john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

hunting

  • Oldowan hunting behaviors at Kanjera South

    Mon, 2013-04-29 16:28 -- John Hawks

    Joseph Ferraro and colleagues have done some neat analyses of the faunal remains from Kanjera South, Kenya [1]. Kanjera South is an archaeological assemblage of Oldowan artifacts and associated animal bones from around 2 million years ago. The site was once a plain next to a lake, and gradually built up clay and silt sediments over years and years of flooding and soil formation. Stone tools and bones stand out in the sediments, representing recurrent activities of ancient humans over a few hundreds or thousands of years. As a result, the site has a good statistical representation of fauna that were hunted by early humans, relatively early in the evolution of our genus.

    This is not the earliest site with evidence for meat acquisition by stone toolmakers. We know that people were butchering animals with stone tools around 2.6 million years ago. But the first really good evidence for hunting strategies is much more recent -- around 1.8 million years ago at Olduvai Gorge. There are actually very few Oldowan-era faunal assemblages large enough to study hunting behaviors. Kanjera South shows that the activities documented at Olduvai Gorge were happening a bit earlier, and the site helps to clarify the kind of context in which we might expect to find more evidence of hunting behavior.

    Hunting versus scavenging is the tiredest chestnut in anthropologists' Oldowan arsenal. Were early hunters really competent enough to bring down a duiker on their own? Or did they steal away pieces of half-eaten zebra carcases when the lions took a break?

    In reality, there is no contradiction here. Undefended meat doesn't last a day in the open, whether on the plains or near waterholes. So scavenging meat from other carnivores usually means facing them down -- not a job for an incompetent killer. Meanwhile, present-day peoples who hunt and gather rely quite a lot on "power scavenging", or taking advantage of other carnivores' successes. The present value of a dead carcass is higher than that of a live animal, as long as it may still escape you. Whether the hunter has to predict prey behavior, or the scavenger has to predict competitors' behavior, both strategies require a depth of planning. So, when it comes to Oldowan-era sites, we should expect to see a mixture of hunted and scavenged remains.

    In that context, we can make some inferences about hominin hunting practices by assessing which kinds of animals they hunted, and which they scavenged. Looking at tooth mark and cutmark evidence is not a perfect way of sorting hunting and scavenging -- because both kinds of marks are rare on faunal elements in archaeological contexts. But sometimes those comparisons lead to clear results. For example, here is the chart showing the number of tooth-marked midshaft fragments from long bones at Kanjera South, in comparison to experimental bone assemblages:

    Figure 3 from Ferraro et al 2013

    Figure 3 from Ferraro et al. 2013. Original caption: Tooth-marked mid-shaft fragments: results from experimental assemblages and excavations at KJS. Figure follows a published model [26]. Hominin-first assemblages refer to remains initially defleshed and demarrowed by hominins, then subsequently exposed to large-bodied carnivores (primarily hyenas). Carnivore-first assemblages refer to remains initially defleshed and/or demarrowed by large-bodied carnivores (primarily hyenas and/or lions). Data for body sizes 1–4 [21]. Modern data (with single standard deviations where available) derived from the literature [23]–[26], [56]–[58]. KJS frequencies are from Table 2 and Table S1. Multiple symbols for KJS indicate the results of multiple analysts. X’s indicate minimum and maximum estimates of damage (see Table S1). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062174.g003

    These are cool data. Carnivores who get to chew on bones for a while tend to leave the middle of them covered in tooth marks. If humans get access to the carcass early, they will strip off the meat from those midshafts, break them into bits, and otherwise prevent the taphonomic pathway to carnivore tooth marking. And in the graph we see that the Kanjera South faunal assemblage looks like cases where humans were the agents of defleshing and butchering.

    If humans had primary access to the carcasses, then the transport decisions of ancient hunters should have shaped the bone assemblage at Kanjera South. It is very common in analyses of the fauna from African Oldowan-era sites to divide the prey animals into three size classes -- small, medium and large. The majority of prey species were bovids, ranging from small antelopes to water buffalo, although most were in the small and medium size categories at Kanjera South. Ferraro and colleagues show that for medium-sized bovids, the hominins were taking two strategies. These bovids were too big to carry wholesale to a central place for sharing. So the hunters disarticulated the animals and carried back the legs, leaving the axial skeleton for the most part behind.

    Except for the heads:

    But why acquire, transport, and process an abundance of medium-sized heads? In living animals, these remains contain a wealth of fatty, calorie-packed, nutrient-rich tissues: a rare and valuable food resource in a grassland setting where alternate high-value foodstuffs (fruits, nuts, etc.) are often unavailable [2], [3], [29], [49], [52], [63], [76]–[78]. Medium-sized heads are also relatively dense and durable elements, and their internal contents are generally inaccessible to all but hyenas and tool-wielding hominins [63], [79], [80]. As a result, they are often seasonally-available as scavengable resources in East African grasslands [63], [76], [79]–[83]. Additionally, bone surface modification studies at KJS clearly demonstrate that hominins accessed internal head contents: several cranial vault and mandibular fragments bear evidence of percussion striae. Considered in sum, the presumed availability of these isolated remains across the landscape, the relative abundance of these remains in the KJS assemblages, and unambiguous material evidence that hominins exploited their contents on-site is most parsimoniously interpreted as reflecting very early archaeological evidence of a distinct hominin scavenging strategy – one that included a strong focus on acquiring and exploiting fatty, nutrient-rich, energy-dense within-head food resources (e.g., brain matter, mandibular nerve and marrow, etc.) [e.g., 24,63,76,82,84–86].

    This is John Speth's scenario for fat acquisition from lean animals. The brain is the last part of the body to become fat-depleted during times of stress. If hunters are energy-limited, further lean meat is not going to be valuable to them because protein takes energy to digest. What they need most is fat, and the most ready source of fat is the brain. Accumulation of head elements, whether from hunted or scavenged sources, is an effective behavioral strategy in those circumstances. It's one that we think Neandertals pursued at the end of winter in some parts of Europe, and a strategy followed by hunters in ethnographic and historic contexts as well.

    The paper's conclusion is well-framed as a summary of the overall value of evidence from Kanjera South.

    With regard to evolutionary ecology, the relative uniformity of hominin activities documented through the KJS sequence indicates an evolved foraging adaptation well-tuned to local ecological contexts. This point implies that hominin involvement with, and their presumed consumption of, animal remains had substantial fitness implications. In turn, sufficiently strong selective pressures are implicated as having favored the evolution of persistent hominin carnivory no later than 2.0 million years ago. This date is approximately 200,000–500,000 years earlier than previously documented [11], [20], [33], [45], and increases the known time depth of this adaptation within the hominin lineage (range of dates reflects varied interpretations of faunal materials from Olduvai [20]–[42]).

    This one was fun to read, because the data being built up at Kanjera South are really capable of testing hypotheses about hunting behavior in a way that some of the Oldovai Gorge assemblages have done up to now. Putting the faunal exploitation together with the stone tool evidence, we see a really interesting picture. As I reported a few years ago ("Plant processing with early Oldowan tools"), Kanjera South is one of the locations where we have good evidence of plant exploitation of some kind by Oldowan peoples. The site has also provided evidence about stone material transport decisions and the planning depth of stone flaking ("Technological sophistication of the earliest toolmakers". It is a good illustration of how deep knowledge of a single site, with teams returning to excavations over multiple seasons, can yield a richness of statistical information about hominin behavior.

    References

    1. Ferraro JV, Plummer TW, Pobiner BL, Oliver JS, Bishop LC, Braun DR, Ditchfield PW, Seaman JW, Binetti KM, Seaman JW, et al. Earliest Archaeological Evidence of Persistent Hominin Carnivory Petraglia MD. PLoS ONE [Internet]. 2013;8(4):e62174. Available from: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0062174
    Tags: 
    Oldowan
    Kanjera
    hunting
    diet
    Kenya
    Africa
    Early Pleistocene
    Lower Paleolithic
    Synopsis: 
    A faunal exploitation study finds clues about brain consumption and prey choices

  • Behavior of the first North African humans

    Thu, 2013-03-07 23:49 -- John Hawks

    Mohamed Sahnouni and colleagues describe the archaeology of El-Kherba, Algeria. [1]. This locality is a paleontological exposure associated with the nearby Ain Hanech site, and Sahnouni and colleagues have excavated an Oldowan archaeological assemblage with large mammals such as hippos, rhinos and horses.

    Dated to 1.78 Ma, the El-Kherba cut marks and usewear traces represent the earliest North African evidence showing a clear causal link between Oldowan stone technology and processing of large animal carcasses for meat, broadening the geographic range of Plio-Pleistocene hominin subsistence activities to include the Mediterranean fringe. As was shown in the East African Plio-Pleistocene archaeofaunas, early hominins were foraging for large mammals in northern Africa by circa 1.8 Ma. The evidence from the modified bones at these sites indicates that early hominins were involved in evisceration, disarticulating and removing meat, and breaking bones of large mammals to extract marrow.

    It's a great site because it is the first to document human activity in North Africa. Australopithecines were present in Chad by 3.4 million years ago, and given their mobility and range it seems likely they would have been present to the north of the Sahara also. But none have ever yet been found. As it stands, humans were at Dmanisi by 1.78 million years ago and also in Java by that time. The extent of human migration outside of Africa makes it clear that the Mediterranean coast of Africa itself should have been well within their range.

    And yet, stone tools are known from Ethiopia from 2.6 million years ago, and nearly as old in Kenya. Did the earliest stone toolmakers range beyond the Rift Valley? So far there's no equivalently early evidence of tool manufacture in South Africa. And in North Africa, the earliest tool assemblage is at El-Kherba.

    It would sure be useful to uncover evidence of A. boisei or related robust australopithecines in the Ain Hanech area. In East and South Africa, early Homo lived alongside late robust australopithecines, sharing the same landscape. No robust australopithecine has ever been found outside East or South Africa, while Homo erectus spread across the Old World tropics and into the temperate zone. What kept robust australopithecines, otherwise seemingly adaptable, out of Eurasia? If they truly never lived near the Mediterranean coast, we would probably conclude that they weren't as tolerant of different habitats as we might have expected.

    The cutmark evidence described in the paper is fairly clear and comparable to that known from East Africa well before this date. The cutmarks on animal bones, including hippopotamus, along with a "meat polish" on some of the stone flakes, indicate that ancient humans had access to animal carcasses very shortly after the animals' death and were using stone flakes to process them. Again, basically like Oldowan evidence that has long been known from Olduvai Gorge and other sites. I would like to see a better comparison of where this assemblage fits compared to both large and small archaeological assemblages from Olduvai.

    The question of whether and to what extent early humans hunted large mammals involves a long debate that wouldn't fit well in this paper. Still, the evidence here adds to that literature. The ancient people who left these remains were relying upon large mammal acquisition within a broader hunted diet including smaller prey species. Together with sites from across Africa and Eurasia, this one shows that early humans maintained this diet pattern across a range of ecologies and geographies.

    References

    1. Sahnouni M, Rosell J, van der Made J, Vergès JM, Ollé A, Kandi N, Harichane Z, Derradji A, Medig M. The first evidence of cut marks and usewear traces from the Plio-Pleistocene locality of El-Kherba (Ain Hanech), Algeria: implications for early hominin subsistence activities circa 1.8 Ma. Journal of Human Evolution. 2013;64(2):137 - 150.
    Tags: 
    Algeria
    Oldowan
    Africa
    North Africa
    technology
    stone tools
    hunting
    Synopsis: 
    Archaeological report from El-Kherba, Algeria, with implications for human occupation range

  • Evidence of hunting at Olduvai Gorge

    Mon, 2012-09-24 10:58 -- John Hawks

    My University of Wisconsin colleague Henry Bunn got some press this weekend for his presentation at the European Society for Human Evolution meeting: "Humans hunted for meat 2 million years ago".

    The results for several species of large antelope Bunn analysed showed that humans preferred only adult animals in their prime, for example. Lions and leopards killed old, young and adults indiscriminately. For small antelope species, the picture was slightly different. Humans preferred only older animals, while lions and leopards had a fancy only for adults in their prime.

    "For all the animals we looked at, we found a completely different pattern of meat preference between ancient humans and other carnivores, indicating that we were not just scavenging from lions and leopards and taking their leftovers. We were picking what we wanted and were killing it ourselves."

    It's a very interesting statistical difference between the human-accumulated and carnivore-accumulated distributions, showing that prey choice really did differ between these groups of predators. Bunn has described the analytical methods behind the age distribution of prey species in an earlier paper with Travis Pickering [1]

    Only a few Oldowan-era sites have been found to preserve very extensive evidence of hominin activity. The canonical example is the FLK-Zinj locality, and there are a handful of others. Meanwhile, stone tools and cutmarks on bone have been found at a much larger number of localities, each of which shows just slight evidence of hominin presence. That distribution was once interpreted as evidence for central-place foraging strategies by early toolmakers, an interpretation that may yet be correct. But it does make more complicated the question of how hunting may have targeted different prey species. Bunn and colleagues have worked through these issues and continue to uncover clues about the behavior of these early humans.

    References

    1. Bunn HT, Pickering TR. Methodological recommendations for ungulate mortality analyses in paleoanthropology. Quaternary Research. 2010;74(3):388 - 394.
    Tags: 
    Olduvai Gorge
    Tanzania
    archaeology
    hunting
    scavenging

  • Reindeer hides and Neandertals

    Sun, 2012-06-24 10:08 -- John Hawks

    In reference to the post below about Quina Mousterian and reindeer specialization ("Paleoclimate and shifting Neandertal strategies"), let me add this great quote from Mark White. He addresses himself to the question of what kinds of strategies Neandertals employed against the cold of the MIS 4 winter in Britain and France.

    Aiello and Wheeler hypothesize a very conservative 1 clo of insulation. The pelts of exploited Pleistocene mammals would have greatly exceeded this level (cf. Stenton 1991: 11), meaning that a clothed Neanderthal could have remained comfortable at temperatures far below those outlined above. Reindeer hides are particularly valued by modern arctic peoples because they are lightweight and their fur has excellent insulatory properties (clo value = 7: ibid.). The best time to procure reindeer hides is in the late summer, prior to the development of the heavy winter pelage and after the skin had repaired the damage caused by any summer parasites (ibid.: 6), which adds another interpretative dimension to the autumn mass killing of reindeer at Salzgitter-Liebenstedt (Gaudzinski and Roebroeks 2000); especially if Bocherens et al. (2005) are correct in their assertion that northern Neanderthals ate a lot of mammoth and rhino, but little reindeer (the reverse being true for hyenas). One wonders whether some species were targeted as much for their hides and sinews as for their meat value (see Burch (1998) for caribou), and whether the classic ‘scavenging’ pattern of heads and lower limbs found in Middle Palaeolithic sites is in fact a signature testifying to the preferential transport of hides away from the kill sites (cf. Chase 1986; Mellars 1996). Indeed, such patterns find obvious parallels in medieval tanneries (Serjeantson 1989; Gidney 2000). The broad association of scraper-rich Quina assemblages with colder environments and reindeer bones is highly suggestive in this regard (cf. Mellars 1996: 329; Dibble and Rolland 1992).

    The quote is from another paper with an awesome title, "Things to do in Doggerland when you're dead" [1]. He adds that in Britain a a major limitation on Neandertals may have been the lack of wood -- not only for fire, but also for construction of long implements such as spears. The evidence for woodworking at some sites suggests they may have been located near stands of trees that persisted during the spread of periglacial steppes. All in all, it's a very interesting paper.

    References

    1. White MJ. Things to do in Doggerland when you're dead: surviving OIS3 at the northwestern-most fringe of Middle Palaeolithic Europe. World Archaeology. 2006;38(4):547 - 575.
    Tags: 
    hunting
    Neandertals
    Britain
    Europe
    Middle Paleolithic
    fauna

  • Paleoclimate and shifting Neandertal strategies

    Sun, 2012-06-24 05:49 -- John Hawks

    A new paper by Guillaume Guérin and colleagues in the Journal of Archaeological Science [1] provides a detailed chronology for the Neandertal site of Roc de Marsal (near Les Eyzies, France).

    The paper includes an interesting discussion, which focuses on the emerging picture of Neandertal technological strategies to a changing climate. In short, during the middle of Marine Isotope Stage 4 (around 60,000 years ago), the regional environment in southwestern France shifted. Before this time, the Neandertals in the area made Denticulate and Typical Mousterian industries and hunted a variety of large fauna including red deer, roe deer, reindeer and horse. After the shift to a mix of steppe and some boreal forest, the Neandertals hunted mainly reindeer, some horse, and made Quina Mousterian tools. As they discuss, this picture is now consistent with the stratigraphies of many sites in the region that preserve Quina Mousterian:

    In southwest France, Roc de Marsal Layers 7–9 are not an exception, as similar faunal patterns have been observed in other archaeological sites. It is striking to see that for sequences that span both Quina and Typical Mousterian, a number of similar features have been observed: first, Quina Mousterian layers are always on top of Typical Mousterian layers (Jaubert, 2010); second, Quina Mousterian is, in Dordogne, always associated with faunal remains dominated by reindeer; third, in the layers underlying Quina industries, fauna exhibits singular patterns combining “forest-adapted” (red deer and/or roe deer) and “cold open-air” species (reindeer).

    There is some more in the discussion about the palynological record and other regional climate indicators. The meta-archaeological perspective would point out that this is a perfect synthesis of the Bordes-Binford debate: There really were different cultural groups of Neandertals and they really did use these technofacies for different activities. What was necessary is the kind of systematic comparison among sites that shows Quina Mousterian systematically overlying the Typical/Denticulate wherever they occur, along with the evidence of climatic and faunal change across sites.

    References

    1. Guérin G, Discamps E, Lahaye C, Mercier N, Guibert P, Turq A, Dibble HL, McPherron SP, Sandgathe D, Goldberg P, et al. Multi-method (TL and OSL), multi-material (quartz and flint) dating of the Mousterian site of Roc de Marsal (Dordogne, France): correlating Neanderthal occupations with the climatic variability of MIS 5–3. Journal of Archaeological Science. 2012.
    Tags: 
    Roc de Marsal
    Neandertals
    hunting
    Mousterian
    France

  • Orangutan loris capture and meat-eating

    Fri, 2012-01-20 16:38 -- John Hawks

    Madeleine Hardus and colleagues [1] describe long-term observations of hunting by Sumatran orangutans.

    The paper is straightforward in its description of the hunting observations: They hunt slow lorises, the practice is rare, it occurs at times when their other preferred foods are scarce, some individuals hunt but most don't, and food sharing among individuals other than mother-infant pairs wasn't observed. This isn't the first time hunting has been reported by wild orangutans, what it does is report a longer-term observation of one hunting female, tying this case to earlier observations.

    I'm pointing to the paper because it includes some discussion about the requirements of meat eating for early hominins. These orangutans take a long time to chew up a slow lorus.

    Orangutans used more than twice the amount of time (160.9 g/h) to eat the same amount of meat than chimpanzees (348 g/h) (Wrangham 2009; Wrangham and Conklin-Brittain 2003). Other chimpanzee data shows that this species is able to consume meat at much higher rates, i.e., 1.9±1.2 kg/h (Gilby 2006). This difference between orangutans and chimpanzees may suggest that higher sociality in chimpan- zees influences intake rates, where individuals are surrounded by conspecifics when eating meat, and where meat is a highly preferred food item and stealing occurs (Boesch and Boesch 1989; Goodall 1986; Stanford 1999).

    I'll point out that orangutans may make a better model for early hominin jaw mechanics than chimpanzees do, because the sizes of jaw musculature and teeth are more comparable. Neither orangutans nor australopithecines have teeth that look well-made for reducing fibrous, tough meat into smaller pieces. Recent humans have been able to cook meat, which reduces its mechanical resistance to chewing. Early hominins didn't cook, so getting some high fraction of their caloric requirements from meat (even if only seasonally) might have taken a lot of time.

    According to orangutan data (ingestion rate of 185 kcal/h), Australopithecus africanus would have had to chew for ca. 2 h to achieve 25% of these caloric requirements purely from meat (Table III, orangutans×A. africanus), while achieving the remaining 75% of its caloric requirements from food sources with faster chewing/intake rates, e.g., leaves or insects. This constitutes a considerable period of the day for orangutans, which spend ca. 6 h/d feeding (Morrogh-Bernard et al. 2009), and does not include the time necessary for the collection of vertebrate prey.

    That sounds like a lot of chewing time, but it's not an insuperable barrier. The isotopic values for A. africanus and A. robustus suggest the possibility of up to 25% meat consumption, although they may have gotten C4 plant input by several different food sources (e.g., corms, edible stems, aquatic animals) as well as meat. Altogether, the chewing time analysis shuts off one line of argument that early hominins would have faced extreme constraints preventing them from moving to a more meat-intensive diet before the control and routine use of fire.

    References

    1. Hardus ME, Lameira AR, Zulfa A, Atmoko SUS, Vries H, Wich SA. Behavioral, Ecological, and Evolutionary Aspects of Meat-Eating by Sumatran Orangutans (Pongo abelii). International Journal of Primatology. 2012.
    Tags: 
    orangutans
    diet
    apes
    hunting
    meat
    A. africanus
    Synopsis: 
    A discussion of early hominin meat-eating emerges from observations of orangutan hunting

  • Bone of the victim mastodon

    Fri, 2011-10-21 20:37 -- John Hawks

    Michael Waters and colleagues [1] report on the date of a mastodon kill site from Manis, Washington. At 13,800 years old, it's not the earliest evidence of New World people, nor the only evidence of pre-Clovis hunting. I find it interesting because of the addition of genetics to the mix of evidence. The specimen is verified as a mastodon, and the bone used to kill it was itself made of mastodon bone:

    We also obtained high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS)–based protein sequences from the projectile point and rib, and used another mastodon sample as a second reference (tables S3 to S6). The MS/MS spectra from the bone point matched the reconstructed mastodon collagen sequences, with the highest scores being within a reference set of collagen sequences (table S7 and supporting table of bone point marker peptides). These results and controls show that the point was fashioned from mastodon bone.

    The conclusion of the paper suggests that the evidence of pre-Clovis megafauna hunting argues against a "blitzkrieg" scenario for megafaunal extinctions. Instead, the authors suggest that the extinction was staged over a period of nearly 2000 years. The invention of Clovis points around 13,000 years ago is proposed to be near the end of the process, which may have begun before 14,800 years ago according to a kill site at Hebior, Wisconsin.

    I think this distinction is just semantic. If 2000 years of human predation eliminated mastodons, mammoths, and all the rest of the megafauna, which occupied North America for more than a million years before that, it looks a lot like "blitzkrieg" to me.

    References

    1. Waters MR, Stafford TW, McDonald HG, Gustafson C, Rasmussen M, Cappellini E, Olsen JV, Szklarczyk D, Jensen LJ, Gilbert MTP, et al. Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington. Science. 2011;334(6054):351 - 353.
    Tags: 
    Clovis
    America
    North America
    American Indians
    hunting

  • Mailbag: Humans are predators

    Tue, 2011-09-20 11:42 -- John Hawks

    Re: Shellfish

    I have been following your weblog for a while and just read your weblog on shellfish diet of early hominines. Interesting.

    I have a little question that you – hopefully – may be prepared to answer:

    Anthropologists describe our ancestors often as “hunters and gatherers”.

    You do that too in your blog. Actually, you do that quite often. It is obviously a valid paradigm.

    Humans are often further characterized as “Predators” which I consider a strange term for primates.

    Well, I see an abundance of evidence – including your blog entry above – that contradicts this characterization.

    I do not see much evidence that supports it.

    Actually, I do not know of any supporting evidence at all.

    The commonly named observations, scratched bones and hunting chimps, only verify that some bones have been scratched (by humans or natural processes?) and that chimps can spend their lives successfully as hunters as long as scientists with Doctor’s cases stand nearby to help them survive the risks of otherwise deadly infections.

    I saw that the diet question is your topic as a scientist.

    So, you may have strong evidence?

    I wonder if this is a confusion of language? A predator is an animal that kills and eats other animals. Any hunter is by definition a predator.

    That does not preclude other means of subsistence or other trophic relationships with different species. Humans were predators from at least 2.5 million years ago, but they were also prey animals of lions, sabretooths and hyenas for most of that time.

    I see your reference to chimpanzee hunting. Chimpanzees hunt in every population where they have been observed in the wild, and new field sites have invariably found them already hunting. There is no need for doctors among them. Many primates are predators, it is not strange at all. Small nocturnal primates obtain most of their caloric requirements from predation of insects and other small animals.

    Tags: 
    diet
    predation
    shellfish
    hunting

  • Tracking endurance

    Wed, 2011-05-04 15:16 -- John Hawks

    Outside magazine has a long article ("Fair Chase") describing how some running enthusiasts recruited world-class marathoners to try to run down a pronghorn in New Mexico.

    AS RIDICULOUS AS THIS spectacle might appear, the men are testing a much-debated scientific notion about when and how humans became hunters. Between two and three million years ago, when our australo pithecine ancestors ventured out of the forests and onto the protein-rich African savanna, they were prey more often than hunter. They gathered plant-based foods, just as their primate brethren did. Then something changed. They began running after game with long, steady strides. Evolutionary biologists like Harvard's Dan Lieberman think the uniquely human capacity for endurance running is a distant remnant of prehistoric persistence hunting.

    The idea has become entrenched in running circles; most notably from the book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen and the associated articles in running magazines.

    David Carrier makes an appearance:

    Evolutionary biologist David Carrier and his brother, Scott, who wrote the 2001 memoir Running After Antelope, made the single recorded attempt to chase down a pronghorn. Scott, a recreational runner, characterized the elusiveness of the animal, which they pursued in Wyoming, like so: "They blend and flow and change positions. There are no individuals but this mass that moves across the desert like a pool of mercury on a glass table." The brothers failed. The antelope, Scott wrote, "used the terrain to ditch us."

    The article is fun, it ends pretty much as you'd expect. Despite having the animal in ideal terrain, they still in the end couldn't track it adequately. That's the critique applied by Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn to the whole idea for early Homo, and here it is in practice.

    (via Melody Dye)

    Tags: 
    locomotion
    hunting

  • Neandertal stories on parade

    Sat, 2010-12-04 23:21 -- John Hawks

    Long-time science journalist Robin McKie has a long article in The Observer about the Neandertals this weekend: "Neanderthals: how needles and skins gave us the edge on our kissing cousins".

    The article puts together several aspects of recent inquiry into Neandertal biology -- the genome sequencing, the dating questions over Châtelperronian artifacts from Grotte du Renne, and some of Steve Churchill's work on projectile versus thrusting weapons. There's a real interesting mix of stuff here, some that I agree with and basically find uncontroversial, and other stuff that I find to be outlandish or unsupported by any evidence.

    For example, McKie talked to Brian Fagan, who has a new book out (Cro-Magnon) that tries to describe the human "edge" over Neandertals. A good topic, but this paragraph is completely misleading:

    But which specific traits gave us such an advantage that we were propelled to global glory at the expense of the Neanderthals? In the suite of behaviours that we evolved in Africa 150,000 years ago, what were the characteristics that really made a difference and can therefore be considered as defining human attributes? There are many candidates – complex language and superior memory, for example. However, among many scientists there appears to be consensus that imagination and opportunism were critical attributes.

    There is no "suite of behaviours that we evolved in Africa 150,000 years ago." There just aren't any. There's no good evidence of symbolic expression, no projectile points, no subsistence innovations, no evidence of long-distance raw material procurement or trade. That's the big problem we have substantiating a modern human advantage -- the "modern" humans didn't seem to get many behavioral innovations in Africa that the Neandertals didn't get, and the Neandertals got them almost as early.

    It is an undeniable problem; there's no sense glossing over it. Churchill's (and John Shea's) ideas about projectile weapons are right now among the most reasonable suggestions, because there do seem to be relatively early (ca. 85,000-90,000 year old) projectile points in Africa.

    It would be convenient if there were better evidence that projectiles were a singular innovation. But as John Shea [1] wrote in 2006, the idea of projectile weapons seems to have gotten around widely, possibly including Neandertals:

    The evidence currently available instead favors an indigenous origin for projectile point technology in the Levant ca. 40–50 Ka. Similarly, the earliest European Upper Paleolithic stone artifacts that fit the TCSA criteria for projectile points, Chatelperronian points, Font Robert points (as well as Aurignacian split-based bone/antler points) do not have clear chronological antecedants in the Levant (though it is possible that other as-yet-unidentified projectile point types do). While it is possible that over-production of atmospheric radiocarbon between 30 and 50 Ka [39] obscures rapid geographical diffusion of projectile point technology the typological variability of the earliest likely stone and bone projectile points in Africa, the Levant, and Europe do not currently support a diffusion/migration hypothesis. It is vastly more likely that projectile point technology was developed convergently among African, Levantine and European hominin populations.

    I probably wouldn't stretch so far as to say that the Châtelperronian Neandertals were using projectile weapons, even if the points are consistent with that hypothesis. But considering that a big element of McKie's story is the dispute over the Châtelperronian evidence of ornamentation (at Grotte du Renne), I think it's fair to remind people that those late Neandertals had a lot of things going on. All the skeletal associations with the industry are Neandertal, and there are multiple sites representing the interesting material culture elements.

    I've actually been stunned lately by the number of people who have asked me about the Grotte du Renne paper and it's "demolishment" of the case for Neandertal ornamentation. I say stunned, because people seem completely unaware of the substantial Mousterian record of pigment processing and use.

    My candidate for the most subtly controversial element of McKie's story: the opening passage about the Swanscombe skull:

    Many treasures [at the Natural History Museum] compete for attention, but there is one sample, kept in a small plywood box, that deserves especial interest: the Swanscombe skull. Found near Gravesend last century, it is made up of three pieces of the brain case of a 400,000-year-old female and is one of only half-a-dozen bits of skeleton that can be traced to men and women who lived in Britain before the end of the last ice age. Human remains do not get more precious than this.

    However, the Swanscombe find is important for another, crucial reason: the skull is that of a Neanderthal

    I say that's controversial because it asserts that this 400,000-year-old skull is a Neandertal. The case for Swanscombe as a member of the Neandertal lineage has been mostly chronological, not because it has any pattern of derived Neandertal morphology. There were people in Europe before the Neandertals, they had a subset of Neandertal features, and so they were plausibly early members of a Neandertal lineage. But the genetic work this year, discussed later in the article, argued that humans and Neandertals shared a common ancestral population only 250,000-400,000 years ago. If that's true, the chronology is all wrong for Swanscombe to be a Neandertal itself. Indeed, this chronology would not permit Swanscombe to be a member of a population exclusively ancestral to Neandertals.

    But what, then, is it?

    I think the chronology is wrong, and I doubt whether the evidence will soon let us distinguish gene flow from isolation at this time depth. There's not much sense talking about the "human-Neandertal ancestral population" when some Neandertals were ancestors of some humans.

    Still, the Middle Pleistocene European population focuses the problem. If Neandertals themselves had derived much of their gene pool from Africa in the Middle Pleistocene, as the genetic work has suggested, what does that mean for specimens like Swanscombe? And if we substantially lengthen the chronology of human diversification, what does that mean for Middle Pleistocene Africans?

    References

    1. Shea JJ. The origins of lithic projectile point technology: evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science [Internet]. 2006;33:823–846. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2005.10.015
    Tags: 
    hunting
    MSA
    Neandertals
    art
    Upper Paleolithic
    Europe
    Middle Pleistocene
    Neandertal DNA
    Swanscombe
    Chatelperronian

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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

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