Four Stone Hearth - 69th Edition

Welcome to another edition of the Anthropology Blog Carnival known as the Four Stone Hearth. Named for the four fields of Anthropology, I plan to offer this edition's blog posts by those categories, which a bonus fifth category at the end.


Sociocultural Anthropology

We're pretty light on posts involving the observation of extant cultures, but Paddy K has done some informal ethnography at his work place: He wonders if the shared behavior he observed is universal in The Milk Leavers.

Here's another look at ordinary people: The Ordinary People Project at Ethnography.com (found via Savage Minds). Mark Dawson says he is "taking a few months off to drive to Alaska and have conversations with the random people that I meet along the way." He has already posted videos of his first three interviews.



Archaeology

I recently took a seminar on the ancient built environment, so I was immediately intrigued by Theoretical Structural Archaeology. The sad part for me is that I didn't have time to even read post #30 before I pulled all of this together, let alone posts one through twenty-nine (which are all intended to be read in order). This is no fluffy blog with a few tidbits from Geoff Carter's work-- it IS his work. He is using his blog as the primary vehicle to further his research and share it with us.

Tim Jones at Remote Central takes us beneath the waters of Lake Huron where evidence of Paleoindian hunters has been found. Tim not only summarizes the recent discoveries, he places them in the context of the very different environment that existed 10,000 years ago in the area of the Great Lakes (among other things, many parts were clearly above water!).

Under another lake in Sweden (Vänern, the country's largest), a 20-meter-long wreck was discovered and almost immediately touted as the remains of a Viking ship. Martin Rundqvist (the coordinator of this fine blog carnival) was lucky enough to receive photos and x-rays of the Viking weapons recovered from the ship, and rains on the parade when he points out they are neither "Viking," nor "weapons." Read the whole story (and hear Martin's radio appearance on the subject) ar Aardvarchaeology.

Greg Laden sets the record straight on a recent paper proposing a new contributor to changes in the Earth's magnetic field (archaeometric dating is the loose tie-in for our purposes, and it's a good read).

It's Summer time, and that means Field Work. Some arhcaeologists are using their blogs to chronicle their excavations (I'll bet you know of a lot more-- maybe we should compile a more complete list for next time).

• Mark Henshaw, the Archaeology Dude, will be reporting on his season at the Father Angel Site in Pennsylvania. He's posting videos, too.
• Brian, at Old Dirt - New Thoughts, reports on his already-completed field season in the Aleutian Islands.
• Checkout RECAP, sponsored by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) in the UK, which will be publishing digital materials from completed projects over the last decade.
  

Biological Anthropology / Human Evolution

More secrets revealed from the waters: Tim Jones also has an excellent writeup on a Neanderthal fossil dredged from the North Sea over at Anthropology.net. This is the first time a find like this has been made.

The news of Darwinius masilae set the press and the internet all atwitter (did I say that?), and Carl Zimmer reports that the online journal PLoS One will be publishing a corrected version of the article which formally announced the find. His post at The Loom is titled Darwinius: Science, Showbiz, and Conflicts of Interest

Daniel Lende points us to a list of posts created by his students in his course "Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse" at Neuroanthropology. They were assigned to look into human compulsion, and wrote some compelling stuff, including this one on Compulsive Internet Use. Daniel also provides some details on how he structured the course and the assignments.

Another post at Neuroanthropology provides links to Trances Captured on Video, providing "film footage of trance states of various kinds–rituals, dance, shamanic, etc."



Linguistics

Wanna be a Linguist? The Linguistic Aanthropology blog has a post listing Universities Offering Graduate Programs in Linguisitics.



Anthropology on the Internet (Bonus Topic)

The internet is changing everything. Information comes to us in many new forms and avenues now that we have the internet, shunting aside not only printed news but even Television sources (for example, people have turned to Twitter to follow current events in Iran, and bashed CNN while they were at it). These posts address the way the internet is changing the way we do anthropology.

John Hawks (what 4SH is complete without a post from him?) discusses a recent controversy about bloggers at scientific conferences, although it doesn't seem to have hit the Anthropology field... yet.

The proliferation of open access journals published online is considered a boon to the open sharing of research, but it looks like "Buyer Beware" still applies. Mike Smith (an Aztec archaeologist) alerts us to the story about a supposedly peer-reviewed Bentham OA Journal which accepted a hoax paper for publication. The submitted paper was created by a very clever article-generating program which puts together very professional-looking articles with figures and tables, and every sentence is technical nonsense.

It's amazing to believe that the Open Anthropology Cooperative already boasts over 900 members, and is about three weeks old. If you haven't heard about it, please visit anthropologie.info for a great introduction. It is a marvelous use of the internet to provide greater access and interaction for anthropologists around the world.

Lastly, Neuroanthropology has an annotated list of various internet tools and resources to help you integrate social networking into your anthropological practice. Anthropologists out there on the interwebs are using Twitter, Ning networks, Wikis, blogs, Livejournal, and more to keep in touch. To be honest, bythe time this blog carnival comes out every two weeks, the people who are really plugged in via these tools have probably already seen it all... are 4SH's days numbered?


Okay, that's it for this time. Be sure to keep your eyes open for the 70th Edition of the Four Stone Hearth in two weeks, hosted at the new home of Afarensis.

Evidence that Neanderthals were Eaten by Humans? Not Yet.

Sometimes, the news media can't resist a sensational, yet false, headline. I caught a glimpse of the following headline:

Humans May Have Eaten Neanderthals

Yep, I clicked through to the news story, and it included these lines:

Scientists and day-dreamers have long wondered, "What happened to the Neanderthals?" those ancient, distant cousins of modern day humans. Well, the answer may be, we ate them.

The story cites a recently published study, and interviews the lead author. I decided to track down the original paper, and was surprised to see that the full article is available online from the Journal of Anthropological Sciences.

I read the abstract, scanned the article, and searched for the word "cannibal." Here is the most relevant quote from the paper:

"In our case, however, contextual pieces of information needed to favour the cannibalistic interpretation are missing."

Silly journalists! Well, the paper does seem to show that Homo sapien and Homo neanderthal remains were found in the same context, so it is interesting. Just not as dramatic as the news headline would have us believe.

Here's the abstract from the journal article:

The view that Aurignacian technologies and their associated symbolic manifestations represent the archaeological proxy for the spread of Anatomically Modern Humans into Europe, is supported by few diagnostic human remains, including those from the Aurignacian site of Les Rois in south-western France. Here we reassess the taxonomic attribution of the human remains, their cultural affiliation, and provide five new radiocarbon dates for the site. Patterns of tooth growth along with the morphological and morphometric analysis of the human remains indicate that a juvenile mandible showing cutmarks presents some Neandertal features, whereas another mandible is attributed to Anatomically Modern Humans. Reappraisal of the archaeological sequence demonstrates that human remains derive from two layers dated to 28-30 kyr BP attributed to the Aurignacian, the only cultural tradition detected at the site. Three possible explanations may account for this unexpected evidence. The first one is that the Aurignacian was exclusively produced by AMH and that the child mandible from unit A2 represents evidence for consumption or, more likely, symbolic use of a Neandertal child by Aurignacian AMH. Th e second possible explanation is that Aurignacian technologies were produced at Les Rois by human groups bearing both AMH and Neandertal features. Human remains from Les Rois would be in this case the first evidence of a biological contact between the two human groups. The third possibility is that all human remains from Les Rois represent an AMH population with conserved plesiomorphic characters suggesting a larger variation in modern humans from the Upper Palaeolithic.

The full paper is here.

UPDATE: John Hawks comments on the sensationalism as well.

Were Australopithecines Obligate Bipeds?

In a recent paper published in the journal Nature, Jeremy DeSilva demonstrates that early hominins did not climb like chimpanzees.

By studying the way chimpanzees climb, DeSilva was able to get a detailed understanding of the role their ankles play. While climbing a tree trunk, a chimpanzee's ankles flex and rotate in ways that would be impossible for a human to replicate.

DeSilva compared the ankle anatomy of chimps and humans, and then compared these to fossil tibia and tali (the tibia is the weight-bearing bone of the lower leg, and the talus is the upper foot bone which, along with the tibia and fibula, forms the ankle joint) from over a dozen hominins from 4.12 to 1.53 million years ago.

What he found is that the anatomy of early hominin ankles shows that they were as poorly adapted as humans to the kind of climbing done by chimps. John Hawks has a really good summary on his website, and brings other recent papers and findings into the discussion-- you should read it.

Here's the rub for me: Was Astralopithecus afarensis a facultative or obligate biped? The thinking up until now has been that they were climbers and facultative walkers. The problem here is that many of the adaptations present in the A. afarensis post-cranial anatomy show that a life in the trees is likely far in their distant past (although clearly it it further in our past-- our body mass relative to arm length/strength is all wrong, and we do not exhibit curved finger bones as the australopithecines did).

For climbing, they no longer have an opposable phallux to allow them to grasp branches with their feet, Their arms are not long enough to wrap around a tree trunk (being closer in proportion to humans than chimps), and DeSilva has shown their ankles are no longer adapted to climbing. Take a look at the figure below, which compares the skeletal anatomies of Homo sapiens (a), H. erectus (c), Pan troglodytes, aka chimps (b), and A. afarensis (f) (from Endurance running and the evolution of Homo).

This leaves us with terrestrial locomotion. Their pelvis, knee, ankle, and big toe are all well-adapted to an upright, striding gait, and they could not have moved about as a quadruped, since their arms are simply not long enough. All of this seems to point to A. afarensis being an obligate biped.

I'm not a biological anthropologist, so don't take my word for it... but it's something to think about.




References:

2009 DeSilva JM. Functional morphology of the ankle and the likelihood of climbing in early hominins. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 106:6567-6572.

2004 Bramble DM, Lieberman DE Endurance running and the evolution of Homo. Nature 432:345-352.

A Slow Semester

After two straight semesters of graduate seminar courses (which were a lot of work, but that I enjoyed immensely), I have an easy load this semester. I am only taking a single undergraduate course: ASM 246, Human Origins, taught by Donald Johanson (as I described back in November).

Johanson is an enjoyable lecturer: Always friendly, explains things clearly, and has great stories from his fieldwork in Africa. My only disappointment is how much of this material was already covered in ASM 104. This makes it more difficult to sit through the lectures, since there's so little "aha" information (at least for me).

The light load has left me with a lot more time for my personal research projects, yet I find that I am squandering a great deal of the extra time and not making much headway. Why is it that the more time we have for something, the less efficient we are at getting things done?

I read a great story in the New York Times about an author, Simon Sinek, who discovered he got a lot less writing done when he reduced his travel and had more time for writing. It seems that he did most of his writing on the plane, and the inevitable dead battery in his laptop provided a sense of urgency that motivated him to write quickly.

Does this mean I need a greater workload to be more productive? Perhaps...

Studying Human Origins

The Spring 2009 semester is quickly approaching, and I just registered for my final undergraduate Anthropology course: Human Origins. The really great news (beyond the obvious fact that I'm nearly finished with my B.A.) is that this course is taught by Donald Johanson.

Yep, the famous paleoanthropologist who discovered Lucy teaches an undergraduate course on the subject every other semester right here at ASU (the home of his Institute of Human Origins).

Even though I'm planning to specialize in archaeology, I've always been fascinated by the mysteries involving the human family tree. I'm really looking forward to this opportunity.

Peking Man OR Piltdown Man?

Just found this on Boing Boing... the skull of Pac-Man. Is it authentic, or an elaborate hoax?



Neither! Just some very interesting art.

Little Foot no longer in the Human Family Tree?

A new paper in the journal Science says that the skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis found about ten years ago in South Africa is not between 3 and 4 million years old as originally thought, but is more like only 2 mya.

I've written an in-depth post on the subject of the skeleton known as "Little Foot" and its revised age over at Anthropology.net.

Reuters is reporting on the recent discovery of a hominid cranium in Ethiopia estimated to be between 200,000 and 500,000 years old.

The skull appeared "to be intermediate between the earlier Homo erectus and the later Homo sapiens," Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian research scientist at the Stone Age Institute at Indiana University.

There's not much meat to the story yet-- most of the report reflects on past significant discoveries in the Afar region.

The Stone Age Institute has posted a press release at their website which provide a bit more info. It says that the cranium, which consists of a complete braincase, upper face and upper jaw, was found in a sandy layer between two volcanic ash layers which allows for bracketed dating of the specimen. Also found in the same stratum were late Acheulean tools, and the fossils of several animals (pigs, zebras, elephants, antelope, cats, and rodents).

Checkout a Real Anthropology Blog

While researching Paranthropus, I stumbled across a blog authored by John Hawks, a Biological Anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He blogs about recent articles by others, his own research, and general news in the world of Anthropology. This is now one of my favorite stops on the information superhighway.

You should definitely stop by.

Why Should I Have to Decide? I'm not even 45!

Every time I take courses in a new anthropological subdiscipline, I love it. I started with an infatuation with Archaeology, then fell head-over-heels for Social/Cultural Anthropology. Now, I'm only a couple of weeks away from completing my first Biological (formerly known as "Physical") Anthropology course, and I can't get enough.

ASM 104 has been as easy as its low number indicates, but I have hung on every word. I already knew the overview of the story of human origins, and we even covered it for a couple of weeks when I took ASB 222 (Buried Cities and Lost Tribes). I just wasn't prepared for how interesting it would actually be.

Paranthropus boisei

Every time Heather Smith (the instructor) would move to the next slide of her extremely organized class materials, I had more questions... questions that I'm sure she never expected to be answering in a 100-level course, although she had no problem doing so (she's a Ph.D. candidate at ASU in Biological Anthro).

I was sitting at a table during one of our lab sessions, looking at across at a skull of Paranthropus boisei (previously known as Astralopithecus boisei). I knew there was significant sexual dimorphism w.r.t. body size, yet the anterior teeth (incisors and canines) were not really any bigger than my own (this is true for P. boisei males and females).

Gorilla gorilla

I was wondering: How that could be? In extant (currently living) species of apes, not only were males much bigger than females, but the guys also posess very large canines. But here was a 2 million year old hominid where the males were much bigger in size, yet they lacked the large teeth for threatening (or attacking) other males.

(I think it is interesting to note that both P. boisei and G. gorilla are vegetarians. The enormous sagittal crest along the top of the their skulls was an anchor for the large temporal muscles needed for chewing fibrous plant stuff).

Recent hypotheses propose that this was an indication of monogamy in P. boisei-- that perhaps the males didn't have large incisors because they didn't need them for male-male competition over females because each male mated with a single female... "just like humans."

I immediately had felt like there were a couple of problems with this line of thinking. First and foremost, humans were not monogamous until very recently in our history. Nearly all documented human cultures in the past (and many still today) featured polygynous marriage patterns. Monogamy is a pretty recent idea for humans, and still far from universal.

Second, representatives of the Paranthropus genus thrived for a million years on this planet, and in spite of their small canines, males were significantly larger than females. Humans, on the other hand, show only slight dimorphism in comparison.

Oh boy... I'm getting pretty wordy here. Suffice it to say, I have another hypothesis to counter the "Paranthropus was just like us... monogamous" argument, but I'm keeping the details to myself until I can do some proper research and write something up. Yep, I'm working on an outside-of-class research project. See how totally consumed I am by this new thing?

I'm probably taking a Linguistics course next semester, so I can go crazy over my final anthro discipline.