Category: anthropology

A new (evidence-free) hypothesis that eliminates sex roles in hunter-gatherer societies

June 14, 2023 • 11:45 am

Many “progressives” don’t like evolutionary psychology because it posits that there are evolved differences between men and women, and some of these differences are still seen in modern society (sexual behavior, aggressiveness, sexual jealousy, and so on). I’ll have more to say about this when our Big Paper comes out in about ten days. But the objections to evolutionary psychology come largely from the Left, I think, because they put limits on the “infinite malleability”  of human behavior posited by Marx and his successors, and also because they imply that some inequities of sex representation in populations may be due not to bigotry but to sex differences in preference.

A lot of objections to evolutionary psychology are based on the misguided criticisms that the discipline comprises only made up “just so stories” that cannot be tested, and that every feature of our behavior was specifically installed by natural selection for that feature. There are no byproducts, no “bugs.” (Masturbation, of course, is a feature with no obvious evolutionary advantage, and is probably a byproduct behavior taking advantage of the existence of orgasms, which evolved to promote the spread of genes. Another example is adoption by infertile couples, which is likely a nonadaptive byproduct of evolved parental instincts.)

While evolutionary psychology and its ancestor sociobiology did have their share of “soft” papers, the field has matured, so that now the hypotheses can be tested in a number of ways (more about that again in the Big Paper), and some hypotheses have been falsified.

What’s ironic about the article below, then, is that it is much weaker than most evolutionary psychology papers—for it is 100% speculation, with some counterevidence, too—and yet it may well be applauded by “progressives” because it proposes that gender roles in early humans may not have existed. In other words, it’s compatible with today’s “blank slate” ideology and notions of flexible gender identity.  But I claim that if you criticize evolutionary psychology because it’s purely speculative, made up of scenarios that comport with a scientist’s ideology, then you have to be ESPECIALLY critical of this article.

It’s by an anthropologist and was published in The Conversation. Click the screenshots to read.

Garvey’s hypothesis, which is hers, is that early humans in North America were not really classical “hunter gatherers”. Instead of the men going out to hunt meat and the women staying around home gathering vegetable matter (and taking care of kids), the women went along on the hunt, too, so the classical “men hunt/women gather” division of labor may not have existed at all.

Why does Dr, Garvey think this? Because her calculations show that if humans ate “digesta”—the stomach contents of large mammals like bison—they could ingest enough essential carbohydrates to eliminate the need to gather. And so, presto—no more sex roles.

Here’s the basis of her hypothesis:

The plant material undergoing digestion in the stomachs and intestines of large ruminant herbivores is a not-so-appetizing substance called digesta. This partially digested matter is edible to humans and rich in carbohydrates, which are pretty much absent from animal tissues.

Conversely, animal tissues are rich in protein and, in some seasons, fats – nutrients unavailable in many plants or that occur in such small amounts that a person would need to eat impractically large quantities to meet daily nutritional requirements from plants alone.

If past peoples ate digesta, a big herbivore with a full belly would, in essence, be one-stop shopping for total nutrition.

And so she makes some calculations that, to her, show that women could have hunted, too, for if everyone eats digesta there’s no need to forage:

To explore the potential and implications of digesta as a source of carbohydrates, I recently compared institutional dietary guidelines to person-days of nutrition per animal using a 1,000-pound (450-kilogram) bison as a model. First I compiled available estimates for protein in a bison’s own tissues and for carbohydrates in digesta. Using that data, I found that a group of 25 adults could meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recommended daily averages for protein and carbohydrates for three full days eating only bison meat and digesta from one animal.

. . . . there is evidence to suggest that large game was much more abundant in North America, for example, before the 19th- and 20th-century ethnographers observed foraging behaviors. If high-yield resources like bison could have been acquired with low risk, and the animals’ digesta was also consumed, women may have been more likely to participate in hunting. Under those circumstances, hunting could have provided total nutrition, eliminating the need to obtain protein and carbohydrates from separate sources that might have been widely spread across a landscape.

And, statistically speaking, women’s participation in hunting would also have helped reduce the risk of failure. My models show that, if all 25 of the people in a hypothetical group participated in the hunt, rather than just the men, and all agreed to share when successful, each hunter would have had to be successful only about five times a year for the group to subsist entirely on bison and digesta. Of course, real life is more complicated than the model suggests, but the exercise illustrates potential benefits of both digesta and female hunting.

(Of course the model assumes a group size of 25; if it was larger, there might have been a lot more hunting success.

That aside, Garvey’s scenario raises many questions. She admits that “eating digesta may have been a more common practice in the past” and “direct evidence is frustratingly hard to come by”. In fact, the sole evidence adduced for her hypothesis is this:

Ethnographically documented foragers did routinely eat digesta, especially where herbivores were plentiful but plants edible to humans were scarce, as in the Arctic, where prey’s stomach contents was an important source of carbohydrates.

The reference she gives is a technical report on “Vitamins and minerals in the traditional Greenland diet,” and says this:

Inuit in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic have experienced health problems, including vitamin C deficiency, as their diet in the 20th century shifted from an exclusive reliance on traditional diet to a mixed diet on traditional food and market food use (Bjerregaard and Young 1998). Formerly, when an animal was caught, all the internal organs were exploited by the Inuit, even the stomach content of ptarmigan, seal and caribou was eaten (Rodahl 1949). When leaving the strict traditional diet, Inuit need to balance their diet properly and weigh benefits and contaminant risks of traditional food.

So yes, the Inuit did eat digesta when hunting some animals. But those are Inuit, and these questions remain:

a. Did the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens, presumably hunter-gatherers who lived in plant-rich environments like Africa, also eat digesta?

b. If so, why did they when the plants were available around them?

c. Modern hunter gatherers do not eat digesta because it’s yucky. Why would their ancestors who lived in places like Africa and South America?

d. If the ancestors of modern hunter-gatherers did eat digesta, why did they stop, so that now they’ve reverted to the traditional sex-role division with men hunting and women gathering (there are of course individual exceptions)?

e. If the men hunted and DID bring back digesta, why did women need to participate in the hunt? Did they not have children to take care of (remember, there was no birth control back then). I would suspect that every woman of reproductive age had kids, and women over and under reproductive age wouldn’t be appropriate for hunts. But of course you could say they had crèches, but that just expands the hypothesis.

f. Do women regularly participate in the hunts of modern Inuit? (After all, their consumption of digesta is the only evidence supporting Garvey’s speculation.)  The Wikipedia article on Inuit women suggests not:

Jobs in Inuit culture were not considered men’s work or women’s work, but the Inuit did believe in men’s skills and women’s skills. For example, hunting was generally done by men. Sewing clothes, cooking and preparing food, gathering food outside of hunting, and caring for the home were generally done by women. This does not mean that women never hunted, nor that men never helped with other jobs. This was just how the work was traditionally divided.

Of course that doesn’t mean that things were always this way, but one has to then concoct a reason why they weren’t.

I would suggest that this scenario of hunting women and the eating of digesta is in fact motivated by ideology: a desire to efface the traditional division of sex roles between hunting men and gathering women. And, of course, the evidence given (the consumption of digesta, but in societies with traditional hunter-gatherer sex roles) is far thinner than we see in most modern papers on evolutionary psychology. Will we see the evo-psych critics go after Garvey’s speculation, too? For some reason I don’t think so.

In the end, this article is another example of what I call the “reverse appeal to nature”: you see—or in this case, speculate—what exists in nature only insofar as it comports with your predetermined ideology. To put it in short: “what is good for humans is what one finds in nature.”

Oh, and one more point. Right at the start of the article is this bit:

First, I want to note that this article uses “women” to describe people biologically equipped to experience pregnancy, while recognizing that not all people who identify as women are so equipped, and not all people so equipped identify as women.

I am using this definition here because reproduction is at the heart of many hypotheses about when and why subsistence labor became a gendered activity. As the thinking goes, women gathered because it was a low-risk way to provide dependent children with a reliable stream of nutrients. Men hunted either to round out the household diet or to use difficult-to-acquire meat as a way to attract potential mates.

In other words, her hypothesis requires the biological definition of women (based on gamete size, nearly completely correlated with the ability to get pregnant) to buttress the traditional division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies. (By the way, the division of labor might have also been based on differential speed and strength, favoring men as the sex who would best chase down and kill animals.)

But then why is the first paragraph in there, a paragraph in which she claims that trans women can’t get pregnant and some biological women identify as men? This seems to be a nod to gender activists, and for the life of me I can’t see what it has to do with Garvey’s theory. It’s looks like a bit of irrelevant prose stuck into the article to show that the author is virtuous.

 

h/t: Luana, whose informing me about these things costs me many hours of work and heartache

Last meal report from Paris

May 15, 2023 • 11:00 am

For some reason I didn’t have time to write about our last meal in Paris, at the esteemed and old fashioned restaurant Sébillon in Neuilly, a small town that’s not in Paris, but might as well be. It was recommended by one of Winnie’s friends, and it turned out to be an excellent recommendation. It’s a little bit out of the way, so although it was jammed for Sunday lunch, we saw no other tourists. Winnie’s friend Nicole joined us for the house specialty, gigot (leg of lamb) served with the traditional white beans. And it’s served according to the two most beautiful words in French: à volonté, or “at your will”.  The proper English tradition is “all you can eat”. And I was prepared to eat plenty of lamb leg, especially if was cooked the right way: pink on the inside, or even rare.

I got off at the wrong Métro stop, but I didn’t know that. Because I was early, I went into a nearby Catholic church (St. Jean-Baptiste) as I heard the sounds of Mass within. I hadn’t been in a Mass since 1989, when I wandered into the midnight Mass at Notre Dame in Paris. What with the singing, the organ, and the swinging censers spewing incense, and the church (before it was burned) that was quite a spectacle.

A few scenes from the Neuilly church:

A kid getting baptized, as per the church’s name. You don’t get dunked like a doughnut any more; this priest simply dipped a hankie in the holy water and wiped the boy’s forehead. That’s baptism on the cheap!

St. John the Baptist:

A memorial to those who died for France in WWI:

. . . and the painting below it:

The Mass:

Suddenly my phone buzzed; it was Winnie telling me I was late. It turns out there are two stops on the Métro like with the name “Neuilly” in them, and I had gotten off at the wrong one. Fortunately, the right one was just two stops down the line, and the Restaurant Sébillon was right by the stop. And so we were only a few minutes late.

Restaurant exterior:

The interior. It’s a panorama, so click to enlarge. It’s an old-fashioned place, lovely and just perfect for Sunday lunch when, according to tradition, adults take their parents and older relatives out to lunch:

I had the prix-fixe menu, which included a choice of oysters for the entrée. My haul:

I had a white wine whose genre I can’t remember (it’s been too long)

Winnie and Nicole had the white asparagus, which was in season. (I almost went for it.) It was served with a butter sauce that both of them eschewed

And then. . . . the GIGOT, brought to the table on carts. I could specify that I wanted rare lamb, and knew that I could get more:

My first plate (I had three). This is how I like my lamb, and this was terrific: juicy and flavorful. The beans were also excellent (the quality of gigot-accompanying beans does vary among restaurants.)

We all had gigot. Nicole, whose appetite is normal, was satisfied with one plate, and I think I even beat Winnie, who had two (she generally can outeat me). But we differed in our desserts. I had the baba au rhum (rum-soaked spongecake), served with a bottle of rum (yo ho ho!) on the side if you want more. This was the rummiest baba au rhum I’ve ever had! I was tipsy after the meal, and I think the rum was largely responsible.

The ladies had a crème caramel and crêpes for dessert:

A selfie of all of us.  The room was filled with locals, with many tables occupied by families as well as and seniors, the latter presumably grandparents.

On the way out, we passed a huge and luscious-looking apple tarte:

I decided to visit the nearby Musée de l’Homme while the ladies went off to nap. It turned out that I should have napped too, as the famous anthropology museum was huge, and I was too full to take it all in. But I wanted to see the exhibit of early human art that had influenced Picasso.

Here’s a reproduction of the Venus of Lespuge, between 26,000 and 24,000 years old,

And a Picasso nude, “Bust of a Woman” (1931) showing a similar style:

Also on view: beach stones that Picasso picked up and sculpted, presumably influenced by “primitive” art. These must be worth a gazillion dollars.

I was too exhausted to peruse the anthropological collections, but did note two things. First, a wall of rubber tongues. When you pull on one, it speaks the language it represents (each tongue connects to a speaker so you can hear the language). Very clever!

And, right outside is a famous Parisian landmark:

Thus endeth my Parisian food jaunt, that included eight restaurants.  As for the Sébeillon, I recommend it highly, but do go for Sunday lunch, and reserve!

Anthropological Wokeism tries to stymie research

July 19, 2022 • 1:15 pm

This article about conflicts in anthropology involving gender and ethnicity comes from the website of Jonathan Turley, whose name I’d heard before but whose work and politics I didn’t know. His Wikipedia bio doesn’t give much clue into his politics (to be truthful, I didn’t look hard for it, since it seemed irrelevant to the story), I wondered simply because he cites a right-wing website below.

But Turley is no weirdo: here’s one bit from his Wikipedia bio:

Turley holds the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at The George Washington University Law School, where he teaches torts, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. He is the youngest person to receive an academic chair in the school’s history. He runs the Project for Older Prisoners (POP), the Environmental Law Clinic, and the Environmental Legislation Project.

I am assuming, then, that what he describes and quotes is accurate, and will give my views accordingly.  Here’s the article at hand, which relates to the last article we had about ethnicity (which, of course, reflects ancestry). Click screenshot to read:

I’ll be brief: there is a cadre of anthropologists who want to stop their colleagues from classifying skeletons by sex and by trying to find out their ancestry. The reason? Because it doesn’t comport with today’s “progressive” Leftist views. I’ll quote Turley:

There is an interesting controversy brewing in anthropology departments where professors have called for researchers to stop identifying ancient human remains by biological gender because they cannot gauge how a person identified at that the time. Other scholars are calling for researchers to stop identifying race as a practice because it fuels white supremacy.  One of the academics objecting to this effort to stop gender identifications, San Jose State archaeology Professor Elizabeth Weiss, is currently suing her school. Weiss maintains that she was barred from access to the human remains collection due to her opposition to the repatriation of human remains. The school objected that she posted a picture holding a skull from the collection on social media, expressing how she was “so happy to be back with some old friends.”

The conservative site College Fix quotes various academics in challenging the identification of gender and notes the campaign of the Trans Doe Task Force to “explore ways in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.”

Let’s take sex and ancestry separately. Turley’s prose is indented.

On gender and sex:

University of Kansas Associate Professor Jennifer Raff argued in a paper, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,”  that there are “no neat divisions between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals.”  Her best selling book has been featured on various news outlets like MSNBC.

. . . However, Raff is not alone. Graduate students like Emma Palladino have objected  that “the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex.”

Well, given that sex is pretty close to a complete binary in humans, and is reflected and diagnosable in our bones bones—hence “Lucy“, A. afarensis, was female and “Turkana Boy“, H. ergaster was male—you determine biological sex from skeletons, not gender.

Is that a problem? I don’t see how. Even if our hominin relatives or ancestors did have concepts of gender beyond male and female, there are genuine scientific questions to be answered by studying biological sex from ancient remains.  What was the ratio of males to females in various places, and if it differed much from 50:50, why? If someone’s remains are associated with items, like Ötzi the hunter (actually a mummy), one can conclude something about ancient cultures and the possibility of differential sex roles. Is it important for scientists to debate whether Ötzi identified himself as a “they/them” given that we’ll never know the answer? Or are we forbidden to inspect the genitals? (He was a biological male).

Now it is of sociological value to determine whether our ancestors identified as “men and women” and saw only two genders, but if we can’t do that, it’s ludicrous to say that we shouldn’t identify remains on the basis of biological sex—a lot easier to do! I won’t give a list of scientific questions that can be addressed by knowing the sex of a fossil hominin, but there are lots, and yet some anthropologists want to stop all such research because hominins may not have had gender roles that matched their biological sex.

On ancestry and ethnicity:

Likewise for ancestry. It’s sometimes possible to guess one’s ethnicity from skeletal morphology, but it’s much more accurate to do DNA sequencing. (Sequencing of fossil DNA can tell us both biological sex and which group of either ancient or modern humans you most resemble genetically.) Yet some anthropologists want to stop that research, too. Turley:

Professors Elizabeth DiGangi of Binghamton University and Jonathan Bethard of the University of South Florida have also challenged the use of racial classifications in a study, objecting that “[a]ncestry estimation contributes to white supremacy.”  The authors write that “we use critical race theory to interrogate the approaches utilized to estimate ancestry to include a critique of the continued use of morphoscopic traits, and we assert that the practice of ancestry estimation contributes to white supremacy.”

The professors refer to the practice as “dangerous” and wrote in a letter to the editor that such practices must be changed in light of recent racial justice concerns.

“Between the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and the homicides of numerous Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement officials, we have all been reminded about the fragility of life, and the failures of our society to live up to the ideals enshrined in the foundational documents which established the United States of America over two centuries ago. Tackling these failures seems overwhelming at times; however, changes can be enacted with candid and reflexive discussions about the status quo. In writing this letter, we direct our comments to the forensic anthropology community in the United States in hopes of sparking a discussion about the long-standing practice of ancestry estimation and changes that are frankly long overdue.”

Once again, research is supposed to be squelched for ideological reasons. Yet estimating ancestry of remains can answer lots of interesting questions.  One, for example involves DNA sequencing of Neanderthals and modern humans. I would consider these to be different, long-diverged ethnic groups of a single species, not different species, for they could interbreed where they lived in the same area and also produce fertile hybrids.

That’s just a guess, but without sequencing their DNA, we wouldn’t know not only that they hybridized, but also that many of us still carry some ancient DNA from Neanderthals.  Where did the Denisovans belong? (We don’t know whether they were a different species of hominin from modern humans or simply an “ethnic group.”) What about H. erectus? Did they die out without issue, or are they related to any modern populations?  Do any of their genes still hang around in H. sapiens? (I don’t think we’ll answer these questions.)

It is the sequencing of DNA of people from different geographic areas (“races” if you will, but call them whatever you want) that has helped us unravel the story of human migration, how many times we left Africa and when, and when different groups established themselves in places like Australia and Polynesia, or crossed the Bering Strait into North America. DNA and estimation of ancestry has immensely enriched the story of human evolution and migration. That’s all from “ancestry estimation”, and you don’t even need a concept of “race” to answer these questions—only a concept of “ancestry” and “relatedness”. Nor does this research contribute to white supremacy, though of course some racists may coopt it.

In the interests of woke ideology, in other words, some anthropologists want to shut down two promising lines of research. I call that misguided and, indeed, crazy. If you despise white supremacy like most of us do, you don’t get rid of it it by banning anthropological genetics. If you want sympathy for people whose gender doesn’t match their biological sex, you don’t get it by stopping researchers from determining the biological sex of ancient human remains.

As the Wicked Witch of the West said, “Oh, what a world! What a world!”

Two questions about human history

December 26, 2021 • 9:30 am

I’m sure that historians have pondered the first question at length, but I haven’t read their lucubrations. According to Wikipedia, the first definitive use of the wheel on transportation was in Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C. We don’t know how many times it was invented independently, but probably more than once (see below):

So, my first question is this: Why was the wheel not devised in the New World? The Americas had plenty of civilizations, including many Native American groups, and the Aztecs, Incas, and Maya as well as many other groups, but none of them had the wheel, with one exception (see below). Why? Further, the Diquis culture had stone spheres beginning about 300 A.D., so they certainly knew that something round could roll. But this wasn’t adapted for carts or other rolling entities. Yet the Incas are said to have used wooden rollers to roll large stones for their walls and cities. Why no wheels, then?

According to The Straight Dope (I just looked this up), there was one exception:

The wheel evidently was familiar to the ancient Mexicans, the only known instance of its having been invented independently of the Sumerian version. Unfortunately, it apparently never occurred to anyone at the time that wheels had any practical application, and their use was confined to little clay gadgets that are thought to be either toys or cult objects.

That link also gives you an explanation that Cecil Adams considers definitive, but I don’t know. See for yourself.  I am guessing that Jared Diamond pondered this question in Guns, Germs, and Steel but I read it so long ago I can’t recall. Go to the link, read “the” answer to my question above, and see if you agree with Cecil.

My second question is this:  How did our ancestors keep their fingernails and toenails at reasonable length?

I thought of this question while clipping my nails the other day, and thought, “Scissors and nail clippers, and even steel knives were not invented in fairly late in human history. But yet our ancestors did without them for millions of years.  How did they keep their nails short?

Now you might say, “They didn’t need to: their nails wore down from hunting, gathering, and walking barefoot.” But I am not sure this is the case. How would walking barefoot wear down your toenails? And we know that, at least in modern society, if you don’t trim your fingernails and toenails, they get ungodly long (see below).  Did the ancients use flint? And what did they do before they had flint implements? Or did they bite their fingernails?

Now we could surely answer this question by observing what hunter-gatherers do, if anything, to keep their nails short. But I am not going to look it up; I’d rather have readers speculate or, if they know the answer, tell me.

Below: a video showing what happens if you don’t trim your nails: here’s a man who didn’t trim the nails on one hand for 66 years. (He explains why.) He has, on that hand, the longest known fingernails in history.

Of course he had to cut his nails on his right hand so he could do stuff (and I’m betting he’s a rightie). Nobody would marry him, and you can imagine the trouble he had just living from day to day. It’s all in the video

At the end they cut his nails:

 

Fire use by hominins: an example of rapid cultural evolution?

July 26, 2021 • 9:15 am

Yesterday we discussed the possibility of cultural evolution (dissemination of a behavior or skill through imitation and learning) in cockatoos, which attracted a lot of attention, probably because of its parallel with human cultural evolution. (The cockatoos seem to have learned to open garbage bins by watching each other.) And in our species there are a gazillion examples, especially since transportation allowed innovations to be spread quickly and widely. You can think of lots of cases: blue jeans, cuisines from other places, music, and, earlier than that, printing, the wheel (some cultures never got it) and even religion.

The new paper in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. below, however, suggests what may have been the very first behavior that spread though species of Homo (not only H. sapiens, but perhaps Neanderthals, which some consider a different species) through movement of individuals: the use of fire.  Click on the screenshot to read the article (free) below, or get the pdf here. The reference is at the bottom.

Fire, of course, has many uses: besides cooking meat and tubers, it can be used to harden wood to make spear points, change the quality of stone to make it easier to flake, and to keep yourself warm. Other uses are given in the Wikipedia article “Control of fire by early humans.”

The MacDonald et al. paper collects evidence of fire use from species of Homo, concluding that it got started about 400,000 to 350,000 years ago and then spread rapidly throughout the species. The rapidity of spread then led them to propose what kind of social structure was present in humans at that time.  This contradicts speculations H. erectus controlled the use of fire about 1.5 million years ago; the authors find that evidence unconvincing.

The problem is to distinguish anthropogenic (“human caused”) fire from natural wildfires. But there are ways of doing this, as the article summarizes. Hearths and charred animal bones are one way. Here’s another bit of evidence: a fire-hardened wooden spear from, coincidentally, about 380,000-400,000 years old, part of a group of artifacts found in Germany:

I can’t evaluate the quality of the evidence, but the authors summarize a lot of data to conclude that regular fire use began about 400,000 years ago, and spread quickly throughout the Old World, with evidence coming from Portugal, Spain, France, Israel, and Morocco. Two quotes:

. . . a review by Roebroeks and Villa identified a clear pattern for Europe: there the record strongly suggests that anthropogenic fire use was very rare to nonexistent during the first half of the Middle Pleistocene, as exemplified by the absence—bar a few dispersed charcoal particles—of fire proxies in deeply stratified archaeological karstic sequences, such as the Atapuerca site complex in Spain or the Caune de l’Arago at Tautavel (France), as well as from such prolific open-air sites as Boxgrove in the United Kingdom. In contrast, the record from 400 ka onward is characterized by an increasing number of sites with multiple fire proxies (e.g., charcoal, heated lithics, charred bone, heat-altered sediments) within a primary archaeological context.

. . . The spatiotemporal pattern of the appearance in the archaeological record of an innovation provides evidence relevant for identifying how the innovation came to be widely distributed: that is, through independent innovation, demic processes, cultural diffusion, or genetic processes. The fact that regular fire use appeared relatively quickly across the Old World and in different hominin subpopulations strongly suggests that the behavior diffused or spread from a point of origin rather than that it was repeatedly and independently invented.

Since fire appeared in both warm and cold places around the same time, the authors suggest that its inception was not correlated with “environmental pressures” (e.g., cold). And because the spread was so rapid, the authors claim, correctly, that the spread throughout the Old World was very unlikely to have been caused by the diffusion of genes producing the tendency to create fire, which would spread only very slowly. Likewise, the near-simultaneity makes it seems unlikely that the use of fire was invented independently by several groups.

If fire use did spread through imitation and learning, then, what does that say about the social structure of early humans? If we were divided up into groups of xenophobic hunter-gatherers who didn’t interact, that would not facilitate the spread of fire. Why would a group give the skill to a competitor group? There are two alternatives.

The first, “demic diffusion,” is that a “deme” (a cohesive populations of hominins) spread rapidly, taking with it the fire use they invented. This seems unlikely given that the spread was more rapid than one could imagine a single population could migrate.

The alternative comprises groups that tolerated each other, and were at least somewhat friendly. As the authors suggest, there was a more “fluid social structure with multiple levels of clustering in social networks”. In other words, perhaps hominims were more interactive than we thought.

Well, we have no direct evidence for that, and it would be hard to come by. And I’ll let other physical anthropologists judge the “simultaneous spread” hypothesis. But I wanted to bring this up because the scenario is at least plausible, and it may be the first evidence for cultural evolution in our genus.

There’s one other trait they add in to the mix as another behavior that spread by cultural evolution: the “Levallois technology” for knapping stone (striking flakes off a stone like flint to make weapons and other implements). This, say the authors, can be learned only through “close and prolonged observation combined with active instruction.” Here’s the Levallois method, which involves producing a flint core in such a way that sharp flakes, useful for tools, can be easily struck off:

The authors posit that this technology also originated in one place, but about 100,000 years later than fire (and surely in a different place), and then spread rapidly among groups in a similar way: non-hostile group interactions in a multi-level social network.

I’ll close with the authors’ final paragraph, summarizing their views:

We hypothesize that around 400 ka, cultural processes supported change in technology across wide areas. This indicates, at a minimum, a degree of social tolerance for individuals from different groups, and suggests the less minimal but still plausible hypothesis that more intensive cooperative interactions within larger-scale networks were already in place, occasionally crossing the boundaries between what we usually infer to have been different biological populations within the wider hominin metapopulation. [JAC: I think they’re referring to movement between “modern H. sapiens and Neanderthals. After all, these groups did mate with each other] We conclude that the spatial and temporal pattern of the appearance of regular Middle Pleistocene fire use documented in the archaeological record signals more than the advent of an important tool in the hominin toolbox: the presence of cultural behavior more like that of humans today than of our great ape relatives. We suggest that long before the cultural florescence associated with the late MSA/Middle Pleistocene and to a greater extent LSA/Upper Paleolithic periods, hominins were beginning to develop the capacities for complexity, variability, and widespread diffusion of technology and behavior that we tend to associate only with H. sapiens.

__________________________

MacDonald, K., F. Scherjon, E. van Veen, K. Vaesen, and W. Roebroeks. 2021. Middle Pleistocene fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118:e2101108118.

Faith versus fact: the problem of Native American creationism and paleoanthropology in North America

June 14, 2021 • 9:30 am

This article in Quillette caught my eye because it was about science—paleoanthropology—and its conflict with faith. The authors are a pair of anthropologists who have written a book about the topic, which is the perennial conflict between scientists on the one hand and Native Americans claiming ancient human remains that, they say, are their ancestors.

Click on the screenshot to read:

The title refers to a meeting of the SAA in April when Weiss gave a talk about the obstructionism of Native American creation myths as they affect paleoanthropology in North America. Although the talk is certainly germane, and provides food for thought (see below), it was in effect “erased” by the SAA, who refused to post it despite their pledge to do so. It was the only talk that wasn’t posted. The reason is clear: going up against the claims of Native Americans, even if those claims can’t be supported, is a no-win situation. As Weiss writes:

The new SAA president, Deborah Nichols, subsequently contacted me to let me know that the video of our live talk would not be posted by the SAA for others to view, due to reports of hurt feelings. (We had previously relied on the SAA’s emailed assurance to presenters that “sessions will be available for viewing on demand within 24–36 hours after their original broadcast, until July 17, 2021.”) Furthermore, we learned, the SAA would not even provide us with the video. (And so we re-recorded the talk, which you can find here.) Another SAA statement was then put out to inform readers that “the SAA board finds the presentation does not align with SAA’s values,” and mentioned that “the board categorically rejects the Weiss-Springer position.”

Here’s the 13-minute talk that Weiss re-recorded after the SAA refused to post it:

There was substantial other pushback on both professional and social media. Here’s an example of a reaction by an “indigenous archeologist” to Weiss’s abstract of the talk: archaeologist.”

Hurt feelings again!

Well, we all know about these conflicts, and it’s conceivable that for some of them the Native Americans have a right to the bones and artifacts found by archaeologists, who of course lose the chance to study them.  But in most cases that “right” is dubious, for the genetic connection between those claiming the bones and the person whose bones are claimed is tenuous at best. Often it rests solely on creation myths: many Native Americans claim that despite scientific evidence that the Americas were populated by “modern” H. sapiens who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia about 15,000 years ago, their ancestors have lived in America forever. Further, to establish that the bones belong to a specific tribe is almost impossible, because bones from people of multiple “tribes” have been found in one locality, and there was considerable migration within North and South America.

Genetic analysis could conceivably settle the question, but without the bones you don’t have the DNA, and even so it’s hard to narrow down ancient DNA to a specific existing group of Native Americans, who are fairly closely related to each other. It’s even worse because the U.S. government passed laws saying that establishing ancestral (i.e., genetic) affinity isn’t necessary: “cultural evidence”, like oral traditions and creation myths, is sufficient. That immediately puts science at loggerheads with superstitions, superstitions that can be demonstrably incorrect.

As an example, Weiss and Springer discuss the famous Kennewick Man, 8,400- year-old remains of a man found in 1996 in Kennewick, Washington. It’s one of the most complete ancient North American skeletons ever found (see photos at bottom), and dates pretty close to the time when Asians began populating the Americas. But the remains were claimed by several tribes of Native Americans, although, according to the authors “the oldest known American tribe, the Hopi, reliably dates its history to only about 2,000 years ago.”

This started a decade-long court case between Native Americans, scientists, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  The case wasn’t resolved until 2004, and in favor of the scientists, though the remains have since been returned to a “coalition of Pacific Basin tribes” for reburial.

In the meantime, scientific studies of the skeleton, including use of DNA, showed that it was actually more closely related to “modern American Indian populations of Central and South America who are not ‘Native American'” by the U.S. government’s regulations. Using ancestry rather than creation myths, those other populations would have a stronger claim to the bones than would North American tribes.

In the meantime, scientists were able to find out a great deal of information from the skeleton. As the article states,

The greatly delayed scientific study was finally carried out, and the result was a magnificent peer-reviewed 2014 volume, edited by Jantz and Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution, titled: Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton. The studies revealed Kennewick Man’s age, sex, bone morphology, and bone chemistry, as well as modifications to the skeleton incurred during his life. This information, in turn, allowed inferences as to his food intake, food production, and other physical activities, and diseases and injuries he’d endured.

His affinities with other prehistoric and modern populations and individuals were also revealed by these studies. Kennewick Man’s dietary reconstruction from nitrogen isotopes (elements found in a variety of food sources that settle in bones and teeth, and which can be used to reconstruct eating and weaning patterns) revealed a diet composed mainly of marine foods. This differed from the previous view of Paleoindians as big game hunters. Kennewick Man also had bony growths in his ear canals called external auditory exostoses, which some have argued may have impacted his hearing and were related to chronic ear infections.

Kennewick Man had multiple injuries—including a projectile point (a spear head) in his pelvic bone. Chatters argued that this injury never healed properly and likely caused lifelong pain. Anthropologist Della Cook, on the other hand, suggested that the lack of reactive bone (which is evidence of bone healing from injury or infection) in the CT-scans suggests that Kennewick Man’s injury healed quickly. Interestingly, these two perspectives were both published in this 2014 book—an example of the open-minded manner in which science should be conducted and evaluated.

All of this information would have been lost had the repatriationists been successful. No other Paleoindian is as well studied as Kennewick Man, and many were reburied with just a simple osteological report. Such reports may include only the remains’ antiquity, sex, estimated age, and other basic information; and often are written up by undertrained students and marginal scholars who are not subject to peer review, and who do not report their findings in a way that contemporaries can validate. . .

Weiss and Springer describe other cases in which cultural tradition blocked scientific study, as well as scientific study that did succeed in finding out stuff about early Native Americans.

So what should the rule be? Of course, as a scientist who values scientific fact over creation myths or oral tradition, I’m biased in favor of empirical study. But if remains can be traced to a specific tribe or group of tribes, showing the bones to be more closely related to that group than to other tribes, one might consider tribal claims to be valid.  Even so, perhaps there should be an allowed period of scientific study, say two years, before the remains are returned to present-day tribes for reburial or various rites. After all, it’s not as if these bones belong to a present family of Native Americans, like the remains of someone’s son recovered and returned after a battle.

But I don’t think that claims based only on “oral tradition” or “creation myths,” should be honored at all. In such a case, the remains should then be available to scientists. After all, if we honor such superstitious claims, we are also tacitly honoring the creation myths of anybody, including Christians, Scientologists, and Muslims, each of which has its own creation story. That is government entanglement with religion.

And it’s a double entanglement: one with the myths of Native American groups, and the other with the religion of Wokeism, which makes the SAA into an organization that renders decisions based not on empirical considerations, but on ideology and identity politics.

Here’s the skeleton and skull of Kennewick Man:

CHIP CLARK/SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

World’s oldest representational art: an Indonesian warty pig from 45,000 years ago

January 23, 2021 • 1:45 pm

Here from Science Advances via National Geographic, is the painting of a wild pig from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. AT 45,000 years old, it’s world’s oldest cave art, and in fact the oldest known representational art of any sort.

Photo: MAXIME AUBERT

Here’s the paper reporting it (click on screenshot), and a free pdf is here:

The very oldest art comes not from Europe or Africa, but from Indonesia; but surely there was much earlier representational art. The subject is presumably a Celebes warty pig (Sus celebensis), a species still with us, and the artist presumably an anatomically modern human (H. sapiens sapiens).

Here’s the subject. Not a bad representation, eh?

From Wild Pig, Peccary & Hippo Specialist Groups.

And a few words from the authors (“AMH” means “anatomically modern humans”)

On the basis of the presently available evidence, we are unable to definitively conclude that the dated figurative rock art depiction from Leang Tedongnge is the handiwork of cognitively “modern” members of our species. However, this seems to be the most likely explanation given the sophistication of this early representational artwork and the fact that figurative depiction has so far only been attributed to AMH everywhere else in the world.

If so, the dated pig image from Leang Tedongnge would appear to provide some of the earliest evidence, if not the earliest, for the presence of our species in Wallacea. The minimum age of this artwork is compatible with the earliest established indications of AMH from excavated deposits in the Lesser Sunda islands, which formerly provided the oldest archaeological evidence for H. sapiens in Wallacea (~44.6 ka cal BP). Hence, dating results for the Leang Tedongnge painting underline the view that representational art, including figurative animal art and depictions of narrative scenes, was a key part of the cultural repertoire of the first AMH populations to cross from Sunda into Wallacea—the gateway to the continent of Australia.