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Archaeologists investigate Ice Age hominins' adaptability to climate change

Computational modeling that examines evidence of how hominin groups evolved culturally and biologically in response to climate change during the last Ice Age also bears new insights into the extinction of Neanderthals. Details of the complex modeling experiments conducted at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado Denver will be published in the December issue of the journal Human Ecology, available online Nov. 17.

Computer agents (colored dots) simulating prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups are superimposed over a map of Late Pleistocene western Eurasia. Grey shows Pleistocene land area with lowered sea levels, black lines show modern coastlines, white areas show ice sheets. The blue dots represent groups of "modern" humans, red dots represent groups of Neanderthals, and yellow dots represent groups with biological mixtures of modern and Neanderthal genes. This is a snapshot of the simulation after hundreds of cycles in which the hunter-gather groups have higher mobility in response to changing glacial climate. The data and corresponding analyses were cited by archeologists from Arizona State University and the University of Colorado Denver in findings published in the December issue of the journal Human Ecology, available online Nov. 17 [Credit: Michael Barton/Arizona State University]

"To better understand human ecology, and especially how human culture and biology co-evolved among hunter-gatherers in the Late Pleistocene of Western Eurasia (ca. 128,000-11,500 years ago) we designed theoretical and methodological frameworks that incorporated feedback across three evolutionary systems: biological, cultural and environmental," said Michael Barton, a pioneer in the area of archaeological applications of computational modeling at Arizona State University.

"One scientifically interesting result of this research, which studied culturally and environmentally driven changes in land-use behaviors, is that it shows how Neanderthals could have disappeared not because they were somehow less fit than all other hominins who existed during the last glaciation, but because they were as behaviorally sophisticated as modern humans," said Barton, who is lead author of the published findings.

The paper "Modeling Human Ecodynamics and Biocultural Interactions in the Late Pleistocene of Western Eurasia" is co-authored by Julien Riel-Salvatore, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver; John Martin "Marty" Anderies, an associate professor of computational social science at ASU in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the School of Sustainability; and Gabriel Popescu, an anthropology doctoral student in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU.

"It's been long believed that Neanderthals were outcompeted by fitter modern humans and they could not adapt," said Riel-Salvatore. "We are changing the main narrative. Neanderthals were just as adaptable and in many ways, simply victims of their own success."

The interdisciplinary team of researchers used archeological data to track behavioral changes in Western Eurasia over a period of 100,000 years and showed that human mobility increased over time, probably in response to environmental change. According to Barton, the last Ice Age saw hunter-gathers, including both Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans, range more widely across Eurasia searching for food during a major shift in the Earth's climate.

The scientists utilized computer modeling to explore the evolutionary consequences of those changes, including how changes in the movements of Neanderthals and modern humans caused them to interact – and interbreed – more often.

According to Riel-Salvatore, the study offered further evidence that Neanderthals were more flexible and resourceful than previously assumed.

"Neanderthals had proven that they could roll with the punches and when they met the more numerous modern humans, they adapted again," Riel-Salvatore said. "But modern humans probably saw the Neanderthals as possible mates. As a result, over time, the Neanderthals died out as a physically recognizable population."

To reach their conclusion, the researchers ran a computer program for the equivalent of 1,500 generations showing that as Neanderthals and modern humans expanded their yearly ranges, the Neanderthals were slowly absorbed by more numerous modern humans until they had disappeared as a recognizable population.

"We tested the modeling results against the empirical archaeological record and found that there is evidence that Neanderthals, and moderns, did adapt their behaviors in the way in which we modeled," explained Barton. "Moreover, the modeling predicts the kind of low-level genetic admixture of Neanderthal genes that are being found in the newest genetic studies just now being published.

"In other words, successful behavioral adaptations to severe environmental conditions made Neanderthals, and other non-moderns about whom we know little, vulnerable to biological extinction, but at the same time, ensured they made a genetic contribution to modern populations," Barton said.

The authors noted that "the methods we illustrate here offer a robust, new framework in which researchers can begin to examine the effects that such invisible characteristics could have on the observable record."

"The kind of modeling we did in this research is very new in paleoanthropology, as is the continental scope of the archaeological analysis we used to test the model results," noted Barton.

"However, such computational modeling can refine our understanding of long-term human impact on the environment that can help inform land-use decisions for our future," said Barton, who also is co-director of ASU's Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, which leverages the emerging field of complex systems to foster interdisciplinary research on fundamental questions of social life.

The research presented in Human Ecology was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship and a Fulbright Graduate Student Fellowship.

Source: Arizona State University [November 17, 2011]

Skeleton of ancient human relative may yield skin

As London's Natural History Museum takes delivery of two replica fossils, palaeontologists hint that they have discovered tools with the fossils, and mummified skin on the bones.

Australopithecus sediba fossils [Credit: Natural History Museum]

It is strangely moving to hold it, knowing that this is an exact replica of a hand of one of our most ancient relatives. The bones looked frail and slight lying on the black felt, but fit snugly on my palm, knuckles lining up to knuckles. This woman, who died 1.9 million years ago after falling down a watering hole in what is now South Africa, had hands remarkably similar to mine.

This morning, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, gave a full cast of her fossil to the Natural History Museum in London, along with a cast of a child of the same species, Australopithecus sediba. Together, the two impressive fossils are calling into question the history of our species, and offering never-seen-before insights into how our very early ancestors lived.

At 1.977 million years old, the pair were nearly contemporary with Homo erectus, yet were discovered at the Malapa cave site in South Africa, far from the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, which has traditionally been considered the cradle of humanity.

Mixed-up kid

The morphology of their bones – an odd mix of structures similar to ones seen in chimpanzees, australopithecines and even Homo erectus – backs up the notion that this is a transition species. Had some of the bones been found separately, says discoverer Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, it's likely they would have been ascribed to the different species of Australopithecus.

The fossils' hands and feet suggest that it could climb trees and yet was also bipedal. One possible explanation for these fossils' presence in South Africa, says Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, is that environmental changes drove several simultaneous changes in australopithecines across the continent. "It's possible that the environment was becoming drier and more open, encouraging changes like meat-eating and upright walking. What if we were doing this in parallel in different places?"

That could explain the emergence of several transition species at roughly the same time in different parts of Africa, including present-day Ethiopia and South Africa. Most of those species would have died out, leaving just one that evolved into modern humans.

No toothpicks

So far we have had only a tiny glimpse at what these two fossils can tell us. This morning, Berger gave tantalising hints of what is yet to come.

Their tooth enamel is being studied for signs of what the pair's diet would have been – and traces of their last meal are still embedded in the crowns of their teeth. Tools have also been found in the area, and are being studied to see if A. sediba could have made them.

If so, they would not be the oldest tools ever found – those date back to around 2.5 million years ago, and evidence of butchery going back to 3.4 million years ago. "But what we have never found is direct association of an early hominid species with lithics [stone tools]," says Berger.

We have to be careful about what we conclude, however, he warns. For one thing, it is hard to definitively associate a tool found at a site with nearby hominid bones. If a fossil were definitely linked to a tool or set of tools, though, anthropologists would have a unique opportunity to explore how our bodies and brains shaped tools, and were shaped by them. "Given the brain, the dental reduction that's taken place, the long arms and the hands, what those tools are and how they're made will give us great insight into the formative process," says Berger.

Oldest skin

The two fossils were found in chunks of rock that came out of a deep shaft in the ground. The shaft may have been a watering hole, and one hypothesis is that the woman and boy fell into it while seeking a drink – fractures in the bones may be signs of a fatal fall.

Other bones are sticking out of the sides of that hole, including human bones and the remains of animals that would have been around at the time – antelopes, hyenas and false sabre-toothed cats, for instance. As Berger puts it: "We have the animals and plants that were with them the minute they died."

But the most exciting possibility is that the woman and the boy – nicknamed Karabo – were mummified before they were fossilised. Many of the bones at Malapa are coated in a very thin layer of material that appears to be skin. There is at least the possibility that the two died in a deep, anoxic pool of water, which preserved them in ways never seen before.

If 'the bone coating does turn out to be skin, it will be the first discovery of soft tissue from an ancient hominin. Hair might be present, proteins such as keratin and even DNA might be extracted from the tissue, allowing us to dig even deeper into our history, and determine exactly how this species evolved, or even mated with other hominid species.

"It's not constructive to think about our ancestry as a linear chain of events," says Berger. "As scientists we would not have hoped to believe we could see a transitional, mosaic, evolving species in the mammalian record outside of horses – and here's one in our lineage, which is amazing."

Authors: Catherine Brahic and Rowan Hooper | Source: NewScientist [November 16, 2011]

Prehistoric men scarred, pierced, tattooed privates

Men in prehistoric Europe scarred, pierced and tattooed their penises, likely for ritualistic and social group reasons, according to a new study.

Warriors at Vermelhossa (Vila nova de Foz Coa, Portugal) [Credit: Javier Angulo/Discovery News]

Analysis of phallic decorations in Paleolithic art, described in the December issue of The Journal of Urology, may also show evidence of the world's first known surgery performed on a male genital organ. The alteration, or surgery, might have just been for ornamental purposes, or a piercing, the researchers suggest.

Lead author Javier Angulo, chair of the Department of Urology at Hospital Universitario de Getafe in Spain, explains that, like today, tattooing and manipulation of body parts have always functioned as a way for people to express themselves.

"[People] may feel that scars are a written story on the skin," he said.

"Making scars, holes to pick bones, and also writing on the skin -- tattooing -- may add meaning to an otherwise 'silly body,'" he added. "If one or several marks became popular or fashionable, they may be culturally elected as 'fancy' and 'desirable.' The face and areas around natural orifices are parts of the body with a higher tendency to be decorated and shown."

Angulo and colleagues Marcos García-Díez and Marc Martínez studied male genital representations in portable, mostly handheld sizes of art made in Europe approximately 38,000 to 11,000 years ago.

The pieces, researchers say, frequently mirrored what actually appeared on the male penis. Paleolithic art is known to be very naturalistic, so the artists were recreating what they saw.

Additionally, Angulo said that "Otzi and some mummies confirm tattoos were on their skin."

"Modern primitives did modify their bodies, including their genitals, with the use of tattooing, perforations and cuttings (scars) to change their appearance," Angulo said.

Phallic decoration became prevalent among men of the Magdalenian culture in France and Spain about 12,000 years ago, according to a study in The Journal of Urology. Analysis of the mostly hand-held art excavated from sites in France, Spain, Germany and the Ukraine shows that most of it was created in Europe approximately 38,000 years ago. Pictured here are several portable phallic pieces. The top line shows totally retracted or absent foreskin on the art pieces. The second line shows a replication of piercing, scaring and tattooing [Credit: Javier Angulo/Discovery News]

They therefore believe it is "highly probable that the marks left on these phalli are not decorative for the sake of the piece of art but rather a depiction of real-life details."

Many of the marks are geometric shapes, such as triangles or circles. Some designs appear to match those of figures seen within Paleolithic cave art from the same regions. This suggests that the symbols may have held important meanings for people then.

"It is widely understood that these designs are part of an unknown code," Angulo said, adding that some of them might have been made exclusively for a decorative purpose. Tattoos today follow the same coda, for the most part. A lion tattoo on a man's arm may only mean that the man likes the look, not that the lion means anything special to him.

Angulo added that other possible explanations for the symbols include: "territorial signs or landmarks, shamanistic repetitive marks in the passage to an unconscious world, some forms of primitive counting, the investigation of non-figurative artistic expression playing with spaces and light and darkness…Who knows?"

What is clear is that phallic decoration became more prevalent among men of the Magdalenian Culture in France and Spain about 12,000 years ago.

"That could be part of a cultural phenomenon related to a concrete time and space," Angulo said.

Another finding of the study is that prehistoric men seemed to favor preputial retraction, or drawing back of the foreskin. As a result, the scientists think it's likely that early males practiced circumcision as both a way to prevent disease and for affiliation purposes. To this day, ritual or religious circumcisions occur within several cultures.

For the prehistoric cultures, Angulo believes that their "canon of beauty” changed over time. Earlier humans of the Gravettian culture, known for characteristic tools such as carving blades, appear to have favored more exaggerated depictions of sexuality, as is evident in many of their "Venus" figurines of naked women. The Magdalenians, on the other hand, had a more naturalistic concept of beauty, according to the authors.

For a separate study, Liam Brady of Monash University's Center for Australian Indigenous Studies, looked at early body art in Australia. He told Discovery News that such research might provide clues into the mindset and actions of early cultures.

Brady explained, "Distinctive design conventions can be considered markers of social interaction so, in a way (they are) a cultural signature of sorts that archaeologists can use to understand ways people were interacting in the past."

The past may additionally be tied to the present, as Angulo and his team suspect that the Paleolithic phallic art may show the anthropological origin of current male genital piercing and tattooing.

Author: Jennifer Viegas | Source: Discovery News [November 11, 2011]

You're just one in 7 billion!

Did you take a deep breath before pushing and shoving your way into a crowded train this morning? Stepped on a few toes or nerves perhaps? Phew, well, if you thought dodging elbows and trying to hop on that crowded morning rush hour train was bad, try thinking about this – the world’s population recently hit 7 billion and in an already crowded planet, that poses quite a problem.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s population more than doubled just in the last fifty years. This staggering growth is certainly a cause for alarm and has scientists, economists and sociologists scrambling to find a solution to combat the problems that come with an overcrowded planet.

Though some have hailed this as a milestone for humanity, there are probably many more reasons to fear our population boom than cheer it.

Shigehiro Oishi, Associate Professor at the University of Virginia’s Department of Psychology, examines the social and cultural impact that the population growth could have on people’s well-being. He refers to the results of a 2011 study by Richard Lucas of Michigan State University which found that residents of densely populated counties are less satisfied with their lives than those of sparsely populated counties in the US. “Stanley Milgram, in a 1970 Science article, famously theorized that urban apathy is due to sensory overload in urban living. Overall, the literature on subjective well-being and pro-social behavior both suggests that population density is negatively associated with well-being and the quality of life,” says Oishi.

Stephen Loughnan, of the University of Kent’s School of Psychology, thinks that the 7 billion population is testament to man’s advances in science and social sciences. However, he is concerned that population growth is largely driven by increased birth rates in developing nations. “As people in these nations begin to rightly demand a standard of living similar to that enjoyed by people in Western and developed Eastern nations, two distinct possibilities arise. On one hand they could be denied the chance to enjoy our level of health, wealth and well-being, which is unfair. On the other, they could adopt the consumption practices of developed nations, which may well be unsustainable,” says Loughnan.

Daniel Stokols, Chancellor’s Professor of Social Ecology in the Departments of Psychology and Social Behavior and Planning, Policy, and Design at the University of California, Irvine is concerned about the impacts that 7 billion people will have on the world’s resources and stresses the need to find better ways of conserving resources for future generations.

“The effects of population growth and high density on behavior and well-being depend largely on the situations in which they are experienced. For the one billion people on earth living in slums, their experiences of density and crowding stress are more chronic and disruptive than for those living in more affluent environments. In general, though, increased population size and density tends to be associated with greater pollution and environmental problems that can dramatically lower our overall quality of life.” Stokols says more effort is needed to develop greener energy technologies and ways of replenishing renewable resources as population growth puts more pressure on natural resources poses new challenges for protecting environmental quality.

Stokols also examines this issue from a psychological perspective. “One way that psychological science contributes toward solving environmental problems is by helping people understand the links between their behaviors and adverse global outcomes – world population growth poses not only environmental and technological, but also behavioral challenges. Psychology offers a basis for promoting environmentally supportive behaviors and lifestyles. When people feel overwhelmed by environmental problems, they are less likely to make efforts to reduce them. As they become more mindful of the links between their own behavior and global problems such as climate change, they can begin to take steps toward reducing their ecological footprint—for instance, by recycling waste products and reducing their energy use” continues Stokols.

So, at 7 billion and counting, whilst we should applaud how far we have come in the last century, we also have to be aware that the problems posed by this population boom range from economic and technological to environmental and behavioral–and that we must redouble our efforts at personal and collective levels to take better care of our environment for future generations.

Source: Association for Psychological Science [November 09, 2011]

Day of Skulls: Bolivians take skulls to cemetery

The human skulls brought to the cemetery in Bolivia's capital Tuesday were dressed in military hats, brightly colored Andean chuyo wool hats, adorned with flowers.

A woman holds a set of decorated human skulls during Dia de los Natitas or Day of the Skulls festivities, before the start of a Mass at the church cemetery in La Paz, Bolivia, Tuesday Nov. 8, 2011. "Natitas," are human skulls from unnamed, abandoned graves or departed loved ones, that when cared for and decorated with flowers, cigarettes, coca leaves among other treats, are believed to protect one from evil. The Bolivian ritual marks the end of the All Saints holiday, but is not recognized by the Catholic church [Credit: AP/Juan Karita]

Bolivia's annual version of the Day of the Dead is a macabre mixture of Andean prehispanic beliefs and Roman Catholicism.

The church considers it a pagan cult but chooses to recognize it as a way of retaining its influence in this indigenous-majority country.

An ancient Andean belief holds that people have seven souls, and one stays with the skull, anthropologists say. Believers think this soul has the power to visit people in their dreams, heal and provide protection.

Believers keep skulls, called "natitas," in their homes, giving them names and keeping them in glass cases or on makeshift altars.

A man carries a decorated human skull before the start of a Mass celebrating Dia de los Natitas or Day of the Skulls, at the church cemetery in La Paz, Bolivia, Tuesday Nov. 8, 2011. "Natitas," are human skulls from unnamed, abandoned graves or departed loved ones, that when cared for and decorated with flowers, cigarettes, coca leaves among other treats, are believed to protect one from evil. The Bolivian ritual marks the end of the All Saints holiday, but is not officially recognized by the Catholic church [Credit: AP/Juan Karita]

For "Day of the Skull" celebrations, they dress them up and take them to the chapel at La Paz's main cemetery for Mass.

Homemaker Luisa Perez brought the skull that has accompanied her family for 24 years.

"To look after my house, to scare away thieves, to protect my family, that is why I venerate her," she said, adding that her mother found the skull in a cemetery.

The skulls are usually not of family members but of strangers, often recovered from cemeteries or purchased. Bolivian custom is to remove human remains for graves or tombs after eight years for the families to incinerate. But some remains go unclaimed.

Catholic faithful carry decorated human skulls during the Dia de los Natitas or Day of the Skulls, festivities, before the start of a Mass at the church cemetery in La Paz, Bolivia, Tuesday Nov. 8, 2011. "Natitas," are human skulls from unnamed, abandoned graves that when cared for and decorated with flowers, cigarettes, coca leaves among other treats, are believed to protect one from evil. The Bolivian ritual marks the end of the Catholic All Saints holiday, but is not recognized by the Catholic church [Credit: AP/Juan Karita]

The Rev. Jaime Fernandez refused to bless the natitas this year at La Paz cemetery — as has been done in the past — but at the insistence of believers he agreed to say a short prayer so "their souls can rest."

"They shouldn't bring them to the church. They shouldn't pull them from their tombs. They should leave them in peace," Fernandez said, praying over the skulls in Spanish and Aymara.

The belief in natitas is deeply rooted in poor neighborhoods and among rural migrants, but isn't popular among Bolivia's middle class.

Anthropologist Milton Eyzaguirre said that in the Andean world death is another dimension of life, and a time spent in contact with spirits is necessary.

Author: Carlos Valdez | Source: Associated Press [November 08, 2011]

3.6 million-year-old "family" may not be related

A famous trail of footprints once thought to have been left behind by a family of three human ancestors may have actually been made by four individuals traveling at different times.

Laetoli footprints, Tanzania [Source: Web]

In a new examination of Laetoli in northern Tanzania, where a 3.6-million-year-old track of footprints of the bipedal human ancestor Australopithecus is preserved, researchers now argue that the classic understanding of this site is mistaken. The footprints have been buried since the mid-1990s for preservation, but a section recently opened for study as Tanzanian officials make plans for a museum on the site.

Preserved at Laetoli are two lines of hominid prints, along the crisscrossing tracks of early rabbits and other animals. The site is the earliest example of an upright, humanlike gait in our ancestors. Early analysis had suggested the tracks were laid down by three individuals, evolutionary relatives of the famous Australopithecus aferensis "Lucy," discovered in Ethiopia. One Australopithecus walked next to another, while a third, smaller individual trailed behind, stepping in the tracks of one of the larger individuals.

Researchers speculated that the three Australopithecus walkers were a male, female and juvenile — a "first family" of upright walkers. But new high-resolution photographs reveal a different story, said study researcher Brent Breithaupt, a paleontologist at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Cheyenne, Wyo.

The multiple-footprint impressions appear to contain not two sets of toe-prints, but three, Breithaupt said. And all of the individuals who walked through the plain had the same-sized feet.

"So instead of having three individuals of different sizes, with the sizes related to different ages, there are probably four individuals of the same size moving through this area, perhaps not traveling as a group," Breithaupt told LiveScience.

New look at old footprints

The Australopithecus tracks were first uncovered in the 1970s by researchers led by anthropologist Mary Leakey. While taking a break, the scientists struck up a rowdy elephant-dung fight on the Serengeti Plain. In the hilarity, one researcher practically tripped over the Laetoli footprints.

But because the footprints are fragile, they were re-buried to keep them conserved, and re-opened only once in the 1990s. That means that much of the study of the footprints has been secondhand, said study researcher Neffra Matthews, a scientist at the BLM in Denver.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management team members Tom Noble, center, and Neffra Matthews, right, partner with the government of Tanzania in a recent re-excavation of the famous early hominid footprints discovered by the Leakeys at Laetoli in Tanzania [Credit: Vanessa Stepanek]

"Any secondary interpretations had to be made from the first interpretations or from a cast or reproduction," Matthews told LiveScience. "So not having access to that primary set of data kind of channeled the way the interpretations would go from then on."

In February 2011, however, a section of the track area was re-excavated for evaluation as a future museum site. Using a photographic technique that provides high-resolution three-dimensional views of the footprints, Matthews, Breithaupt and Charles Musiba, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Denver, and their colleagues from the U.S., Tanzania, Korea and Spain were able to get a new view of the footprints. The research was funded by Tanzania's Ministry of Tourism and Natural Resources.

Party of four

The three-dimensional data provided by the new technique revealed an extra set of toe-prints in the multiple-footprint impressions. Careful measurements revealed that each individual had a footprint that was about 7.5 inches (19 centimeters) long, suggesting that each Australopithecus was the same size.

In addition, the lone set of tracks neighboring the multi-footprint trail revealed that the individual's right foot was angled strangely compared with the left foot, Matthews reported Nov. 4 here at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists.

"Not only do we notice there is a change in the angle, but we also notice there is more weight being placed on the left foot, possibly indicating that there is a problem with the right foot," Matthews said.

The findings are preliminary, and future plans to re-excavate more of the tracks could provide more information on how these ancient human ancestors walked and how many there were, she said.

The new findings raise questions of why Australopithecus might have been walking in each other's footprints, said Martin Lockley, a paleontologist at the University of Colorado at Denver who was not involved in the current study. They also highlight the importance of taking a hard look at the evidence so that modern biases don't creep into ancient stories, he said.

"We kind of idealized the interpretation of the evidence to have a family, a mother, father and a youngster," Lockley told LiveScience, adding that there is a temptation to interpret fossil finds through a modern lens.

"There's a temptation to say, 'Well, we've got this data and it must mean something,'" he said. "And where do we get our meaning? We get our meaning from our cultural experience. So we say, 'We've got happy families today, here's a family 3.5 million years ago.'"

The new evidence torpedoes that nuclear-family ideal, he said.

"The whole concept of the family, possibly two adults and a baby, it's kind of like the three bears: mama, papa and baby," Lockley said. "We've brought in an uncle or a sister or a brother or something."

Author: Stephanie Pappas | Source: LiveScience [November 08, 2011]

Known and unknown: Great travellers of the Pacific

When a well-known travel magazine set out to identify the top ten travellers of all time, the names it came up with held few surprises. Top of its list, which encompassed Charles Darwin and Christopher Columbus, was Captain James Cook, the legendary British explorer. Cook’s voyages were extraordinary in their scope and ambition, but he was not the only person to have travelled widely in the Pacific.

Detail of A View of Maitavie Bay, on the island of Otaheite by William Hodges [Credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Ministry of Defence Art Collection]

A prize-winning book by Cambridge anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire looks at the remarkable journeys undertaken by the Pacific Islanders themselves. It is a narrative that begins with the voyages that led to islands as remote as Rapanui (Easter Island) and New Zealand being settled, and embraces the interactions of these Pacific peoples with the Europeans who followed centuries later. Thomas, whose own academic career has spanned the globe, examines not just the impact of colonial Europe on indigenous cultures but the ways in which the cultures of incomers have merged with those of the islanders – and vice versa – in a way that’s both complex and nuanced.

Though Cook was preceded in the Pacific by earlier Spanish, Dutch and British navigators, his were the voyages that inaugurated contacts with native peoples in many of the archipelagos. Seen through the traditional Western historical lens, his were the “discoveries”. Since the epoch of decolonisation, academics have sought to reconfigure this interpretation – presenting Islanders as active makers of their own histories, rather than merely victims. But most researchers have retained the tendency to see Islanders as the inhabitants of bounded native communities, rather than voyagers in their own right. It is this notion that the worlds of indigenous people were limited to the ‘local’ that Thomas has challenged, on the basis of wide-ranging archival work that has revealed the many and diverse voyages that Islanders themselves undertook.

Thomas was inspired to write Islanders by his understanding of the resilience and the unexpected cosmopolitanism of islanders’ lives. That understanding emerged from two sorts of research experience – his fieldwork in the Pacific and his examination of archives around the globe. Both are underpinned by his lifelong fascination with the Pacific. “Ever since the 1980s I’ve been lucky enough to travel and do fieldwork in the Marquesas Islands, Fiji, Niue and elsewhere, talking to people, living among them, gaining some sense of their own understandings of history,” he says.“During research in Fiji, and in other places, I’ve been struck by the fact that life on the Pacific Islands is still a matter of exchange, debt and ceremony, even as it has become entangled with commerce and politics. People have remained, in vital and intractable ways, themselves. Even when they work far from home in factories, or for peacekeeping missions, they are at once marked by worldliness and able to shrug it off.”

The second strand running through the book is Thomas’s research in archives all over the world, from Europe to Australia and in the Pacific Islands themselves. “Sitting in libraries I’ve struggled through legible and indecipherable manuscripts, journals and memoirs of missionaries, traders, officials and anthropologists. – all have different biases, of course, but many of these records are surprisingly frank, and full of insights of all sorts – into the lives of Islanders in the past.”

Missionaries, their lives, journeys and ambitions have always intrigued Thomas. Less than an hour from his office in Cambridge, where he is director of the University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, are the archives of the London Missionary Society at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies. “As I read the letters and journals of figures such as John Williams – the most renowned missionary before David Livingstone – I was excited, indeed astonished, to gain a fresh sense of what was at issue in the Islanders’ adoption of Christianity. In fact, Islanders had sometimes embraced new cults more than once before. They did so for political reasons – to gain advantage in local struggles for prestige and authority – and would do so again when Christianity seemed a potent new resource. They went as far as to become missionaries themselves, spreading the word to communities other than their own, in advance of the white missionaries whose importance has been exaggerated.”

It’s tempting to perceive indigenous people as “locals”: people living in the middle of nowhere and going nowhere. “We see them as bounded communities who were impacted upon by Western civilisation in the shape of religion, commerce and government,” says Thomas. “But the experiences of the Pacific islanders had long been extra-local. They traded and trafficked among themselves and, when the Europeans arrived, they began to range more widely. There was cosmopolitanism to their practise and to their imagining.”Mission and shipping archives reveal that from the end of the 18th century onwards, many Islanders – especially in the early days – travelled extensively. They joined ships, typically as ordinary maritime workers, they visited ports all over the world, they travelled to many islands in the Pacific, sometimes settling and sometimes returning home.

Perhaps the most striking among the great travellers of the Pacific, and the one that most captures Thomas’s imagination as a Polynesian Odysseus, is a man named Tapioi who left Tahiti on the first day of the 19th century and visited Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, Palau, the Philippines, the East Indies, England and other places. Though all but lost to history, his life offers a lens on the extraordinary changes and new horizons that marked Pacific lives in the period.

Thomas first encountered Tapioi in the archives of the London Missionary Society archives and began to piece together his story from cursory newspaper references, letters and other records. It seems that a thirst for adventure may have motivated the young Tapioi to join a whaler called the Betsey and then another ship called the Plumo. His adventures read like the most fantastical of blockbusters with several shipwrecks, mutiny and imprisonment.

In 1806 Tapioi arrived in London on a trading ship. He fell into the clutches of a former missionary who was prosecuted for exhibiting him like a wild beast in the streets and abusing him. Taken in by another missionary, Tapioi was sponsored by a committee to attend a progressive Quaker school in Southwark where he became “acquainted with the laws of civilised society”. Four years later Tapioi was given a passage on a ship carrying convict women to Sydney. He was given carpentry tools and, because he was fond of drawing, drawing paper, pencils and a large box of colors”.

It may well be significant that Tapioi never returned to Tahiti: he settled on a farm near Sydney and died of dysentery or something similar in 1812. He was just 35, or perhaps slightly older. In Islanders Thomas writes of his frustration that so little remains of Tapioi’s extraordinary story and his encounters with people all over the world. “It would be remarkable to understand how this man understood the extraordinary diversity of places he visited and peoples he encountered,” he writes.

From the late 18th century onwards Europeans made incursions into the Pacific, some seeking to profit from commerce, others to change Islanders’ lives and save their souls. Sandalwood was highly prized for its essential oils, used in soaps and fragrances, and beche de mer (sea cucumber) as an edible delicacy, much favoured in south-east Asia. Conversion to Christianity was seen as a matter of urgency by the evangelically-minded.

The Western characters whose stories are interwoven with those of the Pacific islanders are larger-than-life. Among them are the fervent young Northamptonshire shoemaker William Carey, an evangelical autodidact who drew up a statistical table of the “heathens” in “barbarous nations” who must be systematically converted to Christianity, and the bricklayer George Vason who married into Tongan royalty, took on the status of a chief, and wrote later of his lamentable period of “declension”, while signally failing to conceal his delight in Tongan customs and the island’s idyllic natural environment.

Fascinating too are the ragtag collection of Westerners who ended up through shipwreck, mutiny or misadventure on far-flung shores – precursors perhaps of today’s hippies and drop-outs. Thomas calls them beachcombers, a human version of flotsam and jetsam, riding on the ebb and flow of life’s tides. An ability to speak the local language, and understand the local culture, made them useful, but not always trusted, as interpreters in negotiations between mariners and locals.

Islanders is a work that draws together a lifetime of research. It touches on some deep questions and tells of the tragedies that occur when human interactions go badly wrong. Westerners brought with them diseases that, according to varying estimates, reduced the population of the Pacific by half in many cases, and as much as 90 per cent in the worst. On one occasion a group of missionaries, attempting to address people in Tahiti, found themselves competing with a speech from a man “employed in enumerating the diseases the English have brought here…they were all dying, and but a few left alive.” Yet, despite this real devastation, Islands cultures remained resilient, and are very much alive today.

Source: University of Cambridge [November 07, 2011]

North America's first settlers didn't dawdle

Scientists here are rewriting an early chapter of the history books that describes how and when humans first set foot on North American soil, based on clues extracted from the blood of their San Antonio descendants.

Beringia [Credit: National Park Service]

Experts agree — based on genetic evidence, bones, artifacts and the study of languages — that the ancestors of American Indians came from Northeast Asia thousands of years ago, crossing the frozen Bering land bridge, probably in pursuit of wild game.

In recent years, some experts have speculated they stopped and settled on that land mass, known as Beringia, for perhaps 15,000 years — a long span of time when four distinct ancestral groups genetically drifted away from their relatives back in Asia. Some think their path to the Americas might have been blocked by glaciers until a great thaw.

The idea of that long pause was based both on genetic studies and archaeological finds, including evidence of human settlements on the Asian side dating to about 30,000 years ago.

But in a new paper, scientists at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute argue that new genetic evidence shows those ancient explorers didn't camp out on the land bridge for 15,000 years as believed. Instead, it was less than 5,000 years — and it's possible they barely stopped at all.

“Beringia was more like a bus stop than a homeland,” said John Blangero, a co-author of the paper and director of the AT and T Genomics Computing Center at Texas Biomed.

“If they stopped, it was very brief — less than 5,000 years,” agreed Satish Kumar, a geneticist at Texas Biomed and lead author of the paper. “Otherwise it is kind of a continuous movement to America. They were diverging from Siberian-Asian ancestors, coming to America.”

Their evidence comes from genetic material found within mitochondria — tiny bodies within cells that generate energy, like power plants.

Unlike regular DNA, mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and changes mainly through normal mutations from generation to generation. Scientists have calculated how often those mutations take place, making it possible to mark time from them like rings on a tree.

Kumar and Blangero didn't set out to rewrite history books. Instead they were studying the mitochondrial DNA of hundreds of Mexican American volunteers in the San Antonio Family Heart Study to learn more about the genetic origins of diabetes and obesity. Many scientists have speculated that the high rate of diabetes in Mexican Americans is linked to their blood ties to American Indians, who have even higher diabetes rates.

Kumar identified American Indian portions of the DNA from 215 local volunteers and combined that information with records of DNA collected by other researchers from American Indians and Asians. From those he could create timelines, following each group through the years as new families branched off from old ones and spread into North, Central and South America.

Exactly when each of the four groups crossed into the Americas isn't clear — probably between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago at the end of a period called the Last Glacial Maximum, the researchers said. But three estimates for mutation rates have been put forward by scientists, and Kumar ran all of them for this study — coming up with a range of dates. All of them showed a stop in Beringia of less than 5,000 years.

Kumar, an expert in mitochondrial DNA, had done similar work in years past, helping to trace the roots of Australian aboriginal tribes from India through southern Asia.

Author: Don Finley | Source: My San Antonio [November 05, 2011]

Modern humans arrived earlier in Southern Europe than previously believed

Virtual Anthropology allows new identification of first modern humans – Members of our species (Homo sapiens) arrived in Europe several millennia earlier than previously thought. At this conclusion a team of researchers, led by the Department of Anthropology, University of Vienna, arrived after re-analyses of two ancient deciduous teeth.

Mesial view of the specimen Cavallo-B (deciduous left upper first molar), the first European anatomically modern human. The white bar in the figure is equivalent to 1 cm [Credit: Stefano Benazzi]

These teeth were discovered 1964 in the "Grotta del Cavallo", a prehistoric cave in southern Italy. Since their discovery they have been attributed to Neanderthals, but this new study suggests they belong to anatomically modern humans.

Chronometric analysis, carried out by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford, shows that the layers within which the teeth were found date to ~43,000-45,000 cal BP. This means that the human remains are older than any other known European modern humans. The research work was published in the renowned science journal Nature.

Grotta del Cavallo, in Apulia, was discovered in 1960. It contained about 7 m of archaeological deposits spanning the period during which Neanderthals were replaced by modern humans. Two milk teeth were unearthed in 1964 by Arturo Palma di Cesnola (emeritus of the University of Siena) from the so-called Uluzzian archaeological layers.

The Uluzzian culture has been described from more than 20 separate sites across Italy, and is characterised by personal ornaments, bone tools and colourants; items typically associated with modern human symbolic behaviour. But the teeth from Cavallo were identified in the 1960's as Neanderthals who lived around 200,000 to 40,000 years ago. This attribution has been at the heart of a widely held consensus that the Uluzzian and the complex ornaments and tools within it were also produced by Neanderthals.

Comparison of micro-computed-tomography scans of teeth

Stefano Benazzi, post-doc at the Department of Anthropology at University of Vienna, and his colleagues were able to compare digital models derived from micro-computed tomography scans of the human remains from Grotta del Cavallo with those of a large modern human and Neanderthal dental sample:

Three-dimensional digital model of Cavallo-B (deciduous left upper first molar). Enamel is transparent to show the crown dentine [Credit: Stefano Benazzi]

"We worked with two independent methods: for the one, we measured the thickness of the tooth enamel, and for the other, the general outline of the crown. By means of micro-computed tomography it was possible to compare the internal and external features of the dental crown. The results clearly show that the specimens from Grotta del Cavallo were modern humans, not Neanderthals as originally thought."

New chronometric analyses of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit

Katerina Douka, post-doc at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and History of Art at the University of Oxford, undertook a comprehensive programme of radiocarbon dating to establish a firm chronology for the finds. Previous dates for the Uluzzian were problematic and affected by contamination. Since the teeth were too small to date directly, Douka developed a new approach that focused on the dating of marine shells found in the same archaeological levels as the teeth.

Uluzzian artifacts from Grotta del Cavallo, Apulia, southern Italy [Credit: Annamaria Ronchitelli and Katerina Douka]

This approach showed that the modern human teeth must date to between ~43,000-45,000 years ago. Douka said, "Radiocarbon dating of Palaeolithic material is difficult because the levels of remaining radiocarbon are very low and contamination can be problematic. Shell beads are important objects of body ornamentation and have allowed us directly and reliably radiocarbon date items associated with these early Homo sapiens settlers of Europe."

Uluzzian culture was made by modern humans

"What the new dates mean", Benazzi summarised, "is that these two teeth from Grotta del Cavallo represent the oldest European modern human fossils currently known. This find confirms that the arrival of our species on the continent – and thus the period of coexistence with Neanderthals – was several thousand years longer than previously thought.

Grotta del Cavallo (red arrow) opens on the bay of Uluzzo, which is located in the Regional Natural Park of Portoselvaggio, Apulia, southern Italy [Credit: Annamaria Ronchitelli]

Based on this fossil evidence, we have confirmed that modern humans and not Neanderthals are the makers of the Uluzzian culture. This has important implications to our understanding of the development of 'fully modern' human behaviour. Whether the colonisation of the continent occurred in one or more waves of expansion and which routes were followed is still to be established."

International collaboration makes it possible

Gerhard Weber, head of the Core Facility for Micro-Computed Tomography and deputy head of the Department of Anthropology at University of Vienna, commented on the discovery in the following way: "Human fossil material is very rare, particularly well preserved deciduous teeth. It is only thanks to the collaboration of several European institutions that fossil remains were accessible.

The re-evaluation of the Cavallo material was only made possible through technical innovations developed in the last decade, known as 'Virtual Anthropology'. These new techniques developed for dental morphometrics and also new radiocarbon dating will help to address taxonomic questions associated with other contentious human fossil remains."

Source: University of Vienna [November 02, 2011]

Anthropologist discusses iron coffin discovery

Halloween may be over, but some of us still have cadavers, coffins and mummies on our minds. Last night, the Spurlock Museum welcomed David Hunt to the Dr. Allan C. Campbell Family Distinguished Speaker Series. Hunt is the collections manager of the physical anthropology division at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

David Hunt examines the iron coffin [Credit: Taylor Odisho/The Daily Illini]

At the presentation, Hunt discussed his most recent project that dealt with the excavation of an iron coffin. The coffin was found accidentally by construction workers who were digging out a pipeline. With Hunt’s expertise in the field, detectives asked him what steps should be taken with the coffin. So began Hunt’s research.

“It’s a fascinating area of research in looking at iron coffins because if the coffin has remained sealed, the body is very preserved,” Hunt said. “Its flesh is still supple and you can move it and do histology, so it gives you the opportunity to study an individual who comes from 100 to 150 years ago.”

The process of identifying the body has been long. After taking DNA samples from the boy, Hunt had to identify who he was. Experts from the museum scoured obituaries for a boy age 14 to 17 between the years 1850 and 1854. Of the four matches they found, DNA from one group of descendants matched the boy’s. He was identified as William White. White was born around 1837 in Accomack County, Penn., and died in 1852 from pneumonia.

The descendant Hunt found was a woman named Linda Dwyer, White’s great-great grandniece.

Jazmin Martin-Billups, junior in LAS, found Hunt’s presentation to be very informative.

“The genealogy … was really cool,” Martin-Billups said. “It’s really nice to see things so far away get connected with the present.”

White’s family held a memorial service for the boy before turning over his body and the coffin to the Smithsonian Institution.

Nathan Banion, senior in LAS, initially went to the presentation for anthropology extra credit but came out with a new appreciation for the field.

“I’ve actually come to a few Spurlock speakers before, and they’re always really interesting,” Banion said.

Hunt said the best part of the project was educating White’s family.

“The true greatness of it was the fact that we were able to reassociate a boy with this family, granted it was 150 years later,” Hunt said. “He was sort of a lost-and-then-found-again story.”

Author: Taylor Odisho | Source: The Daily Illini [November 02, 2011]

Understanding emotions without language

Does understanding emotions depend on the language we speak, or is our perception the same regardless of language and culture? According to a new study by researchers from the MPI for Psycholinguistics and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, you don't need to have words for emotions to understand them.

The researchers findings suggest that understanding emotional signals is not based on the words we have in your language to describe emotions. Instead, emotions appear to have evolved as a set of basic human mechanisms [Credit: © Oliver Le Guen/MPI for Psycholinguistics]

The results of the study were published online on October 17 in "Emotion", a journal of the American Psychological Association. The study provides new evidence that the perception of emotional signals is not driven by language, supporting the view that emotions constitute a set of biologically evolved mechanisms.

The study compared German speakers to speakers of Yucatec Maya, a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. In Yucatec Maya, there is no word for the emotion 'disgust', explains co-author Oliver Le Guen, an anthropologist based in Mexico.

When Yucatec Mayan subjects were shown photographs of emotional faces and asked what they thought the person in each photo was feeling, they used the same words to describe angry and disgusted faces. German-speaking subjects, however, used different words for angry and disgusted faces. This showed that the two languages differ in which words speakers have access to for these emotions.

Mix of emotions

The participants from the two language groups were also asked to perform a task using photographs of people showing mixed emotions. The photographs were digitally manipulated to control the mix of emotions in the faces so that the two photos were always equally different across all pairs. Subjects were shown a photo of a mixed-emotion face, which was then replaced by a pair of photos. One of the members of the pair was the original photo, the other featured the same person, but with a slightly different mix of emotions. In some pairs, the dominant emotion in the two photos was different, while in other pairs, the dominant emotion was the same. The participants were asked, for many pairs of photos, which of the two pictures they had just seen.

"Earlier research has found that people who have different words for two emotions do better on this task when the dominant emotion in the two photographs is different, like when one is mainly angry and the other one is mainly disgusted," explains Disa Sauter. "But is this because they internally label the faces angry and disgusted, or is it because emotions are processed by basic human mechanisms that have categories like anger and disgust regardless of whether we have words for those feelings?"

Basic human categories

The crucial test provided by Sauter and colleagues' study was how the Yucatec Maya speakers would do, since they only have one word for both disgust and anger. Their results showed that they did the same as the German speakers, performing better on the task when the two faces they had to choose between were dominated by different emotions.

"Our results show that understanding emotional signals is not based on the words you have in your language to describe emotions," Sauter says. "Instead, our findings support the view that emotions have evolved as a set of basic human mechanisms, with emotion categories like anger and disgust existing regardless of whether we have words for those feelings."

Source: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft [November 01, 2011]