handaxe assemblages and then, you look at trends over time. Then, you look at various measures: mean vs. median symmetry, coefficient of variation, spread of values, whether or not certain levels of symmetry are only reached after some point in time; the list goes on and on. The point is, we need to actually demonstrate this at the very least at a regional level before we can even consider taking 'increased handaxe symmetry' as the starting point for any subsequent analysis. So there - if you're a graduate student looking for a project, feel free to take this one. I can all but guarantee you that the resulting papers, whether they demonstrated one or the other conclusion, would become ridiculously highly cited.

I think that what we now know about technology (especially earlier technologies like the the Oldowan) would set the null hypothesis here as being that we shouldn't expect increasing symmetry or standardization over time. In other words, high degrees of symmetry can be present from the beginning of the Acheulean and low symmetry can occur in its latest phases. If you look at the Oldowan, the data clearly indicate that people didn't start by knocking off one flake, then a few thousand years realizing that they could knock off another one, and then another one yet more thousand years later. Quite the opposite, it seems that by the time people start regularly working stone, they get it pretty well: they know how to knock off flakes in succession, they realize that different materials flake better than other, going to some effort to get the better stuff (e.g., Stout et al. 2010). My impression is that the same is likely to be applicable to handaxe technology: once people start flaking cobbles bifacially, they also get it: they realize that you can knock flakes off both surfaces, often using one removal as the starting point for removing another one. And if they understand this, then making an object symmetrical as a result is also implicit - the question becomes why symmetry in certain case and not in others, and why this is the case

So, to go back to Lam's argument, my take on it is not so much that it's wrong (it might end up being right) that I think that we don't have nearly the archaeological resolution we need to objectively discuss the issues she tackles, especially those linked to the question of increasing handaxe symmetry over time, let alone the interpretation of such a pattern. Only when the baseline archaeological work has been conducted, can we really hope to usefully revisit the question.

Some earlier posts on the Acheulean and handaxes:


Plus-sized in the Pleistocene

Two sides to every biface

I say Acheulean, you say Acheulian


References and some suggested reading:

Machin, A. 2009. The role of the individual agent in Acheulean biface variability: A multi-factorial model. Journal of Social Archaeology 9: 35-58.

McPherron, S.P. 2000. Handaxes as a Measure of the Mental Capabilities of Early Hominids. Journal of Archaeological Science 27:655-663.

Monnier, G. 2006. The Lower/Middle Paleolithic Periodization in Western Europe: An Evaluation. Current Anthropology 47:709-744.

Nowell, A., and M.L. Chang. 2009. The Case Against Sexual Selection as an Explanation of Handaxe Morphology. PaleoAnthropology 2009: 77-88.

Stout, D., S. Semaw, M.J. Rogers, and D. Cauche. 2010. Technological variation in the earliest Oldowan from Gona, Afar, Ethiopia. Journal of Human Evolution 58: 474-491.

Bitumen used as hafting material in the Middle Paleolithic of Romania

Cârciumaru and colleagues (2012) report on artifacts from Gura Cheii-Râşnov Cave (Romania), of which a couple bear residues of a blackish material on their surfaces. One comes from the one of the site's Upper Paleolithic levels, while the other comes from its Mousterian deposit which date to between roughly 33.3-28.9 kya (uncalibrated radiocarbon ages).

The reason this is noteworthy is that the authors identify the black residue sticking to the surface of these tools as bitumen (albeit heavily weathered), which they interpret as evidence for those tools having been hafted. This is not a first. The use of bitumen as hafting material in the Middle Paleolithic is known from the Levant, at the site of Umm el Tlel, in levels ranging from 40-70kya in age (Boëda et al. 2008). What is significant, however, is that these new data from Gura Cheii-Râşnov Cave provide the first evidence of using bitumen as a hafting material in the European Middle Paleolithic. From a behavioral standpoint, this joins the evidence for birch pitch tar documented at several Middle Paleolithic sites as old as 125ky bp in Germany (see Pawlik and Thissen 2011) and maybe even older in Italy (Mazza et al. 2006) as evidence for hafting material. This is significant because it reflects the Neanderthal capacity to come up with different solutions for the same problem, namely finding an adhesive to help in crafting composite weapons. In areas where bitumen sources were present and accessible, it makes sense that Middle Paleolithic hominins would not have bothered to go through the time-consuming process of birch pitch tar production detailed by Pawlik and Thissen (2011) when they needed an adhesive and a naturally occurring one was readily available.

Another interesting dimension of the study by Cârciumaru et al. (2012) is that it tells us something about the potential geographical range of the site's occupants. While the precise location where the bitumen was procured remains an open question, the authors indicate that there are deposits of bituminous limestone located about 20km away from the site, and that these deposits were definitely used by the Gravettian occupants of the site who procured high-quality flint from the region where they are found. Alternatively, the also mention a source of bitumen located about 100km to the south of the site. While a local procurement of any material can reasonably be argued to be the null hypothesis of any behavioral interpretation for the Paleolithic, should additional information eventually indicate that the more distant source was used, it would make this the longest distance over which bitumen was procured in the Middle Paleolithic, since the bitumen found at Umm el Tlel came from a source 40km distant from that site (Boëda et al. 2008). Additionally, as mentioned in other posts, Neanderthals are known to have procured lithic material over much longer distances than that, so it wouldn't really be all that surprising if they also collected bitumen from distant sources - especially considering that unlike stone, bitumen doesn't break irreparably and can be re-used and re-shaped over time, which makes its overall utility and use-life much greater than that of stone, thus perhaps justifying traveling long distances to procure it.

References

Boëda, E., Bonilauri, S., Connan, J., Jarvie, D., Mercier, N., Tobey, M., Valladas, H., al Sakhel, H., Muhesen, S. 2008. Middle Palaeolithic bitumen use at Umm el Tlel around 70 000 BP. Antiquity 82: 853-86.

Cârciumaru, M., Ion, R.-M., Niţu, E.-C., Ştefănescu, R. 2012. New evidence of adhesive as hafting material on Middle and Upper Palaeolithic artefacts from Gura Cheii-Râşnov Cave (Romania). Journal of Archaeological Science, doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2012.02.016

Mazza, P. P. A., Martini, F., Sala, B., Magi, M., Colombini, M., P., Giachi, G., Landucci, F., Lemorini, C., Modugno, F., Ribechini, E. 2006. A new Palaeolithic discovery: tar-hafted stone tools in a European Mid-Pleistocene bone-bearing bed. Journal of Archaeological Science 33: 1310-1318.

Pawlik, A., Thissen, J. 2011. Hafted armatures and multi-component tool design at the Micoquian site of Inden-Altdorf, Germany. Journal of Archaeological Science 38:1699-1708.

John Hawks lecture at UCD, March 2: Paleogenomics and the Evolution of Neandertals and Denisovans

Back belatedly, but bearing great news! This coming week, John Hawks will be in Denver. On his blog, he's already mentioned the talk that he's giving at the DMNS, but I want to highlight the fact that he'll also be giving a talk at 2:30PM on Friday March 2 on the UC Denver campus, as part of our Anthropology Colloquium series. The event is open to all and free to attend. Here are the details.

"Paleogenomics and the Evolution of Neandertals and Denisovans"

John Hawks, Ph.D.

Dept. of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin

John Hawks' lab is currently working with genomes of archaic humans to uncover the relationships of these ancient people to recent human populations. Most living people trace a fraction of their ancestry to Neandertals, and a smaller proportion trace their ancestry to a mysterious population called the "Denisovans", represented by a genome from an ancient specimen from the Altai mountains. They are uncovering the interactions among these ancient groups -- when and where did they encounter modern humans and exchange genes with them? They are also investigating the function of those ancient genomes, and what new facts their genes can tell us about Neandertal biology. He will talk about his ongoing work related to pigmentation, immune system, muscle physiology and the brain.

2:30 p.m. Friday, March 2, 2012

North Classroom 1535

UC Denver - Auraria Campus (Downtown)

Light Refreshments will be served

What's new on the Italian Middle Paleolithic?

I'm traveling this week, participating in the Roundtable of the Middle Palaeolithic of Italy hosted by the Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies(http://camnes.org), which takes place in Florence this coming Thursday and Friday (Feb. 9-10, 2012). I'm really looking forward to it, and looking at the final program, it sounds like a good range of perspectives and regional records will be discussed, which should make for good discussion. This is important given that an underappreciated dimensions of the Italian MP is how varied it is, which really is not al that surprising when you consider the topographic and geographic variability of the peninsula (see e.g., Milliken 2007 for a summary). If possible, I'll try to live blog some of the conference, and I should mention that the organizers have said that the conference presentations should be streamable in real time... I'll update this post accordingly when I have the final details.

How to feed a pregnant Neanderthal

Shorter can be better: Case in point, Bryan Hockett has a short (five pages) paper in press in Quaternary International entitled "The consequences of Middle Paleolithic diets on pregnant Neanderthal women," and it is a must-read for anyone interested in prehistoric nutrition. In a nutshell, what he does here is consider what the hypothesized Neanderthals caloric requirements proposed by a number of recent studies (e.g., Froehle and Churchill 2009; Snodgrass and Leonard 2009) would have meant for a pregnant Neanderthal. In other words, are these estimates even realistic in concrete terms of the number and kinds of animals eaten?

The short answer is no. First, from a strictly caloric standpoint, the amount of food suggested by these estimates is huge, especially for a hunter-gatherer: "from the perspective of a modern fast food diet, a pregnant Neanderthal women would need to eat 10 large burgers per day (or three in the morning, three at mid-day, and four in the evening), or 17 orders of chicken nuggets per day (or five orders in the morning, six at mid-day, and another six in the evening" (Hockett 2012 2012: 2).

Second, and most importantly, the high amounts of meat suggested by the estimates would likely have been lethal for pregnant Neanderthal women. A nutritional ecology perspective emphasizes that humans need more than just calories to survive, especially on range of micronutrients (Hockett and Haws 2003, 2005). Here, using this approach, Hockett shows that the amount of meat currently generally assumed to have been eaten by Neanderthals would have yielded toxic amounts of protein (relative to fat), an unhealthy overconsumption of some mirconutrients (e.g., zinc, potassium - potentially damaging to internal organs), and a severe underconsumption of others (e.g., carbs, folate, calcium). In short, subsisting on a heavily meat-dominated diet given the energy requirements estimated in other published studies would have been impossible. This is all the more dramatic given that he emphasizes that terrestrial herbivores generally yield comparable ranges of essential nutrients. This means that no matter what land mammals they would have hunted, Neanderthals would still have not been able to get the micronutrients to stay alive, especially with the metabolic needs of a pregnant Neanderthal.

This ties in with recent literature that I have discussed on this blog that shows that Neanderthals routinely consumed other kinds of foods than terrestrial mammals, including plants, shellfish and sea mammals, all of which are rich in various essential nutrients often not found in terrestrial mammals. This paper goes a long way to show that hypothetical reconstructions of past diets need to be confronted both with their overall nutritional implications and with archaeological data, the latter of which clearly shows that Neanderthals readily exploited other resources where they were available. As Hockett emphasizes in his conclusion, this is not to say that Neanderthals and modern humans necessarily had comparably broad diets, or that the Neanderthal diet must have necessarily been 'modern' (think about it: is there anything inherently modern about a grizzly bear's diet, even though it sustains it and draws on many resources?). However, it does force people to start grappling with the question of how realistic some recent purported estimates of Neanderthal dietary needs and strategies actually are.

References  

Froehle, A., & Churchill, S., 2009. Energetic competition between Neandertals and anatomicallymodern humans.PaleoAnthropology 2009, 96-116.

Hockett, B. (2011). The consequences of Middle Paleolithic diets on pregnant Neanderthal women Quaternary International DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2011.07.002

Hockett, B., & Haws, J. (2003). Nutritional ecology and diachronic trends in Paleolithic diet and health Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 12 (5), 211-216 DOI: 10.1002/evan.10116


Hockett, B., & Haws, J. (2005). Nutritional ecology and the human demography of Neandertal extinction Quaternary International, 137 (1), 21-34 DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2004.11.017


Snodgrass, J., & Leonard, W., 2009. Neandertal energetics revisited: insights into populationdynamics and life history evolution. PaleoAnthropology 2009, 220-237.

Videos as visual aids in presenting experimental archaeology

For reasons that should become clear fairly soon, I've had experimental archaeology videos on my mind lately. In many cases, actually seeing segments of an experimental study play out can convey so much more of the experience itself than summary tables and graphs, which really take the human element out and often don't do justice to some of the phenomena observed as they unfold.

I saw a couple of good example of this last semester, during the student final project presentations in my Lithic Analysis seminar. In part because UC Denver doesn't have a lot of collections available for students to analyze and in part because of my hyping the approach, there was a groundswell of interest in experimental archaeology projects. Two of those resulted in presentations that used video to drive home key observations: The first was a really stark contrast between how groups of male and female knappers communicated during communal knapping sessions. In that one instance, the ladies talked quite a bit, while the men hardly spoke to one another. It's one thing to describe this, but showing the two videos back-to-back really underscored the deafening silence of the guy group - almost everyone in the class remarked upon it.

The other presentation, by one of our grad students, incorporated video of chert and flint nodules being exposed to heat in a replicated prehistoric kiln to study the mechanism of pot lid fractures. The study ended up yielding little usable data because the high heat of the kiln simply cause the nodules to shatter almost on exposure. Again, however, it was one thing to say this in the presentation, and quite another to actually show footage of the nodules literally exploding (complete with the camera holder ducking out of the way in one instance) to highlight just how dramatic the process actually was. It also quite strikingly drove home the point that kilns may not have been the best manner to heat-treat rock in the past!

Especially given how affordable and increasingly user-friendly movie-making software and equipment is becoming, I really can't imagine why an experimental archaeologist would not film given experiments. Even more, after these presentations, I can't imagine some of these videos not being incorporated in professional presentations of these studies, even though I have to say that I haven't seen much of them at, say, the Paleos or those sessions of the SAAs I usually attend.

Is Academia.edu decreasing scholarly communication?

I love Academia.edu - I think it's a fantastic way for papers to reach the broadest possible audience, and it's made me aware of many studies I wouldn't have otherwise heard of. While I'm not necessarily the best Academia citizen myself (I really should start following some people), it's really been a tremendous help in tracking down some papers published in obscure sources that might have otherwise taken me an eternity - well, a few days/weeks, which might as well be an eternity in this internet era - to get my little paws on otherwise.

That said, the other day, I was reorganizing one of my filing cabinets and came to my offprint section. It was great to look at these things again, and seeing some of the personal notes written to me by the authors reminded me of how I first got in touch with some of them, in some cases even before pdfs had become the de facto offprint. What I thought was cool about it was that getting these documents required some kind of direct interaction with the author(s), which helped broaden the range of scholars who would have at least a faint idea of who I was. In some cases, these first contacts laid the groundwork for lasting friendships and even eventual collaborations. The personal nature of these contacts also was part of e-mailing folks for pdfs, once these had become well-established enough, in that you'd start a conversation.

But now, with Academia.edu, sometimes I wonder if the opportunity of these contacts has been lost (or at least decreased). If so, it would mean that something that was instrumental for my personal development as a scholar would be lost to people starting out now. I mean, sure, you can see who accesses certain papers, but that hardly counts as a meaningful interaction, no? Even if you do look at who downloaded a file, it's not like most people will remember this for very long, so that even if you do run into the downloader at some point down the line, the relationship will have to begin from scratch. Unless of course, the content of your paper has pleased or irked them enough to e-mail you as a result...

Quote of the day: Matt Cartmill on evolutionary laws

From the inimitable Matt Cartmill:

"The trick in discovering evolutionary laws is the same as it is in discovering laws of physics or chemistry-namely, finding the right level of generalization to make prediction possible. We do not try to find a law that says when and where explosions will occur. We content ourselves with saying that certain sorts of compounds are explosive under the right conditions, and we predict that explosions will occur whenever those conditions are realized."

Paleoanthropology: Science or Mythical Charter? (2002: 193)

Archaeology and pepper spray

Pepper spray has been in the news for all the wrong reasons these past few days, after being used unnecessarily on UC Davis students protesting tuition hikes and income inequality. Several professors have already bravely denounced this chilling excessive violence by police, and Rosemary Joyce (a Berkeley archaeologist) gives us a bit of context on the long history of how chili by-products have been used as tools of coercion in pre-Columbian Mexico:

In a sixteenth-century painted manuscript today known as the Codex Mendoza, a few pages depict what are represented as norms of raising children among the Mexica of Central Mexico (commonly referred to as the Aztecs). These idealizations-- which should be thought of as formal idealizations, not norms-- include the actions that children were threatened with if they were not compliant with authority. We have no way of knowing if these actions were ever carried out, or how often: but what is clear is that they were corporal punishments. And primary among them was exposing a defiant child to the smoke from burning chili peppers.

That relationship-- of domination by threat of punishment-- is what, for me, hovers in the background every time pepper spray is used by police on the people. And policing should not be punishment.

For an interesting, eye-opening and shocking review on the history and true potency of pepper spray, you should also check out this very informative post by Deborah Blum.

Write, and write right!

This piece from a couple of years ago and entitled "Righting your writing" has been making the rounds in my FB network. It provides a pretty good series of tip/strategies for scientists to write more clearly. One that stood out to me was the one about developing daily writing habits

Write daily for 15 to 30 minutes
During your daily writing sessions, don’t think about your final manuscript. Just write journal entries, says Tara Gray, director of the teaching academy that provides training and support to New Mexico State University professors. “People think there’s two phases of a research project—doing the research and writing it up,” she says. Rather than setting aside large chunks of time for each activity, combine them to improve your writing and your research. The first time Gray encouraged a group of faculty members at New Mexico State to adhere to this schedule for three months, they wrote about twice as much as their normal output.

I can't emphasize how important this is. For one thing it builds discipline about getting something on the page everyday. For another, it does wonders to declaw the idea that writing has to be perfect on the first go-around. What I mean by this, it that it makes writing a lot less daunting if you do it habitually, and train yourself to expect that for every 10 words you write, you may end up keeping only one or two in the end. Even if you keep just that fraction, it adds up over time into lines, paragraphs, pages, sections, chapters and even dissertations. In a way, it's really just the academic equivalent of Stephen King setting daily writing goals of 1,000 or 2,000 words (King 2000), except that here you're writing to get in the habit of writing about your work, not fiction, and to fit that habit in the rest of your day.

This is incidentally the key piece of advice from J. Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes A Day (Bolker 1998). I rarely recommend books as must-reads for graduate students, since everyone's trajectory and style is so different. Bolker's book is one of the few exceptions to this general rule: it really does a wonderful job of showing the importance and, frankly, the healthiness of making writing a routine exercise as opposed to something that is better saved for intense bursts. Now - spoiler alert - the book doesn't actually show you how to write your dissertation (or thesis, or paper, or whatever) in 15 minutes a day. But it does provide a really clear framework for how to think about and structure your writing, and especially developing healthy writing habits. And the key thing about this is also what T. Gray mentions in the quote above: in my experience, approaching writing in this way does allow you to write more and write better overall. It also provides you with a much better use of your time for those 15-30 minutes 'dead periods' between classes or meetings than just surfing the net!

That said, I don't know about the 'journal entry' approach advocated by Gray, but to each is own. Frankly, the important thing is really just to write something, anything daily. It may sound silly, but for a great many people, it works and it helps make the whole process of academic writing that much easier and, dare I say it, appealing.

References

Bolker, J. 1998.Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis.Owl Books, NY.

King, S. 2000. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, NY.

Neanderthals shellfishing 150,000 years ago

The news is out: the site of Bajondillo, in southern Spain, has yielded clear evidence of Neanderthals collecting and eating shellfish as far back as 150,000 years BP, and pretty much continuously, though at different intensities, after that. One obvious thing to point out: this is almost as old as the earliest evidence of modern humans collecting shellfish (Marean et al. 2007), and the way Neanderthals did it seems to have been constrained by very similar considerations, namely how far the beach was from a given site in the past. The paper itself (Cortés-Sánchez et al. 2011) is published in PLoS ONE, which means that it's freely accessible.

Today's kind of a hectic day (giving a free, non-technical talk at the Colorado Scientific Society tonight, levaing for a trip tomorrow), but this paper is a real game changer on several levels, so check back soon, cause I'll have much, much more to say about this. Exciting times for Neanderthal Studies, I'll tell you that much!

References

Cortés-Sánchez M, Morales-Muñiz A, Simón-Vallejo MD, Lozano-Francisco MC, Vera-Peláez JL, et al. 2011 Earliest Known Use of Marine Resources by Neanderthals. PLoS ONE 6(9): e24026. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024026

Marean CW, Bar-Matthews M, Bernatchez J, Fisher E, Golberg P, et al. (2007) Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. Nature 409: 905–908.

A Mousterian wooden spade from Abric Romani, Spain

A group of researchers from the IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social) reports on the discovery of a handheld wooden implement from Mousterian deposits at Abric Romaní, Spain. The tool was found in Level P which dates to about 56,000 years BP, and its morphology suggests that it might have been a small spade/shovel, or perhaps a poker, given its association to a hearth. In the interest of clarity, let me emphasize that what was recovered is actually a travertine impression of that tool. However, that impression is so detailed that it was possible to identify the precise morphology and dimensions of the spade- or poker-like object (I actually think it looks more like some kind of spatula or knife - it'd be interesting to run some experimental work on the functional and ergonomic properties of this object), as well as the fact that it was made out of the wood of a coniferous species, likely pine.

A view of the travertine impression found in Level P, along with a reconstruction of the wooden object that left it.
© Jordi Mestre/IPHES.

Detail of the impression of the Level P wooden object. © Jordi Mestre/IPHES

This is not the only wooden object that was recovered from the Mousterian levels of Abric Romaní. For example, last year, I discussed the finding of a worked wooden pole that was likely used as part of a structure in level N dating to ca. 55kya (Vallverdu et al. 2010). In that case, the impression indicates that the object was over 5m in length, and shows clear evidence of having been whittled down to a specific morphology, namely that it is devoid of branches, and that it shows a slight tapering from 6cm in width at its base to 3cm in width at its top. This pole-like morphology suggests to Vallverdu et al. (2010: 143) that it was probably used as part of a structure like a fairly simple lean-to.


What I didn't discuss in that post is that there are other levels at Abric Romaní that have yielded evidence of wooden implements: Level H (~45-49kya) contained two dish-like wooden objects (one  32cm by 22cm in dimensions, the other about 22cm by 17cm and elliptical in outline). The larger object was made of juniper wood, and it was flat on its underside and bore a depression in the center of its top surface, reinforcing the idea it might have been a vessel of some sort. That level also yielded a third wooden object. This one was also flat, but displays a pointed end. This odd morphology made it more difficult to attribute it a possible function, but it certainly suggest that it had been worked by humans. These finds are described in details by Carbonell and Castro-Curel (1992). 

Three years later, the same researchers reported on the existence of wood pseudomorphs from Level I at Abric Romaní (Castro-Curel and Carbonell 1995). This layer dates to about 46-49kya, again the tail-end of the Mousterian in the region. In contrast to Level H, it wasn't wood fragments per se that were recovered in Level I, but rather hollows in the travertine that were later filled with plaster to produce casts of the objects that decayed and left their (very detailed) impression in the travertine at the site. Here, one of the pseudomorphs was a worked, tapering tree trunk (3.5m in length, 109cm wide at its base, 45cm wide at the top - both ends of the tree had been hacked off in the Mousterian). But the most striking recovery in that level is that of Pseudomorph 2, which was a set of three straight, rod-like pieces of wood recovered in a roughly triangular arrangement overlying a hearth. It was interpreted by the authors as most likely representing a tripod used in 'food processing' - probably cooking/boiling  (Castro-Curel and Carbonell 1995: 378). 

So, what's the big deal about this new find? Well, a few things. First, it's the only object like it known from the Paleolithic. There are other wooden implements known from a few sites - for instance, the well-known Schoeningen spears (Thieme 1997) - but this is, to my knowledge the first evidence of such a portable pointed object clearly intended to be used in one hand. Its morphology is also unique: according to a report in El Mundo that provides additional information on the find, its handle was 17cm long by 4cm wide, while its 'blade' was 15cm long by 8cm wide, and triangular and pointed in outline. Given that there is now plenty of evidence that some stone tools were hafted by Neanderthals, it should come as no surprise that there are functionally distinct components in this tool. However, what is really striking is that, in spite of Paleolithic archaeologists' obsession with stone tools, Neanderthals seem to have been perfectly content to use wood as the 'active' component of at least some of their tools.

Second, along with the other evidence for use of wooden objects at Abric Romaní, it suggest that the use of wood as a building material was a constant of Neanderthal adaptation. The importance of this is not fully appreciated since wood only rarely preserves, but the peculiar sedimentary conditions at Romaní (especially the conspicuousness of carbonate/travertine accumulations) give us an unparalleled look at the prevalence and diversity of how wood was used by Neanderthals for other things than fueling fire and hafting stone tools. Although naysayers will point out that one of the most common traces of use identified on stone tools has been linked to woodworking, I've never felt that researchers gave those observation their full consideration. Finding actual wooden implements shows what Neanderthals might have been making out of wood, and the range of these objects found at Romaní broadens our view of how diverse and important wood technology must have been for Middle Paleolithic foragers.

Lastly, it tells us something about how Neanderthals considered some of their material culture. In this instance, there is no indication that the object was broken. Yet, it seems to have been discarded rather unceremoniously by tossing it into a smouldering and partly extinguished fire (per El Mundo) that only partly carbonized it instead of consuming it completely. While we lack information about how Level P was occupied (i.e., was it occupied, say, long-term as a base camp, or fleetingly as a task site), the find indicates that there were certain contexts in which Neanderthals were perfectly OK with the notion of discarding objects that were still usable. Maybe spade/pokers like this one were relatively easy to manufacture and were considered unimportant or too bulky to be worth carrying from one site to another. Whatever the case may be, it suggests some labor-intensive objects could be considered disposable at least under certain circumstance, and it provides us with a really provocative glimpse into the nature and breadth of Neanderthal technology and how they thought of it.

Via: Millán Mozota.

References

CARBONELL, E., & CASTRO-CUREL, Z. (1992). Palaeolithic wooden artefacts from the Abric Romani (Capellades, Barcelona, Spain) Journal of Archaeological Science, 19 (6), 707-719 DOI: 10.1016/0305-4403(92)90040-A  

Castro-Curel, Z., & Carbonell, E. (1995). Wood Pseudomorphs From Level I at Abric Romani, Barcelona, Spain Journal of Field Archaeology, 22 (3), 376-384 DOI: 10.1179/009346995791974206  

Thieme, H. (1997). Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany Nature, 385 (6619), 807-810 DOI: 10.1038/385807a0  

Vallverdú, J., Vaquero, M., Cáceres, I., Allué, E., Rosell, J., Saladié, P., Chacón, G., Ollé, A., Canals, A., Sala, R., Courty, M., & Carbonell, E. (2010). Sleeping Activity Area within the Site Structure of Archaic Human Groups Current Anthropology, 51 (1), 137-145 DOI: 10.1086/649499

Svante Pääbo lecture on his recent genetic work

TED has a video up of Svante Pääbo discussing his (team's) recent research on the genetics of Late Pleistocene human populations. It's a good primer on the latest work on Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, and their implications for the relationship of these populations to early modern humans.

Multimillennial Neanderthal occupation at La Cotte de St. Brelade

The BBC has a brief news story about some of the results of new excavations conducted at the site of La Cotte St. Brélade (Jersey, Channel Islands). The site is perhaps most famous for having yielded clear evidence for the systematic slaughter of mammoths and wooly rhinos by Neanderthals, which prompted a reevaluation of their hunting abilities (Scott 1980). That analysis, however, suggested that these animals were accumulated at the site over brief timespans.

The question of how long Neanderthals occupied La Cotte is where the overview of this new research project gets especially interesting:

"La Cotte's collapsed cave system contains intact ice age sediments spanning a quarter of a million years, revealing a detailed sequence of Neanderthal occupation and occasional abandonment, against a background of changing climate.

"The site is the most exceptional long-term record of Neanderthal behaviour in North West Europe," says Dr Matt Pope from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.

"At La Cotte, we get to see far more than a glimpse of their behaviour, we get to see generation upon generation of Neanderthals returning to the same place under lots of different environmental conditions."

In other words, this new fieldwork (including investigations at other sites, btw) is shedding very interesting new light on how Neanderthals occupied the sites under different conditions, and - most importantly - why their behavior varied over time. As someone who's argued for a long time for the need to develop methods that allow us to develop long-term diachronic perspectives in order to understand the full range of Paleolithic lifeways (e.g. Riel-Salvatore and Barton 2004, Riel-Salvatore et al. 2008), I'm very excited about such reports. It'll also be extremely interesting to see how the artifacts collected in older excavations compare to those found by the new project. This new project, incidentally, has a nifty little web site that provides a lot of pertinent information about the new project at La Cotte and nearby sites, as well as other components of their research agenda, including some underwater survey. Check out The Quaternary Archaeology and Environments of Jersey project (which includes one team member who's commented on this blog before).

References

Riel-Salvatore, J., & Barton, C. (2004). Late Pleistocene Technology, Economic Behavior, and Land-Use Dynamics in Southern Italy American Antiquity, 69 (2) DOI: 10.2307/4128419

RIEL-SALVATORE, J., POPESCU, G., & BARTON, C. (2008). Standing at the gates of Europe: Human behavior and biogeography in the Southern Carpathians during the Late Pleistocene Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 27 (4), 399-417 DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2008.02.002

Scott, K. (1980). Two hunting episodes of middle Palaeolithic age at La Cotte de Saint-Brelade, Jersey (Channel Islands) World Archaeology, 12 (2), 137-152 DOI: 10.1080/00438243.1980.9979788

170,000 year-old human skull fragment found at Lazaret

A couple of weeks ago (Aug. 13, to be precise), part of a hominin frontal skull fragment was found during excavations at Grotte du Lazaret, near Nice, France. The find was first reported in a series of French media outlets, but it wasn't removed until just a couple of days ago, after it was apparently given time to dry, as reported in the first English-language report I've seen about the find. Based on the presence of incompletely fused suture, M.A. de Lumley is quoted as saying the skull fragment belongs to an individual who died around 25 years of age.

The skull fragment in situ. Image from France3.fr.

The level in which the skull was found is described as dating to ca. 170,000BP. While the dates at Lazaret are a little bit fuzzy (see the variability and reversals in the sequence reported in Michel et al . 2008), while the level in which the cranium fragment was found is not mentioned in the reports, an age like that places it in OIS 6, which is consistent with what it known at the cave. The intriguing aspect of the report is that the skull is described as belonging to a H. erectus individual. Taxonomically, in my book at least, Europe around that time was peopled by Neanderthals, which makes a H. erectus attribution all the more intriguing. Of course, it may have to do with differences in nomenclature, whereby some researchers don't recognize H. heidelbergensis as a valid taxon, preferring to lump everything that preceded Neanderthals into the H. erectus category. Of course, the Michel (2008) paper still uses the term 'anteneanderthal' to describe the fossils found at the site, so that might have something to do with it. Still, given the recent history of human paleontological research in Europe, that's certainly a view that stands out as a bit odd. That's doubly true if you consider that 'classic' looking Mousterian assemblages such as that from Lazaret are known from throughout the continent at that time, and are often assumed to be the handiwork of Neanderthals. In any case, it'll be really interesting to see where this specimen falls, morphologically speaking, once it (and its context) are published fully. Whatever the case may be, it's certainly a very significant addition to the fossil record of the Middle/Late Pleistocene of the northern Mediterranean.

Reference:

Michel, V., Shen, G., Valensi, P., & de Lumley, H. (2009). ESR dating of dental enamel from Middle Palaeolithic levels at Lazaret Cave, France Quaternary Geochronology, 4 (3), 233-240 DOI: 10.1016/j.quageo.2008.07.003

Hear, hear!

There's a great op-ed piece by Richard Dawkins in the Washington Post, where he excoriates politicians that are ignorant of evolutionary theory and milk that fact for political gain. The best quote?

"... a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today."

Couldn't agree more, and this goes for politicians here and back home!

Stay classy, Kellogg!

In face-palm news for the day:

The Maya Archaeology Initiative, a nonprofit that supports education for Guatemalan children, is challenging a claim by Kellogg’s, the maker of Froot Loops and other sugary breakfast products, that its use of a toucan image infringes on the cereal giant’s Toucan Sam character.

I think this one doesn't even need any extra snark. I really hope Kellogg gets shot down on this, and that the Maya Archaeology Initiative gets a major boost in publicity as a result!