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paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

archaeology

  • Plant processing with early Oldowan tools

    Tue, 2009-05-05 00:24 -- John Hawks

    Ann Gibbons was at the AAPA meetings early last month, and she reports in the current Science on some of the research. Her article about the use of early Oldowan tools from Kanjera, Kenya focuses on the evidence for plant processing:

    To find out just what early Homo was doing with the tools, [archaeologist Thomas] Plummer enlisted archaeologist Cristina Lemorini of the University of Rome, "La Sapienza." She studied replicas of the Kanjera tools, made with the same kinds of stone, that modern Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania had used to butcher animals, process wild tubers, cut grass, and work wood. Then, using confocal and metallographic microscopes, she compared patterns of wear on the edges of the Kanjera tools with those on the replicas. She reported that the ancient tools had telltale signs of being used to process plant materials, such as cutting grass, and the distinct striations made by sediment as tools were used to clean and section fibrous tubers. She also saw patterns consistent with defleshing carcasses and woodworking, possibly to make wooden tools.

    Kanjera has been the subject of some very interesting raw material analyses over the last couple of years, by David Braun and colleagues (2008, 2009), documenting the selectivity of the Oldowan-makers for particular kinds of raw materials -- studies that have counterparts at other early Oldowan sites, including Lokalalei (Harmand 2009).

    Meanwhile, the analysis of use-wear and plant residues on stone tools has advanced markedly in the last ten years. Use-wear analysis considers the kind of microwear produced on artifacts by repeated use against materials like wood, hide, meat, and bone. For many years, archaeologists have worked on microwear -- for example, Lawrence Keeley and Nick Toth (1981) showed that wear patterns on the edges of Oldowan tools from Koobi Fora are consistent with use in both meat and plant processing. But use-wear analysis has undergone recurrent debate over the years, as people questioned the qualitative assessments of similarity between reference tools -- used by experimenters on known materials -- and archaeological artifacts. A short review of this history is given by Evans and Donahue (2008).

    A certain ambiguity about use-wear studies remains unresolved -- how much of the results are in the eye of the analyst? It helps a lot to have additional evidence. Plant residues and phytoliths have increasingly provided such evidence -- the actual parts of plants adhering to stone tools with use-wear that looks like plant materials makes it look pretty likely that the tools were used on the plants. To list some highlights, we have:

    1. Nuts and nutcracking at Gesher Benot Ya`aqov (Goren-Inbar et al. 2002).

    2. Woodworking, as documented by phytoliths and plant fibers adhering to initial Acheulean tools from Peninj (Dominguez-Rodrigo et al. 2001).

    3. Starch grains also can adhere to stone tools, and starch processing is clear in the Middle Stone Age of Mozambique (Mercader et al. 2008).

    4. A range of starchy and woody plant materials were processed by Mousterian (presumably Neandertal) people from Starosele and later Upper Paleolithic people from Buran Kaya III -- similar between the two sites despite their difference in time (Hardy et al. 2001). Some tools had both mammalian hair and feather barbules attached.

    There's an endless range of such studies; a deep literature, so that a few highlights don't really do it justice. A few studies, like the last one here, actually consider enough artifacts to start to develop an idea of the activity patterns of people. When you're only studying three or four artifacts that preserve any microwear, you've got evidence that a few things did happen sometimes, but you really don't have a full pattern.

    References:

    Braun DR, Plummer T, Ditchfield P, Ferraro JV, Maina D, Bishop LC, Potts R. 2008. Oldowan behavior and raw material transport: perspectives from the Kanjera Formation. J Archaeol Sci 35:2329-2345. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2008.03.004

    Dominguez-Rodrigo M, Serrallonga J, Juan-Tresserras J, Alcala L, Luque L. 2001. Woodworking activities by early humans: a plant residue analysis on Acheulian stone tools from Peninj (Tanzania). J Hum Evol 40:289-299. doi:10.1006/jhev.2000.0466

    Evans AA, Donahue RE. 2008. Laser scanning confocal microscopy: a potential technique for
    the study of lithic microwear. J Archaeol Sci 35:2223-2230. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2008.02.006

    Gibbons A. 2009. Of tools and tubers. Science 324:588-589. doi:10.1126/science.324_588b

    Goren-Inbar N, Sharon G, Melamed Y, Kislev M. 2002. Nuts, nut cracking, and pitted stones at Gesher Benot Ya`aqov, Israel. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 99:2455-2460. doi:10.1073/pnas.032570499

    Hardy BL, Kay M, Marks AE, Monigal K. 2001. Stone tool function at the paleolithic sites of Starosele and Buran Kaya III, Crimea: Behavioral implications. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 98:10972-10977. doi:10.1073/pnas.191384498

    Harmand S. 2009. Variability in Raw Material Selectivity at the Late Pliocene sites of Lokalalei, West Turkana, Kenya. Pp. 85-97 in Hovers E, Braun DR, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Oldowan. Springer, Amsterdam. Amazon

    Keeley LH, Toth N, 1981. Microwear polishes on early stone tools from Koobi-Fora, Kenya. Nature 293:464-465.

    Mercader J, Bennett T, Raja M. 2008. Middle Stone Age starch acquisition in the Niassa Rift, Mozambique. Quatern Res 70:283-300. doi:10.1016/j.yqres.2008.04.010

    Tags: 
    diet
    Kanjera
    archaeology
    stone tools
    use-wear
    Oldowan

  • Quote: Otte on lithic analysis

    Wed, 2009-04-15 21:49 -- John Hawks

    I happened across this great quote by Marcel Otte, referring to the Bordes-Binford debate among other archaeological donnybrooks:

    The fastidious descriptions of European lithic assemblages have led to different and often contradictory interpretations—lyric or pathetic—that seem ultimately to be reflections of irreconcilable personal obsessions (Otte 2003:46).

    References:

    Otte M. 2003. The significance of variability in the European Mousterian. In Dibble HL, ed. The Middle Paleolithic: Adaptation, Behavior and Variability. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, Philadelphia.

    Tags: 
    Lewis Binford
    Francois Bordes
    archaeology
    Marcel Otte
    Mousterian
    quotes

  • Baringo blades

    Tue, 2009-04-07 23:03 -- John Hawks

    Ann Gibbons writes about half-million-year-old blades from the Kapthurin Formation of East Africa:

    Now it appears that more than 500,000 years ago, human ancestors living in the Baringo Basin of Kenya collected lava stone cobbles from a riverbed and hammered them in just the right way to produce stone blades. Paleoanthropologists Cara Roure Johnson and Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, recently discovered the blades at five sites in the region, including two that date to between 509,000 and 543,000 years ago. "This is the oldest known occurrence of blades," Johnson reported Wednesday here at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society.

    Blades appear occasionally in later Middle Stone Age contexts. The current report is interesting because they are early -- but I think the interesting part is that blades were lost so many times. Many archaeologists write about them as if blades were self-evidently superior technology -- for instance, the argument that blades "generate more useful sharp edge from the same amount of raw material."

    Of course, if blades were really obviously superior, then we would see more uniformity among Late Pleistocene people, including the Africans who repeatedly pick up the blade production habit and then discard (or more likely, forget) them entirely.

    Tags: 
    blades
    archaeology
    ESA

  • Shell instead of stone

    Mon, 2009-04-06 10:53 -- John Hawks

    Discovery News has a short article about Australian archaeologist Katherine Szabo's analyses of tools made of shell instead of stone in Late Pleistocene contexts:

    In published research to date, Szabo reports having excavated shell tools dating back 32,000 years from a cave site in eastern Indonesia, and comparing them with stone tools from the same cave.

    "It transpired that the shell tools were in fact much more complex to produce than the stone tools," she said.

    The stone tools were randomly chipped, but the shell tools had been carefully chosen and shaped.

    In one case, a "cats eye" or operculum shell was flaked systematically with five blows, each one slightly overlapping with the last in a clockwise direction.

    I want to mention along with this story that one of our own Ph.D.'s, Kildo Choi, published a paper in 2007, "Shell tool use by early members of Homo erectus in Sangiran, central Java, Indonesia: cut mark evidence". That paper documented cutmarks on early Pleistocene faunal elements that were made by clamshell, not stone. So the use of shell as a raw material probably goes back hundreds of thousands of years in the area.

    Tags: 
    archaeology
    Acheulean
    Southeast Asia
    Late Pleistocene
    Indonesia

  • Binford blogging

    Tue, 2008-07-22 23:14 -- John Hawks

    Lew Binford: What's the big deal? Hot Cup of Joe explores:

    In other, later, publications, Binford went on to refine and perfect his perspective of processual archaeology, but it’s my opinion that “Archaeology as Anthropology” was the seminal paper that first showed the glimpse of things to come. Reading it today, Binford’s wisdom and the clarity of his words ring clear. There is an objective and knowable past that can be explained if the right methodology is employed.

    More Binford blogging, please.

    Tags: 
    Binford
    archaeology

  • A short fiction about Neandertal introgression

    Sun, 2008-06-01 09:44 -- John Hawks

    If you have a subscription to Nature, you can get a short story from last week's issue, which explores the reaction of a couple of genetics-types to finding Neandertal genes responsible for human mental abilities:

    That has to be interbreeding. The earlier studies had missed it because they hadn't considered the changing impact of natural selection over time."

    "You can back that up?"

    "Absolutely." Beth was always meticulous about her data.

    I didn't have to force a smile. "That's fascinating," I said. "It will make Nature for sure." It would get a lot of people hot under their collective collars, but that was fine. Evidence of interbreeding with Neanderthals would create a new paradigm for hybridization being behind the rapid advance of modern humans and make me famous. "What genes are involved?"

    Notice: you can tell this is fiction because the result "will make Nature for sure"!

    On the other hand, some parts are uncomfortably true-to-life:

    "I'm a scientist. I want to know the truth!" More importantly, I wanted to finish the contract; that was my job as principal investigator. I'd always succeeded before; that was why after two decades at the university I was department chair and Beth was still a research assistant.

    Yes, the plucky female scientist who believes in the Neandertals is passed over for advancement, while the overbearing man who cares only about grant applications runs the whole department. Well, try to tell me that part is fictional!

    It's not that great a story, but the surprise conclusion is exactly what we've been writing -- some aspects of today's human brain biology probably reflect the genetic interactions between Pleistocene human populations. It's neither shocking nor surprising. It's simply evolution!

    References:

    Hecht J. 2008. The Neanderthal correlation. Nature 453:562. doi:10.1038/453562a

    Tags: 
    Upper Paleolithic
    fiction
    Neandertals
    archaeology

  • Chaw joins poop in archaeology arsenal

    Thu, 2008-05-08 22:56 -- John Hawks

    Well, archaeology is set to receive a once-in-a-generation influx of interest from teenagers drawn to the allure of the past. I mean, from the new Indiana Jones movie, of course.

    So what do they have to go and do? Discover a real life crystal skull? Sorry, kids. If you want to be an archaeologist, it's all bodily functions from here on out.

    Tom Dillehay and colleagues (2008) report in this week's Science that they have found chewed-on seaweed "cud" from Monte Verde, dated to 14,000 calendar years BP. And that paper is right next to the final publication of the Paisley Caves coprolites from Oregon, also dating to slightly before 14,000 calendar years BP.

    Both papers are pretty cool -- together they emphasize that these kinds of forensic evidence are becoming increasingly important in documenting the activities (and existence) of archaeological populations. After all, a person has to poop thousands of times during his life, but he has only one skeleton.

    Dillehay and colleagues interpret their seaweeds as a specialized medicinal collection, based on the presence of non-edible species and species present at different times of the year. Here's a quote from Michael Balter's news piece on the find:

    Back 14,000 years ago, Monte Verde was located about 90 kilometers east of the sandy Pacific coast and 15 kilometers north of a rocky-shored inland marine bay. Algae from both environments were recovered, including inedible species that are today used as medicines in Chile and elsewhere. Moreover, the algal species found are known to flourish at different times of the year, suggesting to Dillehay's team that the Monte Verdeans were intimately familiar with coastal resources--possibly because they had originally arrived in the region via that route. Erlandson agrees: "The variety of seaweeds implies a pretty deep knowledge of coastal ecosystems and a long history of exploiting them."

    Well, that's pretty impressive, even if the seaweed were chewed up. And hey, my kids are much more interested in bodily functions than they are in crystal skulls. So maybe this will bring in new archaeologists after all!

    References:

    Balter M. 2008. Ancient algae suggest sea route for first Americans. Science 320:729. doi:10.1126/science.320.5877.729

    Dillehay TD, Ramírez C, Pino M, Collins MB, Rossen J, Pino-Navarro JD. 2008. Monte Verde: Seaweed, food, medicine, and the peopling of South America. Science 320:784-786. doi:10.1126/science.1156533

    Gilbert MTP and 12 others. DNA from pre-Clovis human coprolites in Oregon, North America. Science 320:786-789. doi:10.1126/science.1154116

    Tags: 
    America
    archaeology

  • Handaxes from under the North Sea

    Fri, 2008-03-14 10:58 -- John Hawks

    In case you needed a reminder that much of the territory occupied by Pleistocene humans is now beneath the waves, just take a look at this press release from the British archaeology company Wessex Archaeology:

    An amazing collection of 28 flint hand-axes, dated by archaeologists to be around 100,000 years-old, have been unearthed in gravel from a licensed marine aggregate dredging area 13km off Great Yarmouth.

    The find was made by a Dutch amateur archaeologist, Jan Meulmeester, who regularly searches for mammoth bones and fossils in marine sand and gravel delivered by British construction materials supplier Hanson to a Dutch wharf at Flushing, near Antwerp, south west Netherlands.

    The axes show that deep in the Ice Age, mammoth hunters roamed across land that is now submerged beneath the sea. These are the finest hand-axes that experts are certain come from English waters, although there have been a few finds on beaches, for example at Pakefield in Suffolk.

    As a result of the find, they moved the dredging operation to conform with regulations -- I suppose to preserve the site in case the sea level falls!

    It seems to me that these are likely to predate 100,000 years ago, but no date is really possible given the circumstances.

    This isn't the first such find. Werz and Flemming (2001) reported the separate discoveries of three quartzite bifaces during shipwreck archaeology in Table Bay, South Africa. Again these are undated but probably precede 300,000 years ago. Finds of artifacts from the later stages of the Paleolithic have been more common.

    References:

    Werz BEJS, Flemming NC. 2001. Discovery in Table Bay of the oldest handaxes yet found underwater demonstrates preservation of hominid artefacts on the continental shelf. S Afr J Sci 97:183-185.

    Tags: 
    Lower Paleolithic
    archaeology

  • On Greenland Norse and Neandertals

    Sun, 2008-01-06 12:02 -- John Hawks

    I just read a good popular article by Colin Woodard about the 15th-century decline of the Greenland Norse.

    "During the same time period, a lot of Norse settlements in Iceland and northern Norway were being abandoned, but nobody writes big books about that," [forensic anthropologist Niels] Lynnerup says. "I'm not sure that the Norse saw Greenland as being very different from the fjords they came from in Norway, and leaving it was no more stressful than abandoning a hamlet in Norway." His theory: In the 1300s and 1400s, Greenland's youths voted with their feet, leaving until the colony could no longer support itself. The last few left.

    You may have seen some of this stuff before -- I think there has been a television special about it -- but it's a nice summary of what forensic anthropologists and others have been up to in southern Greenland, complete with analyses of livestock parasites.

    I'm pointing to the article because of this line:

    Did the Norse colonists starve? Were they wiped out by the Inuit - or did they intermarry? No. Things got colder and they left.

    This is what I always keep in mind when I'm reading about "climate change killing the Neandertals" and whatnot. Human movements are fast. Hunter-gatherer migration is potentially much faster than migration of sedentary agriculturalists. In the archaeological record, we are not looking at migrations, we are looking at long-term fluctuations in the pattern of short-term, rapid movements.

    There is no great dramatic moment. For the Norse, it looks like there were several bad winters. As the story relates, some people died, but most left.

    The possible difference in the Neandertal case is the vastly longer timescale, which may have allowed a much greater cultural shift. It looks like the Norse did not mate with the indigenous Inuit in a way that left a lot of genes behind in Greenland natives. Their culture never adopted elements of Inuit subsistence technology that might have worked for them. Neandertals had longer to adjust -- and there were possibly fewer technological differences between them and their contemporaries in the first place. Cultural interactions seem to have occurred, and we can imagine mating would have also.

    But in the end, climate change in Europe 35,000 years ago really amounted to a long run of bad winters. The people should have moved. They did move. Whoever was making Mousterian tools eventually stopped. As to what else happened, we have to rely on comparisons of other, later samples.

    UPDATE (2007/01/06): A reader writes:

    There is, of course, another comparison, the ESKIMO populations, who did not become extinct, or were even affected.  The Norse were too arrogant to learn from the local "savages", not even Christians.

    Good point.

    Also, Razib picks up the theme.

    Tags: 
    archaeology
    Neandertals

  • Early ochre mining in Southern Africa

    Fri, 2007-11-02 17:13 -- John Hawks

    I was reading back through Bednarik's "Concept-mediated marking in the Lower Palaeolithic," for some background on the ochre-shellfish post, and I ran across this quote in Bednarik's rejoinder to Randall White:

    [A]n estimated 100 tons of iron ore was mined at just one Middle Stone Age site, Ngwenya, carbon-dated to about 43,200 B. P. (Dart and Beaumont 1971)

    That seemed striking -- that is, I hadn't seen any other references to that site -- so I tracked down a bit more information about Ngwenya. The LSA/MSA hematite quarry was described in short publications by Raymond Dart and Peter Beaumont (1967, 1969, 1971). In recent years, the quarry had been mined by a modern operation, and had been a locus of iron ore mining since LSA times at least. Dart had some interest in the idea of Stone Age mining for iron ore, having found an LSA mine in Zambia many years before. Some old flaked tools and other artifacts were found at Ngwenya, and Dart got some some archaeologists, including Adrian Boshier, to investigate.

    The Swaziland National Trust has an informative, although unreferenced, website discussing the findings:

    Boshier found three ancient mines named Lion, Castle and Stag caverns. He collected stone tools in and around them made of dolerite, which is foreign to the area. The tools were unlike those normally found on a stone age site, they were more specialised, consisting of choppers, picks and hammer stones. Professor Dart identified them as mining tools. The tools were not confined to the surface layers but were scattered throughout huge depressions which would have been solid haematite. In one of the mines they were lying among and beneath thousands of tons of red iron oxide known as haematite. Enquiries by Boshier among the Swazis elicited the information that haematite deposits had been mined in historic times and that it was the custom to fill in the excavation to avoid offending the spirits of the underworld. Boshier theorised that if the holes had been refilled with haematite then the mine workers must have wanted something other than haematite.

    The suspicion, mentioned by Dart and Beaumont (1967), was that specularite (a dark-colored sparkly hematite) was the real objective of the quarrying -- they were also led to this idea by the fact that Castle Cavern had surface exposures of hematite, so it would hardly be worth mining deep into Lion Cavern to get it.

    Anyway, once the initial excavations found a substantial antiquity for quarrying at the site, they went deeper to see how old the activity really was:

    From six to eight feet, there were undoubted Middle Stone Age artefacts together with some possible Later Stone Age tools. From eight feet to worked bedrock at over eleven feet, the deposit yielded some 23,000 artefacts which belong unquestionably to a middle stage of the Middle Stone Age. Occasional stone mining tools were also found. Well-defined ash levels indicated that the assemblage was in situ. Quartz, white quartzites, grey-and-white dappled quartzite, black indurated shales, and greenish cherts were the main materials used. Most of these rock-types occur on a ridge overlooked by and about a quarter of a mile from the cavern. Some of the exposures there bear clear evidence of having been flaked. The dappled grey-and-white quartzites come from exposures about a mile and more northwest of the site (Dart and Beaumont 1969:127).

    The extent of the Middle Stone Age activity at the site suggested that a vast amount of hematite had been removed:

    At least 50 tons of haematite rich in specularite must have been removed from Lion Cavern; two-thirds of it during the Middle Stone Age (Dart and Beaumont 1967:408).

    Their dating of charcoal nodules (Dart and Beaumont 1967) in the "middle to lower levels of the Middle Stone Age level" were 22,280 +/- 400 BP and 28,130 +- 260 BP. This was later revised (Dart and Beaumont 1971) to a larger number, based on further survey. Likewise, Dart and Beaumont (1971) provided an earlier date at or above the limits of radiocarbon, 43,200 BP.

    None of this informs us about the earliest use of red pigments, which is far older, or the earliest evidence of quarrying, which is also far older. It's probably even irrelevant to the development of the MSA in southern Africa, which, again, is far older.

    But in the context of the recent literature, highly focused on the "first" evidence of ochre use, or ocher engraving, or "symbolic behavior," a site like this one can get lost in the noise. Systematic utilization of one site for one purpose is not recent in the archaeological record, but when we find evidence of such places, they can be the most informative about the activities of people in the past, their transfer of information with each other, and their acquisition of resources across relatively long distances.

    References:

    Bednarik RG. 1995. Concept-mediated marking in the Lower Paleolithic. Curr Anthropol 36:605-634.

    Dart RA, Beaumont P. 1969. Evidence of iron ore mining in Southern Africa in the Middle Stone Age. Curr Anthropol 10:127-128.

    Dart RA, Beaumont P. 1971. On a further radiocarbon date for ancient mining in southern Africa. S Afr J Sci 67:10-11.

    Tags: 
    Middle Paleolithic
    archaeology
    MSA

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