Category: anthropology

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 1, 2025 • 8:15 am

This is my last batch of reader photos. If you have any, please contribute or the feature goes kaput! Thanks.

Today we have some anthropology photos from reader Jim Blilie. Jim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I hope that your readers find this set interesting.  These photos were taken yesterday (30-May-2025) on a tour of petroglyphs and pictographs in the Columbia Hills Historical State Park near Dallesport, Washington.  The area where we live has a profusion of petroglyphs and pictographs.  In my very extensive travels and hiking in the American West, I’ve found that almost any likely flat rock surface will have petroglyphs or pictographs on it.  This state park is near where important Native American villages existed along the Columbia River, so the stone images are concentrated here.  In cooperation with the Yakima, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce tribes, the state park offers guided tours of these images.

Not so many years ago, one could hike the area freely with a state park pass.  However, recent vandalism has forced the tribes and the state to close the area to all except tribal members and guided tours.  Unfortunately, we saw direct evidence of this need (vandalism).  The vandalism has taken the form of markings on the images (people trying to do rubbings and leaving marks over the images – we saw this) and gun shots to the images (we saw this too, see photos).

The tour is called the She-Who-Watches tour after the eponymous and most spectacular of the images.  There’s high demand for these tours and you will want to book months (!) or at least weeks in advance.  But the tour is well worth it.  The walk is short (about a mile, total, I estimate) and pretty flat; but does cover some rough and uneven ground; and it gets hot (carry water and protect yourself from the sun).  Most of the people, including the guide, used walking sticks for stability.

I highly recommend this tour.

First are some general images of the area.  This park is in the Columbia River Gorge and these are typical scenes from the Gorge.  The geology is dominated by the Columbia Plateau flood basalts and, of course, the Columbia River.  (I highly recommend Professor Nick Zentner’s videos on the geology of the Pacific Northwest.)

Next are photos of some of the smaller images in the park.  All these images are incised into the hard basalt rock (petroglyphs) or painted on the rock (pictographs) in white, red, and black pigments.  These images have survived centuries in a harsh environment, exposed to an intense sun all summer.  It’s still uncertain what was used as binder(s) to apply the pigments.

Now the main event, the She-Who-Watches image, which is a shallow petroglyph also painted with pigments (pictograph).  Please look closely at the most magnified image.  See the fresh pits in the image?  These are gunshot impacts, made by some hooligan.  People’s idiocy and disrespect is sometimes mind-boggling. We are lucky that basalt is so hard and resistant to impact damage.

The next image shows a small “altar” just below the She-Who-Watches image.  This area is an active sacred site for the local tribes noted above.  I took these photos from about 15 feet away and I did not go closer out of respect.  (Some people went right up to the “altar” with their phones.  Obviously, I’m not religious; but still.)  Back at the parking lot, there was a large family group of Native Americans preparing to visit the site.

Lastly are photos of a fairly large number of petroglyphs displayed at the parking lot.  These were moved from their original sites when The Dalle Dam was constructed (1952-1957) and its impoundment would have inundated the images.  Also shown as some informational signs about these images.  These images can be viewed without a tour (just a state parks pass).

JAC: The one below looks like a wildcat!

New findings about the Denisovans

July 5, 2024 • 11:45 am

We’ve known about the Denisovans for about 15 years, since part of a finger was found in a Russian cave (the “Denisova Cave“) in 2008 and wasw published two years later.  They were a hominin subspecies like Neanderthals. I consider these groups subspecies of H.sapiens because they both interbred with H. sapiens and left fertile offspring. Denisovans lived in Asia from about 300,000 to 25,000 years ago. (They may also have bred with Neanderthals.)  They are considered a sister taxon to Neanderthals, which means that these two groups shared a common ancestor that had already branched off from the ancestor of “modern” H. sapiens.

Wikipedia gives a useful table of all the known remains of Denisovans, which are judged as a distinct group from DNA sequencing. We have small bits of bone, including teeth, parietal bones, mandibles, and limb bones (and now, according to the Nature article below, a rib bone) from the three locations—all caves—shown below from the Wikipedia map shown below:

And here’s a picture of the Denisova Cave in Russia where it all started:

Xenochka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a diagram of the route the Denisovans took as they colonized Siberia and SE Asia from the Middle East, as well as a “family tree” on the right showing the sister-group relationship of Neanderthals and Denisovans (the figure presumes that the common ancestor of the two was a different species, Homo heidelbergensis, which, confusingly. has been considered a subspecies of H. erectus or even H. sapiens.

John D. Croft at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Just as many Westerners have some Neanderthal DNA (I have a bit among my Ashkenazi genes), so some Asians and people from Oceania have Denisovan DNA.  This shows the hybridization I talked about above. And if two groups meet, mate, and produce fertile hybrids, they’re considered by evolutionary biologists to be subspecies, not species. Unless, that is, they’re hominins, for paleobiologists love to split names and create new species, a practice that produces more excitement and fame than simply saying “we found a new subspecies of Homo sapiens.”

Well, we’ve known about the Denisovans for a while, so what’s new? This news report from Nature (click to read) gives us a bit more information, like what kind of food they ate, as well as reporting on a new Denisovan rib bone found this year.

The results aren’t that thrilling to me, but many people thrive on human paleobiology, and so here are some extracts from the news:

When life got tough, the Denisovans got tougher. The enigmatic ancient humans hunted birds, rodents, even hyenas, helping them to thrive high on the Tibetan plateau for well over 100,000 years.

Those conclusions emerge from a study of thousands of mostly tiny animal bones that provide an insight into life at Baishiya Karst Cave in China1 — only the second archaeological site known to host Denisovans, after the Siberian cave that gave the group its name. Denisovans are a sister group to Neanderthals, and might have once lived across Asia.

Many of the cave remains could be identified only by their protein signatures. This included a rib bone that represents a new Denisovan individual, one of just a handful known.

“Denisovans are dealing with the full suite of animals they’re surrounded with in order to survive in this quite harsh landscape,” says Frido Welker, an archaeological scientist at the University of Copenhagen who co-led the study, published in Nature on 3 July. “It’s at high altitude. It’s cold. It’s not a nice place to be as a hominin.”

The article they’re discussing, a new one also in Nature, is below: click on the screenshot to read it:

And here’s the paper’s abstract, which discusses not only the discovery of a new rib bone from the cave in Tibet, but also some scratches on associated animal bones, indicating that they’d been processed for food, presumably by Denisovans:

Using zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, we identify a new hominin rib specimen that dates to approximately 48–32 thousand years ago (layer 3). Shotgun proteomic analysis taxonomically assigns this specimen to the Denisovan lineage, extending their presence at Baishiya Karst Cave well into the Late Pleistocene. Throughout the stratigraphic sequence, the faunal assemblage is dominated by Caprinae, together with megaherbivores, carnivores, small mammals and birds. The high proportion of anthropogenic modifications on the bone surfaces suggests that Denisovans were the primary agent of faunal accumulation. The chaîne opératoire of carcass processing indicates that animal taxa were exploited for their meat, marrow and hides, while bone was also used as raw material for the production of tools. Our results shed light on the behaviour of Denisovans and their adaptations to the diverse and fluctuating environments of the late Middle and Late Pleistocene of eastern Eurasia.

Here, from the paper, is a human-cut bird wing bone showing the scratches, probably made when feathers were removed. This happens to be a golden eagle. How did they catch it?

(from the paper): Aquila chrysaetos right humerus (layer 4) with superficial and straight cut mark clusters, associated with the removal of feathers

And here from the paper is a photo of the rib bone from a Denisovan also found in the Tibetan cave, along with a phylogeny showing that the rib is closely related to a Denisovan mandible found in the same cave.  It’s not really earth-shaking that a Denisovan rib would be genetically similar to a Denisovan mandible found in a different level of the same cave, but it does add to the specimens we have. Note as well that Denisovans and Neanderthals are, again, placed by DNA analysis as sister groups: each other’s closest relatives.

(From paper): a, Photograph of the Xiahe 2 specimen. Scale bar, 1 cm. b, Phylogenetic tree for the Xiahe 2 specimen and reference proteomes. Support values at nodes are shown for the maximum likelihood and Bayesian analysis, respectively.

A summary from the News & Views piece of how scientists decided which species the animal bones came from (they used protein sequences from collagen rather than DNA to do this), and which animals they ate:

Proper excavations of the cave revealed more signs of occupation: dirt from the site dating to between 100,000 and 45,000 years ago contained DNA sequences from maternally inherited cell structures called mitochondria, matching those of the Denisova Cave remains. The dig, led by archaeologist Dongju Zhang at Lanzhou University in China, also uncovered thousands of mostly fragmentary animal bones.

To identify more than 2,000 of these remains, Zhang, Welker and their colleagues chemically analysed collagen protein signatures, which vary between animals. Especially common were caprines (the subfamily that includes goat and sheep) as well as wild yak, horses and gazelle. Carnivores, including wolves and foxes, also turned up in the mix.

Many of the bones from the cave, including those of hyena, caprines and golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), contained cut-marks and other signs of human predation. Even rodents and hare were probably hunted: a marmot (Marmota) leg bone was split open, potentially to harvest its marrow. Such small, speedy animals wouldn’t have been easy to catch, says Zhang, and bringing down carnivores such as hyenas would have taken moxie.

And here’s the Tibetan cave, Baishiya Karst Cave.  It’s no wonder they call these hominins “cavemen”. Where else could you get shelter from the rain and wind and a place to process your catch? And cook it, too, for there’s evidence that both the Denisovans and the Neanderthals could probably make fires.

What more do we know now? Well, we know what the Denisovans ate, which is really no surprise. Callaway tries to give his piece more oomph by saying that we now know the Denisovans’ “survival secrets”, but of course they had to eat something. But knowing what they ate is better than nothing. And we also have more bones, though as yet they haven’t yielded much new information. There’s more to come as excavations proceed, but the N&V ends rather lamely:

. . . . scientists’ picture of Denisovans is becoming less opaque thanks to information gleaned from dirt and shards of bone subjected to cutting-edge DNA and protein analysis, says Brown. “Denisovans are essentially, at the moment, a biomolecular population.”

The remains Zhang and her colleagues analysed are from pre-pandemic excavations of Baishiya Karst Cave. But the researchers are now back excavating the enormous cavern, hoping to find more insights into Denisovan life. “We haven’t reached the bottom,” says Zhang.

Perhaps I’ve gotten jaded, for the discovery of a new subspecies of humans in Eastern Asia, one that probably went extinct like the Neanderthals, truly is a surprise.

New paper doubts estimates of how often women hunted in hunter-gatherer societies

March 4, 2024 • 11:45 am

Twitter is good for some stuff, and the best are 1.) cat and duck pictures and 2.) finding out about new science papers, often before they’re published.  Remember the conflict last year about the frequency of women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies (see my posts here). The original paper in PLoS One by Anderson et al. claimed that not only did women engage in hunting in these societies more often than we thought (79% of a sample of such societies showed women participated in hunting), but they also hunted big game more often than we thought. The paper was meant to dispel “The myth of man the hunter” (part of its title) and was clearly meant to promulgate some kind of sex equity in hunting, though a separation of gender roles doesn’t demean women.

The paper was criticized a lot for using biased data (see the set of links above), and the bias, it seemed, either intentionally or fortuitously dispelled what was seen as a misogynistic view: men hunted and women stayed home to grow food, mend things, and take care of the children. It was certainly treated in the popular literature as a blow to both misogyny and the view that sexes had “roles” consistent across societies.

Then I saw this tweet by Alexander, who does cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and it pointed to a not-yet-published paper on BiorΧiv whose claims, when you read it blow Anderson et al. out of the water.  Now remember, it isn’t yet peer-reviewed, but its accusations—there are 15 authors—are devastating. If it’s true, Anderson et al. are guilty of incredibly sloppy scholarship.  And also perhaps ideologically-biased scholarship, since every error or miscoding they used biased the results in favor or women hunting more frequently or taking larger game.

First, the tweet.

Click below to see the pdf of the paper:

Venkataraman et al. find that the paper commits every error that it was possible to make in the paper: leaving out important papers, including irrelevant papers, using duplicate papers, mis-coding their societies, getting the wrong values for “big” versus “small” game, and many others.

Rather than go through the mistakes, I’m just going to show you the last three paragraphs of Venkataraman et al., which summarize the errors they found in Anderson et al.  Read it. If they’re even close to being right, PLoS ONE should retract the Anderson et al. paper.

We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with Anderson et al.’s (2023) analysis. Specifically, Anderson et al.’s (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from DPLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.

Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our re-coding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) societies in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our re-coding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., [10]), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.

The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups. Anthropologists have long recognized that the nature of cooperation in foragers is complex and multi-faceted, and women’s and men’s subsistence activities play important and often complementary roles. Moreover, women’s hunting has been studied for decades, and anthropologists have a good understanding of when and why it occurs. Yet, to focus on hunting at the expense of other critical activities – from gathering and food processing, to water and firewood collection, to the manufacture of clothing, shelters, and tools, to pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, childcare, and healthcare, to education, marriages, rituals, politics, and conflict resolution – is to downplay the complexity, and thereby the importance of women’s roles in the foraging lifeway. To build a more complete picture of the lives of foragers in the present and the past, it serves no one to misrepresent reality. In correcting the misapprehension that women do not hunt, we should not replace one myth with another

The truth is the truth, and, as Venkataraman et al. note repeatedly, the truth does not work to the detriment of women in these societies, who, with a frequent division of labor, work at least as hard as do the men.

h/t: cesar

The American Association of Biological Anthropologists denies the sex binary in humans (on ideological grounds, of course)

December 23, 2023 • 10:30 am

The other day I discussed how several anthropologists wrote a letter supporting the decision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropological Society (CASCA) to cancel a panel on sex (“Let’s talk about sex, baby: why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”) at their annual meeting. Appaerntly they objected to the fact that there are two sexes in humans that can be identified in skeletons with a high degree of accuracy.

One of the three signers of the letter was our old friend Agustín Fuentes, a Princeton professor who apparently decided to devote most of his career being uber-woke (he has, for example, damned Charles Darwin for promoting genocide and being a misogynist).

The letter by Fuentes et al, attacked the sex binary in humans, implying that in our relatives the orangutans there are more than two sexes, because there are two types of males in at least one of the three named species: big dominant males with cheek flaps, and smaller males lacking jowls. The statement was this was this (my bolding):

People are born with non-binary genitalia every day – we tend to call people who fall into this group intersex. People are born with sex chromosomes that are not XX or XY but X, XXY, XXXY and more, every day. The same is true with gonads. What’s more, someone can have intersex genitalia but not intersex gonads, intersex chromosomes but not intersex genitalia. These bodily differences demonstrate the massive variation seen in sex physiology across vertebrate species. Looking beyond humans, we see three forms of the adult orangutan. Does this represent a sex binary? Significant percentages of many reptile species have intersex genitalia. Are we still trying to call sex a binary? The binary limits the kinds of questions we can ask and therefore limits the scope of our science.

Well that’s just stupid. They’re clearly implying that there are more than two sexes in orangutans. In fact, as all sane primatologists agree, there are only two sexes in orangs: in this case there are two types of males and one type of female. Yep, still two sexes!  Even Wikipedia recognizes that the two forms of males are, yes, MALES. They produce sperm, and that’s the diagnosis and definition of males in animals (and vascular plants).

I will say no more except to add that this letter and its craziness comes purely from the ideological view that if there are humans who don’t feel that they are members of their natal sex, then we must be able to see a spectrum of biological sex in nature. That is, we impose what we want to be true upon nature itself, an error called the “reverse appeal to nature” fallacy. Luana and I described that in our paper:

This inverts an old fallacy into a new one, which we call the reverse appeal to nature. Instead of assuming that what is natural must be good, this fallacy holds that “what is good must be natural.”

If there are humans with gender dysphoria, then we must see a spectrum of sex in humans. But in fact we don’t. And we don’t see it on other animals either. The “reverse appeal to nature” is the basis for six misstatements by ideologues in my field that Luana Maroja and I discussed in an article called “The ideological subversion of biology.”

But now there’s another infection of anthropology by wokeness that I’ve learned of, and it’s an infection not just of cultural anthropology, but anthropology in general. I refer to the following statement by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. This is an old and venerable (founded 1928) organization that used to be called the American Association of Physical Anthropology, but changed their name after a series of votes, though I’m not sure why. At any rate, I hear that it’s the home of the top peer-reviewed journal in anthropology.

That, however, didn’t keep it from going full woke, and it issued a statement in support of trans lives (below) that denies the sex binary in humans. And it clearly does that on ideological grounds. Here’s the statement (it appears here). I’ve added red where they go off the rails.

This society, like all science societies, really should institute a policy of institutional neutrality, because this has almost nothing to do with anthropology. It’s virtue-signaling, pure and simple, and their denial of the sex binary is simply nonsense. Of course it’s proper to oppose bias and bigotry against trans people, but it’s also proper to oppose attacks on innocent Israelis and the murder of Syrians by their own President. Note as well that they make a contentious statement here, approving of “care that is gender and life affirming,” There are many people, presumably including anthropologists, who don’t approve of the form of “gender-affirming” care that immediately accept’s a child’s self-diagnosis of being born in the wrong body, and putting them on a conveyer belt that ineluctably leads to hormone treatment and surgery.

Shame on the American Association of Biological Anthropologists! Not only do they make a big scientific mistake, but, in their effort to show how wonderful they are, promote a form of therapy that may well be harmful to the very group of gender-dysphoric youngsters that they want to help.

h/t: Elizabeth Weiss

Once again, cultural anthropologists claim that there are not two sexes, using a stupid and misleading example from orangutans

December 21, 2023 • 10:30 am

This fracas has confirmed my feeling that while physical anthropology is a science, cultural anthropology is, by and large, ideology devoted to buttressing progressive social narratives.

As I reported in September (see here and here), the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropological Society (CASCA), in their annual meeting in Toronto, had decided to cancel a panel on sex (“Let’s talk about sex, baby: why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”). As I wrote at the time:

As I said, the proposal was accepted by the AAA and CASCA for the meeting. But then they has second thoughts—and rejected it (see below).  I suspect that the main issue was [Elizabeth] Weiss’s talk, which maintained that “skeletons are binary”, which is true, but not something that cultural anthropologists, at least, would find comfortable. THERE IS NO BINARY IN WOKEWORLD!

Of course sex in humans is binary, with the proportion of exceptions to the male/femake definition based on gamete size being only about 0.018/%, or one in 5,600 people. Now if you’re a Pecksniff, and I’ve had many of these, you’ll say, “well, 1 in 5,600 doesn’t mean an absolute binary.” Okay, fine, I can respond, “For all practical purposes, it is a binary.” After all, if you toss a nickel in the air, the chance it will land on its edge is also about 1 in 5600, but when the Pecksniffs toss a coin, even they don’t say, “Heads, tails, or edge?”.  The reason for asserting that sex is a spectrum, of course, is that the binary of sex in nature doesn’t match the more spectrum-like nature of gender. But gender is not sex.  The assertion of binary sex in all animals and vascular plants also, for some reason, is said to offend transsexuals and gender activists, although of course the very nature of transexuality—transitioning from male to female morphology or vice versa—presumes a sex binary.  It was this twisted attempt to force nature into a Procrustean bed of ideology that led the anthropology societies to cancel the meeting (it was held elsewhere). As the societies said in their letter of rejection (or, rather, of deplatforming); emphasis is mine:

We write to inform you that at the request of numerous members the respective executive boards of AAA and CASCA reviewed the panel submission “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” and reached a decision to remove the session from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program(me). This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program (me). The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.

Yes, the idea of a sex binary was said to be “unsafe” “harmful,” and “undignified.” That the binary was true apparently didn’t matter. Such is cultural anthropology.

Now Kathleen Lowrey, who organized the panel, wrote an analogy between the canceling of the panel (and a letter from The Offended) and medieval bestiaries that tended to affix human traits on imaginary animals. The centerpiece of her article is a letter from three anthropologists adamantly maintaining that sex in humans is NOT binary, using an example from orangutans that involves, yes, binary sex.

Click below to read the piece from Reality’s Last Stand.

Involved in this fracas as an opponent of binary sex is the omnipresent Agustín Fuentes, a Princeton anthropologist who always shows up when a dose of wokeness is needed in anthropology (see all I’ve written about his missteps here, which include accusing Darwin of misogyny and promoting genocide). Lowrey’s statements are indented:

In September, several colleagues and I were pre-emptively booted from the 2023 joint meetings of the American Anthropological Association and Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto. Our panel, titled “Let’s Talk about Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology,” was scheduled for Sunday, November 20. I have already detailed this regrettable situation elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it here.

Instead, I want to focus on a specific point about why our panel was said to fly in the face of the “settled science” in anthropology: the contention that evidence from orangutans demonstrates that the great apes, humans included, are not sexually dimorphic species. In a joint letter, three anthropologists—Kathryn Clancy from the University of Illinois, Agustin Fuentes from Princeton, and Robin Nelson from Arizona State University—wrote, “We see three forms of the adult orangutan. Does this represent a sex binary?” They proffer this rhetorically, expecting the reader to assent that the answer can only be “no.” I am indebted to my co-panelist, Elizabeth Weiss, for sharing and discussing the relevant literature on this with me.

What? Now we have orangutans showing that sex isn’t binary, alongside clownfish (which of course do show binary sexes)?  Yes, that’s what it says in the letter by the three misguided anthropologists, and I quote from that letter

  • Implicit in the session abstract and several of the individual abstracts is the assumption that sex is a biological binary; a concept that is rejected by current biological anthropology and human biology, and highly disputed across contemporary biology.

So much the worse for biological anthropology. But wait! Here come the orangutans! (my emphasis in the letter):

As anthropologists who work in biological anthropology and human biology, we are aware that definitions of sex can be made using pelvic girdle shape, cranial dimensions, external genitalia, gonads, sex chromosomes, and more. Sex, as biological descriptor, is not binary using any of those definitions. People are born with non-binary genitalia every day – we tend to call people who fall into this group intersex. People are born with sex chromosomes that are not XX or XY but X, XXY, XXXY and more, every day. The same is true with gonads. What’s more, someone can have intersex genitalia but not intersex gonads, intersex chromosomes but not intersex genitalia. These bodily differences demonstrate the massive variation seen in sex physiology across vertebrate species. Looking beyond humans, we see three forms of the adult orangutan. Does this represent a sex binary? Significant percentages of many reptile species have intersex genitalia. Are we still trying to call sex a binary? The binary limits the kinds of questions we can ask and therefore limits the scope of our science.

Clearly the implied answer to the rhetorical question of Fuentes et al. is “Hell no! Orangutans clearly demolish the sex binary.”

Except that they don’t. What the three sweating anthropologists are doing here is conflating sex-related traits like chromosome and genital appearance with biological sex itself, which is defined as whether you have large, immobile gametes (females) or small mobile gametes (males). There are no other types of gametes, so there are just two sexes. Further, the binary nature of gamete size has led to all kinds of advances in understanding nature—for example, how sexual selection works. Turtles don’t have sex chromosomes, but they have sexes—two of them—sex being determined by rearing temperature.  As Luana and I wrote in our Skeptical Inquirer paper:

Natural selection has independently produced diverse pathways to generate the sexes, but at the end there are just two destinations: males and females. And so we have an evolved and objectively recognized dichotomy—not an arbitrary spectrum of sexes.

Back to Lowrey, who handily and quickly dismantles the “orangutans-have-three-sexes” argument:

Clancy, Fuentes, and Nelson are referring to a phenomenon observed among male orangutans whereby junior males will not always develop secondary sexual characteristics if a dominant senior male is present. While these junior males are reproductively capable, and will impregnate female orangutans when the opportunity arises, they do not develop the larger body size, heavy jowls, and “laryngeal sac” that produces the loud, resonant calls typical of dominant males. Consequently, female orangutans are much less willing to mate voluntarily with these developmentally arrested junior males than with dominant senior males.

The mechanism that induces developmental arrest in junior males in the presence of a dominant senior male is unknown. Initially, it was hypothesized that this was a stress response. However, dominant males produce more stress hormones than developmentally arrested junior males. This suggests that the lack of mating opportunities for junior males might be offset by a significant reduction in violent conflicts with other males. Dominant senior males are relatively tolerant of developmentally arrested males but engage in aggressive combat during encounters with other mature males, resulting in injuries and sometimes premature death. This behavior may be a canonical example of what evolutionary biologists have termed the “sneaky fucker” gambit, observed in many species, where some males monopolize mating opportunities with females through aggression, forcing unsuccessful males pursue alternative strategies that avoid direct male-male competition. The arrested development observed in some male orangutans may be a particularly highly developed example of this strategy.

Are orangutans, then, a trimorphic species proving that primate sex is not binary? This species exhibits three adult body forms; however, two of these are male, and one is female. Consequently, orangutans, like humans, have only two sexes. The alternate male body forms likely represent reproductive strategies evolved to access the limiting factor for the production of orangutan offspring. This limiting factor is the bodies and capacities of female orangutans, including their large sessile gametes, uteruses for gestating baby orangutans, mammary glands for nourishing young over extended juvenile periods (orangutan offspring can be breastfed for up to eight years), and the devoted care from orangutan mums necessary to rear orangutan offspring to maturity.

The story of the trimorphic orangutan, therefore, doesn’t hold up under scientific scrutiny as a slam-dunk example that refutes the sex binary. Instead, it serves a different purpose. It contributes not to scientific literature but to the evolving canon of a postmodern bestiary.

It’s weird how people who purport to be scientific will use the example of three forms of orangs, two of them indisputably male and one of them female, to argue for the existence of three sexes. It’s as if people observed that there are dwarf men and women, big outliers in height, to claim that humans have four sexes.

Lowrey, of course, knows that this fallacious “appeal to nature argument”, which claims that what we want to see in nature is what we must see, is purely ideological:

When gender ideologues rifle the annals of animal science in hope of rumbling a plausible tale about white-throated sparrows or bearded dragons, they are looking not for evidence but for allegories. Tracking down their sources is like asking Aesop if foxes ought to eat grapes even if they are within easy reach (they definitely should not, by the way). Such narratives are not aimed at advancing animal ethology or biology, but at telling humans how to behave and what to believe about their own natures.

. . . What kind of morality is enjoined by the parable of the trimorphic orangutan? A creed that says giving kids drugs that erode their bones is groovy. One that urges us to free our minds, man, about where and with whom Marina Volz should be housed. An ethos that claps like a trained seal every time WPATH issues new “settled science” from on high.

WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which has been repeatedly criticized for promoting “standards of care” for trangender health that aren’t safe, and for making statements that aren’t true. You can look up Marina Volz for yourself.

Fortunately, biologists have clarified the cases of the white-throated sparrow and clownfish, both mistakenly said by ideologues to demonstrate a “spectrum of sexes.” Now we have a takedown of the stupid orangutan example as well.  Really, cultural anthropology, which used to be more respectable, has become somewhat of a swamp.

Here’s a demonstration of the two types of MALE orangutans from Wikipedia. Note the caption:

More Sophisticated Theology: a religious scholar ponders whether Neanderthals had immortal souls

August 10, 2023 • 8:30 am

Lest you think that Sophisticated Theology™ has fallen on hard times, here we have an article pondering at great and tedious length the immensely important question, “Did Christ die for Neanderthals?” That can be rephrased, according to author Simon Francis Gaine, as “Did the Neanderthals have immortal souls?” (The “OP” after his name stands for Ordinis Praedicatorum, meaning of the Order of Preacher in the Dominican sect of Catholicism.)

And he gets paid to write stuff like this; his biography gives his bona fides, include a degree from Oggsford:

Fr Simon is currently assigned to the Angelicum, Rome, where he teaches in the Theology Faculty of the Pontifical University of St Thomas. He lectures on the Theology of Grace and Christian Anthropology, and oversees the Faculty’s Doctoral Seminar.

Fr Simon holds the Pinckaers Chair in Theological Anthropology and Ethics in the Angelicum Thomistic Institute, of which he is also the Director. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Blackfriars’s Aquinas Institute, the Pontifical Academy of St Thomas, Rome, and the Vatican’s International Theological Commission.

He studied theology at Oxford, and completed his doctorate in modern Catholic theology before joining the Dominican Order in 1995.

Click on the screenshot for a paradigmatic example of Sophisticated Theology™. The paper appeared in 2020 in New Blackfriars, a Wiley journal that’s apparently peer reviewed.

Here’s the Big Question:

 I have no expertise in any of these sciences, but have tried as best I can to understand what they have to say, in order to take account of what they have to say within a theological framework. Today I am going to look at the Neanderthals and their relationship to us from a theological perspective in the Catholic tradition, asking what a disciple of St Thomas Aquinas should make of them. Are they to be counted among the humanity God created in his image and likeness and which fell into sin, or are they to be counted instead among the other animal species of our world represented in the first chapter of Genesis? Or are they something else? While creation itself is to be renewed through Christ at the last, according to Christian faith Christ is said to die for our trespasses, for our sins. So did Christ die for Neanderthals?

This comes down to the question, says Gaine, of whether Neanderthals had immortal souls, so we have to look for evidence of that. If they did, then they could be saved by Jesus, though since the Neanderthals’ demise antedated the appearance of Jesus by about 40,000 years, their souls must have lingered in somewhere like Purgatory (along with the souls of Aztecs and other pre-Christian believers) for millennia. Gaine does not take up the question of whether other hominins, like H. erectus or H. floresiensis, much less the Denisovans, also had souls.

Since we have no idea whether Neanderthals had immortal souls (indeed, we can’t be sure that anybody else has an immortal soul, since it’s like consciousness), we have to look for proxies for souls. The question is complicated by the fact that Neanderthals interbred with “modern” Homo sapiens, so that most of us carry some a few percent of Neanderthal genes in our genome.

To answer his question of whether Neanderthals are “theologically human” (i.e., whether they had immortal souls), Gaine turns to his hero Aquinas:

So were Neanderthals theologically human or not? I think the only way we can approach this question is to ask whether or not Neanderthals had immortal souls, as we do. But, apart from Christian teaching, how do we know that we even have such souls? We cannot just have a look at our immaterial souls, and Aquinas thought that we only know the character of our souls through what we do. Aquinas argues from the fact that we make intellectual acts of knowledge of things abstracted from their material conditions, to the immateriality of the intellectual soul. Our knowledge is not just of particulars but is universal, enabling pursuits like philosophy and science, and the potential to be elevated by God to supernatural knowledge and love of him. If human knowing were more limited to a material process, Aquinas does not think our souls would be such subsistent, immaterial souls. Finding evidence of intellectual flights throughout the history of sapiens is difficult enough, however, let alone in Neanderthals.

. . .  What we need to look for in the case of Neanderthals is evidence of some behaviour that bears the mark of an intellectual soul such as we have.

And so an “intellectual soul” then becomes a proxy for the immortal soul, which is itself the proxy for whether you can be saved by Christ. Did Neanderthals have these? Gaine uses several lines of evidence to suggest that they did.

  • Neanderthals buried their dead (religion!)
  • Language. We don’t know if Neanderthals could speak, but they had a vocal apparatus similar to that of modern H. sapiens. Gaine concludes that they had language, though of course that’s pure speculation. But since when have Sophisticated Theologians™ bridled at usupported speculation?
  • Neanderthals made cave paintings and may have adorned themselves with feathers and jewelry: signs of a “material culture” similar to H. sapiens.

And so he concludes, without saying so explicitly, that Neanderthals had immortal souls and were save-able by Christ. This supposedly allows us to use science to expand theology:

How though does any of this make a difference to theology in the tradition of Aquinas? If Neanderthals were created in God’s image and saved by Christ, this must expand our understanding of Christ’s ark of salvation and raise questions about how his saving grace was made available to them. Because the Church teaches that God offers salvation through Christ to every person in some way.  theologians have often asked in recent times how this offer is made to those who have not heard the Gospel, members of other religions, and even atheists. It seems to me that, just as modern science has enlarged our sense of the physical universe, the inclusion of Neanderthals in theological humanity must somehow expand our sense of human salvation, given that it was effected in the kind of life Neanderthals lived.

. . . But even if Neanderthal inclusion does not pay immediate theological dividends, at least for apologetic reasons it seems necessary for theology to take account of their discovery. Unless theologians do, they risk the appearance of leaving faith and science in separately sealed worlds, as though our faith cannot cope with advancing human knowledge, leaving it culturally marooned and seemingly irrelevant to many. That is exactly the opposite of the attitude of Aquinas, who, confident that all truth comes from God, in his own day confirmed Christian wisdom by integrating into it what he knew of human science.’

But why stop at Neanderthals when you’re “expanding your faith through science”. There are lots of other hominins that must be considered (see below).  Can we rule most of these out because they might not have had language?

From the Encyclopedia Brittanica

And what about other mammals? In 2015 the great Sophisticated Catholic Theologians™ Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart argued about whether dogs can go to Heaven. (Hart said “yes,” while Feser said “no”, both of them furiously quoting Church Fathers like Aquinas to support their positions.)

These are tough questions, and of course to answer them theologians have to construct confected arguments based on casuistry. What amazes me is that people get paid to corrupt science with such ridiculous theological questions. It is unsupported speculation about unevidenced empirical assertions.

h/t: David

Still more critique of the PLOS article on women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies

July 10, 2023 • 9:45 am

A recent paper in PLOS ONE by Anderson et al. concluded that the frequency of hunter-gatherer societies in which women hunted was much higher than people thought (79%), which was taken to discard the “myth” that in such societies there was a sex-based division of labor, with men hunting and women foraging. Further, Anderson et al. concluded that in 37% of the societies women hunted large game or game of all sizes, so that the hunting was not just things like birds or rabbits. That was taken to explode another myth—that of women who didn’t hunt the big game.

Here’s what I wrote about the paper on June 30:

On June 30 I reported on a PLOS One paper whose data showed that, in existing hunter-gatherer societies, women participated in hunting a lot more than most people (well, at least I) thought.  (The original paper is here.) Here’s what I wrote, giving the authors’ conclusions (the authors’ words are doubly indented, my short bit singly indented).

The authors’ conclusions:

Here we investigated whether noted trends of non-gendered hunting labor known from the archaeological record continued into more recent, ethnographic periods. The descriptive sample described here is sufficient to warrant the conclusion that women in foraging societies across the world participate in hunting during more recent time periods, a finding that makes sense given women’s general morphology and physiology . The prevalence of data on women hunting directly opposes the common belief that women exclusively gather while men exclusively hunt, and further, that the implicit sexual division of labor of ‘hunter/gatherer’ is misapplied. Given that this bimodal paradigm has influenced the interpretation of archeological evidence, which includes the reluctance to distinguish projectile tools found within female burials as intended for hunting (or fighting) , this paper joins others in urging the necessity to reevaluate archeological evidence, to reassess ethnographic evidence, to question the dichotomous use of ‘hunting and gathering,’ and to deconstruct the general “man the hunter” narrative.

Of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of hunting strategies, 79% of them demonstrated female hunting. The widespread presence of female hunting suggests that females play an instrumental role in hunting, further adding to the data that women contribute disproportionately to the total caloric intake of many foraging groups. Additionally, over 70% of hunting done by females is interpreted as intentional, meaning that females play an active and important role in hunting—and the teaching of hunting—even if they use different tools and employ different acquisition strategies. For example, among the Aka, women’s participation in net-hunting was required, whereas men’s participation was not.

It’s clear from these data that hunter-gatherer societies do not show a strict division of labor, though I’d like to see data on the frequency of hunts in which women participate, not just the frequency of societies in which women hunt.  Men still do most of the hunting and most of the big-game hunting, but this shows only moderate rather than extensive division of labor.

Since then, critiques of the data and conclusions of Anderson et al. have appeared first in a series of tweets by Vivek V. Venkataraman in  the original post and then in a paper in Aporia Magazine by the pseudonymous “Alexander”.

Now Venkataraman and one of his students have provided a longer critique of Anderson et al. that isn’t yet peer-reviewed, but is on Venkataraman’s blog. I can’t remember where I found this quote from him, as I copied it out a while back, but it links to the critique that is online:

A group of who know the literature have been discussing this paper on Twitter. One of us along with his students has developed a critique of many of the data problems and data censoring. For example, the paper is on hunter-gatherers but at least five groups in Table 1 are not hunter-gatherers. Here is the link: https://www.vivekvenkataraman.com/blog/2023/7/5/debunking-a-debunking

Venkataraman is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology of the University of Calgary. His university webpage describes his interests:

Dr. Venkataraman is an evolutionary anthropologist who is broadly interested in the evolution of the human diet and food systems, and their relation to life history and behavior. He is assistant director of the Guassa Gelada Research Project ,and also the co-founder and co-PI of the Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project (OAHeLP)

As I said I’d keep people posted as analysis of the Anderson et al. paper proceeds, here’s the latest (click to read):

The general tenor of all the criticism so far is that Anderson et al. selected a group of hunter-gatherer societies that wasn’t random, and was weighted towards those in which women hunted. Further, the critics have argued that Anderson et al.’s literature analysis was slipshod, exaggerating the propensity of women who did hunt to take bigger game. This paper (and remember that it is neither submitted nor peer-reviewed) makes the same criticisms. I’ll give a few excerpts, all indented. Where bolding is mine, I say so.

We present a critique of the methodology employed by Anderson et al (2023) in their study of women’s hunting in foraging societies. When this new article was published, my students (undergraduate Jordie Hoffman and master’s student Kyle Farquharson) and I were putting the final touches on our own cross-cultural study of women’s hunting. This paper will be posted as a pre-print shortly. Given our recent immersion in this literature, we feel well-positioned to comment on this new study. We have identified a number of issues with Anderson et al’s (2023) methodology. While we applaud their investigation of this important issue, and we thank the authors for drawing our attention to sources that we ourselves had not discovered, we believe the main conclusions of their paper are invalidated by these issues.

We argue two main points about this paper:

-The sampling methodology is likely biased toward reports of female hunters, producing an inflated estimate of the frequency of women’s hunting (80%). More realistic estimates are offered.

-The claim that women commonly participate in the hunting of large game does not hold up under closer scrutiny.

This critique is by no means exhaustive. It does not deal with other significant problems about this paper, including the misrepresentation of consensus views on divisions of labor in foragers and of the intellectual history of Man the Hunter (Venkataraman 2021). Other critiques may be read here and here.

Here is their own range of estimates of hunter-gatherer societies in which women hunted:

Anderson et al (2023) argue that 50/63 (80%) forager societies show evidence of women’s hunting. For the estimate of 80% to hold up across all foragers, their sample of 63 societies would need to be representative of the broader literature. However, there are a number of societies with detailed information on subsistence behavior, including hunting, that were not included in their study. These might be found in sources with large compilations of foraging behavior such as Kaplan et al (2000) and Kraft et al (2021), among others. Dozens of such societies could appear in such a list. Because there are so many populations with ‘explicit’ – if not in-depth – descriptions of foraging returns, we are not confident that Anderson et al’s (2023) sampling strategy was not biased toward reports of women hunters. The lack of description in their methods does little to allay this concern.

ESTIMATING THE FREQUENCY OF WOMEN’S HUNTING [JAC: the bolding below is mine]

Based on our forthcoming paragraph-level survey of women’s hunting (Hoffman et al. in prep) using the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), we found that reports of women’s hunting were genuinely rare. Our analysis revealed only 232 paragraphs across 53 societies in this large database. If we consider data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), which consists of 186 societies, we found that 29 societies had evidence of women’s hunting. This translates to a frequency of 15.5%( 29/186). We also conducted a search on the D-PLACE database, focusing on the “Sex Difference: Hunting” variable. Out of 965 societies, only 14 (1.4%) were coded for the presence of women’s hunting. Of those 14 groups, 12 were hunter-gatherers, and the other two were agriculturalists. If we treat 965 as a reasonable denominator for the number of societies and consider the 53 societies we found, this would raise the frequency of women’s hunting to 5.5% (53/965). This estimate covers all subsistence types. If we consider only the forager cases (n=391), the frequency would be calculated as 13.5% (53/391). Finally, Koster et al (2020) synthesized data on hunting across 40 small-scale societies. There was little data on hunting by women. Though the authors caution against generalizing about sex differences based on low female sample sizes, it is important to recognize that much of the data in that study came from well-studied populations (e.g. Ache, Batek, Pume). This would suggest the behavior is indeed uncommon.

Our search of reports on women’s hunting using the SCCS in the HRAF revealed nearly an 80% match with the ethnographies found by Anderson et al (2023). This convergence suggests our study and that of Anderson et al (2023) have synthesized the vast majority of ethnographic reports on women’s hunting, and do not support the idea that there is a large unsampled literature on the topic. Therefore, assuming that 80% of the 328 societies unsampled by Anderson et al (2023) will also show evidence of women’s hunting is not warranted.

In summary, the frequency of women’s hunting depends on the type of calculation performed. We argue that any reasonable calculation puts this number well below 20%. Our findings confirm previous cross-cultural work on the topic and contrast starkly with those of Anderson et al’s (2023) estimate of 80%, which, we suggest, likely results from biased sampling.

Venkataraman and Farquharson (henceforth, V&F) then show several coding errors or “problematic cases” in the data of Anderson et al. that seem to show that their original paper recorded “women hunting” when the original data didn’t show it. But V&F also note one paper in which women apparently hunted big game but it wasn’t recorded as such. In general, though, their list of eight “miscodes” tend to exaggerate the frequency of societies in which women hunt. Here are just three cases they point out:

Ganij

In Table 1, the authors reference Hewlett (1996), which has only one reference to the Ganij in a paragraph that is about breastfeeding. We were unable to locate any mention of women’s hunting.

Lardil

Memmott et al (2008) focused on fishing techniques and the trapping of fish, dugong, and turtle. The latter two prey types would, in fact, be quite large and perhaps better classified as large game. However, it was not explicitly noted that women were participating in the hunting.

Kikuyu

This Bantu ethnic group from Kenya are agriculturalists, not foragers.

If this is true, it’s embarrassing for the original authors.

Finally, the rest of the preprint is a society-by-society analysis of whether women hunted large game. The consensus of anthropologists before Anderson et al.’s paper is that this was quite rare, and V&F support that conclusion, by criticizing Anderson et al.’s analysis.  I’ll end with V&F’s conclusion (bolding is theirs):

We have critiqued a number of aspects of the Anderson et al (2023) paper. We find, on the whole, that their data do not support their conclusions. We have argued that their sampling methodology suffers from significant problems related to sampling bias. Moreover, a re-examination of their data contradict the conclusion that one-third of their sample of foraging societies show evidence of female participation in large-game hunting. With the exception of a few cases (such as the Agta and some Arctic cases, totaling roughly six), the data do not present compelling ethnographic examples of women participating habitually in large-game hunting; and in virtually every case, hunting is communal. The findings of Anderson et al (2023) do not pose a significant challenge to current consensus views on divisions of labor among foragers.

Here we see a paradigm of how science is done: the use of replication, in this case of literature analysis.  First, data are presented, then several authors go through the original data with a fine-tooth comb and conclude that it doesn’t support the original conclusions. No doubt Anderson et al. will respond to this spate of criticism.

One thing that should not be taken from this back-and-forth is that any authors have a substantial investment in finding the results they did. We have no idea of whether there was confirmation bias in any of these papers, though time will tell if there was cherry-picking of data.

Along with that goes a caveat that we shouldn’t say that “men are better” if they hunt more often, or hunt big game. The roles of both men and women even if separated by task, are both absolutely essential for these societies to function. If it turns out that men hunt mor, and take bigger game than Anderson et al concluded, that doesn’t mean that men had a more “important” role.