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[thegeekanthropologist]

Happy World Anthropology Day!

[anthrolover79]

Need help finding forensic courses

I am looking for a forensic anthropology/human osteology online course. I am aware this is not a subject you would want to study online, but I missed my opportunity to take those classes when I was in school. I am now in a somewhat remote area in South America and there are none forensic fellows in miles. We have a very small collection of human remains which may grow a little bit. I do not expect to be able to study the remains myself, we have capable people for that, but they do not reside in the area, and these need to be properly curated while the sites are being studied and we wait for analysis. A system to have the remains return once they are studied is in place, just clarifying.

Any recommendations?

[theolduvaigorge]

Paleogenetics is helping to solve the great mystery of prehistory: how did humans spread out over the earth?

by Jacob Mikanowski 

“Most of human history is prehistory. Of the 200,000 or more years that humans have spent on Earth, only a tiny fraction have been recorded in writing. Even in our own little sliver of geologic time, the 12,000 years of the Holocene, whose warm weather and relatively stable climate incubated the birth of agriculture, cities, states, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation, writing has been more the exception than the rule.

Professional historians can’t help but pity their colleagues on the prehistoric side of the fence. Historians are accustomed to drawing on vast archives, but archaeologists must assemble and interpret stories from scant material remains. In the annals of prehistory, cultures are designated according to modes of burial such as ‘Single Grave’, or after styles of arrowhead, such as ‘Western Stemmed Point’. Whole peoples are reduced to styles of pottery, such as Pitted Ware, Corded Ware or Funnel Beaker, all of them spread across the map in confusing,amoeba-like blobs.

In recent years, archaeologists have become reluctant to infer too much from assemblages of ceramics, weapons and grave goods. For at least a generation, they have been drilled on the mantra that ‘pots are not people’. Material culture is not a proxy for identity. Artefacts recovered from a dig can provide a wealth of information about a people’s mode of subsistence, funeral rites and trade contacts, but they are not a reliable guide to their language or ethnicity – or their patterns of migration.

Before the Second World War, prehistory was seen as a series of invasions, with proto-Celts and Indo-Aryans swooping down on unsuspecting swaths of Europe and Asia like so many Vikings, while megalith builders wandered between continents in indecisive meanders .After the Second World War, this view was replaced by the processual school, which attributed cultural changes to internal adaptations. Ideas and technologies mighttravel, but people by and large stayed put. Today, however, migration is making a comeback” (read more).

(Source: Aeon)

[alphacaeli]

Hi Elen, First of all congratulations! I have one question and one comment. What are those other dating methods to be applied that the team considered destructive?

Now the comment I think the discussion of wether or not naledi is a new species is futile. We all know the biological def of species is not clear cut, more so in paleoanthropology. It boils down to the scientists position, and while some are more conservative in naming new species, Berger has always chosen to emphasize difference and “mosaic features”, whatever that may mean

Thanks! :D

U-Pb (Uranium-lead)isotopic dating was attempted on the flowstones within the site, but the highamount of background Pb from sediment contamination made this method unviable,though we’re still exploring other means of utilising this method. Faunaldating was obviously not possible. We can’t use K-Ar (Potassium-argon) datingbecause there are no volcanic horizons in the caves to use. Destructive methodsin this case would be any isotopic analysis methods that would require grindingup of fossil specimens for samples. This includes radiocarbon dating, whichwould probably only tell us if the fossils are younger or older than 50k years.ESR (electron spin resonance) wouldn’t damage the fossils themselves, but wouldrequire taking vertical samples of the sediments in the cave, which has thepotential to damage unexcavated material. Palaeomagnetism is another optionthat might be investigated but it’s a difficult method to employ in this kindof scenario.

I disagree thatdiscussing species attribution is futile, mostly because the biological speciesconcept (BSC) isn’t what palaeoanthropologists use to describe species, thoughit is true that some researchers are more conservative than others (Lumpers v.Splitters). The BSC requires that palaeoanths be able to observe phenomena thatare not observable in the fossil record (i.e. reproductive or geneticisolation). Instead we use the phylogenetic species concept (PSC). The PSC definesa species as the smallest diagnosable cluster of organisms with a shared patternof ancestry and descent, so all members of a species according to the PSCtherefore possess a certain combination of traits that clusters those membersas diagnosably distinct from others. This is the more operational concept interms of diagnosing fossil populations because it can draw on multiple lines ofevidence: ecology, geographical range, temporal period (though I think this isproblematic on a number of fronts), analogous variation in modern species, andautapomorphic morphology.

I mean, you’re right ina sense. One of the primary difficulties associated with this method is thatany overlap in these areas blurs the boundaries between one species and thenext. This is especially true in closely related taxa (such as H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis) as they will hold many traits in common. In aneffort to circumvent this, character states are polarised to render themdistinct, thus facilitating the ease with which species are identified. This isproblematic. The features palaeoanthropologists most often use to allocatespecies labels are continuous and non-metric and the act of drawing arbitraryand discrete boundaries between them means that vital information aboutphenotypic variability within a population is lost. But! There are statisticalindices like the Coefficient of Variation (CV) that describe the normal rangeof variation that we can expect for a single species based on extant ones, andwe can use them to falsify hypotheses about whether a fossil populationcomprises multiple species. The work that has been done calculating the CVs forthe genus Homo has demonstrated thatthere are multiple species.

The differentialdiagnosis for H. naledi is rigorousand conservative and I really do urge you to read it. We have a wholepopulation of fossil hominins (notsingle fossils or individuals like have been used to describe new species inthe past) with really consistent morphology across all ranges of development. Thereare autapomorphies as well as features shared with other taxa in H. naledi in acombination not present anywhere else in the fossilrecord (this is the mosaic we’re talking about). There is nothing that lookslike the stuff we’ve pulled from Rising Star, cranially or postcranially.Superficial similarities with other taxa do exist (as you would expect) but ultimatelythe whole picture, for me, is of a new species.

Having said that, downloadthe material scans from Morphosource and check it out yourself! You’ve got tomake up your own mind.

[anthrolover79]

Thanks for the extended answer and for putting up with my ignorance! I am obviously NOT a paleoanthropologist, and with very limited knowledge on human evolution was unable to word my comment correctly. I guess what I was trying to say is that the phylogenetic concept of species seems a bit artificial to us outsiders, which you are addressing indeed

[theolduvaigorge]

12,000-year-old Human Skull Discovered In Mexico

by Guneet Bhatia 

“Scientists have unearthed an ancient skull from an underground cave in Mexico. It is believed to be one of the oldest human remain discovered so far in the American continent. The ancient human skull was recovered along the coast of Tulum in Quintana Roo, Mexico. It is believed to be 10,000 to 12,000 years old, according to the Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM). The researchers claim that the specimen will help gain knowledge about the early human settlements in and around the Mexican region.

Atelier Daynes, based in Paris, reconstructed the recently-discovered skull to identify its characteristics, including age and sex. The Global Times reports that Daynes specializes in “reconstructing hominids from bone remains.” Based on the study of the skull, the lead researchers from UNAM, Alejandro Terrazas Mata, says that the skull recovered belongs to none of the indigienous groups in America known so far. The researcher based his conclusion on the fact that the skull does not exactly resemble any of the existing indigenous groups.

It is widely believed that a group of people from Asia crossed across the Bering Strait around 15,000 years ago. The group of migrated people was identified as Paleoamericans. The structure and features of their cranium and face bear resemblance to the humans belonging to the Pacific Rim or south Asia.

Another migration took place around 9,000 years ago when a group of people became an ancestor to the Amerindians. However, the researchers are still unclear whether the specimen belongs to an ancestor of the Amerindians or not and that further research is required to clarify the same.”

(Source: International Business Times)

[anthrolover79]

How about all the other paleoindians uncovered in South America?!

[theolduvaigorge]

Declaring The Discovery Of A New Species Can Get Tricky

by Barbara J. King

“May was an exciting month for new discoveries that add to our knowledge of human evolution during the period around 3 million years ago. This is before the origin of the genus Homo, 2.8 million years ago, and during the time when Australopithecus afarensis (the famous “Lucy”) lived in East Africa. On May 21, details of 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Kenya — the oldest yet discovered — were published by Sonia Harmand and her colleagues in the journal Nature. The tools consist of sharp flakes, large cores and flat anvils. 

According to an NPR report, “While they weren’t as sophisticated as tools that have been associated with the first humans, they were definitely crafted intentionally.” That intentionally-fashioned tools predate our genus doesn’t surprise me; it makes abundant evolutionary sense, given what we know of sophisticated tool-use and tool-making among animals as diverse as chimpanzees and birds. One week later, in the same journal, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, curator and head of the physical anthropology department at the Cleveland Museum of Nature History, and his colleagues, announced a new 3.3-million-year-old species of human ancestor contemporaneous with Au.afarensis and living (as Lucy did) in the Afar region of what is now Ethiopia: Australpithecus deyiremeda. (The word “deyiremeda” means “close relative” in the local Afar language.)

Whether you find this news surprising depends, in part, on whether you’re a lumper or splitter. The Wikipedia definition of these terms works well for our purposes: 

“A ‘lumper’ is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A ‘splitter’ is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.”

Haile-Selaisse et al.’s decision to create a new category for this East African hominin comes from the splitter camp and is bold (though certainly not unprecedented) given that the fossil material they uncovered consists entirely of jaws and teeth. These scientists are confident that there’s adequate morphological variation in the maxilla (upper jaw), mandible (lower jaw) and teeth compared to earlier-described hominins to justify the new species designation. According to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History website:

“Australopithecus deyiremeda differs from Lucy’s species in terms of the shape and size of its thick-enameled teeth and the robust architecture of its lower jaws. The anterior teeth are also relatively small indicating that it probably had a different diet.”

Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus in the division of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and author of the new book The Strange Tale of the Rickety Cossack and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution, agrees that we are dealing with a new species” (read more).

(Source: NPR; third image: Economist)

[teamanthro-deactivated20250425]

What's Wrong with Cultural Appropriation? These 9 Answers Reveal Its Harm

If cultural appropriation doesn't seem like a big deal to you, you're missing something big. Here's what you need to know.

[theolduvaigorge]

12 Theories of How We Became Human, and Why They’re All Wrong

Killers? Hippies? Toolmakers? Chefs? Scientists have trouble agreeing on the essence of humanity—and when and how we acquired it.

by Mark Strauss

“What a piece of work is man! Everyone agrees on that much. But what exactly is it about Homo sapiens that makes us unique among animals, let alone apes, and when and how did our ancestors acquire that certain something? The past century has seen a profusion of theories. Some reveal as much about the time their proponents lived in as they do about human evolution.

1. We Make Tools: “It is in making tools that man is unique,” anthropologist Kenneth Oakley wrote in a 1944 article. Apes use found objects as tools, he explained, “but the shaping of sticks and stones to particular uses was the first recognizably human activity.” In the early 1960s, Louis Leakey attributed the dawn of toolmaking, and thus of humanity, to a species namedHomo habilis (“Handy Man”), which lived in East Africa around 2.8 million years ago. But as Jane Goodall and other researchers have since shown,chimps also shape sticks for particular uses—stripping them of their leaves, for instance, to “fish” for underground insects. Even crows, which lack hands, are pretty handy.

2. We’re Killers: According to anthropologist Raymond Dart, our predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers—carnivorous creatures that “seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.” It may read like pulp fiction now, but after the horrific carnage of the Second World War, Dart’s 1953 article outlining his “killer ape” theory struck a chord.

3. We Share Food: In the 1960s, the killer ape gave way to the hippie ape. Anthropologist Glynn Isaac unearthed evidence of animal carcasses that had been purposefully moved from the sites of their deaths to locations where, presumably, the meat could be shared with the whole commune. As Isaac saw it, food sharing led to the need to share information about where food could be found—and thus to the development of language and other distinctively human social behaviors” (read more).

(Source: National Geographic)

[theolduvaigorge]

What the Inuit can tell us about omega-3 fats and ‘paleo’ diets

by Robert Sanders 

The traditional diet of Greenland natives – the Inuit (once known as Eskimos) – is held up as an example of how high levels of omega-3 fatty acids can counterbalance the bad health effects of a high-fat diet, but a new study hints that what’s true for the Inuit may not be true for everyone else.

The study, which appears in the Sept. 18 issue of the journal Science, shows that the Inuit and their Siberian ancestors have special mutations in genes involved in fat metabolism that help them partly counteract the effects of a diet high in marine mammal fat, mostly from seals and whales that eat fish with high levels of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Those genetic mutations, found in nearly 100 percent of the Inuit, are found in a mere 2 percent of Europeans and 15 percent of Han Chinese, which means they would synthesize omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids differently from the Inuit. “The original focus on fish oil and omega-3s came from studies of Inuit: on their traditional diet, rich in fat from marine mammals, Inuit seemed quite healthy with a low incidence of cardiovascular disease, so fish oil must be protective,” said project leader Rasmus Nielsen, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. “We’ve now found that they have unique genetic adaptations to this diet, so you cannot extrapolate from them to other populations. It could be very good for the Inuit to eat all these omega-3 fatty acids, but not for the rest of us.”

These genetic mutations in the Inuit have more widespread effects. They lower “bad” LDL cholesterol and fasting insulin levels, presumably protecting against cardiovascular disease and diabetes. They also have a significant effect on height, because growth is in part regulated by a person’s fatty acid profile. The researchers found that the mutations causing shorter height in the Inuit are also associated with shorter height in Europeans.“The mutations we found in the Inuit have profound physiological effects, changing the whole profile of fatty acids in the body, plus it reduces their height by 2 centimeters: nearly an inch,” said Ida Moltke, a University of Copenhagen associate professor of bioinformatics who is joint first author on the study. “Height is controlled by many genes, but this mutation has one of the strongest effects on height ever found by geneticists.”

Personalized diets

Nielsen noted that this is the first evidence that human populations are actually adapted to particular diets; that is, they differ in the way they physiologically respond to diets. Just as genome sequencing can lead to personalized medicine tailored to an individual’s specific set of genes, so too may a person’s genome dictate a personalized diet.

“People ask themselves whether they should be on a stone-age diet, for example. The response may well depend on their genome,” Nielsen said” (read more).

(Source: UC Berkeley) 

[alphacaeli]

Homo naledi Q&A

Thank you to the people who sent me questions! I’ve started off with the questions about the fossils and put the excavation-specific stuff at the end. Fair warning: it’s a long post.

Has only one skull been recovered so far (and if so do you expect to find more)? 

We’ve recovered the remains of four partial calvaria, some more complete than others. Dinaledi Hominin 1 (DH1; the holotype) is the most complete. It’s a presumed male preserving a partial calvarium, partial maxilla, and largely complete mandible. I fully expect more cranial material will be found. There’s still a lot of fossil material in the Dinaledi chamber.

Has any dating been done yet? 

The team has tried a number of methods to date the site and thus far they have failed, but other methods are being explored. The complexity of the site and its deposit adds to the difficulty. The fossil-bearing deposit is soft sediment that has been reworked a number of times so the stratigraphic position of the material is hard to determine. In addition to that, the Dinaledi hominins aren’t found with other faunal material so we can’t date them using a faunal age. Nor can we directly associate the flow stones in the site with the fossil deposit; the flow stones we do have are contaminated by sediments which makes them difficult to date. 

Other options involve destructive methods that will damage the fossil material which we didn’t want to do until the material had been described and published. Ultimately we have to balance the need (pressure) to have a date for these fossils with the potential of damaging the material before it can be properly studied. We’ll only publish the dates when we can be absolutely certain that they’re right, and unfortunately this can take some time. 

Keep reading

[alphacaeli]

So it has been a big couple of days for me. I hope to write a better post when I can get to a computer, but I’m ecstatic to announce that this is what I’ve been involved with for the past two years!

I’ve been a part of the team that excavated and described a new species of fossil hominin, Homo naledi. The taxonomy (http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09560) and the context papers (http://elifesciences.org/lookup/doi/10.7554/eLife.09561) have been published open access in ELife along with an OA package of 3D scans of the material available at Morphosource. I am also pleased to say that I am lead author on the soon-to-be-published paper describing and analysing the upper limb paper for H. naledi.

These are just some happy snaps from the press event, but I promise to post some cool stuff as soon as I can.

-Elen

[anthrolover79]

I am back after a long while just to see what alphacaeli had to say about this